The Europè research centre's hypothesis is that Europe, tensed between theory and reality, represents both a historical novelty and the embodiment of the philosophical ambivalences raised in the introduction.
But it is also, perhaps, the place where these ambivalences can be overcome. While it is difficult to identify European identity, this indeterminacy also opens up a critical space in which the great questions of practical philosophy come into play: what is identity? What is the universal? What is a concrete universal in the Hegelian sense, i.e. a universal embodied in a particularity? Are human rights to be understood in this sense?
Conversely, what could a non-embodied ideal be if not a formal universal, unwilling to take on board historicity, particularities and change? Are human rights susceptible to this criticism? More generally, can European values provide principles for practical action ? Lastly, if Europe is spoken but not heard, it would be worthwhile considering the project of a ‘positive europeology’: what are the phenomena through which and in which Europe is spoken? What is the logos of Europe, which was born in the same cradle as this one?
Europè is first and foremost a research group in practical philosophy which, in Europe as it exists and as it thinks, finds inexhaustible material for these fundamental debates.