End and Beginning in Religion and Ethics

Beginning and end constitute two fundamental coordinates of human experience. They are, first and foremost, biological terms of life — birth and death — and for that very reason categories inseparable from the experience and conceptualization of time. A major strand of Western philosophy has developed around finitude and death; more recently, however, increasing attention has been devoted to birth, natality, and the capacity to bring something new into being, also in the context of a renewed appreciation of female philosophical traditions and perspectives.
In religions, beginning and end assume an even more evident centrality. The “Alpha and Omega” of the Christian tradition symbolically condenses the two extremes of time, yet religious cultures have elaborated widely differing temporal topologies: linear or cyclical, oriented towards an original creation, a future redemption, a succession of ages, or an eternal return. Religions themselves, moreover, have histories of their own beginnings: one need only think of the debate surrounding the “Axial Age” and the hypotheses through which scholars have sought to understand the emergence, in different cultural contexts, of new conceptions of transcendence, ethics, and history. No figure, however, thematizes the end with the force of the apocalypse: revelation and catastrophe, fulfilment and transformation, the destruction of one order and the possible opening of another.
These ancient structures are re-emerging today with particular intensity in technological discourse. Artificial intelligence is alternately presented as a new beginning for humanity or as the beginning of its end. Scenarios involving uncontrollable autonomous systems, agents capable of escaping their safety environments, new possibilities for the artificial production of biological threats, and existential risk nourish explicitly eschatological imaginaries. At the same time, sectors of technological culture attribute to technology itself a function of containing catastrophe: a kind of digital katechon, capable of anticipating risk, governing uncertainty, and deferring collapse. The boundary between prophecy and prediction, salvation and algorithmic risk management, eschatology and computational anticipation thus becomes increasingly porous.
Beginning and end also cut across highly concrete ethical questions. Nowhere is this clearer than in bioethics, where controversies concerning conception, birth, abortion, ageing, death, and end-of-life decisions reveal how difficult it is to establish not only when something begins or ends, but also what it means to attribute moral value to that boundary.
The seminar will therefore approach beginning and end as religious, philosophical, ethical, technological, and semiotic problems. Particular attention will be devoted to the forms through which societies endow these thresholds with meaning: how is a beginning narrated?
How is an ending represented? Which words, images, sounds, rituals, texts, and narratives enable us to think what comes before and what comes after? The seminar will culminate in
the final conference, “Ultimate Meaning: Where the Human Ends”, devoted precisely to the religious, ethical, philosophical, and semiotic possibility of interrogating what appears at the end, but also what, within the very experience of ending, may begin anew.

CALENDAR

12 gennaio 2026 | 14.30 | Umberto CURI | Parlare di dio, parlare con dio: filosofia e teologia in dialogo
7 January 2027 | 11:00  Marta SOLIGO (IN PERSON)
21 January 2027 | 11:00  Eugenio MAZZARELLA (IN PERSON)
4 February 2027 | 11:00  External seminar (IN PERSON)
18 February 2027 | 11:00  External seminar (IN PERSON)
1 March 2027 | 11:00  External seminar (IN PERSON)
15 March 2027 | 11:00  External seminar (IN PERSON)
22 March 2027 | 11:00  External seminar (IN PERSON)
5 April 2027 | 11:00  External seminar (ONLINE)
12 April 2027 | 11:00  External seminar (ONLINE)
19 April 2027 | 11:00  External seminar (ONLINE)
3 May 2027 | 11:00  External seminar (IN PERSON)
17 May 2027 | 11:00  External seminar (IN PERSON)
3 June 2027 | 11:00  External seminar (IN PERSON)
17 June 2027 | 11:00  External seminar (IN PERSON)
1 July 2027 | 11:00  External seminar (ONLINE)
15 July 2027 | 11:00  External seminar (ONLINE)
29 July 2027 | 11:00  External seminar (ONLINE)
2 September 2027 | 11:00  External seminar (ONLINE)
6 September 2027 | 11:00  External seminar
9 September 2027 | 11:00  External seminar
13 September 2027 | 11:00  External seminar
16 September 2027 | 11:00  External seminar (ONLINE)
27 September 2027 | 11:00  External seminar
4 October 2027 | 11:00  External seminar
18 October 2027 | 11:00  External seminar
8 November 2027 | 11:00  External seminar
22 November 2027 | 11:00  External seminar
6 December 2027 | 11:00  External seminar
13 – 14 December 2027 | Event on Paolo De Benedetti with Massimo GIULIANI (UNITN)
14 – 17 December 2027 | International conference “ULTIMATE MEANING: Where the Human Ends”

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The calendar may experience alterations.

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The initiative was also realized thanks to the contribution of “Direzione generale Educazione, ricerca e istituti culturali” of the Ministry of Culture.