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Dialogical reason requires dialogue among the members of a community. Thinkers like Habermas and Apel have proposed that judgments of both fact and value become objects of public debate. The debate should determine whether these judgments can earn the assent of the community. If so, they attain a degree of intersubjective validity. Javier Muguerza's Ethics and Perplexity makes a highly original contribution to the debate over dialogical reason. The work opens with a letter that establishes a parallel between Ethics and Perplexity and Maimonides's classic Guide of the Perplexed. It concludes with an interview that repeatedly strikes sparks on Spanish philosophy's emergence from its "long quarantine," as Muguerza puts it. These informal pieces-witty, informative, conversational-orbit the nucleus of the work: a formidable critique of dialogical reason. The result is a volume by turns vivid and profound. Muguerza insists that the experience of perplexity is inseparable from the exercise of philosophy. Perplexity is linked to aporia and wonder, which the ancients identified as the origin of their activity. The only solidarity among philosophers is that of searching, and philosophy is hardly more than a set of questions unceasingly posed and posed again, of forever open problems, of perplexities that assail us over and over again. Perplexity avoids both the certainty of dogmatism and the ignorance of skepticism. In fact, it is the only philosophical ailment capable of immunizing us against both. Philosophy is always a guide to the perplexed. The series Philosophy in Spain , founded to bring Spanish philosophy to the attention of English-speaking philosophers, seeks outstanding works by classic and contemporary Spanish thinkers as well as books on Spanish philosophy

The title of our text reads Around the idea of moral progress, where the expression "moral progress" points out on the one hand to moral philosophy or ethics and on the other hand to the philosophy of history. As for the first one, the idea of a moral progress is questioned here through the Aranguren's threefold distinction between morals as structure, content and attitude. For the second one, the idea of moral progress refers to utopian thought, which assails the problems of human rights in the context of what be called "democracy as morals". ; El título de este texto es el de A vueltas con la idea de un progreso moral, donde la expresión "progreso moral" apunta por un lado a la filosofía moral o la ética, así como, por otro, apuntaría más bien a la filosofía de la historia. En cuanto a lo primero, la idea de un progreso moral es cuestionada a través de la triple distinción de Aranguren entre moral como estructura, contenido y actitud. En cuanto a lo segundo, la idea de progreso moral remite al pensamiento utópico, dentro del cual se aborda la problemática de los derechos humanos y su ubicación en el contexto de lo que cabría llamar la "democracia como moral".

Taking R. Von Ihering's essay, "Der Kampf ums Recht" ([The Struggle for Rights] 1872), as a point of reference, Javier Muguerza argues for a new approach to the realist-formalist debate in legal theory. Ihering's differentiation between "Law" & "Society" aimed at showing the conflict of interests that inevitably underlies the law. Human beings may be ready to die for what they consider to be theirs, but the law conceived as a "battlefield" also helps to understand that each individual defending his rights is in fact defending everyone's rights. However, for this to be true, it is necessary to move from a corporative or historic perception of the law, to a universalistic one, & it is here where philosophy must prove that the rights of the individual & human rights are one & the same. This could be labeled as the transition from ethics to law through politics. Such an evolution has been articulated in philosophy by consensualist theories such as those of John Rawls & Jurgen Habermas & their idea of the public use of reason, but it could equally be conceived from an agonistic point of view in which the dissident would play a leading role in the continued struggle for justice. 19 References. Adapted from the source document.