{"id":6984,"date":"2022-10-10T10:42:57","date_gmt":"2022-10-10T13:42:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ufmg.br\/ieat\/?page_id=6984"},"modified":"2025-08-12T14:19:27","modified_gmt":"2025-08-12T17:19:27","slug":"what-does-it-mean-to-be-cultured-today","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.ufmg.br\/ieat\/en\/events-2\/tansdisciplinary-meetings\/what-does-it-mean-to-be-cultured-today\/","title":{"rendered":"What does it mean to be cultured today?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Date:<\/strong> May 24, 2006
\nLocation:<\/strong> UFMG Rectory Auditorium<\/p>\n

Synopses by author:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Alfredo Gontijo de Oliveira:<\/strong> Culture is the great human invention\u2014a meta-invention that unleashes inventiveness and makes all other inventions possible. However, throughout human history, we have learned that culture is also the art of promoting exclusion. In modern times, the effects of this cultural exclusion were mitigated and eliminated by the deportation of cultural “refuse” through the expansion of physical borders. In contemporary times, with an overpopulated world and an essentially technological culture based on science developed in the 20th century, new harmonies are being sought to promote unification between the “two orthodox cultures”\u2014the humanistic and the scientific\u2014since they are sometimes intertwined. Thus, we understand that the instruments of acculturation today have a strong scientific bias, and being cultured today demands mastery of the principles of science and scientific methodology. With contemporary science, we learn that being cultured is knowing how to live in a fluid and dynamic world, devoid of permanent, authoritarian, and dogmatic references. These new characteristics are what lead to the person being considered cultured who has a minimal command of the basic laws of nature and the functioning of the devices they use in their daily lives.<\/p>\n

Ricardo Takahashi:<\/strong> The notion of a cultured individual today, proposed for debate by the IEAT, certainly lacks a precise meaning \u2013 its use throughout history has led to a development of denotations and connotations that render any attempt to select one meaning as the “correct” one virtually futile, depriving the others of semantic legitimacy.<\/p>\n

In this text, we have chosen to attempt to identify a core meaning\u2014not necessarily the most correct, the oldest, or the most widely used, but rather the one relevant as a concept capable of guiding long-term and far-reaching social processes. This core unites, in an inseparable concept, the idea of an anthropocentric civilization, founded on reason, the laws of nature, the premise of universal ethics, and the careful elaboration of the political space, with the idea of a cultured man, the true man capable of building and bringing into being such a civilizational project.<\/p>\n

We show here that, over time, this core meaning had to change its apparent content to maintain its essence, and that today a new change is necessary for our era to pass on to the future of humanity the utopia of civilization as a common and universal good.<\/p>\n

Speakers:<\/strong> Alfredo Gontijo de Oliveira \u2013 Institute of Exact Sciences, UFMG. Paulo Henrique Oz\u00f3rio Coelho \u2013 School of Philosophy and Human Sciences, UFMG.
\nRicardo Hiroshi Caldeira Takahashi \u2013 Institute of Exact Sciences, UFMG.<\/p>\n