Frequency of publication

«Teoria» is a six-monthly journal. One issue is the result of a public call for paper, the other issue stems from (double-blind peer-reviewed) invited papers.

Aims and scope

«Teoria» aims to investigate and deepen specific philosophical and ethical issues that are central to contemporary debate. These issues are addressed from a conceptual perspective, going into the territories of the history of philosophy, metaethical reflection, and comparative approach. Given the growing importance of applied ethics, the journal has devoted numerous issues to this area of inquiry. In particular, issues concerning the ethics of emerging technologies and Artificial Intelligence, environmental ethics, issues of bioethics (with a specific interest in the ethics of care), specific aspects of communication ethics (such as translation ethics and image ethics), as well as problems concerning environmental ethics and food ethics have been explored. In addition, “Teoria” has recently grappled, from a philosophical perspective, with a number of pressing current issues, such as war, corporeality, automatic decision-making processes, and the question of free will.

History of the journal

TEORIA was founded in 1981 by Vittorio Sainati, professor of Moral Philosophy, History of Logic and of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Pisa. Sainati had been a student of Armando Carlini: an important Italian philosopher active in the first half of the twentieth century, linked to both Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile, who had developed the idealism of these thinkers into a spiritualism with an existential character. Sainati had cultivated, in the course of his philosophical reflection, studies in logic (his is a History of Aristotelian Organon), history of medieval philosophy, hermeneutics and philosophy of religion (Dall'idealismo all'ermeneutica and Logica e teologia are in fact the titles of his other two significant volumes).

The first series of TEORIA (1981-1990) reflected this dual interest of Sainati. Two issues per year of the journal were in fact published: one devoted to Philosophical Hermeneutics and one to Logic and Philosophy of Language. As it was said in the back cover, the title of the first section already alluded to "a program of rereading the problematic tradition of philosophy in the light of that essential linguisticity of theoretical models which is in various forms put to the test by contemporary thought," while the title of the second section intended precisely "to make its own research contribution to the most relevant 'sermocinal' disciplines of our time, while nevertheless preventing the risk of specialist closure with its insistent reference to the historical traditions of those disciplines and their persistent charge of theoretical suggestion."

 

In this project Sainati had been joined by the valuable advice and collaboration of Renzo Raggiunti, professor of Theoretical Philosophy and Philosophy of Language at the University of Pisa. Raggiunti, in fact, had been from the journal's inception until 1998 co-director of TEORIA and had made an important contribution of ideas and expertise to the development of the publication. An articulate profile of Raggiunti, a scholar of Husserl and contemporary philosophy of language, is dedicated to him by Carlo Marletti at the beginning of issue 2010/2.

 

The years from 1991 to 2005 record the development of the second series of TEORIA. The journal, again under Sainati's careful guidance, breaks free from the rigid bipartition of the previous series. As stated in the back cover, it now intends "freely to satisfy, in its two persistent annual issues, the most urgent theoretical instances of our present, with the obvious caveat that in theory it will insist on seeking the history that intrinsically sustains and justifies it, guaranteeing itself by this means against the verbalistic lapses of an abstract academy".

The second series expands even more decisively to international collaborations and is structured, for the most part, in a partially monographic manner, in that part of each issue is dadicated to a specific theme. What is ensured, however, is the open character of the journal, which truly becomes a place of encounter and comparison of the most original philosophical positions of the time. This is always declared by the editorial published on the back cover, which programmatically states, "TEORIA refuses any anchorage to scholastically preconstituted or stiffened perspectives, with the intention of making some contribution to the free and fruitful dialectical convergence of multiple research experiences."

The same spirit of openness and free discussion characterizes the third series of TEORIA, inaugurated in 2006 by Adriano Fabris. Upon Vittorio Sainati's death, the direction of the journal had in fact passed to his student, professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Pisa, who had followed the journal since its inception. The monographic character of each issue became the characteristic element of the journal itself, as did the international provenance of the individual contributions, which were often published in the original language. TEORIA is thus increasingly proposed as a crossroads of the most significant debates in today's philosophical scene and a place where research of international scope is published, the result of studies from the most qualified research centers and the best universities of the old and new world.

This is evidenced by the volumes published in the third series. These include, for example, the dossiers written in collaboration between the University of Pisa and Northwestern University (Evanston, Ill., U.S.A.), the one that brings together European and South American scholars around the theme of the Ethics of Communication, the one that gives an account of the Italian-Spanish project on "Philosophies of the Image," the one that publishes the results of the European Union-funded research on "Ethicbots: Ethics and Robotics," and, above all, the one that brings together various European philosophers on the theme of the possibility of a common thinking, conceived under the sign of a true "Eurosofia." From this point of view, in short, TEORIA presents itself as a journal aware of its own continental traditions and deeply rooted in them, and yet open to a confrontation with all those philosophical positions, whatever their provenance and approach, that are not one-sided, dogmatic, reductive or ideologically inspired.

In short: TEORIA today represents a test case, for philosophy, of the possibility of confronting the most pressing issues of our time, adopting the style by which it has always been characterized. Therefore, TEORIA can only be a journal open to anyone who is capable, still, of doing philosophy in the best meaning of the term. As it has always shown that it can do throughout its history.