Dalla tolleranza all'empatia. Alla ricerca di un paradigma cognitivo

The current global and multicultural society ought to review the conceptual and the practical tools available to handle toleration. Our society needs to overcome yet "toleration" as an arbitrary and temporary concession of privileges, derived from the political tradition of the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries. The Modern Age and the Enlightenment defined a theory and an ethics of toleration well grounded on the recognition of inalienable rights, both by nature and by law. Toleration was not conceived just by the western culture, as highlighted by the philosophers of the eighteenth-century, as it was shared also by the cultures of the Middle and the Far East: the mutual hybrids induced across history will be analyzed in order to define the archetypes of the current issues as derived from the paradigms of cultural emancipation and cosmopolitism. "Empathy" is the result of an analysis and it derives from a proper understanding of what the "others" do, what they feel, what they want, what they think. My contribution focuses on philosophers such as David Hume, Adam Smith and Edith Stein and on the concepts of toleration, sympathy and empathy based upon the international right and the defence of the individual rights, as it takes into account real life experience and relationships.