Contemplating guilt: Between atonement and justice

Lecture: Contemplating guilt: Between atonement and justice

Lecturer: Tommaso Greco (Università di Pisa)

Date: Friday, October 10, 2025, 6:30 p.m.

Place: Monte Verità (Ascona), Auditorium

Cycle: Eranos-Jung Lectures 2025 - A Jungian Lexicon for our Times: Guilt, Soul, Conflict, Time, Care, Knowledge

Language: Italian

Moderator: Fabio Merlini (Fondazione Eranos, Ascona / SUFFP, Lugano)

Followed by discussion with the audience and aperitif

The video recording of the conference will be viewable on the official YouTube channel of the Eranos Foundation.

Lecture Presentation

Taking up C.G. Jung's reflections, and in dialogue with them, intertwining law and literature, we will try to argue the inescapability of the “question of guilt” for the purposes of justice, through the path of expiation. A repressed issue of modern criminal law, which nevertheless remains an unavoidable point to reckon with.

Lecturer' Bio-bibliography

Tommaso Greco (Caloveto, 1968) is Full Professor of Philosophy of Law in the Department of Jurisprudence at the University of Pisa, where he is also director of the Interdepartmental Center of Bioethics. He is the editor of the “Bobbiana” series published by Giappichelli and the journal of the history of the philosophy of law Diacronìa. He has published Norberto Bobbio. Un itinerario intellettuale tra filosofia e politica (2000), La bilancia e la croce. Diritto e giustizia in Simone Weil (2006), Diritto e legame sociale (2012), and L'orizzonte del giurista. Saggi per una filosofia del diritto “aperta” (2023). For Laterza he is the author of La legge della fiducia. Alle radici del diritto (2021, Pisa National Literary Prize 2022 for non-fiction) and Curare il mondo con Simone Weil (2023). In 2024 he was awarded the Bartolo da Sassoferrato Prize for legal and political-social sciences, in the section “Pensare la pace”.

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On the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the birth of C.G. Jung (1875-1961), the Eranos Foundation dedicates its Eranos-Jung Lectures - the public conferences held at the Monte Verità Conference Center in Ascona - to the exploration of a Jungian micro-lexicon, with which we wish to map some problematic nodes of our present. These are six words - Guilt, Soul, Conflict, Time, Care, Knowledge - to which Jung, during his intellectual and human journey, dedicated pages of great clarity and depth. For us today, they are precious notions through which we can shed light on ourselves, on our relationship with others and with the surrounding world. In this way, Jung will accompany us on a journey of discovery inside and outside ourselves, to help us better understand what went wrong in the process of civilization to which we owe both our power and our fragility, in the face of a reality that no longer seems to respond as we would like to our hegemonic designs.