La pedagogia di Maria Montessori nello specchio dell’epistemologia della complessità

The scientific revolutions of the early decades of the Twentieth century chal-lenged the principles of the classical paradigm of science and nature. Maria Montessori deeply understood these revolutions, and realized the need for a new paradigm, able to overcome the thinking by dichotomies (object/subject, mind/body, organism/environ-ment, species/ecosystem, nature/culture, res cogitans/res extensa). She anticipated in her theory and in her pedagogical and social action the features of a relational, systemic and evolutionary epistemology, which would later have developed starting from the last dec-ades of the century: an epistemology of complexity, within a planetary humanistic hori-zon. This is the epistemological and humanistic horizon in which Maria Montessori intro-duced her idea of a “cosmic child” and “cosmic education”, and in whose mirror today we can reinterpret and regenerate her idea.