Casacuberta Sevilla, David

Enrahonar An international journal of theoretical and practical reason

Revistes Catalanes amb Accés Obert

Enrahonar. Quaderns de Filosofia 47, 2011 11-12
The year 1981 the first edition of Enrahonar was published. A magazine 
devoted to cover and raise awareness of philosophy in Catalan. Over the past 
thirty years many things have changed in the wide world of philosophy and 
in this small space that is Enrahonar. Just check the index and you will see 
how the goals have changed in this issue: if Enrahonar originally combined 
some specialization with generic numbers, the large number of publications 
now accessible in philosophy has led us inevitably to convert all the numbers 
in monographies, to facilitate dissemination and thus reach as many readers 
as possible.
The reader will probably ask himself what is left of the original linguistic 
vocation, when most of the papers in this issue are in English or Spanish 
—despite the fact, though, that we have recently published two monographies 
on Catalan philosophy. Over the past thirty years, our idea of how scientific 
communication should be has changed, and we all seek some lingua franca, 
especially English-to ensure that our message reaches our subject specialists. 
Catalan lives on in our classes, popular science magazines or Internet com-
munication, but is largely absent from the scientific communication, where 
the publish or perish, the impact factors and the number of citations tyrannize 
our research. Even the university quality agency of the Catalan Government 
tends to favor English publications and international journals. This is no place 
to think whether this policy is correct or not, the fact is that the everybody 
does it now, and a magazine wants, above all, to be read, so, thirty years later, 
Enrahonar is a multilingual magazine.
In these three decades, philosophy has changed a lot. In fact, the year 
1981, 1991 or even 2001 a number like you are reading now would be impos-
sible. Buddhism, Taoism and Hinduism were just religions that were basi-
cally linked to the myth, and the word philosophy could not be applied to 
them. An important exception, both in the classroom and the research field 
was Pep Montserrat, professor of the Philosophy Department of the UAB, 
who did a great task in introducing Eastern thought in philosophy. Beside 
exceptions, thinking seemed to be a basically Western thing, and the current 
Presentation
Thirty years of Enrahonar, East and West
12  Enrahonar 47, 2011 Presentation
explanations about what was Buddhism, Taoism or Hinduism —which were 
largely inherited interested simplifications from Christianity— were simplistic, 
and absurd, eliminating all philosophical concepts behind these schools of 
thought.
Also, it would have been difficult to find the year 1981 a view of subject 
as eclectic as it is today. As the reader can see, in this issue Deleuze shares space 
with analytic philosophy, mysticism with cognitive sciences, and philosophical 
reflection with experimental data published this year.
This latter fact is especially important: more and more the armchair phi-
losophy — I sit and begin to think about an issue, trying to establish a priori 
truths, becomes less credible with new generations that ignore barriers and 
have no problem in working together on a team where there are philosophers, 
immunologists, engineers, neuroscientists, psychologists, etc. Damasio is a 
neuroscientist that recognizes all the interesting ideas that are on the emotions 
in Spinoza, and a philosopher interested in emotions in the xxi century knows 
that she needs access to Damasio’s research to speak of the philosophical impli-
cations of these mental states.
In form and substance, this issue of Enrahonar shows changes that phi-
losophy has suffered the last thirty years: increasingly specialized numbers 
published in languages that reach the greatest number of researchers, to open 
up to new perspectives to analyze the reality that the West have forgotten but 
which have always been active in the East, and above all, a way of working 
much more interdisciplinary, where the labels do not matter and what is 
sought is finally establishing the truth (I apologize to sensitive readers to use a 
word so little post-modern).
Because ultimately, this is the issue. The truth. In these thirty years we have 
understood the limitations of a Cartesian view of the mind. We recognize the 
arbitrariness of assuming that mental processes begin and end within the skull. 
We wonder whether there has been progress in the philosophy of the Western 
mind Hume once established his skeptical doubt about the substantiality of 
mental states.
We believed to have most of the answers to the great enigmas and through-
out this new century we have begun to see that we have not even done well 
most of the questions.This number probably will not reveal any great truth, 
but the publisher and the authors hope that at least help you ask some new 
questions. Nothing would make us happier.
David Casacuberta Sevilla
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona


Presentation. Thirty years of Enrahonar, East and West

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Revistes Catalanes amb Accés Obert