SOBRE LA RACIONALIDAD DE LOS PROCESOS DE CONVERSIÓN

Artículos

Resumen

My aim is to analyse the nature ofradical changes in view or conversions, whether they are of cognitive, moral or of religious nature. At first, I examine deliberative processes taking place within the framework of practical reason and ponder if the subjective recognition that one has a reason to be moral or a moral motivation implies an insight that could be assessed as a sort of radical 
conversion, as sorne moral philosophers have suggested. Secondly, I explore the same question within the framework of theoretical reason, that is to say, inside the epistemology of natural sciences. Central for this analysis will be Bas Van Fraassen's ideas about the possibility of a non metaphysical epistemology. As a general conclusion I will suggest that to fully understand the concept of conversion one has to presuppose a unitary notion of reason, a notion where the limits between the practical and the theoretical, or the formal and the substantive, would be fuzzier than it is normally admitted. Finally, I will apply what has been gained in the previous analysis to a case of religious conversion and will explore it not simply as a kind of affective movement of irrational nature, but rather as the result of a "rational" insight -but "rational" in a special, maybe Kantian, sense- that could be better understood from the point of view of an undivided concept of reason.