Este manuscrito pretende plantear dos ideas: la primera problematiza el origen de la universidad en tanto creación humana en sentido pragmático (Kant, 1800), para luego abordarlo en perspectiva histórica desde tres momentos: Medieval, Clásico y Ancestral, retomando autores como Rashdal (1895), Haskings (1923), Ureña (1919), Ribeiro (1971) y Dussel (2004); posteriormente se plantea el origen de la universidad más allá de su historicidad, en el interior del ser humano como cultivo de la virtud y el conocimiento poiesis en Platón (380 (...) a.C/1999). La segunda idea implica comprender que desde su origen la universidad como politeia desde la apropiación de algunos planteamientos aristotélicos (s,f/1883) y arendtianos (1997), ha posibilitado pensarse como un escenario de movilización social o continuidad del orden social establecido, donde se reflexiona críticamente en la necesidad de actualización de la universidad entre poiesis y politeia como potencia para recuperar su sentido primigenio, en tanto actitud que brota del interior del ser humano. (shrink)

The aim of this review is to identify and provide a structured overview of quantitative models in the pharmaceutical supply chain, a subject not exhaustively studied in the previous reviews on healthcare logistics related mostly to quantitative models in healthcare or logistics studies in hospitals. The models are classified into three categories of classification: network design, inventory models, and optimization of a pharmaceutical supply chain. A taxonomy for each category is shown describing the principal features of each echelon included in (...) the review; this taxonomy allows the readers to identify easily a paper based on the actors of the pharmaceutical supply chain. The search process included research articles published in the databases between 1984 and November 2016. In total 46 studies were included. In the review process we found that in the three fields the most common source of uncertainty used is the demand in the 56% of the cases. Within the review process we can conclude that most of the articles in the literature are focused on the optimization of the pharmaceutical supply chain and inventory models but the field on supply chain network design is not deeply studied. (shrink)

MAYER, Rui Carlos. Letras Canibais: um escrito de crítica ao humanismo em educação. Belo Horizonte: Autêntica, 2004.

Este ensayo estudia la actitud asumida por Francisco Suárez frente al pensamiento de Nicolás Maquiavelo y la razón de Estado, en el marco de los estudios históricos sobre el pensamiento español de los siglos xvi y xvii (Maravall, Tierno Galván, Fernández Santamaría), los cuales han establecido una distinción entre autores “tácitos mayores” y “tácitos menores”, tradicionalistas e innovadores, “moralistas” y “arbitristas”. En el estudio se examinan dos tesis: la más radical de Carlo Giacon, quien contrapone el pensamiento del Teólogo de (...) Coimbra al del Secretario florentino, y la más ponderada de Cintia Faraco, que vislumbra cierto nexo entre la prudencia maquiavélica y la suareciana. A juicio del Autor, el problema se resuelve desde su raíz teniendo en cuenta que la ley del Príncipe debe ser siempre justa y recta, es decir, conforme a valores éticos, particularmente, a los expresados en la ley natural. (shrink)

La primera parte del artículo presenta un raro texto titulado "Avertissements aux Confesseurs", que se completa con otros dos fragmentos y las "Ordenances synodales" para los confesores. Se muestra como ejemplo de los efectos prácticos del Concilio de Trento en la diócesis de Ginebra, como había hecho San Carlos Borromeo en Milán. La segunda parte del artículo se refiere a los penitentes, y aunque se basa principalmente en "Introducción a la vida devota" y "Conversaciones espirituales", también tiene en cuenta (...) algunos extractos de sus cartas, traducidas ahora por primera vez al español, así como algunos de sus sermones. La tercera parte trata de tres de los capítulos del "Tratado del amor de Dios", en el que San Francisco de Sales presenta su hermosa doctrina de la contrición, rechazada por la Reforma, pero confirmada por el Concilio de Trento. (shrink)

En 1941, deux ans après la fin de la guerre civile, le gouvernement espagnol a signé un accord avec le St-Siège par lequel le Chef de l’État, le Général Francisco Franco, intervenait directement dans la nomination des évêques et des archevêques diocésains. L’accord a été inclus dans le Concordat de 1953, qui a scellé les relations de coopération entre les deux États. Après le Concile Vatican II, le pape Paul VI a personnellement demandé au Général de renoncer à ce (...) privilège, mais Franco refusa, subordonnant son renoncement à une révision totale du Concordat. Le Roi Juan Carlos Ier a renoncé à ce privilège quelques mois après son couronnement ; ainsi les relations Église-État, compliquées pendant les dernières années du franquisme, se sont normalisées.In 1941, two years after the end of the civil war, the Spanish government signed an accord with the Holy See under which the Head of State, General Francisco Franco, intervened directly in the nomination of diocesan Bishops and Archbishops. The accord was included in the Concordat of 1953, which cemented cooperative relations between the two States. After Vatican Council II, Pope Paul VI personally asked the General to renounce the privilege, but Franco refused, linking his renouncement to a total revision of the Concordat. King Juan Carlos I renounced the privilege a few months after his coronation, thus normalizing Church-State relations, complicated during the last years of Francoism.1941, zwei Jahre nach dem Ende des Bürgerkrieges, unterzeichnete die spanische Regierung ein Abkommen mit dem Heiligen Stuhl, durch das der Staatschef, General Francisco Franco, direkt an der Ernennung der Diözesanbischöfe und -erzbischöfe beteiligt wurde. Die Übereinkunft wurde in das Konkordat von 1953 eingefügt, das die Kooperationsbeziehungen zwischen den beiden Staaten besiegelte. Nach dem Zweiten Vatikanischen Konzil hat Papst Paul VI. den General persönlich gebeten, auf dieses Privileg zu verzichten, doch Franco lehnte ab und ordnete seinen Verzicht einer umfassenden Revision des Konkordats unter. König Juan Carlos I. hat schon wenige Monate nach seiner Krönung auf dieses Privileg verzichtet, so dass sich die in den letzten Jahren des Francoregimes schwierig gewordenen Beziehungen zwischen Kirche und Staat normalisierten. (shrink)

Este artigo discute algumas variantes de relevo na língua alemã na crítica à modernidade. Em rigor, discute-as na sua pertinência actual, tal como se deixa ver em dois trabalhos recentes de autores portugueses, Rafael Gomes Filipe e Alexandre Franco de Sá. O nó-górdio da questão encontra-se na caracterização da modernidade através da elaboração de uma filosofia da His­tória, problema que sobressai na análise de Nietzsche e Weber por Gomes Filipe e no ensaio schmittiano de Franco de Sá.

La ingente obra mediática de Félix Rodríguez de la Fuente en relación con las ciencias naturales nos permite explorar detenidamente los procesos de generación, circulación y gestión de conocimiento científico-tecnológico en un contexto particularmente convulso de la historia reciente de España, el final de la dictadura de Franco. Con un enfoque centrado en las relaciones entre los seres humanos y su entorno, el trabajo multidimensional de Rodríguez de la Fuente, como cetrero, naturalista, activista y comunicador, aportó un excepcional componente (...) científico-técnico a los procesos de transformación social, política y cultural de España en esos años. El objetivo de este trabajo es mostrar cómo este componente científico-técnico estaba frecuentemente ligado, y entre otros aspectos, a la definición y contextualización de España y su patrimonio natural tanto dentro de sus fronteras como en el escenario internacional. (shrink)

En este artículo nos proponemos exponer, a partir de los límites conceptuales encontrados a los planteamientos arqueo-genealógicos de Michel Foucault, la posibilidad de plantear, en dos momentos –arqueo-genealógico y gubernamental–, una “ética de la insubordinación reflexiva”. Es decir, una “ética de la libertad inmanente” al débil que al decir su palabra, denuncia y al denunciar cuestiona al tirano y su mundo al habar y actuar con –y por– los otros. Esta ética de la intersubjetividad planteada como una ética de la (...) insumisión concertada, crítica y deliberada, pensamos, puede derivar de ciertas “condiciones enunciativas” encontradas en las dos últimas investigaciones concernientes al “decir veraz” o el “hablar franco” expuestos en El gobierno de sí y de los otros y El coraje de la verdad. (shrink)

Enrico Berti has had a profound influence on the birth and development of Italian studies in ancient philosophy. His sizable work has shaped a great part of Italian studies on Aristotle and other ancient philosophers. To celebrate him and express their gratitude for his work, some of his disciples, under the impulse of the late Franco Volpi, have brought together a volume in his honour, requesting the participation of some foreign scholars particularly close to him. The volume comprises essays (...) by Pierre Aubenque, Jonathan Barnes, Terence H. Irwin, Tomás Calvo-Martínez, Jaap Mansfeld, Pierre Pellegrin, Gerhard Seel and Alejandro G. Vigo. The main themes are Aristotle's metaphysics and practical philosophy. A Selected Bibliography by E. Berti himself completes the volume."--Publisher's website. (shrink)

Since at least 1945, the Franco regime conditioned its existence on the ability to adapt to the demands of the postwar Western world, in various political and social aspects. The most visible changes in the Franco regime were both the progressive disappearance of purely fascist elements and the assumption of a Catholic and anti–communist role that made the face of the Regime more affable, which corresponded to a rapprochement with the recent American ally. However, these transformations must be (...) seen in a broader context, encompassing a historiographic perspective that gives them full meaning. The thesis defended here is that the economic–political line that Francoism followed, especially from the 50s was legitimized by a concrete discourse –hegemonic in the Western part of Europe– which is based on an hegemonic vision: the history of cold war economic liberalism, as well as the idea of ​​modernization that derives from it. (shrink)

El presente artículo analiza cómo se desarrolla el proceso de enseñanza-aprendizaje de la historia del franquismo en las aulas de secundaria y propone un modelo metodológico alternativo, centrado en una didáctica del sentir la historia situada. A través de una metodología investigativa, de carácter constructivista, y centrada en el aprendizaje significativo, se propone abordar la comprensión y el estudio de la dictadura franquista investigando y poniendo en reflexión hechos sociales y simbólicos de carácter local. La finalidad es acercar el objeto (...) de estudio al alumno, hacer que lo sienta como algo propio y que sirva para la comprensión de su mundo. Asimismo, se debate la necesidad de abordar un cambio didáctico en la enseñanza de las Ciencias Sociales, abandonando el modelo tradicional (hegemónico) para avanzar hacia un modelo alternativo que descubra la utilidad de las Ciencias Sociales a través de su método de conocimiento: la investigación (escolar). (shrink)

Carl Schmitt is the most important anti-liberal political theorist of the European interwar period (1918-1939). His theories on the state of exception, dictatorship, and his criticism of parliamentary democracy are very well known. However, what remains unknown to this day is how his ideas had a remarkable influence on the ideologues of the Francoist state between 1939 and 1942. During these years, a debate developed among Francoist jurists about whether Francisco Franco was a “sovereign dictator,” that is, a dictator (...) legitimized by popular consent, or rather a new kind of “monarch” that emerged in the context of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). This paper aims to explain how two ideological factions formed in Francoist Spain. The “Decisionist Francoism” of Juan Beneyto Pérez, Francisco Elías de Tejada, and Luis Legaz Lacambra held that Franco emerged as a reaction to the process of “legalization” triggered by liberalism in Spain. The “Weberian Francoism” of Francisco Javier Conde held that Franco was a charismatic and traditional leader whose position emerged in response to the Civil War. I explain how three concepts of Schmitt's anti-iberalism inspired Francoist theorists: political theology, dictatorship, and the rejection of parliamentary democracy. (shrink)

Since the early Gestaltists there has been a strong interest in the question of how problem solvers get stuck in a mental impasse. A key idea is that the repeated activation of a successful strategy from the past results in a mental set (‘Einstellung’) which determines and constrains the option space to solve a problem. We propose that this phenomenon, which mostly was tested by fairly restricted experiments in the lab, could also be applied to more complex problem constellations and (...) naturalistic decision making. We aim at scrutinizing and reconstructing how a mental set determines the misinterpretation of facts in the field of political decision making and leads in consequence to wrong expectations and an ill-defined problem representation. We will exemplify this psychological mechanism considering a historical example, namely the unexpected stabilization of the Franco regime at the end of World War II and its survival thereafter. A specific focus will be drawn to the significant observation that erroneous expectations were taken as the basis for decisions. This is congruent with the notion that in case of discrepancy between preconceived notions and new information, the former prevails over the new findings. Based on these findings, we suggest a theoretical model for expectation violation in political decision making and develop novel approaches for cognitive empirical research on the mechanisms of expectation violation and its maintenance in political decision making processes. (shrink)

The study of cultural evolution has taken on an increasingly interdisciplinary and diverse approach in explicating phenomena of cultural transmission and adoptions. Inspired by this computational movement, this study uses Bayesian networks analysis, combining both the frequentist and the Hamiltonian Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) approach, to investigate the highly representative elements in the cultural evolution of a Vietnamese city’s architecture in the early 20th century. With a focus on the façade design of 68 old houses in Hanoi’s Old Quarter (...) (based on 78 data lines extracted from 248 photos), the study argues that it is plausible to look at the aesthetics, architecture, and designs of the house façade to find traces of cultural evolution in Vietnam, which went through more than six decades of French colonization and centuries of sociocultural influence from China. The in-depth technical analysis, though refuting the presumed model on the probabilistic dependency among the variables, yields several results, the most notable of which is the strong influence of Buddhism over the decorations of the house façade. Particularly, in the top 5 networks with the best Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC) scores and p<0.05, the variable for decorations (DC) always has a direct probabilistic dependency on the variable B for Buddhism. The paper then checks the robustness of these models using Hamiltonian MCMC method and find the posterior distributions of the models’ coefficients all satisfy the technical requirement. Finally, this study suggests integrating Bayesian statistics in the social sciences in general and for the study of cultural evolution and architectural transformation in particular. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss the similarity between Wittgenstein’s use of thought experiments and Relativity Theory. I begin with introducing Wittgenstein’s idea of “thought experiments” and a tentative classification of different kinds of thought experiments in Wittgenstein’s work. Then, after presenting a short recap of some remarks on the analogy between Wittgenstein’s point of view and Einstein’s, I suggest three analogies between the status of Wittgenstein’s mental experiments and Relativity theory: the topics of time dilation, the search for invariants, and (...) the role of measuring tools in Special Relativity. This last point will help to better define Wittgenstein’s idea of description as the core of his philosophical enterprise. (shrink)

1. La filosofia antica-India, Cina, Grecia -- 2. La filosofia tardo-antica e medioevale: ebraismo, cristianesimo, islamismo -- 3.1. La filosofia moderna: umanesimo, Riforma, rivoluzione scientifica (1350-1715) -- 3.2. La filosofia moderna: illuminismo, criticismo, idealismo (1715-1815) -- 4.1. La filosofia contemporanea: scientismi, sroticismi, irrazionalismi -- 4.2. La filosofia contemporanea: filosofie analitiche e continentali.

Chaque fois que nous "donnons forme" à quelque chose, cette représentation nous figure, par signes, l'objet évoqué, mais nous confirme également qu'il ne s'agit que d'un simulacre. D'où le besoin, à chaque époque, de créer du vivant pour pallier cette déception : tel est le sens du mythe de Pygmalion. Ce livre s'organise donc autour de deux pôles : d'un côté la nécessité de figurer, et de figurer l'acte même de la perception (voir le chapitre "Un oeil immense artificiel") ; (...) de l'autre, l'impératif de dépasser le signe. Il s'agit d'un défi radical, qui concerne l'avenir même des arts. C'est la raison de ce titre, A vif, qui témoigne d'un "coup d'oeil" : un regard et une incision pratiquée à vif dans l'objet, un désir de définitif qui ne caresse plus la forme, mais qui pénètre, met à nu, éviscère dans les paroles et dans les actes. Dedans et derrière l'oeil, comme dans l'un des plus impassibles traités d'anatomie du Cinquecento. Aujourd'hui, est-il encore vif notre oeil qui cherche le vivant? N'est-il pas lui-même défiguré par l'informe qui s'est logé en nous? Où est la pupilla viva qui illumine le Paradis et qui, de Dante à Baudelaire, a animé, de longs siècles durant, tant de quête mentale? Il faut remonter à ces origines, parcourir les espaces séculaires et sidéraux dans lesquels le cosmos était ordre, beauté, compréhension ; où, justement, il était nécessaire de "captiver les yeux pour avoir l'âme". Cet essai se voudrait une parabole déployée au fil de l'ardente soif humaine d'"exorbiter", de brûler la distance du point de vue, pour accéder, maintenant et à jamais, au vivant. (shrink)

This article compares the political philosophies of Michael Oakeshott and Isaiah Berlin, probably the two most important political philosophers in postwar Britain, who, strangely, had very little to do with one another during their illustrious careers. The article focuses on their respective critiques of rationalism and theories of liberal pluralism, arguing that Oakeshott provides the more consistent and philosophically satisfying account in both instances.

Volume XVIII Special Issue: Gian-Carlo Rota and The End of Objectivity, 2019 Aim and Scope: The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy provides an annual international forum for phenomenological research in the spirit of Husserl's groundbreaking work and the extension of this work by such figures as Scheler, Heidegger, Sartre, Levinas, Merleau-Ponty and Gadamer. Contributors: Gabriele Baratelli, Stefania Centrone, Giovanna C. Cifoletti, Jean-Marie Coquard, Steven Crowell, Deborah De Rosa, Daniele De Santis, Nicolas de Warren, Agnese Di Riccio, Aurélien Djian, (...) Yuval Dolev, Mirja Hartimo, Burt C. Hopkins, Talia Leven, Ah Hyun Moon, Luis Niel, Fabrizio Palombi, Mario Ariel González Porta, Gian-Carlo Rota, Michael Roubach, Franco Trabattoni and Michele Vagnetti. Submissions: Manuscripts, prepared for blind review, should be submitted to the Editors electronically via e-mail attachments. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper analyses the discourses produced on their websites by the two organisations that conducted the official ‘leave’ and ‘remain’ campaigns in the Brexit referendum. The analysis, whi...

In this detailed study of the republican tradition in the development of the Enlightenment, the central problem of utopia and reform is crystallized in a discussion of the right to punish. Describing the political situation in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the author shows how the old republics in Italy, Poland and Holland stagnated and were unable to survive in the age of absolutism. The Philosophes discussed the ideal of republicanism against this background. They were particularly influenced by (...) the political and religious radicalism of John Toland, which had survived the English Restoration and was then reaching Europe. Professor Venturi traces the debate on the penal laws and the attempt to relate utopian ideas of society to the practical problem of dealing with man in society, which culminated in the assertion by many Philosophes that an unjust social system necessitated harsh penal laws, thereby rejecting the possibility of reform. (shrink)

Many of the computing systems programmed using Machine Learning are opaque: it is difficult to know why they do what they do or how they work. Explainable Artificial Intelligence aims to develop analytic techniques that render opaque computing systems transparent, but lacks a normative framework with which to evaluate these techniques’ explanatory successes. The aim of the present discussion is to develop such a framework, paying particular attention to different stakeholders’ distinct explanatory requirements. Building on an analysis of “opacity” from (...) philosophy of science, this framework is modeled after accounts of explanation in cognitive science. The framework distinguishes between the explanation-seeking questions that are likely to be asked by different stakeholders, and specifies the general ways in which these questions should be answered so as to allow these stakeholders to perform their roles in the Machine Learning ecosystem. By applying the normative framework to recently developed techniques such as input heatmapping, feature-detector visualization, and diagnostic classification, it is possible to determine whether and to what extent techniques from Explainable Artificial Intelligence can be used to render opaque computing systems transparent and, thus, whether they can be used to solve the Black Box Problem. (shrink)

Volume 16, Issue 4, September 2019, Page 381-388.

This paper provides a historical reevaluation of the originality and implications of Avempace's critique of Aristotle's causal explanation of the motion of projectiles. It also offers a serious revision of the place which has usually been assigned to Avempace in the history of science. The views regarding projectiles defended in Avempace's Arabic commentary are in sharp opposition to the anti-Aristotelian Avempace that was known in the Medieval West through Averroes. Avempace's commentary reveals only a moderate critic of Aristotle, a critic (...) who did not, in any case, break with the master, and who, therefore, did not even go as far as Philoponus in creating a new and more profound theory of projectile motion. (shrink)

The received view of dynamical explanation is that dynamical cognitive science seeks to provide covering law explanations of cognitive phenomena. By analyzing three prominent examples of dynamicist research, I show that the received view is misleading: some dynamical explanations are mechanistic explanations, and in this way resemble computational and connectionist explanations. Interestingly, these dynamical explanations invoke the mathematical framework of dynamical systems theory to describe mechanisms far more complex and distributed than the ones typically considered by philosophers. Therefore, contemporary dynamicist (...) research reveals the need for a more sophisticated account of mechanistic explanation. (shrink)

Models developed using machine learning are increasingly prevalent in scientific research. At the same time, these models are notoriously opaque. Explainable AI aims to mitigate the impact of opacity by rendering opaque models transparent. More than being just the solution to a problem, however, Explainable AI can also play an invaluable role in scientific exploration. This paper describes how post-hoc analytic techniques from Explainable AI can be used to refine target phenomena in medical science, to identify starting points for future (...) investigations of causal relationships, and to generate possible explanations of target phenomena in cognitive science. In this way, this paper describes how Explainable AI—over and above machine learning itself—contributes to the efficiency and scope of data-driven scientific research. (shrink)

This paper presents the Futurium platform used by Digital Futures, a foresight project launched by the European Commission's Directorate General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology (DG CONNECT). Futurium was initially developed with the primary purpose of hosting and curating visions and policy ideas generated by Digital Futures (Digital Futures was launched in July 2011 by DG CONNECT's Director General Robert Madelin following a prior DG CONNECT exercise called Digital Science.). However, it has turned into a platform on which to (...) experiment with new policymaking models based on scientific evidence and stakeholder participation, referred to in this paper as ‘Policy Making 3.0’. The platform hosts an online foresight toolkit to facilitate the joint creation of ideas to help design future policies. It leverages the potential of social networks, open data, semantic and knowledge mining technologies as well as participatory brainstorming techniques to engage stakeholders and harness their views and creativity to better inform policies that matter to them. The Futurium distinguishes between different variables, reflecting the emotional vs. rational mindsets of the participants, and offers the possibility to frame the engagement and co-creation process into multiple phases of a workflow. Futurium was developed to support Digital Futures, but its open architecture makes it easily adaptable to any policymaking/decision-making context where thinking ahead, participation, scientific evidence and agility are needed. Futurium is an early prototype implementation of the Policy Making 3.0 model, which is a long-term vision requiring further investigation and experimentation. The Futurium production website can be seen here: ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/futurium. (shrink)

To date, no definition of life has been unequivocally accepted by the scientific community. In frustration, some authors advocate alternatives to standard definitions. These include using a list of characteristic features, focusing on life’s effects, or categorizing biospheres rather than life itself; treating life as a fuzzy category, a process or a cluster of contingent properties; or advocating a ‘wait-and-see’ approach until other examples of life are created or discovered. But these skeptical, operational, and pluralistic approaches have intensified the debate, (...) rather than settled it. Given the failure of even these approaches, we advocate a new strategy. In this paper, we reverse the usual line of reasoning and argue that the “life problem” arises from thinking incorrectly about the nature of life. Scientists most often conceptualize life as a class or kind, with earthly life as a single instance of it. Instead, we advocate thinking about Earth’s Life as an individual, in the way that species are now thought to be. In this view, Life is a monophyletic clade that originated with a last universal common ancestor, and includes all its descendants. We can continue to use the category ‘life’ pragmatically to refer to similarities between various phenomena and Life. But the relevant similarities are a matter of interest and preference, not a matter of fact. The search for other life in the Universe, then, is merely a search for entities that resemble parts of Life in whatever sense astrobiologists find most appealing. This does not mean that the search for evolved complexity elsewhere in the universe or its creation in the lab are futile endeavors, but that debates over whether they count as ‘life’ are. Ironically, finally abandoning the concept ‘life’ may make our searches for evolved complexity more fruitful. We explain why. (shrink)

"Epistola a Memeceo, Maximas capitales, Sentencias vaticanas, fragmentos y testimonios; texto griego y traduccion": p. [87]-161.

This paper discusses the varieties of capitalism in transitional societies in Latin America and Central / Eastern Europe. The intended purpose of these transitions from semi-closed import-substituting economies in the first case and state socialist ones in the second was to institutionalize open-market economies. Twenty or thirty years later, there is a variety of types of capitalism in these countries, which I classify into three: open-market, neo-mercantilist, and anemic. The question for sociology is whether these quite different variants represent temporary (...) stages or distortions in the same process of transition or whether, on the contrary, they may institutionalize as discrete forms of peripheral capitalism. Neither standard “legacy” argu­ments nor institutionalist theories offer satisfactory answers to this question. The multiple modernities approach, on the other hand, is more appropriate as a theoretical perspective, but it has not produced yet specific propositions applicable to this question. My paper makes two claims. First, the successful transfer of institutions depends on the congruence between these institutions and the broader institutional framework of the recipient economies, a point not developed by institutionalist theories. I offer a hypothesis in this regard: Two critical nodes of congruence are the regulatory and extractive capacity of the state and the strength of civil society. Second, market capitalism (as liberal democracy as well) is a complex institution, and some of its components “travel” more easily across societies and institutional frameworks, and therefore are easier to institutionalize. This is the source of the hybrid variants. (shrink)

This article compares the political philosophies of Michael Oakeshott and Isaiah Berlin, probably the two most important political philosophers in postwar Britain, who, strangely, had very little to do with one another during their illustrious careers. The article focuses on their respective critiques of rationalism and theories of liberal pluralism, arguing that Oakeshott provides the more consistent and philosophically satisfying account in both instances.

An examination of new forms of alienation in our never-off, plugged-in culture—and a clarion call for a “conspiracy of estranged people.” We can reach every point in the world but, more importantly, we can be reached from any point in the world. Privacy and its possibilities are abolished. Attention is under siege everywhere. Not silence but uninterrupted noise, not the red desert, but a cognitive space overcharged with nervous incentives to act: this is the alienation of our times... —from The (...) Soul at Work Capital has managed to overcome the dualism of body and soul by establishing a workforce in which everything we mean by the Soul—language, creativity, affects—is mobilized for its own benefit. Industrial production put to work bodies, muscles, and arms. Now, in the sphere of digital technology and cyberculture, exploitation involves the mind, language, and emotions in order to generate value—while our bodies disappear in front of our computer screens. In this, his newest book, Franco “Bifo” Berardi—key member of the Italian Autonomist movement and a close associate of Félix Guattari—addresses these new forms of estrangement. In the philosophical landscape of the 1960s and 1970s, the Hegelian concept of alienation was used to define the harnessing of subjectivity. The estrangement of workers from their labor, the feeling of alienation they experienced, and their refusal to submit to it became the bases for a human community that remained autonomous from capital. But today a new condition of alienation has taken root in which workers commonly and voluntarily work overtime, the population is tethered to cell phones and Blackberries, debt has become a postmodern form of slavery, and antidepressants are commonly used to meet the unending pressure of production. As a result, the conditions for community have run aground and new philosophical categories are needed. The Soul at Work is a clarion call for a new collective effort to reclaim happiness. The Soul at Work is Bifo's long overdue introduction to English-speaking readers. This Semiotext edition is also the book's first appearance in any language. (shrink)