Filosofia della citt�
Creators: name: SIDDI, NICOLA
Publisher: name: Universit� degli studi di Genova
Year: 2022

description: Why should philosophy deal with the city?
Philosophy can and must deal with the city for at least two reasons. The first is linked to the union that was formed from the beginning between polis and philosophy and the second has to do with the salvation of humanity.
The encounter between philosophy and the city has its roots to be found in the origins of philosophy itself. The birth of the polis dates back to the social and economic transformations between the age of Hesiod and that of Anaximander. The astronomical conception of the universe is possible only with a thought that is located on the level of reflective consciousness and precisely this meditation is capable of leading to deliberate research in the public sphere, favoring the emergence of political thought. The new way of reasoning, starting in the fourth century, needs a powerful tool to use in public debates that provides strength for the argument: the logos. The importance of the word corresponds to a change in the social meaning of writing: laws must be written and the accounting of trade must be kept. From that moment on, the polis will allow Anaximander to discuss the ideas of Thales, Anaximenes those of his predecessors, and it is through this dialectic that the proper field of philosophy will be established. City and philosophy come together in the project for the expansion of Miletus, where Hippodamus, for the first time, proposes to the Greek world a functional organization of the city.

The philosophical point of view shows us the city as the origin of the greatest challenges, but also the place of possible solutions. Our position towards the future, far from even the slightest thought of predicting it, is based on some trends that we can summarize with the following adjectives: asymmetry, complexity, uncertainty, speed, interaction.
The most convincing answer we can give to the initial question and therefore why philosophy should deal with cities, suggests Edgar Morin, when in his attempt to structure a complex concept he argues that philosophy is a type of thought capable of connecting knowledge, to put them in the concrete and in the complexity to allow a global reflection going beyond the hyperspecialization.

The analysis focuses on the aesthetics, ontology and identity of the city and then leads to a vision 'towards' the future, but not 'of' the future. With regard to this last point, we believe that the vision of the future is not possible, for reasons related above all to the randomness of the development and the complexity of the institution taken into consideration. However, we believe it is possible to identify some trends towards the future, one of all the constant migration in the urban direction (about 100 million people every year).
The thesis that underlies the entire work is that there is an aesthetic vision, an ontological system and an identity of the city before the advent of the web and an aesthetic point of view, an ontological approach and an identity recognition that have progressively changed. starting from the new millennium.