Coordinators: Daniel Goldman and Carlos Rafael Ruta
The expression "spirituality" has its origins in a Christian Latin creation used to translate the Greek term "pneumatikos" found in the ancient versions of the Pauline letters. From there the term will expand its use in three fields of meaning: religious, philosophical and juridical. In any case, and beyond its nuances, a core of the meaning has always referred to a "way of life" which places at the centre of its attention that human dimension indicated under the (even diffuse) concept of "spirit". The levels involved in this meaning are multiple and complex, both in phenomenological and historical perspective. However, it is important to recognise at least two decisive instances for its meaning: a) the need for a care for oneself that tempers the vital tonality in tune with a meaning that is not exhausted in material mediation without reference to a totality that encompasses and transcends us; b) the inherent implication of processes of understanding that concern each person, his community, his environment and his land. Thus, Hermeneutics as a theory of understanding has seen in this semantic and vital dimension, called (even diffusely) under the term "spirituality", a privileged field of study to approach the constitution of the "worlds of life" unfolded from their experiences and their original cultures. From this angle of vision, its observation and analysis encompass both its religious and secular concretions. Although hermeneutics, since its formulation in the 19th century, has been devoted to the study of the levels of understanding that correspond to these ways of life, attention to this itself is not new. Since the Platonic Academy (to mention only the Western tradition) there has been a questioning of the ways of accessing the original principles of human existence and their translation into lifestyles. The university and the centres of knowledge, right from their origins, have not been oblivious to this concern, even and above all in the genesis and development of modern science. New lifestyles were born there, rooted in a new way of understanding nature and the social world.
The Permanent Seminar on Hermeneutics and Spirituality aims to give voice to these experiences in their heterogeneous registers, to approach their diverse ways of "understanding" human existence and its challenges.
