Alessandro Ferrara

Studies

Ferrara graduated in Philosophy in Italy (1975) and later, as a Harkness Fellow, received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley (1984). He conducted post-doctoral research in Munich and Frankfurt with Jürgen Habermas as a Von Humboldt Fellow and later at Berkeley again (1989), leading to the publication of his first book, Modernity and Authenticity.

Academic life

Assistant Professor in Sociology at the University of Rome "La Sapienza" between 1984 and 1998, then Associate Professor in Sociology at the University of Parma between 1998 and 2002, since 2002 Ferrara is Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Rome "Tor Vergata".

Since 1991 he has been a Director of the Yearly Conference on Philosophy and Social Science, initially held within the Interuniversity Centre of Dubrovnik, but since 1993 relocated in Prague, under the auspices of the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Science.

Since 1990 he has been a founder and a Director of the Seminario di Teoria Critica, which used to meet yearly in Gallarate and since 2008 takes place in Cortona, in Italy.

And since 2007 he is on the Executive Committee of the Istanbul Seminars on religion and politics, held at Bilgi University in Istanbul under the auspices of the Association Reset - Dialogues of Civilizations.

Ferrara serves as co-editor (with David Rasmussen) of the series Philosophy and Politics – Critical Explorations (Springer), as editorial consultant for a number of journals including Constellations, Philosophy and Social Criticism, Krisis, Balsa de la Medusa, Iris and The European Journal of Philosophy, and serves on the Advisory Board of the series New Directions in Critical Theory at Columbia University Press.

He has taught and lectured in various capacities in a number of universities and institutions, including Boston College, Harvard University, Columbia University, Rice University, Cardozo Law School, Yale University, New School for Social Research, University College London (UCL), Oxford University, the Chinese Academy of Social Science in Beijing, Sapienza University of Rome, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Bilgi University and Sehir University in Istanbul, the National University of Singapore, and the Universities of California (at Berkeley), Paris - Sorbonne, Madrid, Chicago, Potsdam, Amsterdam, Mexico City, Exeter, Manchester, Johannesburg, Rio de Janeiro, London, Exeter, Dublin, Belfast, Coimbra, Lisbon, Frankfurt, Copenhagen, Berne, Bordeaux, Barcelona, Kraków, Porto Alegre, Lyon III, Tilburg.

Research

Ferrara's work revolves around an account of normativity centered on authenticity and exemplarity, which incorporates a reconstructed version of Kant's "reflective judgment". The theory of exemplary normativity aims to represent an alternative both to proceduralist or neo-transcendental approaches to validity and to contextualist anti-normativism.

In Reflective Authenticity exemplary normativity is first outlined and in Justice and Judgment is developed in the direction of a political-philosophical notion of justice.

In Force of the Example the paradigm of exemplary normativity (and of judgment) is discussed in relation to the contemporary philosophical horizon. During the 20th century, the view that assertions and norms are valid insofar as they respond to principles independent of all local and temporal contexts came under attack from two perspectives: the partiality of translation and the intersubjective constitution of the self. Defenses of context-transcending normativity have then by and large been recast into various forms of proceduralism. In his book, instead, Ferrara tries a strategy centered on the exemplary universalism of judgment for reconciling context-transcending normativity with our pluralistic intuitions. Drawing on Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment but also on Arendt, Rawls, Dworkin and Habermas, Ferrara outlines a view of exemplary validity designed for today's dilemmas, showing how this notion – for long thought to belong in the domain of aesthetics – can be applied to central issues in political philosophy, including public reason, human rights, radical evil, sovereignty, republicanism and liberalism and religion in the public sphere.

In The Democratic Horizon. Hyperpluralism and the Renewal of Political Liberalism, Ferrara argues that Rawls's “political liberalism” – which due to its anti-perfectionist thrust, its embedded sense of the contingency of justice, its openness to plurality still constitutes the best available paradigm for understanding what a complex democratic society free of oppression could look like – needs to be updated in order to improve it traction in a historical context rapidly become different from the original one. Four adjustments – conjectural arguments, an enriched notion of the democratic ethos, a decentering of it in several local varieties, as well as the remedial model of a multivariate democratic polity – are suggested in order to enable political liberalism to meet the challenge of hyperpluralism. The aesthetic sources of normativity that have formed the object of Ferrara's earlier work—exemplarity, judgment, the normativity of identity, and the imagination—are called on to supplement the conceptual resources of a revisited political liberalism.

Books Authored

Edited Volumes

Recent articles and book chapters