Writers Andrea Camilleri and Hanif Kureishi, filmmaker Marco Bellocchio, journalism doyen Eugenio Scalfari, Oscar-winning music man Nicola Piovani and architect Peter Eisenmann will be among those charting 'Borders' at Rome's second Philosophy Festival this month.
"The West versus the East, Faith vs Reason, the endangered prospects for Enlightenment thinking, emancipation from received ideas and the end of the mind-body disconnect," are among the topics to be thrashed out at the capital's Auditorium complex from May 9 to 13, organisers say.
The 'lay' speakers will be joined by professional thinkers like Italy's Gianni Vattimo and Luciano Canfora, France's Marc Auge', Germany's Peter Sloterdijk, Spain's Fernando Savater and Switzerland's Tariq Ramadan, famous for his belief that Islam may gradually moderate European secularism.
"Confines" is another translation of the Italian heading for the get-together ('Confini') - as reflected by other topics to be bashed about, such as the limits of multiculturalism, the raising of new geopolitical boundaries, and the cramped spaces of global metropoli.
Like last year's first edition, which attracted 60,000 people, 'Confini' will feature sidebars on cinema and a range of activities for children.
There will also be novelties like 'philosophical coffee-shops' and yoga sessions.
One-off lectures will include "The Sound of the Logos: I, Charles Darwin" and an examination of four of Italo Calvino's 'cosmicomical' stories.
The aim of the event, again, is to bring often abstruse subjects "into the realm of collective thinking and common sense," say the organisers, two of Italy's best-known leftwing thinkers and authors, Giacomo Marramao and Paolo Flores d'Arcais.
