HASS Colloquium Series by Paolo Di Leo

03 Jun 2015 4.00 to 5.30 pm SUTD, LT 3 (Room 2.403)

Paolo Di Leo
Lecturer
Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences
Singapore University of Technology and Design

ABSTRACT

Technology has increasingly become the ultimate horizon in which human-beings understand themselves and their world. While this reality is perceived by many as a sort of general malaise, Heidegger has been the one who, during the course of the 20th century, has put forth one of the most piercing analyses of this phenomenon while at the same time proposing a thesis regarding its origin, which he saw as a necessary result of the path started with the dawn of metaphysics. In this talk, Heidegger's question of technology will be analyzed. A different answer to its challenge will also be proposed, whereby metaphysics and its tradition will not have to be discarded, but rather looked at as the path from which a solution may be derived.

SPEAKER'S BIO

Paolo's commitment to Classical Studies brought him to wander from his native Southern Italy through Europe and North America. He obtained his PhD at the department of Classics of the University of Pennsylvania, with a dissertation on Augustine and Plotinus. His main research interests are ancient philosophy, above all Plato and Plotinus, and Patristics: currently he is working on a commentary on one of Plotinus' treatises. He studies also the influence of Platonism and Augustinism in the subsequent Western tradition, as well as the intersection of Platonism with non Western traditions: in the past two years he has been studying the works of Sohrawardi, the main representative of what has been defined as Persian Platonism, as well as the relation between the monism of Plotinus' philosophy and that of the Upanishads. Finally, he has a deep interest in architecture and painting, with a particular emphasis on the works of Marcello Piacentini and Louis Kahn on the one hand, Giorgio De Chirico and Renato Guttuso.