The philosopher Gianni Vattimo died this Wednesday night in Turin, the city where he was born 87 years ago. This was confirmed to the Italian press by Simone Caminada, the thinker’s companion in his final years. He spent his last hours in the hospital in the municipality of Rivoli, which is part of the Turin metropolitan area. Considered the last great Italian philosopher and author of the theory of weak thinking, a criticism of traditional metaphysics. Following the ideas of Nietzsche, Heidegger and Gadamer, he reinterpreted postmodernism as “liberation” from totalizing metaphysics. In addition to his academic career, Vattimo was a member of the European Parliament and actively participated in Italian and European politics.
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Vattimo was also a pioneer in defending the rights of LGBTI people and defined himself as “homosexual and Christian”. Author of works such as “The Adventures of Difference” (1979), “The Weak Thought” (1983), “The End of Modernity” (1985), “The Transparent Society” (1989), “Ethics of Interpretation” (1989) and “Creer que se cre” (1996). ), Dialogues with Nietzsche (2002) and Nihilism and Emancipation (2003).
Vattimo’s theory of weak reasoning, which grew out of his experience of marginalization as a homosexual and a Christian, proposes abandoning dogmatic claims of absolute and universal truths in favor of a more open vision of philosophy. In the philosopher’s own words, he proposes “renunciation of violence, control over the destruction of nature and, ultimately, a less neurotic interpretation of existence.”
Vattimo always spoke openly about his homosexuality. In an interview with EL PAÍS in 2019, he explained: “I am convinced that this topic was crucial for my education, but I do not know to what extent it could have been a mistake.” A youth problem, like politics, is now more crucial to me appears. Nowadays it is more important to be a communist or not than to be gay, which means almost nothing.”
Even when it came to the church, he didn’t mince his words, even though he declared himself a Christian. He proposed “abolishing celibacy” and “freeing the church from superstition.” “The problem is not whether miracles happened or not. The problem is that there is an authority that wants to tell us whether they are true. Who cares? But it is difficult to imagine a history of the Church without dogmatic authority. When Christians pray, they still think they are talking to the Virgin. A physicist friend suggests conducting an interplanetary expedition to find out where in the sky María Santísima Asunta landed in her body 2,000 years ago. That’s the realistic deficit that no one cared about. Worse, this is what papal authority is based on,” he commented in an interview with this newspaper.
Vattimo was not only a philosopher, but also a politically active man. He was a member of several political groups, including the Radical Party, the Alliance for Turin, the Left Democrats and the Italian Communists. He was also a candidate on the lists of Fuori!, one of the first associations of the Italian gay liberation movement, founded in Turin in 1971 by Angelo Pezzana. In 2005 he ran for mayor of San Giovanni in Fiore, Calabria. On March 30, 2009, Vattimo announced his candidacy as European Parliamentarian for Antonio Di Pietro’s Italia dei Valori and was elected representative in the North West constituency.
In 2016, Vattimo donated his personal archive to the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, much to the dismay of the University of Turin, where he taught for much of his life. The reason, according to the philosopher, is that Pompeu Fabra was the first to propose it.
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