About the Journal

Approach and scope

Scientific journal of communication, published by the Editorial Razón y Palabra, dedicated to the studies of comunicología. It is published every four months. Razón y Palabra is a plural, inclusive, open, tolerant, non-profit digital space that is alien to political or partisan interests of any kind, whose mission is to contribute to the generation of productive knowledge for possible communication.

It is a non-profit project: it does not pay the authors, nor does it charge for the costs of processing the articles and not for their publication.

Peer evaluation process

Items that meet the requirements may be accepted in the first instance. These will be reviewed by the Editor of the magazine.

The articles after their revision will be sent to the Editorial and Arbitration Committee for their respective evaluation.

The members of the Editorial and Arbitration Committee will read and evaluate, as academic peers, the articles taking into account the originality of the approach, the methodological and scientific rigor, the topicality of the topic, the transcendence of the contributions, in addition to the respect of the academic norms of writing. The Editorial and Arbitration Committee may recommend an external academic pair, in relation to the subject.

The evaluation of the articles will be confidential and will be expressed in a report where either the acceptance, the conditioned acceptance or the rejection of the article will be indicated.

In case the article obtains the conditioned acceptance, the Editor of the journal will send the report to the author in order for it to make the corresponding adjustments. The author is completely free to make corrections or not. The magazine will only publish fully accepted articles. In case of controversy, the journal may submit the article to a new evaluation.

If the article was accepted or rejected, the journal will notify its author of this particular by means of a corresponding communication.
The opinions expressed by the authors do not necessarily reflect the position of the editors of the publication.

Frequency of publication

Reason and Word is a magazine that has a digital publication format. Its periodicity is four-month. Its headquarters are in the School of Communication (EsCom) of the Pontifical Catholic University of Ecuador, Quito-Ecuador.

The magazine is not for profit and rather constitutes a space for the publication of research articles, reflective essays and reviews of academics. There is no remuneration for the contributions.

Scholars interested in collaborating should send their articles through the platform. Otherwise, you can contact the Director: Marco López Paredes (mvlopez@puce.edu.ec).

Open access policy

This journal provides immediate open access to its content, based on the principle that offering the public free access to research helps in a greater global exchange of knowledge.

Objective

The journal Razón y Palabra Communication has as its general objective the scientific dissemination of the research of the academic community in the context of comunicología. For this reason, NO CHARGE for the contributions that are submitted to the consideration of our editorial boards. Rather, it is open to discussion and the advancement of knowledge, within the framework of the defense of the dignity of the human being.

Indications for review

The articles must be written considering the rules indicated by Reason and Word; be sent, after registration of the author *, by means of the Shipping tab, in Word or Open Office format with the extensions .doc, .docx, .rtf.

* Due to security issues, in the first instance, the author can only register as a reader, so he can not attach any file. Once registered as a reader, you must send an email to the Reason and Word Manager, to change the user to author and thus continue with the sending process.

The days and the years

Razón y Palabra is the first web magazine in Spanish, dedicated to communication issues, and since 1996 it has been published uninterruptedly in cyberspace.

The initiative was by Alicia Ramírez. Thus, a group of academics and researchers of the INTERNET PROJECT of the Tecnológico de Monterrey, State of Mexico campus (Octavio Islas, Fernando Gutiérrez, Carlos de la Guardia, Jaime Limón and Alicia Ramírez) decided to venture into cyberspace and publish the first web magazine in Castilian dedicated to communication topics.

Alicia Ramírez made the first website of Reason and Word and was the first director. In the direction of the magazine, he was succeeded by several students and professors from Tecnológico de Monterrey, the Estado de México campus, such as Eduardo Scheffler, Alejandro Carranco. Alejandro Ocampo Almazán and Mauricio Huitrón did a particularly fruitful job.

In 2015, Octavio Islas migrated to Quito, Ecuador and settled the magazine in this city. Since 2019, Reason and Word has its base in the Pontifical Catholic University of Ecuador (PUCE). Marco López Paredes is the director of the magazine and Patricio Cevallos is the director of art, design and technology.

Over the years, Razón y Palabra has become one of the most important collections in the study of possible communication in Ibero-America.

Razón y Palabra is a plural, inclusive, open, tolerant, non-profit digital space that is alien to political or partisan interests of any kind, whose mission is to contribute to the generation of productive knowledge for possible communication.

Philosophy of Reason and Word

These lines respond to the need to explain why we adopt the name Reason and Word for our scientific journal.

In the book Metaphysics of Expression, to affirm that man is "the being of the logos", Eduardo Nicol referred us to Plato, who in his dialogue "The Banquet" reiterates the profound symbolism that contains the beautiful philosophical myth of Empedocles about the origins of the world and of life.

In his story, Empédocles refers to the existence of primitive beings, in whom strangely mixed male and female nature. It could be assumed that these beings would be more complete and self-sufficient than humans. However, their terrible fate was that they were completely sterile. For that reason, they soon disappeared from the face of the Earth.

Later - Empedocles continues - new beings emerged, which were already clearly differentiated as male or female; that is, defined by the same lack of the alien being. In them, the philosopher says, the fire of desire would burn intensely, because the fire itself expressed the fervent longing to join its fellow man again.

In "The Banquet", Plato delves into the broad symbolism of this philosophical myth through the discourse of Aristophanes. Eduardo Nicol precisely goes to that myth to reflect on the transcendence of our communicative actions and conclude that man is the being of logos:

The primitive humanity was also full in its duality: each being had two faces in the same head, four hands and as many legs, four ears and two sexes (...) His strength and vigor were so prodigious that they ambitioned to climb the sky and invade the abode of the gods. They could not consent to it, but neither did they want to get rid of men and annihilate them, depriving themselves of the honors and offerings that they received from them. Needed, then, from the mortals, but fearful of their strength, Zeus and the other gods deliberated and then agreed to cut them in half, doubling their numbers in this way, while they were subtracting each one half of their power. This cut, originating from the current human condition, unfolded the nature of the primitive being, and left each man with the dark conviction that his was only half a being, and with the desire to meet with the other half, that would complement again. The human being has, then, the constitutive desire to form a single being, whole and complete, with the alien being. Therefore, the love of one for another is implanted in the very being of men. Love would be like the expression of a metaphysical insufficiency. But more acutely still, the expression itself would be a consequence of that diminished ontological condition of man. Love would be achieved in fullness, and with it would be achieved the fullness of one's own being, through the meeting fulfilled with the being of the other. But this love can aspire to communion because the other is not an alien being, in the sense of ontologically foreign to his own: with two dissimilar parts can not be recomposed a unit. The other is a being whom we call neighbor, or similar, because his being is not so alien that he can not appropriate it: he has constitutively the disposition to be part of his own being. And this radical disposition is what determines the expression. The word is the nexus of connection and restoration of "primitive unity", as the myth was called, that is, the way to achieve ontological fulfillment (Nicol, 1989, pp. 17-18).

From the above, it could be concluded that man is an ontologically insufficient being; as such, he wishes to reunite with himself, to complete himself, and can only be completed with the other, which is his own and foreign at the same time.

Due to its own ontological insufficiency, man sees himself in the need to try to transcend, leaving the narrow limits reserved for him by his sameness. In order to undertake the search for otherness, man expresses. It is the same dialectic of being that determines the dialectic of expression.

For Plato, man is a symbolic being, man is the being of sense. This means that, for man, the expression is to be in act, is to realize the power of the self. In this way, Nicol, starting with Plato, proposes that communication is only possible from the same being: "the being of man became

and patent in a direct and unequivocal way in human expression "(Nicol, 1984, p.41) .Thus, while the theories of intersubjective communication locate the relationship between one self and the other from the perspective of a relationship mediata, Nicol on the other hand affirms that the expression is not "mediating", but immediately communicating the being.

Man is the being of logos. Logos - Nicol explains to us - is reason and word: "these two meanings of the term are complementary or reciprocal, like the obverse and the reverse of a coin, and should never have been detached from each other". (Nicol, 1984, p.61)

The word is our deep nexus of ontological community. The communication action reveals the being. Communication implies in itself the active and productive participation of being. The word is not only the being in act of the particular entity that expresses it; it is a current form of being in general. Therefore, the being presents itself in the dialogic relationship that involves the communicative action. The dialogic relationship, however, is dialectical. The being of expression is a historical being.

Razón y Palabra is a space open to the encounter of the productive dialogue of being and its history.

References

Nicol, E. (1984). The principles of science. Mexico: FCE.

Nicol, E. (1989). Metaphysics of expression. Mexico: FCE.

Plato: "The banquet or the erotic", in Dialogues. Mexico. Editorial Porrúa, Col. Sepan Cuantos. No. 13