It is said that all philosophy is nothing other than a commentary on Plato.

Maybe.

But was not Plato himself a commentary on Parmenides, Heraclitus, the Pythagoreans, and the Sophists, not to mention Socrates?

And conversely, too, the Commentary on Aristotle composed by St Thomas was not the personal philosophy of Thomas Aquinas? Or then again, do Proclus’ Commentarii in primum Euclidis Elementorum librum not embody a new and original neoplatonic philosophy of mathematics?

There is even a paradox in the name of philosophy. Philosophy would rather love wisdom than have it. This is what exasperates those who interrogate it for answers and not questions. But this love must not be unhappy: being satisfied with unsatisfied love means loving love and at bottom feeling contempt for its object. It changes the object, the beloved wisdom is not what one thought one had. Those who say they have wisdom do not doubt, what they have is dogma, but those who doubt whether they have it may gain another wisdom, knowledge. Wisdom seems to change according to its place: it is false wisdom at the beginning of the cognitive process, but may be true in one or other of its relative terms. Knowledge is a wisdom that one works towards and to gain it one must deny having it, know that one does not know. Thus, in order to grasp what philosophy is, we must ask what a knowledge of not-knowing can be - a Socratic question - and what kind of cognitive process it is that can start with what is false to reach what is true; and this is a question to which the answers might be Platonic or Aristotelian. From Plato to Aristotle the ousia, what truly is, which is translated as essence in Plato, and as substance in Aristotle, changes places in this process. And if every philosophy decides to see true being as the thought essence of things or else as their particular substance, it would be a good idea to formalize the difference - gnoseological, ontological, political - between the two philosophers. It is a tricky project because it will have to contravene the rules of interpretation to produce this formal reconstruction.

During an interview on human rights in a TV programme, the interviewer all of a sudden said that, so far as he could understand, I was establishing a connection between philosophy and torture, and asked me what this connection was. I was shocked.

In a couple of seconds I tried to guess how he could have come to such a conclusion. My response was: there is no connection between philosophy and torture, still when you look at the fact of torture with philosophical-ethical knowledge, you can realize that torture does not damage, nor ‘degrade’, the human dignity of the victim of torture, as is usually accepted – e.g. in the formulation of the title of the ‘Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment’. It causes damage to the human dignity of the person who tortures. We protect or damage human dignity, but our own human dignity, by what we do and not by what we suffer, since we are responsible for what we do and not for what others do to us. What we do, or refrain from doing, depends on each of us, i.e. acting in accordance with human dignity in our relations with other human beings is a problem in our ethical relation with ourselves, in spite of the fact that our actions are directed to somebody else.

One of the most important issues concerning the organization of research and higher education concerns their interaction. The most common form that this relationship of research and education takes in our time and age is to have both functions combined in universities, often referred to more specifically as research universities. This form of organization is more recent than one perhaps might first think, and even at this time there are exceptions to this form of organization. In natural sciences and medicine there are industrial laboratories for research without teaching. In some countries, especially in Russia, there exists an extensive hierarchical institution almost entirely dedicated to research rather than teaching, called an academy of sciences. The members of such academies can devote themselves entirely to research without any teaching duties, except perhaps on the level of dissertation advising. Other exceptions include some rare graduate or research institutions, for instance Rockefeller University, All Souls College, Oxford, and some institutes of advanced study. But such exceptions are few and far between, at least in Western Europe and the Americas. Thus by far the most common relationship, especially in the humanities, of research and teaching is to have them conducted by the same people at the same institution, usually called a university.

I propose to examine here, at the outset, what I call the asymmetry in Thomas Hobbes's thought between his treatment of civil war and war between states, that is to say, between the departure from the state of nature - when that is a condition prevailing between individuals - and the permanency in the state of nature when it forms a condition existing between states. Secondly, I will address the Kantian progression beyond this asymmetry through the dual introduction of the idea of progress and of ‘cosmo-political’ peace. The attention given in recent years by Habermas to the Kantian idea of perpetual peace [Habermas, 1996], the recent events in Kosovo and Chechnya, and their implications for the shape of an international penal tribunal to judge crimes against humanity, invigorate the questions of civil peace and of rights which transcend state frontiers.

We have never come face to face with ‘Philosophy’, that goddess who was courted, scorned, hated, and betrayed throughout history by those who claimed to represent her - we only come into contact with her officers: philosophers, that is, human beings who exist in an economic context, have religious ideas, support political opinions, find a way through their emotional history, are paid by institutions, fanstasize about a vision of hope, have appetites, can fight, are mad keen to be noticed and recognized and above all frequently make certain types of statements that have claims to validity. So philosophers are not only creatures in history but also historical creatures who interrogate the meaning of the world and particularly their own work. However, one of the tricks of instrumental rationality - if we follow Marx's analysis - is to focus first on the product rather than the producer. This is the basic reason for the fact that a passion for the exegesis of philosophical texts often conceals philosophers’ practices. And this is why - where African philosophers are concerned, and they are not the only ones - people focus first, with benign curiosity, on their books, the theories that they expound and that may provide matter for heated discussion, but questions are hardly ever asked about the stance of African philosophers, in other words, the actual conditions in which their position is created, the particular abilities of African philosophers to achieve their emergence as ‘philosophers’, and their recognition in the international arena. The rhetoric about the acceptance of multi-culturalism argued on the basis of the complexity of present-day societies often hides practices and processes of legitimation that are revealed by their relationship to those two phenomena, economics and the state. The love of little abstractions that philosophy resists in the name of its historical position, the haste with which African philosophers, among others, clamour for recognition from their peers in other cultures are partly intended secretly to conceal their true relationship to money. Not that ‘disinterested’ philosophers ‘in love’ with knowledge do not exist, but we need to recognize that they often fail to say, as Adorno does in Dialectique négative, that ‘philosophy's freedom is simply the ability to allow its non-freedom to be expressed’. The purpose of this article is less to question philosophers’ capacity for knowledge than to urge them to have the courage to proclaim and challenge their non-freedom.

The liberal-communitarian debates, which became prominent in social and political philosophy during the 1980s, continue to be waged in those disciplines and in politics today with even more fervor, and this time, both the ‘80s and the ‘90s are called forth as bleak and sorry evidence for one side or the other. The current scene is reminiscent of some of the ‘60s ideological disputes, especially the reformist critique of conservatism within liberalism. And that dispute itself is reminiscent of yet another, the one from whence it derived, John Dewey's well-known opposition of new and old individualism.

We are at the moment experiencing renewed interest in the life and work of Aldo Capitini, the Italian philosopher of nonviolence, who was born in Perugia in 1899 and died there in 1968. Conferences, publications, and meetings are drawing the Italian public's attention to his pure lifestyle, deeply marked first by the courageous choice to oppose fascism, then by the long period during which he was marginalized by the university world and official culture; but attention has also been drawn to his numerous writings (from his Elementi di una esperienza religiosa, published in 1937 at the height of the fascist regime, with the help of Benedetto Croce, to Religione aperta, one of the last books to be placed on the Index by the Catholic Church, and finally the essay Attraverso due terzi del secolo, which appeared posthumously in Guido Calogero's journal La Cultura), and to his tireless activity as the driving force behind movements and initiatives (it was Capitini, amongst others, who organised the first peace march from Perugia to Assisi in 1961).