The internal structure of this issue of the International Journal of Philosophy and Social Values is slightly different from the former issues. We don’t have the usual Dossier, but instead a series of five different papers. In the last year, several different papers were sent to the Editorial Board, covering different fields of research, none of them fitting the scope of the planned Dossiers. However, we thought that they deserved publication in the journal, since they covered topics related to the ones referred to in our editorial statute.
That is why the reader will find, first, a paper about the European ecological pact, by Fracisco Torres and Annette Bongardt, two researchers with a vast curriculum in this field; the authors address its economical rationality, and the challenges posed by climatic change and the recent pandemic crisis. Then, a paper by Albano Pina, about Machiavelli and his notion of sovereignty and power, and how the Italian thinker acknowledged their intrinsic conflictual character. A paper by Carlos Morujão, about the much-debated question of Ortega y Gasset’s liberalism, its relation to democracy, and the threads to individual freedom imputable to the rise of totalitarianism. A paper by Diogo Fernandes about the concept of public reason. A paper by Mark Piper about the notion of well-being, where the author shows the aporias inherent to any invariant (i.e., independent of the social milieus) conception of it, for instance, in some ethical systems. And, finally, a paper by Aiswarya Pradeep Kumar and Anoop George about Judith Butler notion of gender and the impossibility of connecting directly with the body without taking into account cultural mediations.
The reader can easily see that what this issue may have lost in internal coherence, it has certainly gained in the richness of these contributions and their unquestionable relevance.
This number IV / 1 of the International Journal pf Philosophy and Social Values will be its last issue. As is well known by those who followed us since the publication of first number, the journal was born in a specific research context in the Faculty of Human Sciences of the Portuguese Catholic University. This context no longer exists. The Research Center to which the journal was attached disappeared, following a process of internal restructuring of research at the Catholic University. The internal conditions for maintaining the journal became problematic, specifically, the capacity to ensure the regular publication of two issues each year, bearing the respective expenses. However, looking back, the scientific quality of the almost 40 papers (ten of them from non-Portuguese speaking authors) published in seven issues, and 20 book reviews, gives me the conviction that we did, over six years, a very reasonable job. Above all, we proved that a very small group of philosophers, having limited financial resources, could still carry out work with quality.
In Presentation - Carlos Morujão
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