El Thursday November 30 was held in the Degree Hall of the Departmental Building I of the Fuenlabrada Campus la first session of the Teaching Project 'Chronos & Kairós', managed by Professor Pablo Alzola Cerero (area of ​​Aesthetics and Theory of the Arts) y funded by the Tatiana Foundation of Madrid. 

This project aims invite students and university professors to reflect on time from different branches of knowledge, taking into account that the University It must be, above all, the place where we face the big questions and learn to seek knowledge for its own sake. The University teaches us that “knowledge is capable of being its own end”, wrote John Henry Newman, whom Professor Alzola cited at the beginning of the meeting.

The first session, entitled “Getting right with life and time”, was focused from a philosophical perspective: consisted of a colloquium between Ignacio Sánchez Cámara, professor of philosophy at the URJC and Ernesto Baltar García-Peñuela, also professor of philosophy at the URJC. In the conversation between the two professors, issues like the cconnection between our conception of time and our way of living, the narrative reason of human life, the different ways of understanding eternity, the need for a vocation or project to understand ourselves or illusion as the engine of life. Professors Sánchez Cámara and Baltar addressed these issues from your own reflections, But also turning to thinkers to whom they have dedicated attention and study: José Ortega y Gasset y Julian Marias, above all, in addition to Augustine, Boethius, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein y Heidegger. “Perhaps narration is the form of thought that has allowed us to better understand the temporal essence of living”, argued Professor Baltar, quoting Marías.

At the end of the colloquium The turn for interventions of the participants was opened, that were more than forty, Many students of the Degree in Philosophy at the URJC, as well as other Degrees. The debate was seen enriched with questions about how the cultivation of intimacy can feed illusion as a vital engine o how to understand the narrative nature of life, the notion of a project, the end of life, the apparent contradiction between not wasting time and living slowly, as well as about Other themes Related over time. In this way, the University becomes a space for the exchange of concerns, ideas and perspectives between teachers and students, which is an excellent formative complement in the field of Humanities.                                                                      

Photos: Professors Sánchez and Baltar (first photo), Professor Alzola (second) and attendees at the event (third).