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“Foundations of a Life-Experiential Philosophical Method of the Concrete based on Praxis. The Philosophy of Maurice Blondel’s L’Action (1893)”. Maurice Blondel’s L’Action presents a philosophical method that seeks to access totality starting from the concrete, based on praxis as a dynamic-concrete and syntheticuniversal mediation. The rigor of this method does not depend on an abstract or systematic logical sequence immanent to the method itself, but on a necessary concatenation immanent to the concrete life-dynamism. Philosophy is thus understood as the awareness of life in front of life itself. In a totalizing horizon of meaning, phenomena are seconded such as they appear to the subject, in an openness to the possibility of assuming the totality of their elements without exclusion, partiality, or contradiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the problem of the praxis of freedom in consideration of its opposite, inevitableness/necessity. I propose a way to overcome the unilateral perspectives that presuppose an alternative between these two phenomena, emphasizing only one of them as determining action. Through an analysis of Maurice Blondel's philosophy around L'action (published in 1893), I present the possibility of analyzing opposing phenomena from the concreteness of praxis as non-contradictory opposites. At the same time, the possibility of establishing a philosophy of the concrete that maintains the links between opposites as polar tensions is shown as an alternative to the intellectualist currents that postulate contradiction as a general ontological principle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This analysis reveals the main philosophical influences observable in the thought and praxis of Pope Francis, as well as offering a systematic outline of the strictly philosophical categories present in the structure of his reflection in general. At first, the questioned premise of the possibility of formally identifying a philosophical thought in the pontiff is founded and demonstrated. Then a reconstruction of the notions implied by the philosophical category of polar tension is proposed, which, in a certain sense, structures all of Pope Bergoglio's reflection. The notion of polar tension, or contrast, is offered as an adequate meaning for concrete existence, capable of accepting and affirming the oppositions of existence as they actually occur, in a dialectic of non-contradictory opposites. Francis proposes the category of overflow as an explanation of the overcoming, unpredictable and novel synthesis that occurs between the opposites of existence when they are approached dialogically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Levinas' unpublished lectures at the Collège philosophique, there is an analysis of the western conception of language because of a luminal paradigm of logical-conceptual relationship with being: a silent world that reveals itself in light. Phenomenology would not have been able to move away from traditional metaphysics, which encloses and dominates the being that is given in the light through reason, reducing it to the uniformity. Levinas finds in the sonority of sound a key to philosophical interpretation with the potential to design an alternative form of relationship with existence where otherness is expressed itself. Therefore, it is proposed the paradigm of sonority, as a refulgence, of the alternative being to that of light. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper proposes a critical approach to the question of evil and human suffering. Within the framework of Levinas's ethical thinking and from a new perspective on the current conception of language and human body, we intend to call into question every form of rationalism and metaphysical understanding regarding human pain and suffering. The purpose of this study thus consist of outlining a new sort of behavior concerning the question of evil and human weakness, seeking conceptual alternatives of clarifying this complex ethical problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]