Athena – Critical Inquiries in Law, Philosophy and Globalization

Athena is a scholarly journal that sets out to analyse the problems relating to the legal, political, and social changes attendant on globalization, proposing to provide these problems with theoretical answers.

Since the mid-twentieth century, we have been living in an age of deep transformation, with globalization processes that have heightened the crisis of the nation-state; amplified the clash, and meeting, of civilizations; and triggered huge migration flows.

In several disciplines, these epoch-making transformations have prompted an effort to understand their nature by wrestling with new themes and ideas: human rights, international constitutionalism, global justice, multiculturalism, new identities, accelerated technological changes, and the emergence of new forms of power and of regulation.

The incremental process toward a meeting of civilizations and cultures poses an inevitable challenge to Western knowledge and to its presumed centrality, making it necessary to recognize the particularity of the Western tradition, its connection and relation to non-Western traditions, and the importance of engaging with other approaches and cultures without claiming a position of superiority. For an apt visual rendering of this predicament of Western reason we can turn to the unsettling and enigmatic image of Klimt’s Pallas Athene, and the beheaded Medusa on her armour can be interpreted as signalling the end of a fossilized thought, while embracing the prospect of new horizons.

As global pressures mount and crises come to a head, several legal and philosophical questions come into focus that need to be addressed through different lenses, making it possible to break out of the traditional dogmatism so as to gain deeper insights into the issues with which we are confronted, leading to a wider perspective on how best to deal with those issues and find globally accepted formulations of the problem they pose.

These transformations that we are facing compel the philosophy of law to analyse the grounds of law from a critical perspective by also fostering interaction with other disciplines: political thought, history of political doctrines, cultural anthropology, international law, political philosophy, ethics and applied ethics, moral philosophy, theoretical philosophy, philosophy of technology, history of law, philosophy of international law. The vantage point from which to tackle these challenges will be that of legal philosophy, but this observatory will also do double duty as a laboratory in which to test out different ideas through a discussion that can bring into play a whole range of perspectives reflective of the complexity of the changing reality were are currently experiencing.

Directors' Board: Gustavo Gozzi (Editor-in-Chief), Alberto Artosi, Giorgio Bongiovanni, Susanna Maria Cafaro, Orsetta Giolo, Geminello Preterossi