Agenda UV

Involved in the act:

Adela Cortina, Professor of Ethics and Political Philosophy, University of Valencia.

Pilar Barreto, Professor of Clinical Psychology, University of Valencia.

Juan Carlos Siurana, Author.

Moderator: Victor J. Suberviola, PCP, CS Nazareth, Valencia

Synopsis of the book:

The smile and laughter accompany us daily, but not always the right way. We need to learn to laugh, educate our mood. This book is a reflection on humor, the humor that we use in our daily lives, and on the ethical dimension it contains. It proposes a new ethical theory that puts in the mood the Archimedean point from which to advance our own understanding as moral subjects, obtain reasons for our moral action and show ways to improve ethically both individually and collectively.

After defining what is humor and display the current status of studies on this subject, the author takes the main contributions of the great philosophers of humor to build his proposal. Then integrating ethical categories as relevant as those of moral sentiments, virtues, duties, skills or responsibility, bases its ethical theory, which he calls “ethics of humor”, in both a linguistic and a biological rationality, and presents a new medical-philosophical method: the clinical and ethical, able to interpret humor as a link between ethics and health.

The volume also points out various ways of implementing this ethical theory to health care, business, education, politics, media and everyday life, and takes great interest the contributions of psychology, especially the discovery of the healing dimension of humor and instruments to measure it.

Juan Carlos Siurana argues that humor expresses freedom, is universal and hides the basis of an intercultural ethics. It is necessary to know it and educate on it. To the extent that humor is or may be present in all dimensions of our life, personal or professional, book adresses a broad interdisciplinary audience (philosophers, doctors, nurses, business leaders, teachers, politicians, psychologists, heads journalists ...) and anyone interested in the different registers of humor. It provides both theoretical and practical instruments to improve ethically professions, organizations and citizens in general.