1. - The philosophical exigency considered from palaeontology and anthropology
Under the Honorary Presidency of Eudald Carbonell (Co-Director of ATAPUERCA Project)
πάντες ἄνθρωποι τοῦ εἰδέναι ὀρέγονται φύσει (Aristotle)
Philosophy has an emblem in the opening sentence of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, in which he affirms that “all men by nature desire to know”. Whether Aristotle was right or not and whether it is appropriate or not to attribute to human nature as such a predisposition to lucidity, this becomes then a key question that concerns, among other disciplines, anthropology and palaeontology.
As we said, it is hard to imagine that in any place man stop wondering about man, that is, that there is not any kind of philosophical anthropology. And this is perhaps valid for each and every one of the questions that have fed the history of philosophy. It is difficult to contemplate a human community without a background of these elementary questions (from which arises, among other aspects, the need to analyse phenomena, to describe them and to order them as a whole, all of which we may refer to as science), as this would almost be tantamount to imagining it without culture, without knowledge, and even without technology.
2. - Invariant features of philosophy and plurality of civilizations
Honorary Presidency of Darius Shayegan (Founding Director of the Iranian Center for the Studies of Civilizations) and Pierre Aubenque (Institut International de Philosophie).
It is a fact that philosophy, whatever its features may be, is a human production of a relatively recent history, especially in the occidental version. Can a cultural universal appear so late? Can it arise only within one geo-cultural context or just within some of them?
It is known that some people supported that philosophy would be the exclusive fruit of the Greek culture, in such a way that the analogue forms linked to other civilizations would be modalities of spirituality that correspond to an exigency different from the philosophical one. Nevertheless, the so called intercultural philosophy admits that in the Maya, Vedic or ancestral Africans cultures, among others, there are modalities of philosophy as well. Which are the intersection points, if there are any? If that is the case, the following question arises: is it not abusive to keep the term “philosophy” for what in the West has been practised since the Greeks under this name, excluding by this way spiritual productions that intercultural philosophy calls philosophic as well?
3. - Philosophy and the origin of science
Under the Honorary Presidency of Andrés Moya (Head of the Instituto Cavanilles of Biodiversity and Evolutionary Biology)
In this section we will wonder about those philosophical invariances present in the scientific activity (very probably in all civilizations and in all times). This section, in a certain way, tries to remember that science, originally, may be primarily an exigency of intelligibility, whatever its ulterior applications may be. Remembering this origin, philosophy interrogates science in a world that we know it is mainly the fruit of science itself and of the ways of technology that are shoots of science.
4. - Parmenides. Common root of philosophical thought and poetic thought.
Under the Honorary Presidency of Jose Saramago (Nobel Award)
The significant Parmenides finds himself inextricably connected to the history of philosophy and literature. Many times it is forgotten (simply because of the difficulties of translation) that this jewel of the logical thought is, primarily and first of all, a poem. Remembering this inextricable knot of both dimensions of spirit (poetry and philosophy) is the aim of this section.
5. – Paideia. “Philosophy educating humanity”
Under the Honorary Presidency of Ionna Kuçuradi (Director of the Centre for Research and Application of the Philosophy of Human Rights, Hacettepe University)
Affirming or denying the universality of philosophy is almost a case of anthropological optimism or pessimism, of confidence in a common disposition of reasoning beings, disposition that would be a consequence of the essential richness of language beyond the contingent differences that separate peoples, cultures, and civilizations.
As we said before, in 1998 the World Philosophy Congress was held in Boston with the generic title of “Philosophy educating Humanity”. This title was mentioned in the last edition of the Congress (Seoul 2008) by the professor Ionna Kuçuradi. The professor emphasized the fact that the biggest equity that would mean the reduction of the abyssal economical differences between countries and persons would only suppose an effective generalization of the human rights if it were accompanied of a general education intended to develop in every individual the faculties that entitled them as a human being. And in this project perhaps philosophy would have a fundamental role.
