Costruire a partire dalle rovine. Figure dialettiche fra catastrofe e progresso [Building from the ruins. Dialectical shapes between catastrophe and progress]

The article starts from the Lisbon earthquake as a paradigm of the mo­dern meaning of catastrophe and it analyzes the philosophical writings on the Portuguese disaster by Voltaire, Rousseau and Kant. The earthquake that destroyed the city of Lisbon, and several thousand of its inhabitants, shook the Age of enlightenment and affected the best minds in Europe. Sin­ce then, modern conceptions of evil were developed in the attempt to stop bla­ming God for the state of the world, and to take responsibility for it on our own, as testifies the meditation on the ruins of Volney . Hegel, in his lessons on the philosophy of history, will develop the thought on the con­sequences of the catastrophe in dialectic key: the advancement of his­to­ry consists in building from the ruins