Per la Pau / Peace in Progress

Irene Comins Mingol. Filosofía del cuidar. Una propuesta coeducativa para la paz. Barcelona: Icaria, 2009

The starting point of the author's work is the concept of cultures for making peaces as developed by the Chair in Philosophy for Peace at Universitat Jaume I in Castellón, which stresses the human capacity for mutual help, solidarity and care, and the various ways in which human beings cultivate relationships between each other and with nature. Among the various human skills for making peace, Irene Comins highlights caring and proposes using care and tenderness as human abilities for living in peace.

To that end, the book is divided into two parts: the first deals with the ethics of care and its contributions to a culture for peace; and the second part includes a proposal for an ethics of care as education for peace. While the first part analyses two contributions of the ethics of care that are considered important for a culture for peace, which are peaceful conflict transformation and care and concern for others, and questions the factor of time in everyday life; the second proposes the inclusion of values and tasks on the school curriculum that have traditionally been assigned to women and are considered as belonging in the private sphere, such as care and expressing emotions. Education for peace would thus have one aspect that would be intellectual education, and another that would be sentimental education, in order to stimulate the development not only of cognitive skills, but also of emotional and interpersonal relationship skills.
(E.G)