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Introduction to the special issue on human emancipation and the problem of violence

The 2017 International Association of Critical Realism’s Annual Conference in Turin provided the opportunity for a fruitful confrontation of two different traditions of realist contemporary thought: that initiated by the work of Roy Bhaskar [1944–2014], known as Critical Realism; and that initiated in Turin by the work of Maurizio Ferraris, known as New Realism. The latter is a philosophical theory which, though founded by Ferraris, has been further developed by several philosophers around the world, such as Mauricio Beuchot, Mario De Caro, Rossano Pecoraro and Markus Gabriel. New Realism captures and describes a set of structures that form social reality and make it possible (Ferraris, passim: pp-pp). Among these structures, one of the most remarkable is that of ‘documentality’, which creates social objects by means of recordings of acts. Documentality underlies ‘governmentality’, which makes power an instrument that effectively and actively – one might say violently – intrudes into social reality. It is therefore appropriate that the theme of the 2017 IACR Annual Conference, held in Turin, was ‘Human Emancipation and the Problem of Violence’. In the modern age, violence has tended to be legitimated, justified and ennobled as a public and institutional act that is useful or necessary for the fulfilment of the ambitious ‘modern programme’ of human emancipation from nature and culture. Violence, and in particular coercion, is here understood as an indicator of the refusal to recognize and consider the existence of an intimate ontological structure of reality; and this refusal may be connected with the development of modern philosophical thought (Scalon, passim: pp-pp). In this scenario, the social sciences seem to have been exposed to a radical gentrification process, becoming a sounding board for dominant ideological thought; their task appears to be to clothe the narratives of the power elite with a pseudo-scientific aura. It seems that university curricula have become vehicles by which to emphasize politically correct thought, thus enforcing a kind of knowledge that is presumed to be indisputable, and therefore not up for debate (De Bernardi, passim: pp-pp). The two different souls that characterize the realist approach – the ethical-ontological one and the ethical-political one – share a common antirelativistic normative instance which situates and identifies in reality the last canon for its own comprehension of both natural phenomena and social phenomena. Thanks to this canon, a strong ontology becomes the moral constraint for epistemological reflexion, and prevents any possible use of science, education and politics to justify, or even ennoble, violence (coercion) as the way for realizing any project of emancipation from the intimate ontological structure of reality. A strong ontology includes both a social ontology and a human person ontology, for example considering the antinomy between ‘violence’ and responsibility towards next generations (Andina, passim: pp-pp), or the relationship between ‘moral transactions’ concerning blame, guilt, responsibility, apology and forgiveness and ‘the possibility of transition away from states of trauma’ (Norrie, passim: pp-pp) or, finally, with reference to the relationship between violence and subjectivity as a consequence of the affirmation/deprivation of the ultimate concerns which express ‘the intimate nature of the human person’ (Wielecki, passim: pp-pp). Therefore, each of the papers in this Special Issue of