On Saturday, 26 September, Andrea Moro, Full Professor of General Linguistics at the IUSS University School for Advanced Studies in Pavia, will take part in the fourth edition of the Festival del Pensare Contemporaneo with the event “A Bat with Blue Eyes: Lucretius’ Surprising Ideas on Human Language”.
On Saturday, 26 September, from 6:30 to 7:45 p.m., Andrea Moro, Full Professor of General Linguistics at the IUSS University School for Advanced Studies in Pavia, will be a guest at the Festival del Pensare Contemporaneo in Piacenza, an event launched in 2023 with the aim of bringing ideas beyond specialist circles and creating a public space for discussion on the transformations shaping our present.
At the Auditorium Fondazione Piacenza e Vigevano, Moro will lead the event “A Bat with Blue Eyes: Lucretius’ Surprising Ideas on Human Language”, a journey through linguistics, philosophy, neuroscience and artificial intelligence, beginning with a fresh reading of Lucretius’ De rerum natura.
Just as an infinite number of words can be generated from a limited set of letters in the alphabet, so the multiplicity of elements that make up the universe can arise from a small number of atoms. Starting from this striking analogy, Moro will explore some fundamental questions about human language: do thoughts or languages come first? What distinguishes human language from animal communication? Are there impossible languages? How do words emerge from chaos?
The journey moves through the insights of Democritus, Plato and Aristotle, encounters Dante and Descartes, and ultimately reaches the questions raised by contemporary research on the brain, language and artificial intelligence.
The event draws on themes explored in Andrea Moro’s recent book, Lucretius and the Bat with Blue Eyes: Explaining the Universe with the Alphabet (The MIT Press, 2025), in which literature and science intertwine in an investigation into the nature of language and its ability to help us understand reality.
Information
Saturday, 26 September 2026, 6:30–7:45 p.m.
Auditorium Fondazione Piacenza e Vigevano, Piacenza
Free admission, no reservation required