This is the twenty-ninth installment of The Cocoon Goes Global, a series that gives a sense of what the philosophy profession looks like outside of the Anglophone West.
This guest post is written by Chiara Russo Krauss, associate professor at Federico II University in Naples
- General Information
Italy is a peninsula in the south of Europe, which extends in the Mediterranean Sea. Italy also has two big islands: Sicily and Sardinia. The Italian peninsula is separated from Northern Europe (France, Switzerland, and Austria) by the Alps mountain chain, whereas another mountain chain, the Apennines, runs from North to South along the peninsula. Given this geographical configuration, the climate – although generally temperate – changes drastically depending on whether you are in Northern or Southern Italy, on the coastline or in the mountains.
Italy has a population of roughly 60 million inhabitants. Rather than having a few big metropolises, Italy has many medium-size cities. Only three of them have more than one million inhabitants (Rome, Milan, Naples). Apart from the many cities that have from 50.000 to 500.000 inhabitants, there are also a lot of smaller towns and villages spread along the Italian territory, which is thus densely inhabited and highly anthropized. If you drive by car in any part of Italy, you won’t travel long before encountering another town.
The history of Italy is a history of conflicts and divisions. During the period of ancient Rome, the Romans succeeded in unifying the various tribes and populations which inhabited the Italian peninsula (2nd-3rd century B.C.). However, after the definitive disintegration of the Roman Empire (5th-6th century A.D.), a period of political fragmentation began, which lasted over a thousand years, up until the unification of Italy in 1861. During this period, Italy was constituted of multiple states in a never-ending conflict with each other, as well as exposed to the constant invasions from foreign armies (Arabs from the south of the Mediterranean Sea, Normans from Scandinavia, the Spanish kingdom, the German Holy Roman Empire, the French kingdom, and so on and so on).
Even after the political unification of Italy, this history of fragmentation still has its marks on Italy. For example, various parts of Italy speak different dialects that are reminiscent of the languages of past conquerors. The regions and cities are very protective of their different traditions and cuisines, and often maintain a more or less explicit hostility towards their neighbors.
The greatest division that still characterizes Italy is surely the economic divide between the richer Northern regions and the poorer Southern regions. Whereas North Italy is an industrial district of paramount importance in the overall economy of Europe, the economy of South Italy is based mostly on tourism, agriculture, and subsidies from the European Union. For this reason, Italy has a long history of internal immigration from the South to the North, and to this day many young people still have to leave their places of birth in South Italy to find work in the Northern regions of Italy, or even the Northern countries of Europe.
Politically, Italy is a democratic republic. Every five years, in the general elections, the citizens vote to elect two chambers of representatives. These representatives then choose a Prime Minister to be the head of the government. Next to this, Italy also has a Head of State, the President of the Republic, which is elected by the members of the two chambers every seven years. However, the President of the Republic has no actual power, serving more as the guarantor of the Constitution. Since in Italy there are a lot of different political parties, the arrangements between them are very fragile and unstable, which makes it is very difficult for a Prime Minister to stay in office all five years between elections.
After World War II, Italy had one of the strongest communist parties in the Western world and also a strong trade union movement. For this reason, Italy has a fairly strong welfare system, which includes universal healthcare, paid maternity leaves, paid vacations, paid sick leaves, laws against unfair dismissals, public retirement funds, and so on. However, in the last decades, new types of jobs positions were created, which don’t have all these benefits. Therefore, there is often a strong difference, even in the same companies and in the same jobs, between older employees hired with old contractual forms with lots of benefits, and younger employees hired on fixed terms contracts, with far fewer benefits and job security. Moreover, since it is almost impossible to fire the employees with the more secure contracts, they do not have any incentive to work, so – especially in public institutions – it is not uncommon to find people who get a paycheck without actually working. This is one of the reasons why dealing with bureaucracy in Italy is so frustrating, together with the excess of regulations.
- The university system
The many kingdoms and city-states that constituted Italy in the past also had their own universities. Therefore, Italy still has many universities of ancient origin. However, the development of the modern university system began in the nineteenth century, following the model of the new German universities. The universities became more structured organizations, based on the self-administration by the professors and focused not only on teaching but also on research. Even though the Italian universities underwent a process of corporatization in the last decades, which regards the students as customers and the university as a firm selling its services to them, the old system is still partly in play. Thus, apart from the people working in the administration, most of the governing bodies of the universities are still constituted of and elected by professors. For the same reasons, each university in Italy is an independent organization, even though they all receive funding from the Italian Ministry of University and Research.
After a series of reforms in the last decades, the academic career is now structured as follows. After the high school diploma, a student enrolls in a three-year degree course. At the end, the student discusses a thesis and obtains the degree. After that, the student can enroll in a second (and generally more specialistic) two-years degree course, that ends with another thesis. Unlike the rest of the world, in order to be called “doctor” in Italy one doesn’t need a doctorate, but one of these degrees. However, if one wants to go to graduate school to earn the title of Ph.D. in Italy, one has to have the second degree and win a public competition for the few available positions at each university. Graduate school only lasts three years in Italy. Technically, it is possible to ask for an extension, but this has a negative impact on the evaluation and funding of the university from the ministry, so it is rather uncommon. After the Ph.D., in order to stay in academia, one should either look for fixed-term research grants (funded by the universities or the Ministry) or – even better – for more stable positions in the university.
In particular, the academic career is made of four steps: 1) type-A researcher (aka rtd-A, it lasts three years, renewable for two more years); 2) type-B researcher (aka rtd-B, it lasts three years, after which one almost automatically becomes associate professor); 3) associate professor; 4) full professor. In order to become type-B researcher, one needs either to have been rtd-A for three years or have done three years of research grants in the past (not necessarily continuous). Moreover, to become a professor, one needs to obtain the habilitation from the Italian Ministry of Research and University, which requires a certain number of publications and the evaluation of a selection of these publications by a commission of professors.
People occupying all four of these ranks are required to teach classes, with a growing number of teaching hours. However, there is also another career for researchers in Italy, that does not require teaching. Indeed, Italy has a public research institution called CNR (Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche) which employs researchers working in different fields. Needless to say, most of the fundings of the CNR goes to scientific research (medicine, biology, physics,…), but there are also departments for the humanities.
To secure an academic career in Italy, one usually must have an affiliation with a strong research group, that will be able to find research grants and jobs positions for the aspirant philosophers of their group. For this reason, powerful professors are often named “barons”, to indicate this sort of feudal system that decides the fate of young scholars. However, partly to avoid the obvious shortcomings of this system, there are also various kinds of incentives for researchers from other countries, since universities are financially rewarded for their efforts towards internationalization. Moreover, there are many programs funded by the European Union to incentivize the mobility of academics between countries.
- Philosophy in Italy
Almost all universities in Italy offer a degree course in philosophy, because philosophy is a mandatory subject in high school and many people want to be school teachers. The typical university lesson in the Humanities, philosophy included, is still the frontal lecture. Hence, the students are not necessarily required to take an active part in the class, nor they are required to write papers. At the end of the course, the students must pass an oral examination, during which they must prove to know the topics of the syllabus, rather than produce something original. The syllabi generally are not made of bits of multiple works (chapters, journal articles, etc.), but rather entire books that the students must study from cover to cover.
Since there are many universities in Italy, each one with its own history and tradition, it is difficult to speak in general of what kind of philosophy is the most popular in Italy. Different universities have different schools, different approaches, and different fields of study. Even though analytic philosophy did not spread in Italy as it did in other countries during the twentieth century, there are some universities and research groups that fall into this tradition, especially in the northern regions. Thanks to the influence of Benedetto Croce’s and Giovanni Gentile’s historicism, the history of philosophy has a strong tradition in Italy, especially in the Southern regions. Indeed, already in high school, philosophy is taught historically, starting from ancient Greece and proceeding chronologically up to modern times, as was decided by Gentile when he was the ministry of school and university. Since Latin and Ancient Greek are also taught in high school, there is also a florishing school in the research of ancient, medieval, and renaissance philosophy. Thanks to the aforementioned popularity of communism in post-war Italy, political philosophy too has a strong tradition in Italy. However, if you are interested in a particular kind of philosophy, it would be better to make contact with someone who studied or works in a university, so as to ask what are the strengths of the philosophical schools and research groups in that university.
Finally, it should be noted that – even though the younger scholars are getting used to publishing on international academic journals in English and to engaging more with the international community – Italian is still the main language for doing philosophy in Italy. Probably many colleagues and professors will not be able to speak English, since French, German, and even Spanish were once more studied than English. So, if you plan to study or work in Italy, you should either speak Italian or learn Italian.
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