The International Congress on Forgiveness and Reconciliation brings together professionals and academics from different parts of the world to reflect from an interdisciplinary an interdisciplinary perspective, philosophically inspired, on the issues of forgiveness and reconciliation. It will take place from March 24 to 26, 202. 5 at the Francisco de Vitoria University (Pozuelo de Alarcón, Madrid).

If the twentieth century was marked by overwhelming violence, the new century, with its accelerated historical pace and societies in the presence of one another and technologically connected, has brought or has definitively brought to light other forms of barbarism that undermine coexistence. Terrorisms, health and energy crises, the proliferation of technologies that isolate people, environmental problems, gender violence and abuses… all have as an added consequence new forms of social and economic exclusion, pathologies and disorders. . From an interdisciplinary approach, it seems increasingly clear that a reflection aimed at clarifying and offering solutions to these new forms of violence cannot be developed without an action and therefore a study aimed at formulating the possibilities of forgiveness and reconciliation, fundamental associative principles of any society, which allows to preserve it from its disintegration.

It will take place from March 24to 26, 2025 at the Universidad Francisco de Vitoria (Pozuelo de Alarcón, Madrid) in hybrid mode (face-to-face and online).

The emergence of a thematic attention of philosophy towards forgiveness has taken place in the second half of the twentieth century and, although its literature is not yet particularly varied, with contributions coming mainly from Anglo-Saxon thought and, occasionally, from phenomenology, it has come to speak, in general terms, of a “philosophy of forgiveness” (Lewis -ed.- The philosophy of forgiveness, ed. Lewis, 4 Vols. 2016, 2017). With a broader historical trajectory, forgiveness has been the subject of theological studies and has recently aroused the interest of scientific psychology. Sociological reflections also aimed at understanding historical phenomena are increasingly present in contemporary societies.

The Forgiveness and Reconciliation Congress seeks to offer aninterdisciplinary reflection on the meaning, conditions and scope of forgiveness in human life, in all its cultural dimensions, i.e., socio-historical and concrete knowledge, in view of the birth of the possibility of reconciliation.

• Area 1:Agents of forgiveness. The question of mediation. The encounter between philosophy and theology of forgiveness.
• Area 2:Forgiveness and culture. The influence of the historical-social conditions of forgiveness and reconciliation.
• Area 3:Forgiveness and reconciliation in sexual violence determined by situation of abuse of power and authority.

Appropriate methodologies: theoretical reflection on the thematic areas, hermeneutic-textual analysis, case analysis.