Sao Paulo
Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo, author of works such as “The End of Modernity” and “Beyond the Subject”, died on Tuesday (19) at the age of 87. According to the newspaper Corriere della Sera, he was admitted to the nephrology department of the Rivoli Hospital in his hometown of Turin and his death was confirmed on social media by his partner, ItalianBrazilian Simone Caminada.
The son of a seamstress and a policeman, Vattimo lost his father before he was two years old and grew up in a proletarian environment. Before starting his academic career, he worked at the Italian state broadcaster RAI. In 1959 he completed his philosophy studies at the University of Turin, where he worked as a professor from 1964 until his retirement in 2008.
Although he wrote several books on his main philosophical references Martin Heidegger (18891976) and Friedrich Nietzsche (18441900) Vattimo achieved fame thanks to his own concept. This is “weak thinking,” which made him one of the representatives of postmodern thinking.
The term, taken from the title of a collection of essays that he organized with Pier Aldo Rovatti in 1983, expresses the idea that there is no single universal truth that could reflect reality as a whole, contrary to what advocates defended antiquity and the Middle Ages. Or, to put it in Vattimo’s own words: “There is no single way to describe facts objectively.” “To get closer to them, you can use many points of view,” he told the Spanish newspaper El País in the 1990s.
Despite this postmodern tendency, Vattimo did not share a catastrophic vision of the future with many of his contemporaries. Describing himself as an optimist, he argued that “weak thinking” was inextricably linked to the idea of democracy a political system ultimately based on the confrontation of different “truths”.
He also always claimed that humanity was not nihilistic enough. “All the terrorism we know is fundamentalist and is carried out by people who believe so strongly that they kill themselves to force their beliefs on others,” he said in an interview with Sheet in 2002.
In addition to his academic career, Vattimo, who defended a “hermeneutic communism”, was also active in politics and was elected to the European Parliament twice between 1999 and 2004 and between 2009 and 2014 he was an MEP.
He also focused intensely on religion, a topic with which he became familiar throughout his career. The philosopher was openly gay and a pioneer in promoting LGBTQIA+ rights in his country. He defended the practice of a secularized Christianity that is independent of traditional church institutions and therefore compatible with his sexual orientation.
According to Corriere della Sera, his love life was indeed marked by tragedy. In 1992 he lost his partner, his academic colleague Gianpiero Cavaglia, who died of AIDS. Then, in 2003, another partner, Sergio Mamino, died in the toilet of a plane while traveling to the Netherlands to undergo euthanasia. Vattimo was on the flight with him.
More recently, one of the philosopher’s relationships made headlines in the Italian tabloids. His partner Caminada was sentenced to two years in prison in February for abuse of an incapacitated person. According to the local press, a court in Turin described the ItalianBrazilian, who had a relationship with the philosopher in 2010 when he was hired as his driver, as a “profiteer” who led Vattimo to make decisions that were detrimental to the author They only had his sights set on his assets.
In the weeks leading up to the verdict, the couple had applied for a civil partnership, but this was blocked by the courts.