Tiziana Faitini presents a working paper on ‚Officium and professional duty. Exploring a semantic field‘

This paper is intended as a contribution to the analysis of the
semantic field of “professional duty”. It will partially explore
various layers of meaning of the polysemic concept of officium
(which can be translated as “duty”, “service” or “office”), from
Late Antiquity to the Early Modern period, in a number of Latin
and Italian sources. In doing so, it will suggest that the
reelaboration of the concept of the officium is a condition of
possibility of the very concept of “professional duty” in itself, and,
for this reason, an essential step in the process of valorizing work
and the professions ethically. An analysis of this reelaboration can
thus serve to provide important insights into the genealogy of the
multifaceted valorization of work and professions.