The collection brings together nine essays on the cultivation of the intellectual life as a condition for the formation of the administrator. The argument that articulates the chapters is that management, understood as human action and not as a technique for optimizing resources, requires the exercise of prudence in the Aristotelian-Thomistic sense, that is, the habit that integrates deliberation, judgment, and command. Without intellectual life, the administrator is reduced to the “specialist without spirit” described by Weber, hostage to managerial fads and unable to distinguish immediate success from the true good.
The essays diagnose pathologies of contemporary formation, among them the fragmentation of knowledge, cognitive politics, the ontological decline of language, and the reduction of rationality to instrumental calculation, and indicate paths of recovery from Sertillanges, Whitehead, Voegelin, C. S. Lewis, Weaver, Sayers, Guerreiro Ramos, Polo, and MacIntyre. The themes range from the typology of studies to the relationship between science and philosophy, from education ordered to the common good to the social role of the intellectual, and from the cognitive limits of artificial intelligence to the prudent use of the internet.
Resulting from the course Introduction to the Intellectual Life, taught in the Graduate Academic Program in Administration at Esag/Udesc, the work is addressed to undergraduate and graduate students, researchers, and professors committed to the ethical and anthropological foundations of administrative work.
Organizer: Mauricio C. Serafim
Other authors
Mauricio C. Serafim, Nicolas Rufino dos Santos, Victor Pasquoal de Oliveira, Renata Biana da Silva Bruno Cesar Antunes, Priscilla Infâncio Antunes, Ana Paula Grillo Rodrigues, Sabrina Oliveira de Souza, Guilherme Aleandro Campestrini, Francisco Yukio Hayashi, Evelyn Nunes de Melo, Conrado Miscow Machado.
