Departament d'Humanitats i Ciències de l'Educació

La finalidad de este artículo es analizar la importancia que tiene el lenguaje como herramienta de comunicación y expresión de nuestro pensamiento, especialmente en el contexto educativo. Esta aportación, gira en torno a aquellos elementos pedagógicos que incluyen el lenguaje y que nos llevan a considerarlo no sólo desde una perspectiva instrumental, sino también desde una interpretación antropológica y, aún más en concreto, desde consideración de una antropología de la educación. Todo ello en el contexto de la figura y obra de Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936), uno de los pensadores contemporáneos conocido sobre todo por su gran obra, especialmente literaria.

El artículo recoge resultados de una investigación acerca de la denominada “tradición jurídica catalana”, a saber, un modo particular de concebir y hacer derecho, que ha caracterizado la labor de buena parte de los juristas catalanes desde la Edad Media hasta el siglo XIX. La finalidad es demostrar la fuerte relación que existe entre dicha tradición y la filosofía jurídica de Santo Tomás de Aquino. Para ello procede reiterando la existencia de una tradición jurídica catalana, señalando sus características fundamentales e indicando en cada caso si estas características se encuentran en la filosofía jurídica del aquinate.

En el ámbito estrictamente pragmático cada uno de los proyectos políticos que hoy se citan

Neste artigo argumentamos que os temas da ação e da história presentes em alguns contos de Jorge Luis Borges antecipam alguns pontos que apareceram nas discussões pós-estruturalistas – nos campos da história, filosofia, antropologia – das últimas décadas do século XX. No seu labirinto literário-filosófico, especialmente por meio da ideia de destino, Borges explora elementos chave que se tornaram parte da noção de crítica que enfatiza as ideias de contingência e da impossibilidade de controle deliberado dos efeitos da ação humana em seu curso temporal.

The notion of multiple modernities as developed by Eisenstadt has become increasingly influential in debates about modernity and the historical formation of societies in comparative perspective. On closer inspection, the theoretical framework is less than straightforward when it comes to specific applications. This article considers Brazil from the perspective of a revised theory of multiple modernities. There has been virtually no application to specific case studies within the countries of the South. Brazil could be considered an important case study of modernity that deserves attention in its own right. The article shows that the theoretical framework of multiple modernities offers insights into the Brazilian trajectory of modernity, a consideration of which also challenges some of the assumptions of Eisenstadt’s approach. Despite the limits of the framework, the notion of multiple modernities offers a good basis for a global analysis of modernity. Greater attention needs to be given to civilizational encounters and to sources of conflict and plurality within modernity and which cannot be accounted for in terms of the principles of axiality postulated by Eisenstadt.

Drawing on archaeological findings about individuals of the archaic Brazilian ‘hunter-gatherer’ societies and on the life and work of a contemporary Brazilian artist, Paulo Nazareth, this paper argues for the use of a timeless history in which chronological historical time will be less important in sociological comparative analyses. There are processes that belong to a significant past which still inform how societies imagine themselves and which cannot be understood from the established perspective of a divided human and natural history. These processes can only be interpreted by overcoming disciplinary constraints and by assuming that history goes beyond the systematic organisation of the facts and historical evidence. There are aspects of American archaic history that are not only completely unknown to us, but they also inform societal practices and imaginary significations of the past, present and future in many New World societies. The paper critically discusses historical-sociological literature on Brazil. Based on a number of perspectives developed in the fields of philosophy, sociology, anthropology, and archaeology, it will be argued that the division of the world into ‘civilisation’ and ‘other simplistic social-historical-economical-cultural groups’ is incompatible with a comparative historical sociology that does not aim to hierarchise diff erent societal forms.

The growing body of literature on the idea of the Anthropocene has opened up serious questions that go to the heart of the social and human sciences. There has been as yet no satisfactory theoretical framework for the analysis of the Anthropocene debate in the social and human sciences. The notion of the Anthropocene is not only a condition in which humans have become geologic agents, thus signalling a temporal shift in Earth history: it can be seen as a new object of knowledge and an order of governance. A promising direction for theorizing in the social and human science is to approach the notion of the Anthropocene as exemplified in new knowledge practices that have implications for governance. It invokes new conceptions of time, agency, knowledge and governance. The Anthropocene has become a way in which the human world is re-imagined culturally and politically in terms of its relation with the Earth. It entails a cultural model, that is an interpretative category by which contemporary societies make sense of the world as embedded in the Earth, and articulate a new kind of historical self-understanding, by which an alternative order of governance is projected. This points in the direction of cosmopolitics – and thus of a ‘Cosmopolocene’ – rather than a geologization of the social or in the post-humanist philosophy, the end of the human condition as one marked by agency.

In his recent work Peter Wagner has dealt with understandings of modernity in different world regions. He has expanded the analysis of modern transformations in Europe to parts of the Southern world. This turn in his work has been a response to challenges about the development of Western modernity, including his own earlier arguments. This article explores some features of Wagner’s recent research on the Brazilian, European and South African trajectories of modernity and his proposal for a world-sociology. The aspects of his work that I am especially interested in are: i) the establishment of the Atlantic connection for the ‘enablement’ of the modern transformation in the nineteenth century; ii) the question about the spaces where experiences happen and the interpretation of temporal transformations and historical continuities. As a sociologist who takes a classical approach to the analysis of historical transformations, Wagner has developed a conception of trajectories of modernity using the notion of societal self-understanding to challenge both conceptually and empirically the presuppositions of communality and continuity assumed as guiding ideas to account for difference in the modern world. I explore in this article the advantages of Wagner’s unorthodox sociological perspective that is to propose both a general understanding of autonomy as key features to comprehend historical transformation and to show how reflexivity opens up a variety of ways of being in the world.

The past half century has witnessed major socio-political transformations across the globe. The end of formal European colonialism, basically achieved except for small pockets in the aftermath of the Carnation Revolution in Portugal in 1974, was followed by the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991 in parallel to the one of Keynesian organized capitalism in the Northwest and of “state-led development” in much of the South, but also the rise of Asian economies, starting with Japan and now featuring China. The subsequent era of globalization and individualization was short-lived and has given way to the notion of a “multi-polar” globe marked by the at best half-intended withdrawal of the US from hegemony and the loose association of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa under the name of BRICS. What has not changed across this half century is the depletion of the earth’s resources and the pollution of the environment. This article retraces the rise of ecological issues to become a global concern, and it does so by relating shifting interpretations of the issue to assignments of political responsibility in the changing global context. Emerging from a comparative research project on Brazil, South Africa and Europe, it draws its examples from these regions, but aims at developing a more general argument about the current impact of historical power asymmetries on ways of dealing with the ecological crisis.

La entrevista ahonda en el análisis de Peter Wagner y Aurea Mota sobre los procesos de democratización que se dieron en Brasil y Sudáfrica de manera más bien tardía, considerando el fin del apartheid en este último país y una inclusión más social que política en el caso de Brasil, los que significaron, por largo tiempo la exclusión de un importante sector de la sociedad de dichos lugares. En este sentido, se debate también sobre el concepto de democracia, no solamente desde una perspectiva formal sino en especial a partir de considerar quiénes son las personas que “van quedando atrás” en los distintos procesos de avance democrático. En este marco, se discute además la supuesta “excepcionalidad” de Europa y de su centralidad en un contexto de relaciones en permanente interacción con otros territorios, interacciones que eventualmente dieron lugar al pensamiento político ilustrado y al concepto moderno de humanidad. Finalmente, se abordan las movilizaciones actuales en Chile y otros países, además del incremento de los movimientos de derecha los que, nuevamente, plantean excluir a ciertos grupos de personas de los derechos sociales y políticos, dando cuenta de la necesidad de tener una mirada global para abordar los desafíos que actualmente enfrentamos.