Gianni Vattimo
| Gianni Vattimo | |
|---|---|
_-_Foto_di_Giovanni_Dall%27Orto_-_Como_22-5-99.jpg) |
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| Born |
Gianteresio Vattimo 4 January 1936 Turin, Piedmont, Italy |
| Alma mater | University of Turin (Laurea, 1959) |
| Era | 20th-century philosophy |
| Region | Western Philosophy |
| School |
Continental philosophy Phenomenology Hermeneutics |
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Main interests
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Ethics Political philosophy |
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Notable ideas
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Pensiero debole (weak thought) |
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Influenced
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Gianteresio Vattimo (born 4 January 1936) is an Italian philosopher and politician.
Gianteresio Vattimo was born in Turin, Piedmont. He studied philosophy under the existentialist Luigi Pareyson at the University of Turin, and graduated with a laurea in 1959. After studying with Karl Löwith and Hans-Georg Gadamer in Heidelberg he returned to Turin where he became assistant professor in 1964, and later full professor of Aesthetics in 1969. While remaining at Turin, becoming Professor of Theoretical Philosophy in 1982, he has been a visiting professor at a number of American Universities.
Vattimo says he was exempted from military service.
After being active in the Partito Radicale, the short-lived Alleanza per Torino, and the Democrats of the Left, Vattimo joined the Party of Italian Communists. He was elected a member of the European Parliament first in 1999 and for a second mandate in 2009.
He is openly gay and a nihilist who has embraced Nietzsche's idea of god's death.
Vattimo's philosophy can be characterized as postmodern with his emphasis on "pensiero debole" (weak thought). This requires that the foundational certainties of modernity with its emphasis on objective truth founded in a rational unitary subject be relinquished for a more multi-faceted conception closer to that of the arts. He draws on the philosophy of Martin Heidegger with his critique of foundations and the hermeneutic philosophy of his teacher Hans-Georg Gadamer. Perhaps his greatest influence though is the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche, whose "discovery of the 'lie', the discovery that alleged 'values' and metaphysical structures are just a play of forces" (1993:93) plays an important role in Vattimo's notion of "weak thought."
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Wikipedia