Abstract: Cotta’s political philosophy and philosophy of law are closely connected. Reading and studying even today philosophical-legal-political work of Cotta is recommended because it is a philosophy that not only thinks, but also or above all makes one think. Cotta’s style is always clear and his reasoning is always dialectical; but his conclusions are prospective, i.e. open to further philosophical developments and to new questions.
Keywords: Sergio Cotta – philosophy of law – political philosophy – modernity
Abstract: Sergio Cotta’s historical-political writings confirm that in his philosophical perspective the ontological and existential sense of law tends to go beyond the confines of a geopolitically determined legal order, opening up to a cosmopolitan level as an overcoming without negation of the peculiar national closure of the political dimension. In essence, it is an implicit rediscovery of the Kantian lesson on the philosophical and cosmopolitan project of perpetual peace between nations, which Cotta reinterprets as the primary value and very vocation of the universalism of law, defined as a «structure of peace» and founded on the ontological principles of the «duty to be» and of the respect for human life in its unavailability. It remains firm that, for Cotta, a universal and unconditional openness towards the otherness of the human and social world is possible only in the superior asymmetrical dimension of charity, which however is not separated from law in its symmetry between rights and duties, but is present within it as «perfect justice», even if they constitute two distinct and unmistakable relational dimensions.
Keywords: Sergio Cotta − philosophy of law − juridical cosmopolitanism − law and charity − philosophy of peace − duty to be and right to live
