Marie Bugnitz
ROME, March 17 - University of John Cabot professor Brunella Antomarini discussed her most recent book, “Pensare con l’errore” at a presentation given by the Fondazion Basso on Friday.
Antomarini, a philosophy professor at JCU, has published several articles on her study of epistemology, or “the study of knowledge”. Her most recent book is a culmination of her studies and centers around the idea that there is no such thing as certainty.
“My purpose is to show certainty is never the case…When we know something, actually, we can never know if we are right or wrong,” Antomarini told The Matthew Online.
Philosophy usually focuses on just two subjects: certainty and relativism. “I wanted to find a third way. Certainty is fake; it’s an illusion," she said. "On the other side, I didn’t want to become skeptical of knowledge. We can turn uncertainty into something positive. Being uncertain is good; it means we are aware we have different possibilities.”
Antomarini started writing “Pensare con l’errore” about ten years ago. She researched at Gregoriana University in Rome and libraries in New York and Berkley, California. The American philosopher Charles Pierce and Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein greatly influenced her work. Another invaluable reference was a one-day seminar held at JCU three years ago, where she discussed a chapter on statistics from her upcoming book.
She then received feedback from different professors, including JCU's dean Mary Merva, and from professors Luca de Caprariis and Meloria Meschi, plus JCU President Franco Pavoncello. One of the speakers at the presentation, Professor Franco Voltaggio, read and analyzed Antomarini’s book before it was published.
“Pensare con l’errore” is divided into five chapters. The first projects art and science as examples of concepts without certainty.
To Antomarini, artists are the prime example. “They are the ones who don’t care about being logical or consistent. They are the ones who think with error,” she says.
She then analyzes the great philosophers, from Plato to Pierce. The third chapter analyzes the validity of statistics. Antomarini said they “include error, not exclude it.”
Next, she discusses memory. “We very often remember wrongly. We tend to reconstruct the past. We also need to forget sometimes,” Antomarini says.
She concludes the book with the idea of parallel universes. “We make decisions but know we might have had other solutions, and we keep those in our mind,” she says.
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