Emanuele Severino on the Meaning of Scientific Specialization: An Introduction

Abstract

Science appears, to the eyes of contemporary man, as the most reliable guide to the human enterprise. However, we possess little awareness as to what the proper meaning of scientific specialization is, and this knowledge is indispensable if we are not to proceed mindlessly in our relations to being. One of the most profound, coherent, and penetrating insights into this matter is constituted by the work of contemporary Italian philosopher Emanuele Severino, whose discourse demonstrates how scientific specialization is the most coherent consequence of humanity's most ancestral relationship to being, how every human decision enacts the essence of scientific specialization, and thus why all denunciations of scientific specialization have fallen, and must continue to fall, unheeded, by necessity. Thus, by focusing on one of Severino's major theoretical works (Oltre il linguaggio, 1992), but also with an eye to several other key texts, this essay aims to introduce international readers to Severino's discourse, and in order to do so translates passages of his work that have never appeared in English.