Sigmas of contemporaneity

Abstract

The article criticizes the mechanistic transformation of the Academy into a commercialized university, where knowledge and thought become commodities and an immoral, stressful environment drives out innovators and paralyzes reflection. In opposition to this modern legacy, it calls for a more virtuous, critical, and nondogmatic contemporary science capable of revisiting ancient metaphysical questions through radical inquiry. The new relationship between philosophy and science should produce more abstract categories, termed «generic symbols», and open thought to the new, the impossible, and the unthinkable. «Contemporary sigmas» represent traces not inherited from modernity but created by a mode of thought that builds a natural path from contemporary science to metaphysics. The author presents indications supporting this hypothesis and maintains that we are already living in the contemporary era.