“We are witnessing a profound crisis of identity of the human being. Many people even think that it is the most profound crisis of anthropologic thinking of all times, to such an extent of denying the i>raison d´etrê of human existence as substantive identity. This anthropological pluralism –which has not got past in most cases the empirical or sociological phase of human behaviour- dismisses any possibility of metaempirical and metaphysical reflection to illustrate the sense of humankind”.
With these words, the Professor of the University of Granada Urbano Alonso del Campo starts his book “Anthropologies in dialogue”, which has just been published by the University of Granada in its Biblioteca de Bolsillo.
According to the author, “Anthropologies in dialogue» does not intend to be a treatise of systematic anthropology – in the physical, cultural, structural or philosophic dimension-, but an approach to essential questionings and concrete anthropological references in certain specific subjects, without forgetting the dimension and full sense of mankind”.
The problem of man, in contemporaneous thinking, is a must and an object of critic analysis in view of the varied and repeated irrationalist persistence or lifeless rationalisms that leads to a dehumanization process and to the lose of its essential unity forgetting the sense dimension. That is why the big questions about man are unavoidable for any anthropologic concern, even though some of them have lost the sense of the question about man.
Urbano Alonso del Campo maintains that, “our age is demanding the active presence of thinkers with critic sense, of genuine thinkers, with a clear vocation and intellectual honesty, passionate for the search for truth, able to put some mental order and clarity of opinion in a society devoid of hopeful ideals and humanizing criteria. As Edgar Morin used to say, a society without thinkers able to create their own thinking, stimulate the conscience and esteem of this need, getting satisfied with the merely utilitarian and pragmatic, would have lost its most revitalizing and creative sap. Without disinterested, profound, contemplative thinkers, a society is heading for superficiality and even death”.
This book offers, in almost 300 pages and ten chapters, sociological analysis and reconsiders the sense of human existence from philosophy or theology, meeting different postulates.
Reference: Prof Urbano Alonso del Campo.
Department of Personality, Assessment and Psychological Treatment.
Phone number: 958 246250 / 244251.
