The present book addresses the background, rationale, general structure, and particular aims and arguments characterizing our third and last volume about "humor" and "cruelty". A guiding foray is provided into the vast expert literature that can be retrieved in the Western humanities and social sciences on these two terms. Pivotal thinkers and crucial notions are duly identified, highlighted, and examined. Apposite subsidiary references are also included, especially with regard to psychodynamics and clinical psychology, existentialism, feminism, liberalism, Marxism, and representative recent (...) studies in the philosophy of humor and its cognates. The stage is thus set for the exploration and assessment of the conflicts between humor and cruelty unfolding in Part 2 of Volume 3. Being the philosophical terminus of our entire research project, Volume 3 counterbalances, complements, and, occasionally, complexifies the numerous forms of mutual cooperation between humor and cruelty that the preceding Volume 2 had unearthed and discussed. (shrink)

Resumen En el pensamiento contemporáneo, el relato de Babel ha suscitado alegatos teológicos contra los proyectos titánicos del racionalismo moderno y exégesis poéticas en defensa de la diseminación idiomática. Los dos ensayos de Michael Oakeshott titulados “La Torre de Babel” permiten reconocer las principales inquietudes intelectuales del autor y los diferentes dilemas teóricos en la comprensión del Estado europeo moderno. No solo escenifican el aspecto ruinoso del racionalismo moral y el utopismo político, sino también los riesgos de la política de (...) la fe, del colectivismo, y de la reducción de las asociaciones humanas a transacciones instrumentales o corporaciones empresariales. En la exégesis de Oakeshott, Babel se perfila como un mito político moderno, que exhibe una marcada ambivalencia mediante la convergencia de motivos éticos, religiosos, políticos e, incluso, poéticos.In contemporary thought, the story of Babel has raised theological arguments against the titanic projects of modern rationalism and poetic exegesis in defense of idiomatic dissemination. The two essays by Michael Oakeshott entitled "The Tower of Babel" allow to recognize the main intellectual concerns of the author and the different theoretical dilemmas in the understanding of the modern European State. They not only illustrate the ruinous aspect of moral rationalism and political utopianism, but also the risks of the politics of faith, of collectivism, and of the reduction of human associations to instrumental transactions or enterprise corporations. In the exegesis of Oakeshott, Babel emerges as a modern political myth, showing a marked ambivalence through the convergence of ethical, religious, political, and even poetic motives. (shrink)

In the present text I discuss Michael Oakeshott’s idea of liberal education and its main menace, authority. By identifying two ways of examining the issue of authority, I launch two different perspectives on this issue. The first one is abstract and it considers an early Oakeshottian essay and Gadamer’s rehabilitation of tradition, and allows me to formulate the following thesis: conversation precedes education. The second perspective is an application, and its concreteness allows me to employ the concept of authority in (...) a more leisurely manner. (shrink)