The Project inscribes the relationship between reason and beliefs in the framework of political and moral philosophy as a problem of public reason functioning in a multicultural society.

Focusing on public reason, a concept inherited from Kant that plays an important part in Rawls’ and Habermas’ later works, the project consists in the investigation of the theoretical and moral presumptions engaged in the discussion about public reason and the inter-connection of the results of this investigation with the problematic of the education in a multi-cultural society.

By its first aspect, our project will generate results in the re-analysis of the problematic of the nature of rationality, its sources, its structure, its aims, and its limits (the fundamental aspect of the research), and concerning its second aspect (the applicative aspect of research), the project will highlight the conditions of possibility of the public reason in a multi-cultural society, in which the comprehensible doctrines, in Rawls’s meaning, as well as their linked behaviors and attitudes, are non-reductive.

The great challenge of this relation and what constitutes the novelty of our approach will consist in the fact that the discussion about the public reason is extended from the political field to content aspects that can be capitalized by education. To these objectives linked to the practical and theoretical aspects of the research are connected a series of institutional objectives concerning the participation of Romanian researchers at the international philosophical debating. The project will polarize the different preoccupations at a national level around this direction of research, until the formation of a scientific community that would reach the necessary critical mass in order to be recognized on an international level.

See Project Presentation for details.