Thank you, President von Braun and, of course, greetings to all the people who have come from very different parts of the world, but first of all I want to repeat, I would like to thank especially those who organised the meeting, President von Braun, who we can say is the first time that as President he participates in a meeting, and for his willingness to come and say these very important things. But I also want to thank the President of the Foundation for the Collaboration of Peoples, that is President Romano Prodi, who is a friend of our Academy and had the initiative to promote this idea that connectivity is a right, a human right. Of course, I also want to thank Engineer Alessandro Ovi for his very hard work, as well as our Academician Antonio Battro, who has been spent a few days here to organise the details of this meeting.
I only want to mention a simple idea. With my professional ‘deformation’, which is philosophy, as you know, according to Aristotle, the logos is what characterises the human being. His or her dignity, the dignity of the human being is logos, rationality. Today, without connectivity we don’t have a complete logos, we don’t have a logos, therefore we must consider connectivity as part of human beings. I prefer to say human beings than human rights, because human rights, of course this is very important, there are more and more human rights, but dignity is more receptive for countries (I think about China, and other similar States).
So nevertheless, connectivity, like logos, must express the being, the truth, the good and the beauty, as we say, in the tradition of philosophy, the transcendentals of life, that is, characterising the human soul. Consequently we consider connectivity as part of human dignity insofar as it responds to the being, to the truth, to the good, and to the beauty, as the Pope more or less said in his speech.
So I think that our meeting can really study deeply the capability of the human being to connect people, and today, of course, good, our social good is justice, and to develop the justice between people and, of course, to develop friendship. Without justice, without friendship it is very difficult to have a society. In the classic idea, as you know, society strives to achieve happiness and this is true of virtue, so we also need to have virtue, in the countries where we don’t have it. I think that the Pope’s idea is very important; logos is important to be near to connectivity but also to ethics. Thank you very much and I hope that our meeting can deeply study this question. Thank you.