ARTICLES PHILOSOPHY, ETHICS, EDUCATION AND CULTURE FOR A PARTICIPATIVE SOCIETY ABSTRACT Politeja No. 3(60), 2019, pp. 9-21 https://doi.org/10.12797/Politeja.16.2019.60.01 José Luis BELLóN AGUILERA Masaryk University 116683@mail.muni.cz A PNYX OF RESEARCH FIELDS MULTIDISCIPLINARITY ABOUT SORTITION AND DEMOCRACY 1 This article conveys the objectives and results of an international and multidis- ciplinary − or interdisciplinary − research project still in operation, until the end of 2018. Based in the University of Cádiz (Spain), this project deals with an- cient, modern and contemporary discussions, representations and narratives of Democracy, focusing on the contrast and comparison between a democratic sys- tem based on sortition, namely − broadly speaking − selection by lot to public offices and representative democracy. The article discusses the relevance of the investigation, the applicability of the results and the real effects of the action- research part. It also argues that − paradoxically − scientific autonomy is indis- pensable if that kind of research seeks to achieve tangible impact in society and its political fields. In short, this article asks about the inevitable fragility of the interaction between ethics, political commitment, and investigative objective- ness in humanities and social sciences. Key words: multidisciplinarity, research, sortition, democracy 1 This article is a revised version of the paper “Philosophy, History, Sociology, Archaeology, Philology. About Democracy”, presented at the Uniwersytet Pedagogiczny in Kraków, in the conference Philo- logies and the Construction of an Open Society. Possibilities, Goals, Challenges (20-21 October 2017). I would like to thank Jorge Costa and F. Manuel Carballo for reading it and for the suggestions that they made in reference to the draft. Another – much shorter – text was read on the 26 May 2018 at the 2018 Hic Rosa Studio in Politics & Aesthetics: Re/In/Citing Politics After Capital and Colony, 25- 26 May 2018, in Brno, Czech Republic. This text has been written as part of the R+D research pro- ject ‘Reception of Greco-Roman Philosophy by French and Spanish Philosophy and Human Sciences from the 1980s to the Present’ no. FFI2014-53792-R (2015-2018).