There will be no end to the troubles of states, or of humanity itself, till philosophers become kings in this world, or till those we now call kings and rulers really and truly become philosophers - Plato
ENLIGHTENMENT AND municipal administration might not seem intuitively to be the most usual of bedfellows. But, breaking new ground, Podesta (Mayor) Ada Fiore, capo of Corigliano d’Otranto (pop. 5,889) in the province of Lecce in the heel of Italy, has certainly brought the former to the latter with her appointment of the town’s and Italy’s (even Europe’s?) first municipal philosopher.
Citing Socrates and Spinoza, the town council’s Resolution 72 appointed one Graziella Lupo, who would be available for consultation at the town hall “between 15.00 and 19.00 on Fridays”, at €15 a time. To date, since appointment in September, she has engaged in dialectics with some 500 citizens, all at no cost to the town.
Meanwhile Fiore has gone further, according to the Guardian, persuading the council to organise philosophy seminars, and to sprinkle plaques around the town’s ancient walls with quotations from philosophers like St Augustine, and postcards in the shops that ask questions, such as “Why were you born?”.
Indeed. And just as important as those other municipal bestsellers, “How to pay your water rates” and “Pre-school playgroups in your locality”.
Lupo’s appointment has, unsurprisingly, raised a few anti-intellectual eyebrows and provoked irate head of psychologists’ local professional body Dr Giuseppe Luigi Palma to claim that the use of a consulting philosopher – presumably, as opposed to using a psychologist – was “not only misleading and confusing, but utterly perilous”. A complaint which, appropriately, Lupo dismissed as “devoid of epistemological content.” Fiore says Palma misunderstands what a municipal philosopher does. Lupo engages clients in Socratic dialogue and did not “dwell on their past, but their present and their perspectives on the future”.
Corigliano d’Otranto clearly has something of the quality of those glorious small-town-Italy clashes between Don Camillo and communist mayor Peppone in Giovannino Guareschi’s stories. Or even of the eccentric spirit of Podesta Giulio Cesare Fava who earlier this year issued an edict forbidding dying because Falciano del Massico, near Naples, has run out of burial space.
And why not? There’s a philosophical conundrum.