Hápax — Institute

+ Our Project

We aspire to be a firmly consolidated intellectual community through mature lines of interdisciplinary research, linking philosophical anthropology with the social sciences and the diverse cultural manifestations in which the person lives.

We want to offer a theoretical proposal for cultural renewal, with a Christian perspective, as the fruit of long-term interdisciplinary research, through our own body of publications and an internationally recognized and active Ph.D. program, especially in Latin America.

We seek to integrate an international community of scientists and university professors with an anthropological and interdisciplinary formation that will be agents of change in their respective institutions.

We want Hápax to be a common space for open dialogue and inter-university synergy, and for our scientific community to be able to act in concrete social projects in which it verifies its theoretical proposal and contributes to the improvement of the community.

+ Why do we talk about Action Sciences?

The richness of the human person is materialized in action, and social institutions are a space where it is expressed, framed, and developed with special fullness. In Hápax we will investigate on the human person as the main agent of social change, as a creative being, generator of culture and source of novelty: as a being who makes himself with his action without reducing himself to it.

The sciences of action are those disciplines that study the way in which human action is engaged both individually and socially and are therefore essentially interdisciplinary. They bring together knowledge such as ecology, systems theory, cybernetics, complexity sciences, discourse analysis, neurosciences, or theories of social organization, as well as the recovery of classical knowledge. These are sciences that, starting from a philosophical deepening of the being of the person, investigate the essence of the diverse realities that she creates.

+ Our Name

"Hápax" is the transliteration of the Greek word ἅπαξ, meaning "once only". Philologists have coined the expression "hápax legómenon" to designate words that occur only once in each corpus or literary context. Philosophers and theologians have designated with it the unrepeatable, the mysterious, and which, therefore, is a true singularity.

This is the person: a being that cannot be homogenized or treated as one more member of a species, but must be considered as a "hapax," as a unique event, that is, as a singular being whose vocation and fulfillment lie in relationship and communion with other people.

With this name we want to indicate the centrality of philosophical anthropology in the research and teaching activity of the Institute, and to emphasize that the human person is a true source of cultural innovation.

The title Institute of Action Sciences indicates the scientific character and the interdisciplinary approach that we pursue through the study of human action. This is how Hápax seeks to clarify that its interest is global and that it involves various aspects of the manifestation of the personal being: theory and practice nourish each other, linking speculation to life.

+ Our Logo

We have chosen as our icon a stylized H, inspired by a burning bush. The Hebrew word for "bush" is seneh (סנה), a biblical habpax legomenon, which for some theologians and philologists indicates the peculiarity of the passage and underlines the uniqueness of the theophanic event for Moses and the history of the Hebrew people.

The burning bush is a symbol that we have chosen to remind us that the world can sometimes be the place where God appears, that he enters history, that he is an eternal promise and that he does not fail men. The bush, as a sacred symbol, is the meeting place between truth and time, between the infinite and the world, between the transcendence of the Good and our desire to attain it. But at the same time, it is the establishment of a new history for humanity; it is the space of communication between people, the creative origin of a dialogue that makes culture and civilization.