The philosopher and essayist Diego S. Garrocho joins the Opinion pages of the newspaper EL PAÍS this Monday as a columnist. Garrocho (Madrid, 40 years old) is a professor of moral philosophy at the Autonomous University of Madrid, in whose Faculty of Philosophy and Letters he serves as Vice Dean of Research. Was newspaper opinion chief ABC between January 2023 and September 2024. In 2021 he received the David Gistau Prize for journalism for his column ‘Letter to a young postmodern’.
“Ideologies have become substitution religions that also generate forms of identity grouping that are very unhelpful for sincere deliberation,” he says about the state of public discussion in Spain. “I think that it has too many activists and that it lacks prudence, pluralism and better ways. There are fewer and fewer meeting places where people who think differently can meet and that appreciation for difference and plurality is an essential ingredient in any liberal democracy. I also think that we lack a greater presence of expert judgment. It is impossible for the same person to establish a well-founded position on the consequences of an erupting volcano, the Constitutional Court, the management of a pandemic or the regulation of the media.”
Doctor with international mention in Philosophy, Garrocho completed his training in France, at the Université de la Sorbonne (Paris-IV) and carried out research stays in the United States, at Boston College, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Johns Hopkins University. In his opinion, philosophy and journalism have a lot in common: “In both cases the search for truth is essential and both tasks should turn doubt, and I would almost say suspicion, into their fundamental premise. In the case of opinion journalism, it is obvious that an eminently evaluative dimension is added that, however, should always maintain rigorous adherence to the facts.” Also in this he finds a coincidence between opinion as a journalistic genre and ethics as a philosophical discipline, “since it is in moral reflection where the criteria, values and principles from which we evaluate reality become more accessible and explicit.”
Diego S. Garrocho is the author of the books last summer (Debate, 2023), About nostalgia. Damnatio Memoriae (Alliance, 2019) and Aristotle. An ethics of passions (Avarigani, 2015). He is also a collaborator of Cadena Cope, Coordinator of the Master’s Degree in Philosophical Criticism and Argumentation, member of the DEMOSPAZ Institute and the UNESCO Chair in Education for Social Justice. He also serves as president of the Academic Council of the think tank Ethosphere.
Aware of the times, he knows that the figure of the public intellectual “is in question.” Although he clarifies: “It is obvious that there are people who, by fortune, chance or merit, have a special power of prescription. And with that privilege comes a responsibility.” Among others, the responsibility to think on your own. “Perhaps what I miss most among so-called intellectuals is the capacity for surprise,” he says. “We live in a time in which thinking is too predictable and there are hardly any truly creative people in the ideological or conceptual field. “At the end of the day, the market of ideas is not too different from that of washing machines or the textile industry.”
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