Alicia Juarrero
Born in Cuba, Alicia Juarrero
received her BA, MA and Ph.D. in Philosophy from theUniversity
of Miami (Florida). She has taught at Prince George's
(MD) Community College since 1975, and was the first
community college professor to receive a Presidential
appointment to the National Council on the Humanities,
the governing board of the National Endowment for the
Humanities. She serves as Chair of the NEH's Committee
on Federal/State Partnership, which oversees the $32
million that the NEH distributes annually among the
56 State Humanities Councils. Dr. Juarrero lectures
widely, both in the U.S. and Europe, and her many articles
on action theory have appeared in prestigious professional
journals, including The Review of Metaphysics and The
Texas Law Review. Her book Dynamics in Action: Intentional
Behavior as a Complex System will be published by NUT
Press in October, 1999. She lives in Washington, D.C.
Dr. Juarrero considers herself
a teacher, not a therapist. She believes, with
Socrates, that her role is to serve as midwife to the
student's learning and renewal process. To that end,
she has found that philosophers of the Hellenic and
Hellenistic periods (particularly Aristotle, Epictetus,
Epicurus, Marcus Aurelius, Cicero and Seneca) and the
philosophical framework of contemporary complexity theory
elicit the most personal resonance with students. The
virtues-based ethics of the classics have much to teach
us about our connectedness to others. And the healing
value of Stoicism is not new: from turn-of-the-century
European authors to the testimony of Vietnam War POW'S,
its benefits have been widely reported.
On the other hand, Aristotle
and Ilya Prigogine may seem to be strange bedfellows;
but they are not. Unlike modem philosophers from Descartes
to Kant who think of human beings as isolated atoms--
philosophers, incidentally, whose conceptual framework
our culture takes for granted -- both Aristotle and
complexity theory take temporal and contextual embeddedness
seriously. Complex adaptive systems teach us that resilience
is more important than stability: resilient organisms
withstand perturbations, adapt, and survive. To do so,
however, they cannot be separate and closed off from
the world: they must be open to and interact with their
environment. Instead of trying to find in life a certainty
and a set of absolutes that don't exist (as the cognitive
framework we have inherited from Plato would have it),
the writings of Aristotle and Prigogine therefore teach
us that we must embrace uncertainty and novelty.
