Dehumanization and Human Fragility

A Philosophical Investigation

When the trade center collapsed in New York, I was sitting at my desk at the newspaper La Provincia di Como, in Italy. If I cannot forget that day, it is not only because that major event shuttered me, but in reason of the cognitive limits that I could experiment. For the first time in my professional career, I realized that a further theoretical step was asked in order to throw light on evildoing. This philosophical investigation is aimed at exploring the loss of humanity from a phenomenological perspective integrated with a metaphysical approach. It collects and develops a decade of theoretical researches, mainly published in Italy, focused on the anthropological aspects of global terrorism from which I moved further to explore human fragility. Despair, sloth, and the pain of traumas are explored in part II of the investigation that ends with the story of Etty Hillesum, the Dutch intellectual who was able to flourish in the midst of the Nazis hell.