Carlos Miguel Gómez

This article presents the results of the Laboratory of Art and Spirituality (LAS), in which a group of seven Colombian artists investigated, over a period of 10 months, how artistic creation contributes to understanding spiritual experiences. The research-creation methodology involved spaces of spiritual practice, artistic exploration, and autoethnographic reflection. With the help of these spaces, the artists produced various materials that were subsequently analyzed using a hermeneutic phenomenological orientation. As a result, we developed a model of artistic understanding based on the idea that meaning-making is a process of unfolding meaning that goes through different interpretative moments or loci (experience, the creative process, the artwork, the artist’s life, and autoethnographic reflection). This model entails five meaning-making mechanisms: perception, knowing-how, emotional understanding, seeing-as, and perceiving mystery. The article aims to let the artists speak for themselves, disclosing in their journals and dialogues these fundamental structures of spiritual understanding through artistic creation.

He maintained that there are two main categories of truth: those that are a result of natural laws and those that are completely necessary since their opposite suggests contradiction. God can dispense solely with the latter rules, such as the law of human mortality. Although a doctrine of faith may conflict with second-type realities, it can never contradict first-type truths. Therefore, reason may not be able to completely understand an article of religion, even though it cannot be self-contradictory. Simply put, mysteries like the Trinity are "above reason." However, how can we balance the odds in favor of a religious belief with those based on natural law and common experience? The presence and character of God, as well as the global harmony that underpins the providential creation and order of the universe, must all be considered when we make these choices. On the other hand, moving from the higher to the lower classes is also feasible. Since goodness has an immediate order to the higher pattern of the universal source of being, rational creatures are able to understand "the meaning of the good as such" (II-IIae q.2, a.3). The last good that theologians and philosophers examine is different; the former is the bonum ultimum, which can only be understood with the help of revelation, while the later is the beatific vision, which reason can understand. Both conceptions of the ultimate good have significant implications since they serve as the foundation for the political division between secular and ecclesiastical authority as well as the moral division between natural and supernatural virtues.

Subjects may be aware in each moment of the content of a given scene and/or internal state. However, the vivid reality of the scene is a by-product of the complex processing of external and internal information in the brain. This point is more evident in the hallucinatory phase of psychosis or during dreaming. There is complex internal processing for the recreation of certain contents which are unconscious for the subject, whilst the content is experienced, the process to arrive at the contents is not perceived at all. Therefore, an important question that naturally arises is if process and content are served by different neural mechanisms. The possibility that postsynaptic potentials arranged in an open-field configuration would be more related to the content, experienced (or not) by the subject, and transmission-transformation of information along neural networks would be related to processing would be proposed. The proposal has some important implications for clinical applications, given that depression, psychosis, anxiety, and others are experienced as defined contents or states, while more possibly the underpinnings are related to abnormal information processing. Therefore, any clinical application should be primarily directed to psychological, pharmacological, or neural stimulation modification of information processing. However, if the content is related to activation of defined neural nets, possibly defined as engrams in a broad sense, the activation of those engrams (content) would only be able to modify processing through action on the processes. A handful of psychological therapies, more or less, explicitly tacitly successfully focus on processes (i.e., cognitive therapy in psychosis) rather than on contents, while others also focus on contents (flooding therapy in anxiety). These ideas are being implicitly running from the beginning of Psychology and made explicit in the field of motivation in organizational psychology. It is important to clarify the different Physiological underpinnings of content and process, and how each intervention is more or less focused on one or the other to justify their odds for success. From an educational point of view, this topic refers to educational strategies more biased to memory (content) vs. educational strategies where the solving tasks approach (processes) is primed.

This paper attempts to delineate a kind of realism, which incorporates some anti-realistic insights regarding the perspective, situated, and historical character of our forms of knowing and being in the world, and which resonates with the basic tenets of Christian theism. The first part of the paper analyzes the challenges anti-realism poses to Christian theism, particularly regarding the role, which the doctrine of creation played in securing the correspondence theory of truth as well as the fundamental experience of God as the foundation of order and meaning. Using Heidegger’s hermeneutics in the second part, it is shown that epistemic pluralism can be made compatible with realism. Given that this form of hermeneutic realism still has problems with integrating the transcendence of God, as well as his/ her presence and action in the “world,” the notion of continuous co-creation as the basis for a pluralist realism that is amenable to Christian theism is explored in the final part.

Se pretende mostrar la influencia de Cervantes en Freud. Preocupado por los trastornos psíquicos y decepcionado por los métodos que la psiquiatría de su tiempo manejaba, Freud mostró gran interés por las obras de Cervantes, principalmente por El coloquio de los perros y por El Quijote, en las que los temas de la realidad y de la ilusión, y de la relación entre cordura y locura son sus respectivos ejes centrales. Una de las posibles lecturas de la magistral obra cervantina es la que lleva a desdibujar los límites entre razón y sinrazón, hasta encontrar incluso «la razón de la sinrazón», lo que nos haría ésta comprensible y explicable. Fantasía... (Ver más) realizada, realidad fantaseada, pocas cosas preocuparon más a Freud que hacer el deslinde entre ambas. Freud no es simple abogado de lo irracional, sino que trata de encontrar también «la razón de la sinrazón» que los neuróticos expresan en sus síntomas, los cuales pretendió explicar hasta en sus más mínimos detalles

The “philosophy of conscience” is the fundamental paradigm of modern philosophy from Descartes to Kant. Such paradigm has been the object of continuous criticism starting with the so call “philosophy of suspicion” and latter on by the “linguistic turn”, which in this article is considered from the perspective of the discursive ethics of Habermas. Although these criticisms force us to abandon the primacy and the monologism of the “philosophy of conscience”, we should not forget the value of the moral conscience itself in spite of all its resituations. This is what I try to claim in this work, following the arguments of Wellmer, Muguerza, Bilbeny or Renaut, among other critics, revisiting, from this perspective, the confrontation between Kant and Hegel, which has been brought up again by the liberal/communitarian debate, leading finally my discussion to the relation between individualism and cosmopolitanism.

Este artículo reflexiona críticamente sobre la teoría de la comprensión intercultural de Panikkar. En la primera parte se muestra en qué se diferencia de la hermenéutica filosófica de origen heideggeriano, haciendo énfasis en la tesis del pluralismo radical. En la segunda, se exploran las nociones básicas de la hermenéutica diatópica: la noción de los equivalentes homeomórficos y la idea de la comprensión como conversión. En la última parte se examina el concepto del diálogo dialógico y se muestran sus limitaciones para una hermenéutica intercultural situada en escenarios de conflicto intercultural.

RESUMEN Se explora críticamente el pensamiento del filósofo colombiano Jorge Aurelio Díaz acerca de la religión. En particular, se examina, por un lado, la cuestión del lugar y el papel de la religión en la modernidad, a partir de la pregunta por la racionalidad y el valor cognitivo de la creencia religiosa, y, por otro lado, la diferencia entre misticismo y religión. Se plantearán y discutirán algunos aspectos problemáticos de la manera en que Díaz comprende ambos asuntos. ABSTRACT The paper carries out a critical examination of Colombian philosopher Jorge Aurelio Díaz's philosophical thought regarding religion. Specifically, it examines the place and role of religion in modernity on the basis of the question regarding the rationality and cognitive value of religious belief, as well as the difference between mysticism and religion. The article sets forth and discusses some problematic aspects of the manner in which Díaz understands both of these issues.

The relationship between socio-constructionism and Christian theology has not been sufficiently explored. This paper critically analyses some of the main insights of socio-constructionist theories and suggests that a reinterpretation of the idea of social construction from a theistic perspective can avoid the unresolved problems of its radical versions. The paper argues that an order of meaning, whose origin cannot be reduced to human action, has to be presupposed for practices of social construction to work. This resonates with the belief in God´s action in human reality.

Se explora la relación entre las dimensiones proposicional y no proposicional de la creencia religiosa para mostrar que la última dirige el proceso de justificación y representa su límite. Se defiende que la no proposicional también tiene valor cognitivo, porque constituye una suerte de elección epistémica preteórica que no es exclusiva de la fe religiosa. Se explora la noción de ambigüedad religiosa, tanto a nivel intelectual como experiencial, y se sostiene que la relación entre la dimensión proposicional y la no-proposicional de la fe está mediada por la función directiva de las presuposiciones metafísicas instauradas por la experiencia religiosa.

Se examina la idea de un vínculo directo entre modernización y pérdida de plausibilidad de la creencia religiosa, se explora la imagen contemporánea de la relación entre religión y racionalidad, y se muestra cómo no puede afirmarse que el avance de la ciencia conduzca a la secularización. Ante la pregunta, si la postsecularización conlleva una mutua exclusión de religión y racionalidad, se examinan las propuestas de J. Habermas y N. Wolterstorff, buscando criterios normativos para el diálogo entre racionalidades religiosas y no religiosas.

Tras recordar la intensa labor intelectual desarrollada por José Gómez Caffarena, se analizan la estructura y tesis fundamentales de su obra El enigma y el misterio. Una filosofía de la religión. A las consideraciones sobre la historia y estructura del hecho religioso se agrega un amplio estudio sobre las diversas posiciones ante lo religioso, conforme a una triple tipología inspirada en Dilthey, para articular finalmente una elaborada propuesta sobre la plausibilidad filosófica de la fe en Dios, en la que se abordan muy diversos problemas de la filosofía de la religión (panteísmo, providencia, mal físicio y moral, etc.). Con un sólido conocimiento de la tradición escolástica y de la filosofía moderna (de Kant a las principales tendencias del pensamiento del siglo XX), Caffarena ofrece una sobria y matizada propuesta en la que defiende la posible conjugación de las cautelas de la razón con el aliento de la esperanza.

La «filosofía de la conciencia» constituye el paradigma fundamental de la filosofía moderna de Descartes a Kant. Dicho paradigma ha sido sometido a sucesivas críticas, en primer lugar por parte de la denominada «filosofía de la sospecha» y, más tarde, por «el giro lingu..stico», aquí considerado desde la perspectiva de la ética discursiva habermasiana. Aunque esas críticas obligan a romper la primacía y el monologismo de la «filosofía de la conciencia», no deberían llevar a olvidar el valor de la conciencia (moral) misma, por resituada que quede. Así se trata de defender siguiendo los planteamientos de, entre otros, Wellmer, Muguerza, Bilbeny o Renaut, y reconsiderando desde ese horizonte la confrontación entre Hegel y Kant, retomada en nuestros días por la existente entre comunitaristas y liberales, para, finalmente, esbozar algunas perspectivas sobre la relación entre individualismo y cosmopolitismo.