Piergiorgio Donatelli

Invited researcher of the 2026 DEA Programme | In residence at Maison Suger in November 2026

Piergiorgio Donatelli is Professor of Moral Philosophy at Sapienza University of Rome, where he served as Director of the Department of Philosophy from 2019 to 2025. His research focuses on ethics and its history, bioethics, and the transformations linked to artificial intelligence, with particular attention to the intersections between forms of life and democratic experience. His work is grounded in a Wittgensteinian philosophical perspective, in dialogue notably with Michel Foucault, Stanley Cavell, and Veena Das, whose ideas he connects to themes of democracy, moral perfectionism, and ordinary experience. His research also develops in dialogue with anthropological perspectives, with close attention to lived experience and everyday life. He is President of the Consulta di Bioetica and Vice-President of the Italian Society for the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence.

The project

Title: Pratiques de liberté et formation du sujet. Foucault, l’Italie des années soixante-dix et la généalogie d’une éducation depuis l’expérience ordinaire.

"This project investigates the ambivalence that Michel Foucault identified from the 1970s onward between the rise of neoliberal rationalities and the emergence of practices of freedom grounded in ordinary experience: feminist and gay movements, transformations in trade unionism, and forms of dissidence in Eastern Europe. These practices redefine subjectivity beyond the classical humanist model. In dialogue with Italy in the 1970s (particularly Pasolini) and with the Wittgensteinian critique of rationality developed by Aldo Giorgio Gargani (Il sapere senza fondamenti), the project seeks to pursue the genealogy of an education “from below” rooted in the ordinary. In this way, it further develops my research on forms of life and the ordinary through the philosophies of Wittgenstein and Stanley Cavell."

Hosting institution: University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, ISJPS