Suenan timbres, by the Colombian poet Luis Vidales, is an urbanely rural work. The fact that flowers, spiders, cats and landscapes are found in these short poems-vignettes –all of which are a reflection of a city in the process of modernization–; confirms how interested was the author in the idea that his poetic project could erode the barrier separating the cultural and natural spheres. Bearing this in mind, the article attempts to show that the intersubjective dialogue between the two spheres (...) is not peaceful, balanced or horizontal. On the contrary, the article, through a philosophical analysis based on the ideas of ecocriticism, seeks to reveal that underlying this dialogue, there is the desire of modern men to dominate, control and subdue nature to the laws and rule of culture. (shrink)

When, in Telos #55, we sought to evaluate the meaning and impact of French socialism in power, the verdict turned out to be peculiarly disappointing. The rhetorical question in the Introduction: “Beyond Reform or Revolution?” had already been effectively answered. As early as 1982 French socialism had revealed itself to be a “Gaullism with a Human Face” which did not have much to do either widi reform or revolution, and could provide nothing more -above and beyond the usual cliches—than a (...) continuation of the same berated but unsurpassed technocratic management of the given. Socialism had turned out to be a bad idea whose time had past. (shrink)

He was almost a year older than my father. Yet when I learned of his death on February 12 in Paris I did not have the sense of an orderly passing of generations. Julio Cortázar had the personal as well as the literary ability of remaining young. It was the combination of a nimble mind, the experimental quality of his narrative, and the uncanny resilience of his lean figure to the routine ravages of time (he looked a good 25 years (...) younger than his age). He stood tall in a generation of splendid Latin American writers. As Carlos Fuentes has remarked, he is the first figure of what is known as the Latin American boom to go. (shrink)

Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut are political philosophers in Lyon and Nantes, respectively. They have jointly directed the Collège de philosophie since 1975 and have recently collaborated in a study titled From Human Rights to the Republican Idea. In La pensée 68, which was published in Paris last October, they seek to settle scores with some of the most influential French thinkers of the past twenty years. Their book purports to deal with the intellectual heritage of the sixties in France. (...) Its central thesis claims that humanism remains the philosophical question of our times and that, from this perspective, the sixties must be revisited with a great many apologies. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.2 (2003) 31-45 [Access article in PDF] Antonio Gramsci on Surrealism and the Avant-garde E. San Juan, Jr. Surrealism provided me with what I had been confusedly searching for. I have accepted it joyfully because in it I have found more of a confirmation than a revelation. It was a weapon that exploded the French language. It shook up absolutely everything....A process of (...) disalienation, that's how I interpreted surrealism. 1In the spring of 1919, André Breton and Phillipe Soupault conducted various experiments in automatic writing. They converted themselves into machines to record the whispers of the unconscious, inspired by Rimbaud's urge for adventure in quest of cosmic knowledge and Lautreamont's conviction of art as a communal enterprise. To destroy bourgeois morality and class inequality, uphold the freedom of the imagination, and release the libidinal energies dammed up in the psyche, surrealism — Guillaume Appolinaire's term 2 — was invented from the nihilistic ruins of Dada to lay the groundwork for building a society founded on liberty and justice. In the same year the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci founded the innovative journal, L'Ordine Nuovo and advocated the factory council (modeled after the Russian Soviets) as the germ of an emergent communist society. Both initiatives were pathbreaking in challenging the orthodoxies of modernist bourgeois culture, politics, and philosophy.When Breton published his 1924 "First Manifesto of Surrealism" privileging dreams, the unconscious, the fantastic, and marvelous, Gramsci was the principal leader of the Communist Party of Italy spearheading the opposition to Mussolini's fascist takeover. Two years later, Gramsci was arrested and imprisoned until his death in 1937. In the Prison Notebooks that occupied him while in jail, Gramsci does not — as far as I am aware — refer to Breton or to surrealism directly. But in his scattered reflections on modern art and culture in general, and in his particular observations on Italian futurism (in particular, on Filippo Marinetti and Luigi Pirandello), we can [End Page 31] extrapolate the general approach Gramsci would take toward surrealism and avantgarde art as oppositional cultural practices. This exercise may clarify what a revolutionary Marxist position should be toward the philosophical or pedagogical category of the aesthetic within the field of cultural practice and artistic production, especially in the post-Cold War epoch of nation-state realignments and the reconfiguration of globalized finance capital in the new millennium.All commentators agree that Gramsci viewed the aesthetic as a category within the terrain of historical materialism and the political economy ofvalue in general. Artistic values are rooted in the social and material practices of a specific society which defines the limits of conventional artistic forms and the subject matter available to the artist. Vision or intuition and diverse raw materials (language, sounds, dance movements, and filmic images) are indissociable. Contrary to Benedetto Croce's emphasis on transcendental intuition, Gramsci valorizes the materialization of this intuition into perceptible, sensory structure, an architectonic whole produced by intellectual discipline and shaped by an integral worldview. In short, for Gramsci, the work of art is the historicization and objectification of vision/intuition.Gramsci's conception of Marxism stresses its intrinsic dialectical method, its emphasis on processes and relations within a social formation comprised of multilayered modes of production, given the necessarily uneven development of capitalism. This mode of historicizing life not only to interpret but to change it is a guide for collective action, not a dogmatic party line. "Man 'is' precisely the process of his actions," Gramsci writes, and "relative to what we have thought and seen, we seek to know what we are and what we can become, whether it is true and within what limits that we do 'make ourselves,' create our own lives and our own destinies." 3 Here, knowledge and action are oriented toward linking the past with the present in order to fashion the future. The chronotope of revolution is essentially a collage, more precisely a montage, of transformations that amalgamates contraries, oppositions, disparities.While Gramsci did not endorse Freudian theory completely except by... (shrink)

E. San Juan Jr. examines Peirce’s discourses on semiotics, ethics, and aesthetics and suggests their analogies with the radical critiques of Marx and other progressive trends.

Universal jurisdiction and the existence of an International Criminal Court (ICC) under the Rome Statute provide a framework through which true reconciliation can be achieved simultaneously with truth and justice. The ICC and universal jurisdiction can be viewed as laying out objective limits on the power of domestic and international actors to seek peace at any cost.This paper argues that those objective limits are not necessarily inimical to a just peace, nor are an undue burden on peacemakers. On the contrary, (...) they can set parameters whereby a just and lasting peace can be differentiated from impunity achieved through blackmail.The first step is to take a hard look at whether international standards of accountability for gross abuses have been met. At the same time, the examination of any specific scheme of domestic accountability cannot be done on a blanket basis. It will require a close look at conditions prevailing in the country, both at the time the scheme was adopted and later; at the policies adopted and how they were meant to advance the process of national reconciliation; at who adopted those measures and how; and at concrete applications of the scheme to individual cases.Even applying this exacting standard, there will be cases in which the best course of action for the ICC and for third country courts will be to defer to the greater wisdom of local actors operating in good faith, and to decline to prosecute. (shrink)

Desde la llegada al poder de Hugo Chávez, en las elecciones de 1998, comenzó la configuración de unas nuevas relaciones de poder en el sistema político venezolano (SPV). Estas relaciones estaban determinadas por la naturaleza de los actores políticos que accedieron al poder, el funcionamiento ..

Cancer is a singular cellular state, the emergence of which destabilises the homeostasis reached through the evolution to multicellularity. We present the idea that the onset of the cellular disobedience to the metazoan functional and structural architecture, known as the cancer phenotype, is triggered by changes in the cell's external environment that occur with ageing: what ensues is a breach of the social contract of multicellular life characteristic of metazoans. By integrating old ideas with new evidence, we propose that with (...) ageing the environmental information that maintains a multicellular organisation is eroded, rewiring internal processes of the cell, and resulting in an internal shift towards an ancestral condition resulting in the pseudo‐multicellular cancer phenotype. Once that phenotype emerges, a new local social contract is built, different from the homeostatic one, leading to tumour formation and the foundation of a novel local ecosystem. (shrink)

This book considers coercion within the healing and ethical framework of therapeutic relationships and partnerships at all levels, and addresses the universal ...

En "Legal Reasons, Sources and Gaps", Raz señala que las lagunas jurídicas existen sólo cuando el derecho habla con voz incierta o cuando habla con muchas voces, pero que no hay lagunas cuando el derecho guarda silencio. En este último caso habría reglas de clausura, analíticamente verdaderas, que impiden la ocurrencia de esas lagunas. Según Raz, si hay una laguna en un sistema jurídico, entonces no es verdadero ni falso que exista una razón concluyente para ejecutar cierta acción. Así, una (...) de las contribuciones más importantes de Raz a la solución del problema de las lagunas jurídicas es subrayar que el discurso jurídico no está completamente controlado por la bivalencia. Sin embargo, a menudo se sostiene que el rechazo de la bivalencia conduce a contradicciones. Si esta afirmación fuese verdadera, entonces la solución de Raz al problema de las lagunas jurídicas se vería seriamente amenazada. En este artículo mostramos, con ayuda de una herramienta analítica sofisticada, i.e., la lógica de la verdad de G.H. von Wright, que el rechazo de la bivalencia sólo nos compromete a aceptar la conclusión trivial de que puede haber proposiciones que no son verdaderas ni falsas. Por esta razón, el trabajo de Raz todavía puede ser considerado un buen punto de partida para analizar las relaciones entre normas, razonamiento práctico y lagunas jurídicas. Sin embargo, también mostramos que para admitir proposiciones que no son verdaderas ni falsas, las tesis de Raz deben ser reformuladas. De otra manera, la tesis de que no existen lagunas cuando el derecho guarda silencio no sería compatible con el rechazo de la bivalencia. /// In his paper "Legal Reasons, Sources and Gaps", Raz says that legal gaps only exist when law speaks with uncertain voice or when it speaks with many voices, but there are no gaps when law is silent. In this later case, rules of closure, which are analytically true, prevent from the occurrence of gaps. According to Raz, if there is a gap in a legal system, then both the claim that there is a conclusive legal reason to perform a certain action, and its negation are neither true nor false. Therefore, one of the Raz's most important contributions to the solution of the problem of legal gaps is to remark that legal discourse is not altogether governed by the principie of bivalence. However, philosophers often claim that the denial of bivalence leads to a logical inconsistency. If this claim were true, then Raz's solution to the problem of gaps would be seriously threatened. In this paper we show--with the aid of a sophisticated analytical tool, i.e., von Wright's truth-logic--that the rejection of bivalence only commits us to accept the trivial conclusion that propositions can lack truth-values. For this reason, Raz's paper can still be regarded as a good starting-point for analyzing the relationships between norms, practical reasoning and legal gaps. However, we also show that in order to admit propositions which are neither true nor false, Raz's theses must be reformulated. Otherwise, the claim that there is no gap when law is silent would not be compatible with the rejection of bivalence. (shrink)

Gracias al invaluable aporte hecho por Foucault, hoy sabemos que la transición del acto de tortura de un espacio público y abierto a un espacio cerrado y secreto trajo consigo una serie de repercusiones filosóficas, políticas y físicas de gran complejidad. No obstante, vale la pena significar que, dentro del contexto de las dictaduras militares del cono sur, el acto de la tortura –si bien fiel a su naturaleza cerrada, inaccesible y secreta– evidenció en ciertos casos una regresión atávica a (...) espacios que si bien no eran públicos sí eran abiertos: los registros de los hombres y mujeres que tras ser sedados, golpeados y brutalmente enceguecidos fueron arrojados al mar, las montañas, los volcanes y el desierto chileno así lo confirman. Debido a esto, los rasgos físicos de la geografía chilena terminan siendo constituidos por los cuerpos anónimos de todas estas personas. Por eso, en su afán por re-construir tanto el cuerpo de la nación chilena como los cuerpos de los torturados, con su INRI (2004) Raúl Zurita apela a una inversión filosófica y física de la geografía chilena. Si bien es cierto que dicha inversión cosmogónica confirma que la redención está negada para estas almas, el despliegue astuto del recurso de la metalepsis, como concatenación metonímica que ya de por sí es, permite que estos cuerpos, antes fustigados, concebidos siempre como ajenos al país, irónicamente terminen por configurar la fisionomía misma de un Chile zuritano en el que los términos “democracia” y “muerte” resultan estar ligados de manera indisoluble. (shrink)

Machine Learning has become a popular tool in a variety of applications in criminal justice, including sentencing and policing. Media has brought attention to the possibility of predictive policing systems causing disparate impacts and exacerbating social injustices. However, there is little academic research on the importance of fairness in machine learning applications in policing. Although prior research has shown that machine learning models can handle some tasks efficiently, they are susceptible to replicating systemic bias of previous human decision-makers. While there (...) is much research on fair machine learning in general, there is a need to investigate fair machine learning techniques as they pertain to the predictive policing. Therefore, we evaluate the existing publications in the field of fairness in machine learning and predictive policing to arrive at a set of standards for fair predictive policing. We also review the evaluations of ML applications in the area of criminal justice and potential techniques to improve these technologies going forward. We urge that the growing literature on fairness in ML be brought into conversation with the legal and social science concerns being raised about predictive policing. Lastly, in any area, including predictive policing, the pros and cons of the technology need to be evaluated holistically to determine whether and how the technology should be used in policing. (shrink)

Market inefficiency is a latent concept, and it is difficult to be measured by means of a single indicator. In this paper, following both the adaptive market hypothesis and the fractal market hypothesis, we develop a new time-varying measure of stock market inefficiency. The proposed measure, called composite efficiency index, is estimated as the synthesis of the most common efficiency measures such as the returns’ autocorrelation, liquidity, volatility, and a new measure based on the Hurst exponent, called the Hurst efficiency (...) index. To empirically validate the indicator, we compare different European stock markets in terms of efficiency over time. (shrink)

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

En noviembre del año 2000, un grupo de paramilitares atacó el corregimiento de Nueva Venecia, una población aislada de la Ciénaga Grande de Santa Marta. Este documento argumenta que, a pesar de los múltiples instrumentos legales relativos a los derechos de las víctimas y a la justicia transicional, el Estado colombiano no ha conseguido reparar y dignificar a la población objeto de análisis. Desde un estudio de campo y una descripción del papel del Estado en el caso investigado, se evidencia (...) cuáles han sido los instrumentos que se han implementado y qué resultados pueden haber obtenido. (shrink)

This article analyzes the evolution of state capacity in Peru during the recent commodity boom. Peru’s economic growth happened in a context in which inclusive democratic institutions were at play for the longest period ever registered in the country and at a time when political elites decided to invest considerable resources in developing state capacity. This case illustrates how boom-led economic growth can lead to the institutional strengthening of a weak state. However, state capacity continues to be low in Peru. (...) The causal mechanism that yields such continuity differs from those entertained in classic path-dependent explanations of state capacity in Latin America. The article identifies a novel mechanism that helped reproduce the Peruvian path intertemporally. This relational mechanism suggests that state capacity remains low because of the relatively enhanced capacities of state challengers to locally fend off and contest an otherwise much stronger state apparatus. The article argues, on that basis, the need to employ a relational analysis that gauges net state strength with respect to the power acquired by relevant non-state actors who might challenge state authority across different local arenas. Classic conceptualizations of state capacity are indeed relational, but conventional applications are predominantly unilateral and, thus, misleading. Unilateral notions of state capacity are those that focus on either state efforts and investments to assert state capacity or, alternatively, on the presence of challenges that curtail the levels of actually observed state capacity. (shrink)

The Walmart Company is one of the favorite punching bags of market critics. They accuse this firm of underpaying employees, dealing unfairly with customers, exploiting suppliers, and bankrupting small competitors. Various political jurisdictions have banned this firm from their environs, either implicitly or explicitly. The present article offers a more nuanced position on the behemoth from Arkansas. Although it has some flaws, there is an overwhelming case to be made in its behalf as an employer, competitor, purchaser, benefactor of customers.

In the present article we propose to approach and think about the event, the difference and the abyss. This is extremely important because it allows us to think about the individuation of the new. For this, we expose the positions of Heidegger and Deleuze. In the conclusions, we try to make dialogues both philosophies so that they are pushing each other trying to avoid justifying one position over the other.

We analyse the relationship between applicability and effectiveness of legal norms from a philosophical perspective. In particular, we distinguish between two concepts of applicability. The external applicability of norms refers to institutional duties; a norm N is externally applicable if and only if a judge is legally obliged to apply N to some case c. Internal applicability refers instead to the sphere of validity of legal norms. A norm N is internally applicable to actions regulated by its sphere of validity. (...) We also explore the consequences of a thesis which maintains that applicability restricts the concept of effectiveness, so that only applicable norms can be considered effective. Our analysis illustrates that a proper reconstruction of the concept of applicability is of great importance not only for understanding the concept of effectiveness but also for providing insight into the nature of law. (shrink)