DIMITRIOS S. PATELIS

Values as expressions of cultural universals

In: Voudouris K. ed., (2006). THE PHILOSOPHY OF CULTURE. Athens: Ionia, pp. 170-183.

In my Paper I examine the meaning of Values as accepted evaluations of social and cultural importance, as the meaning of several objects, phenomena, relations and activities, which are involved with the cultural being and serve as bearers of certain social relations. I will put emphasis on the fact that, in relation to the man, Values represent the objects of his interest, while in his consciousness they serve as reference points in the daily substantive and social realities and as symbols of his various practical attitudes to surrounding objects and phenomena.

I am bringing out the framework of the concrete historical terms of the emergence, the formation and the development of the Values in the field of the material and spiritual culture, underlining the relation between Labour and Value, in a world, in which the quantity aspect of the exchangeable value is emerging directly on the apron, while the whole of the human forces, creative possibilities and social relations, appear as a Scale of Values, and all the regulative codes functions through the dipole: merits- demerits.

I will also investigate the unity and diversity of Individual, Particular (national, regional, etc.), and Universal (international, global, etc.), in Culture and in several kinds of cultural values, from the point of view of the difference between “abstract universal” (as the verbally expressed sameness of phenomena) and the real “concrete universal” (as the inner essence, the law of existence and change).

Dr. Dimitrios S. Patelis
Assistant Professor

Dept. of Sciences
Technical University of Crete