Democracy Today.indb - Universidade do Minho

Ethics for a homogeneous community, has its departure point exactly
in the diversity of conceptions of life, among which there are quite different
positions about what life is for, and about the meaning of living.
There is no agreement on the meaning of the word eudaimonia. That’s
exactly why Aristotle needed to write the Ethics!
Diversely, Greeks were always explicitly and soundly aware of the
constitutional role of difference in the Polis, always discussing about
and struggling for what living as a Polis is.
The conscience of difference as something that requires Politics
and Ethics is also clear in the description of human soul. This is present
in the whole Greek philosophical tradition: psyche is composed by
different dimensions, whose good relationship (order) resumes the
ethical challenge.
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DEMOCRACY TODAY
3. Philosophy and Politics (Politics as Philosophy)
From the birth of Greek ancient culture, we ca briefly point out a
hermeneutical framework to understand philosophy, politics, equality
and democracy. Philosophy is the new world view provided by Greek
culture from the literacy revolution - remarked by an universal criticism
in knowing. The crash of narrative foundation of nature and society
gives place and requires the research for new foundations. We, in this
Congress, are not doing anything else but participating in this same
infinitive process of explicit reconstruction of world view.
Philosophy is a contra-dogmatic and always unsatisfied thought,
which infinitively submits any discovery or opinion to verification -
recall Socrates, who exercised Confutation until the very end of his
life. Its criticism cannot accept any criteria for truth which cannot be
submitted to discussion. The openness that characterizes the philosophical
culture is the framework where Politics can be born. The very
question of Politics - how is living in community as equals? - remains
an open question. It is endless, as Philosophy.
The limits of this power have always been under discussion as
well. In this sense we can read the speeches on the binomial “physis
and nomos”. Under this topic, Philosophy (in all of its dimensions:
Science, Tragedy, Lyric, Rhetoric etc.) discusses the boundaries of