Emanuele Pili

Emanuele Pili is Associate Professor in History of Philosophy at the University of Perugia (Italy), where he is also Principal Investigator of the PRIN 2022 PNRR project "CHEWIE - Well-being, Humanism and Civil Economy" (funded by European Union - Next Generation EU, and Ministry of University and Research, Italy). His research interests center on ontology, intersubjectivity, Italian philosophical tradition, and the relationships between philosophy and theology, examined across different periods and key figures in the history of thought (Thomas Aquinas, Antonio Rosmini, Simone Weil, Hannah Arendt).

Project Abstract: The recent critique on the concept of meritocracy finds its closest origin in the twentieth-century debate around a theory of justice. However, the study of what merit is and why Western societies have attached great importance to this concept has a much longer and more complex history. With implicit reference to these issues, part of my research shows how the philosophical tradition of the Italian Enlightenment, in the movement of thought from Giacinto Dragonetti (Delle virtù e de’ premi [On Virtues and Rewards], 1766) to Melchiorre Gioia (Del merito e delle ricompense [On Merit and Rewards], 1818- 1819), expresses a peculiar evaluation of merit. For both, merit exists and, in a just society, must be rewarded, even if it remains extremely difficult to see it clearly and, consequently, to calculate it. Ultimately, merit appears to them – especially for Gioia, who rethinks Bentham's utilitarianism – as structurally ambivalent: on the one hand, it appears to be the best principle through which to distribute different social positions; on the other, it is not easy at all to measure it, and therefore it easily lends itself to its ideological (ab)use (for example, to justify exclusion or unjust social inequality). Particularly noteworthy, finally, is that both Dragonetti and Gioia invite us to understand merit in relational terms, connecting it to the notions of reciprocity and gratuitousness.