Il Multifocal Approach: tra fecondità euristica e rischi dialettici

The paper aims to outline the heuristic fruitfulness of the Multifocal Approach, considered not only as a method for reading and interpreting texts, but also as a theory dealing with the complexity of reality. This approach relies upon the all-part relation (which can be traced back to the ancient topic of the one-to-many relation). On this basis, the article proposes epistemological, ontological, ethical and socio-political reflections and critically highlights some issues that require further investigations. Therefore, Multifocal Approach develops some theoretical refinements to overcome not only the ‘dialectic of enlightenment’ – what it does succeed in – but also any ‘dialectic of differentialism’ and systemic constraint. Indeed, these latter approaches run the risk of missing the richness of the panorama they have to analyze, thereby condemning themselves to inaction.