"Giving is the highest form of freedom".
Angel Luis Gonzalez, Full Professor of Metaphysics, has been in charge of the inaugural lecture of academic year 2013-14.
The inaugural lecture of the opening ceremony of the University of Navarra, at position of Full Professor of Metaphysics Ángel Luis González, dealt with the capacity of every human being to give as a pure form of the freedom of each person. "The gift, an interdisciplinary issue, has reached in the last 25-30 years a major treatment in the field of sociology, Philosophy, psychology, Economics, theology, ethics in general, ethics of care and other applied ethics," he said.
He underlined some points of a theoretical framework concerning the gift and the act of giving, the multiple forms of altruism and generosity that make it possible to overcome the society of individuals, the insertion of gratuitousness in the public sphere, the multiform modes of solidarity that appear more and more widely. "From different points of view, and with different methods, it can be affirmed that various current interests of the human and social sciences, and also those of Humanities, show that the concept or category of gift, anancient notion, now rehabilitated, is core topic especially privileged in order to understand the human person and nature and social and economic problems," said Full Professor Gonzalez.
In his speech, graduate "Person, freedom, gift", he reviewed the doctrine of freedom in modern authors to focus on the proposal union of being staff and freedom as donation. He alluded to the doctrines of Kant, Kierkegaard and stopped at Nietzsche.
He concluded that "the person is more than his will, and the freedom staff is always kept or remains in reservation, since it transcends human manifestations and, in this way, again freely, he will be able to sanction his previous decisions or he will be able to change them -improving them or worsening them-. Each person is a different freedom. The contributions of a free being staff come from his or her intimacy and that intimacy is not closed: it is openness, precisely because it is a gift: it is not enclosed or closed, it manifests itself. The logic of gift cannot appear as long as the pretension of self is not cut off and intimacy seeks and finds otherness. Giving is the highest form of freedom.