A Brief Bio, And a Lick of Irony
Giorgio Baruchello is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Akureyri in Iceland. Born in Genoa, he studied philosophy in Italy and Iceland, and completed the Guelph-McMaster-Wilfrid Laurier joint Ph.D. Programme in Philosophy at the University of Guelph, Ontario (Canada) with a dissertation entitled "Understanding Cruelty: From Dante to Rorty." He has published extensively on a great variety of topics, while also cultivating operatic singing and trying his best to live a life on a suffering planet. He is an Icelandic citizen, a father, a husband, an avid reader, and yet another human being. As such, he is fascinated by all varieties of human experiences, endeavours, and errors.
His scholarly output has addressed axiology, moral and socio-political philosophy, intellectual history, religion, rhetoric, and humour. Across these areas, and frequently in collaboration with other experts, one crucial matter has kept calling for closer scrutiny: how social values, personal responsibility, cruelty, and folly shape human institutions and self-understanding, in a never-ending reiteration and typically chaotic combination of rational and irrational factors, at both the collective and individual levels. Learned abstractions may well offer an orderly account of lived reality, which is however anything but orderly. Philosophy can spawn more such abstractions, or teach us how to live.
His recent literary and comedic works do not leave philosophy behind. They modify the medium. Hence, they concoct and combine artistic devices with theoretical, existential, and ethico-political concerns. Fables, novelettes, squibs, outlandish spoofs, fantasies, spiels, tragicomedies, sarcastic parables, and much else are deployed, played with, and enjoyed, in order to address a plethora of philosophical themes and issues. All of this is done while also toying with language and the ways in which we express ourselves, so as to reveal the underlying, vast realm of tacit assumptions, habits, prejudices, complexes, and magmatic affects informing and fuelling all of the above — and our very lives.
P.S. As a scholar steeped in Jungian lore, Baruchello knows that an online blog is an obvious extension of its creator's persona. Therefore, the blog is written in the third person, and its words are expected to mock their author in the most impish ways (especially in Icelandic).