Notes, summaries, assignments, exams, and exercises for Philosophy and ethics for Other courses

Lorca: Dramatic Production and Symbolism

Lorca's dramatic production expresses the problems of life and history through a language loaded with drama, farce, and symbolism.

Early Works

His first theatrical dramas are related to Modernismo, including The Butterfly's Evil Spell and Mariana Pineda. The four farces derived from Lorca explore the expressive conflict between the marriage of the old and the young, contrasting luxury with commercial theater using popular forms like puppet shows (guiñol).

Impossible Comedies and Farces

Lorca's "impossible theater" anticipates the breakdown of spatiotemporal logic, the overflow of personality, and the possibility of multiple interpretations.

• As Soon as Five Years Pass (1931): Describes an existential drama

Human Dignity: A Fundamental Assumption

Kant believed that what characterizes human beings from a moral standpoint is their inherent dignity. To violate this dignity is to treat a human as a means or a tool. The end is always the person, who has intrinsic value and not a price. Therefore, they cannot be bought. The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that "liberty, justice, and peace are universally established values," the realization of which depends on the recognition of the dignity of all. Dignity itself is not a scientific fact; it does not belong to the vocabulary of science. Some try to deduce it from human nature, others from reason. However, describing reality as it is does not mean deducing norms from it. Intelligence...

Defining Sovereign States in International Law

States are sovereign, independent entities recognized under international law. Today, the international community is composed of approximately 199 states. An independent state is defined as a community established in a territory, politically organized under a single government, and free from external authority.

Constituent Elements of a State

• Territory: The physical space—land, sea, or air—under state status. Precise territorial boundaries are not strictly required for statehood.
• Population: A human collectivity established within the territory on a stable and permanent basis.
• Government: The capacity to exercise effective control over the territory and its people while maintaining international

Admiration: The Root of Knowledge

"All forms of knowledge arise from curiosity and wonder that causes us to face the unknown." (Aristotle). This wonder leads us to discover that everything around us consists of riddles and questions that must be resolved to understand our actions and the world. Along with the sense of wonder, there are two essential abilities:

• The ability to ask questions.
• The ability to develop arguments to answer these questions.

Ignorance, Opinion, and Belief

Knowledge is the domain of information available at a given time that enables us to act appropriately. We can distinguish two types:

1. Theoretical Knowledge: The pursuit of understanding reality as it is, purely for the sake of knowing.
2. Practical or Technical Knowledge: The

The Transition from the Middle Ages to Modernity

Background: In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, knowledge revolved around the relationship between faith and reason, and society was organized according to a theocentric vision of the world. Modernity arises from the confrontation with the Middle Ages.

The Rise of Renaissance Humanism

If medieval life revolved around God, Renaissance humanism stars in a naturalistic turn that promotes anthropocentrism. Man becomes the center of intellectual interest, rediscovering Greco-Roman thinkers through philology. This change in European thought provoked a crisis of European consciousness determined by various social, economic, religious, cultural, artistic, and scientific events.

The Scientific Revolution

The Nature of Argumentation

The argument is the act of arguing, a set of arguments, discussion, and controversy. The act of arguing includes one or more presentations of ideas and one or more personal viewpoints accompanied by evidence from the text to which the author has the right. In informal dialogue situations, we argue very often but may forget the evidence or the reasoning with logic. In formal situations, such as legal discourses, these care-driven discourses are present.

Key Elements of Argumentation

Consistency of reasoning: It consists of the transportation of reasoning so that it can be confirmed and be exempt from being vacated by counter-argumentation.

The evidence: This is the truth criterion that is reached by reasoning or the presentation...

1. The Intrinsic Dignity of the Human Person

The Social Doctrine of the Church (SDC) upholds the intrinsic dignity of every human person. This dignity is immutable because it does not depend on:

• Intelligence
• Health
• Usefulness
• Social status

Human dignity originates from the fact that every person is created in the image of God and possesses a spiritual nature. According to Church teaching, dignity belongs to the whole human person, understood as a unity of body and soul, reason and will. Therefore, every human being possesses dignity from conception until natural death, independently of personal circumstances or level of development.

2. Natural Freedom vs. Moral Freedom

The SDC distinguishes between two types of freedom:

• Natural Freedom: The human capacity

Ortega y Gasset's Concept of Philosophy

Ortega's concept of philosophy posits that man is not known or defined solely by his function as a knower; knowledge is something man does within life. Life is something to do; it is therefore insecure, and man seeks certainty to know what to expect. Life is based on a set of beliefs; when they fail, man is forced to think and form ideas about things. Man exists in an intermediate state of not fully knowing. The edge of philosophy is the search for a radical certainty that allows us to know what to expect in life.

A Critique of Realism and Idealism

The overriding reality is life, which is the coexistence of the self with things. This represents a new ontology for the ancient conception that no longer works....

The Three Manifestations of the Will to Power

Nietzsche identifies three primary manifestations of the Will to Power (Wille zur Macht):

• Will to Create: Developing the instincts that give us life and creating new values.
• Will to Self-Affirmation: Striving to maintain one's current state.
• Will to Improve: Trying to surpass oneself by becoming more authentic.

The Will to Power is a force driving continuous change, movement, and creation. All beings are expressions of the Will to Power, but some possess a greater intensity of this life force than others.

The Concept of the Übermensch (Superman)

Following the “death of God” and the decline of traditional Christian values, we conclude that there are no absolute truths. This creates the necessary atmosphere...

Modern political theory is a systematic study of the state, government, and the fundamental values that govern collective human existence. Unlike classical theory, which was often rooted in idealism and religious morality, modern theory emerged alongside the Enlightenment, prioritizing human reason, secularism, and empirical observation.

To understand its nature for a 15-mark analysis, we can break it down into the following key dimensions:

1. Shift from Idealism to Realism

The nature of modern theory is fundamentally realistic. While thinkers like Plato sought the "Ideal State," modern theorists like Niccolò Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes focused on politics as it is, not as it should be. They viewed politics through the lens of power dynamics,...