Analogical Hermeneutics, ethics of virtue and promotion of life. Interview with Mauricio Beuchot

Abstract

Mauricio Hardie Beuchot Puente (Coahuila, México, 1950) is a Dominican
priest, philosopher, historian of ideas, philologist, translator, pedagogue, editor and
poet. He is one of the greatest exponents of the Mexican and Ibero-American
philosophical panorama, and the main promoter of the so-called Analogical
Hermeneutics, a baroque project that amalgamates universal and local, classical and
contemporary theoretical inspirations in a new synthesis of systematic claim and
practical intention. His prolific work ranges from The Problem of Universals (1981) to
Interpretation of the Human Being. An Essay in Philosophical Anthropology (2019).
This interview proves that with his theoretical efforts, Mauricio Beuchot –an
intellectual critically rooted in the traditions of neo-Thomist personalism and liberal

social humanism– undertakes the task of clearing a path for North-South and South-
South philosophical dialogue that transposes, both in the world of ideas as in the

practical field, the aporetic limits that provoke cultural incommensurability and
nihilistic relativism in the epochal horizon of the present. Analogical Hermeneutics,
art and science of text analysis –and of action understood as text–, provides a model of
interpretation and application committed to resolving the two-sided dilemma that
plagues contemporary thought under the double influence of subjectivism and
objectivism, and for which he succumbed to two extremes: the relativist and the
scientist. In these terms, it elaborates an approach that adopts, in accordance with a
policy of interpretation based on the ethical-political ideal of phronesis, a mediating
position that moderates tensions without leveling or abolishing them. Through this
path of proportional prudence, Analogical Hermeneutics appropriates the logical rigor
of the analytic current while retaining the semantic plurality of postmodern theory.
Avoiding the temptation to close down the realist paradigm of ontology, he has been
able to build a Latin American and intercultural philosophical program whose task is
to accept that although complete objectivity in knowledge cannot be achieved, at least
it can be achieved without rejection. of equivocation, constituting meaning from
difference over identity. Avoiding the temptation to close down the realist paradigm of
ontology, he has been able to build a Latin American and intercultural philosophical
program whose task is to accept that although complete objectivity in knowledge
cannot be achieved, at least it can be achieved without rejection. of equivocation,
constituting meaning from difference over identity. The open dialectical framework –
not without a certain tragic breath– carefully deployed by Analogical Hermeneutics –
renovating the sources of ancient and medieval philosophy– points to an experiential
clarification of ethics that includes the foundations of meaning of all dimensions of
activity human.