[III, 7, 28/02/17] THE UNTIMELY. FROM NIETZSCHE TO USL'INATTUALE. DA NIETZSCHE A NOI

This article discusses whether the two terms ‘faith’ and ‘reason’ are used univocally or not throughout John Paul II’s encyclical Fides et Ratio (1998), and which is the Pope’s stance with respect to their semantic history, in both philosophy and theology.
The article analyses some clusters of crucial questions which FR not only does not eschew, but rather prompts and partially answers; this provides a framework for a comparison of the encyclical’s ‘faith and reason’ with those of the surrounding Catholic tradition. This will demonstrate how Fides et Ratio is both ‘timely’ and ‘untimely’: timely inasmuch as the problems it discusses are possibly more relevant to the philosophical and social situation of today’s world than they were twenty years ago; ‘untimely’ since they propose a view of knowledge, personhood and relationship which is deeply at odds with that most commonly found in contemporaneity, and yet for this very reason has a lasting quality which no passing trend may aim at achieving.

KEYWORDS: Fides et ratio; Faith; Reason; Christian Philosophy; Epistemology

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