Furio Cerutti

Qualifica

Professor of Political Philosophy em. (già professore ordinario)

 Contatti

 furio.cerutti unifi.it

 Attività  di ricerca

Cerutti’s early work dealt mainly with Western Marxism and Critical Theory; he has then worked and still works on a political philosophy of international relations and global affairs, following two research paths that are not related with each other:

• the theory of global challenges (nuclear weapons and global warming), seen as those that, while disrupting the rationality of political modernity, raise unprecedented problems for politics  and require to introduce a new dimension of it - the non-adversarial management of global commons out of solidarity with future generations - far beyond both the realist and the cosmopolitical approach;
• the question of a political (as different from social or cultural) identity of the Europeans in connection with the legitimacy of the European Union; this is a key to the understanding of the difficulties experienced by the EU in its attempt to become a full-fledged polity and international actor.

Although political philosophy remains its leading interest, Cerutti’s research is interwoven with elements deriving from empirical political science, International Relations and climatology.
   On this key, in his last book Cerutti has developed an interest in the systematic rethinking of the categories that constitute the tissue of political philosophy and allow for a substantial understanding of it, far from any reduction to normative ethics .  
 

Note

Born in Genoa, Furio Cerutti graduated at the Univ. of Pisa (supervisor: C.Luporini) and was later a DAAD fellow at Heidelberg (supervisor: K.Löwith) and a Humboldt fellow at Frankfurt am Main (supervisor: J.Habermas). His career developed then at Florence and also included two years at Harvard (Law School, later Center for European Studies) as well as visiting professorships at Paris 8, London School of Economics and Political Science, Humboldt Universität, Berlin. After his retirement he has been a visiting professor at China Foreign Affairs University, Beijing and Stanford University in Florence, and still teaches at the PhD School, Scuola superiore Sant'Anna, Pisa. He has also taught the online course (MOOC) "Political Philosophy: An Introduction" which still runs on the platform www.iversity.org.
Cerutti was a co-founder and is a past president of the Forum on the problems of peace and war, an independent research institute based in Florence. He is also a member of the Harvard Law School Alumni Association, and a Research Alumnus of the University of Heidelberg.

Publications from the year 2000 on
 

• Global Challenges for Leviathan. A Political Philosophy of Nuclear Weapons and Global Warming, Lanham, Md.: Rowman&Littlefield 2007 (paperback 2008; Italian transl. 2010)
• Conceptualizing Politics: An Introduction to Political Philosophy, London: Routledge 2017.
  
  
   Edited books:

• (with R. Ragionieri) Identities and Conflicts. The Mediterranean, Basingstoke and New York : Palgrave, 2001
• (with E. Rudolph), A Soul for Europe. On the Political and Cultural Identity of the Europeans, vol.1 A Reader; vol.2.An Essay Collection,  Leuven –Sterling, Va.: Peeters 2001 (partial translations in Farsi and Italian)
• The Search for a European Identity: Values, Policies and Legitimacy of the European Union, ed. with S. Lucarelli, London: Routledge 2008
• (as guest editor) Risk and Responsibility. A Special Issue of “Science and Engineering Ethics”, vol. 16, no. 3, 2010
• Debating Political Identity and Legitimacy in the European Union, ed. with S .Lucarelli and Vivien A. Schmidt, London: Routledge 2011
• Brauchen die Europäer eine Identität? ed. with E. Rudolph, Zürich: Orell Füssli 2011.
•  全球治理：挑战与趋势(Global Governance: Challenges and Trends), edited by Zhu Liqun, Furio Cerutti and Lu Jing, Beijing: Social Science Academic Press,  2014 (in Chinese)

All these books open with longer theoretical introductions by Cerutti.
 

Among his articles and book chapters only the last ones are listed here:

• Two Global Challenges to Global Governance, “Global Policy”, III, 3, September 2012,  314-323.
• Survival – Humankind’s First Fundamental Right,  “Constellations",22, 1,March 2015, 59-67.
• Climate Ethics and the Failures of ‘Normative Political Philosophy’, “Philosophy and Social Criticism”, 2016, Vol. 42(7) 707–726.