Conference Report: IV IberoLatino Personalismo Conference

by Denis Larrivee

Spanish speaking personalists again advanced scholarly commitment to the most significant philosophical contribution to human anthropology of the 20th century, personalism. Held at the Universidad Popular Autonoma des Estado de Puebla in Puebla Mexico August 28 to 30 the IV IberoLatino Personalismo conference featured a reaffirmation by Spanish scholars of its centrality for normative action in human activity. Building on the work of Wojtyla, Mounier, Maritain, and Hildebrand the conference also explored the contributions of significant but lesser known figures like Carlos Llanas in economic theory and evolved personalist frameworks for education, psychological therapy, and neuroethics.

Specific contributions on the impact of personalism in economics from economic scholar Rocco Buttiglione and personalism’s geo and cultural challenges by Juan Manuel Burgos established the thematic orientation, bookending the three-day conference's inception and closing. Dominating material content were 69 panel papers given by scholars from ten Spanish language nations of Central and South America, and their European ‘patrones’ from Spain. Although a majority of papers originated in universities of the host country, the significance of personalist philosophy in the broader culture was emphasized by the inclusion of attendees from Asia (Korea), North America (United States), and Europe (Italy and Poland).

The challenge to the cultural acceptance of personalism as a metaethical principle and anthropological framework was nonetheless also evident, some 70 years after Jacques Maritain's instrumental influence in the UN adoption of the Rights of the Person as a guiding manifesto. Proposals for personalist frameworks in education and psychology were, for example, set against the backdrop of the obvious dehumanizing structures of thought and action that today remain widely distributed. Contemporary trends have radically delocalized the personalist subject in human anthropology, confounding progress in education, psychology, and neuro(bio)ethics. Yale’s 2015 conference on the person, for example, was noted for its pursuit of definitional elasticity in anthropology that can only impede normative valuation in the human personalist subject. As Juan Manuel Burgos noted much remains to do.