Filosofia da ciência e religiosidade: problemas do sagrado na teoria de relações internacionais

Abstract

This work aims to include religiosity as a relevant variable for the production of scientific knowledge in International Relations (IR). It is inserted in the double debate that considers, on the one hand, the meta-theoretical and epistemological grounds of the discipline, within the general framework of the Philosophy of Science, and, on the other, questions the most basic pillars of IR as a rational and secular science, with the demise of the well-known secularization thesis. The first chapters treats the relationship between science and IR, in order to comprehend the outline which conditions the idea of knowledge production in the area, involving issues such as the symbolic power of science, the politics of science, and the demarcation of scientific from non-scientific work. At the end of the chapter it will be forwarded a paradigm of science that gives conditions of openness to the complexity of reality and knowledge, and under which science cannot be equated as a reduction to a single method. The second chapter develops a typology of religiosity, which is constituted by two axes, religion, as its institutional expression, and the sacred, as its ontological discourse; this typology is applicable at two levels: political-sociological or theoretical-epistemic. As the discipline of IR is relatively more used to work within the religion axes, the work will deepen the subject of the sacred – understood as an anthropological mode of human experience. The sacred will also be substantiated historically, through its transmission, resignifying, and permanence, from judeo-christianism to Modernity. The last chapter exemplifies the religiosity variable, applying it to the theoretical-epistemic level, in which it is possible to observe that religiosity is inner to IR‘s own theoretical construct, and not merely external, as an empirical phenomenon which can be observed by the discipline‘s ―independent‖ tools. With an incursion to International Political Theology the work will revise two naturalized suppositions in the sub-field Theory of International Relations: the secularization thesis and the problem of sovereign power.