Science and technology are the most distinctive traits of Western civilisation. The last seminar is focused on the perception of those traits by some eminent thinkers and writers (such as Goethe and Nietzsche, Simone Weil and Hannah Arendt, Musil and Valéry, among others) which is sometimes of fascination and more frequently of aversion. It will give us the opportunity to ponder on the radical changes intervened in the last few centuries in the world around us (and in our perception of it), as well as on science itself which is by now utterly unintelligible to the common sense. The seminar is delivered on zoom.

Mauro Sellitto is researcher at the Department of Engineering, Università della Campania "Luigi Vanvitelli", working on non-equilibrium statistical physics and complex dynamics. His long-time interests in science, broadly understood as a global, cultural, historical and human endeavor, has led him to collaborate in the past few years with the publishing house Adelphi, for which he has edited several books and written some essays.