4000

Ethics is concerned with the issue of how to act in given circumstances and the judgments on such manner of acting. This seminar dwells on the justification of those acts and judgments. The likelihood of basing or not ethics is especially relevant for politics, culture and society. The relevance moral judgments have in practical, individual and collective life depends on ethics. Along this line of thinking, the course seeks to focus in the analysis of the problems posed by the philosophical groundings of moral and ethics. It takes on an aporetical approach, based on the theoretical and practical problems of the discipline. The text used to spark the discussion is Lessons of Ethics written by Ernst Tugendhat.

Although it isn’t strange to find the concept of "play" associated with diverse philosophical reflections about art and culture, this link appears to take a new turn in H.G. Gadamer’s thought. The play works here as the main train of thought which the German philosopher develops against what he terms to be the "subjectivization of the experience of art", one of whose effects is to reduce the work of art to a simple event for the aesthetic pleasure of the spectator. The efficacy of this critique –particularly targeted against Kant- demands a transformation of the traditional conception of play, which goes from being associated, as is usual, with the ontologically secondary realm of the illusory and superfluous, to taking on a preeminent status as an ontological model for art, model thanks to which the very possibility to legitimate art’s truth claims becomes real. With the purpose of comprehending how this radical displacement of the categories of play, art and truth takes place in Gadamer’s discourse, we will mainly focus on the first part of Truth and Method, his major opus, and its development in other of the author’s essays.

The purpose of this seminar is to serve as a space for studying and discussing some of the most influential perspectives in the actual debate regarding ‘Biopower’. As it is well known, it is Michel Foucault who introduces this term into the contemporary political discussions to describe that form of power, characteristic of modern societies (one which Foucault also calls "Governmentality"), which submits and normalizes the bodies, individuating them, tying them to a fixed identity, while at the same time regulating populations, ordering them towards their preservation and productivity, it is a power which, then, problematizes the possibility for subjects to take care of themselves, assuming themselves creatively in singular forms of life. Hannah Arendt had already moved in a similar direction, although from a different horizon, with her analyses regarding totalitarianism and her critical postulates about Modernity. For this author, then, when politics in Modernity assumes as its main goal the defense and promotion of life, human plurality is attempted to be reduced to predictable population, to mere biological existence which can be controlled and administered. Following these reflections, and in dialogue with the philosophical tradition, other coeval thinkers like Derrida, Agamben and Esposito have also thought about these complex relations between power, life and subjectivity, aiming to question, from their diverse interpretive paths, the opposition between what is "human" and what is "animal", prevalent in the Western conception of the political realm. The seminar proposes itself, then, to discuss some of the above mentioned reflections, as well as some of the main problems which in them could arise.

Hermeneutics of facticity starts from the interpretive status in which factical life is found. Greek conceptuality was coined in the midst of experiences which have no longer been available to us for quite some time. The philosophy which appropriates itself of the actual state of affairs through interpretation is forced to dismount the inherited interpretive state, because that of which we couldn’t originally interpret we don’t know how to safeguard in its originality. The dismounting and the return to the original sources can only be achieved if "there is a concrete interpretation of the Aristotelian philosophy available, oriented towards the facticity program, that is, towards a radical anthropological phenomenology". The horizon of Aristotelian ontology is the world which appears in the treatment of production and in the use of the produced objects, theoretical knowledge and praxis in which we must "have to do with beings which may be in a different manner".

This seminar attempts to respond the following question: Truth with no method, or truth against the method? To do so, it covers the following topics: a) Method, the cornerstone of modernity [Bacon. Descartes. Ideological unification. b) Positivism of Comte. Droysen, Dilthey. c) Insecurity and schizophrenia of human sciences. d) Logic positivism. Carl Hempel and its coverage law. From Kuhn to Geertz. Airs of Freedom in human sciences]. e) Relativization of scientific experience in the vast environment of human experience. Temporality of human truth,  fallibility and relativism.

There are diverse similarities between the subjects and the fundamental postulates of hermeneutic philosophy and those of rhetorical discipline. These similarities may be given because of either coincidences in perspective, or concrete influences during their historical development. In any case, studying the essential problems of hermeneutics in the light of the rhetorical discipline’s assumptions, and the other way around, proves to be not only useful for a better comprehension of both disciplines, but also an undertaking which contemporary philosophy has tried to take with, alas, few concrete results. The seminar’s method will consist of contrasting texts belonging to both traditions, in order to find their conceptual affinities and, if possible, a historical bond (influences of some authors on others, conceptual evolution, etc.).

During this course the monograph director monitors the development of the research project until the defense of the thesis.

This subject will be enrolled by the students who intend to graduate in the following semester.