Global Ethics at the 25th World Congress of Philosophy Rome 2024

In a fascinating newspaper article, Roberto Esposito previewed for the general public the nature and objectives of the 25th World Congress of Philosophy, held in Rome at Sapienza University from August 1 to 8, 2024.1 Esposito did not hesitate to paraphrase the conclusion of Marx’s Manifesto: “Philosophers of the world, unite!” in order to emphasize the universalism that philosophy cannot but aspire to, but which must not mean homologation. With nearly 6,000 registered participants, the Rome Congress did not exceed the nearly 7,000 in Beijing in 2018, but it doubled the 3,000 gathered in Athens in 2013, the last time the Congress was held in Europe. It was good to see that the auditoriums were always full, in a program that started at 9:00 a.m. each day and ended at 7:00 p.m. (with a queue, on three evenings, from 9:00 p.m. to 10:30 p.m. at the Palatine), an extremely packed schedule, searchable on a dedicated app and published in a 552-page online document. What were the most innovative lines seen at the congress? Certainly, as Marina Calloni noted in her evaluation article, the discourse on interculturality, the interdisciplinary approach, and gender issues. The official languages were those of the United Nations, with the addition of German and Italian, but no Arabic. Note how, for the first time in the history of the World Congress, artificial intelligence applications, along with on-screen transcription of the original language, produced excellent simultaneous translations from one source language into six target languages.