Resumen: El presente trabajo intenta analizar los elementos críticos a la base de aquella suerte de prescripción que Edward Said formulara a los intelectuales bajo la célebre consigna de “decir las verdades al poder”, esto es, de interpelar públicamente al poder -político, económico, religioso, militar- frente a toda evidencia de injusticia, inconsistencia o turbia manipulación en su operar. En tanto tal, y a partir de nuestra lectura de Said, delimitamos cinco dilemas que el intelectual ha de resolver, en tanto requisitos (...) para decir las verdades al poder: orientación intramundana versus extramundana, rol profético versus sacerdotal, libertad universalista versus organicidad, racionalidad sustantiva versus instrumental y arrojo versus temor. Se comentan las implicaciones de estos dilemas a la luz de los desafíos y oportunidades que las sociedades contemporáneas -en particular, las latinoamericanas- presentan para el rol del intelectual.: This work analyzes the critical foundations of that quasi-rule posed by Edward Said to intellectuals through the famous motto “speaking truth to power”, that is, of publicly interpellating to power -political, economic, religious, military- whenever its exercise may involve injustice, inconsistency or underhanded manipulation. So, according to our interpretation of Said’s work, we identify five dilemmas the intellectual should resolve in order to be able to speak truth to power: a worldliness orientation versus an otherworldliness one, a prophetic role versus a priestly one, universalist freedom versus organic compromise, a substantive rationality versus an instrumental one, and courage versus fear. Involvements of these dilemmas are discussed according to the challenges and opportunities posed by current societies -in particular, the Latin American ones- to the intellectual’s role. (shrink)

Some commentators have condemned Kant’s moral project from a feminist perspective based on Kant’s apparently dim view of women as being innately morally deficient. Here I will argue that although his remarks concerning women are unsettling at first glance, a more detailed and closer examination shows that Kant’s view of women is actually far more complex and less unsettling than that attributed to him by various feminist critics. My argument, then, undercuts the justification for the severe feminist critique of Kant’s (...) moral project. (shrink)

La Educación para la Justicia Global es una propuesta educativa crítica y transformadora impulsada por la Federación de entidades de Justicia global catalana, aunque es un enfoque extendido su marco conceptual está poco desarrollado. El objetivo del artículo es definir criterios temáticos/metodológicos que permitan identificar y caracterizar las prácticas educativas de justicia global. La metodología corresponde a un proceso de sistematización y organización de las experiencias de las entidades utilizando entrevistas cualitativas, focus-group y análisis documental. Los resultados muestran seis ejes (...) temáticos y cinco criterios teóricos/metodológicos que pueden ilustrar y orientar a quienes deseen conocer o adoptar el enfoque. (shrink)

À partir de conversations sous forme de tchats qui émanent d’une association qui lutte contre le suicide, nous nous intéresserons plus particulièrement aux conversations dont les appelants reviennent sur la plateforme (que nous nommerons poly appelants). Reprennent-ils leurs dires là où la conversation antérieure s’est arrêtée? Quels sont les éléments nouveaux dans le récit des participants? Comment le récit des appelants progresse-t-il au fil des (re)connections? quel(s) versant(s) de l’histoire personnelle est-il, sont-ils mobilisé(s)?

En este trabajo se analiza críticamente la literatura sobre el capital social, con énfasis en la situación actual del tema. En la primera parte se presenta el concepto, se da cuenta de algunos antecedentes relacionados con el contexto teórico en que surgió y se indican los momentos más importantes de la discusión posterior. Aquí también se enuncia la tesis del trabajo, que sostiene que parte de la confusión e indeterminación conceptual existente deriva de la manera como fue inicialmente establecido el (...) enfoque. A continuación se analizan críticamente las estrategias para delimitar el campo teórico y de aplicación del capital social, se presentan los componentes básicos en el plano de los indicadores y se resumen las elaboraciones más importantes que han caracterizado su desarrollo. En la parte final, se entrega un resumen y se hacen algunas consideraciones generales sobre el tema. (shrink)

El trabajo busca situar el análisis de los movimientos indígenas latinoamericanos dentro del desarrollo global del capitalismo y el sistema-mundo moderno, tratando de seguir una lectura decolonial de dichos procesos. Se postula que el neoliberalismo representa la encarnación actual de dicho sistema, pero que además simboliza un proyecto cultural que otorga criterios para el diseño de políticas de gobernabilidad en materia indígena. Se revisa la trayectoria actual de los movimientos indígenas en relación con las diferentes estrategias de gobernabilidad Estatal implementadas (...) en tres regiones latinoamericanas: Mesoamérica, los países Andinos y el Cono Sur. Finalmente se analiza el potencial transformador y contrahegemónico de los movimientos indígenas contemporáneos, en cuanto intentan renovar valores y significados culturales, cuestionar el sistema de relaciones de poder y promover una comprensión alternativa del desarrollo. (shrink)

'Memoria' is the collection of lectures by different authors, with the occassion of the 50th Aniversary of the "Centro de Estudios Filosóficos Adolfo García Díaz" of the Faculty of Humanities and Education of the University of Zulia. -/- As Director of that Research Center, I was also the editor of 'Memoria'. -/- PLEASE NOTE: I AM NOT THE AUTHOR OF "MEMORIA" BUT ITS EDITOR.

Background Prison creates philosophical needs due to the exceptionality of the situation. This study explores how philosophy can meet these needs by focusing on three aspects: critical thinking, personal relationships and the government of passions. It builds on similar interventions in several countries and is proposed as a research that bypasses some limitations of previous projects in prisons.Method Following the participation of 81 inmates in 22 philosophical sessions over six months, the results of both interventions were analyzed using mixed methods, (...) as well as a pretest posttest design with a control group. Specifically, Webster’s Self Assessed Wisdom Scale, a questionnaire and an interview with four participants were used. These methods were triangulated in order to obtain data from the various methodologies and to improve the validity and reliability of the results.Results It was demonstrated that the experimental group showed significant progress in relation to the categories “openness”, “humor” and “emotion regulation”. Participants also showed a progression in categories related to the project’s goals. These results allow for a description of the categories that explain in what sense philosophy can act in the context of imprisonment.Conclusions This study demonstrates, on the one hand, how philosophy workshops involve outcomes linked to cognitive, affective and relational aspects. Furthermore, it provides evidence to confirm previous studies and interventions that are more modest in their results and use less rigorous scientific methodologies. (shrink)

Classical logic has proved inadequate in various areas of computer science, artificial intelligence, mathematics, philosopy and linguistics. This is an introduction to extensions of first-order logic, based on the principle that many-sorted logic (MSL) provides a unifying framework in which to place, for example, second-order logic, type theory, modal and dynamic logics and MSL itself. The aim is two fold: only one theorem-prover is needed; proofs of the metaproperties of the different existing calculi can be avoided by borrowing them from (...) MSL. To make the book accessible to readers from different disciplines, whilst maintaining precision, the author has supplied detailed step-by-step proofs, avoiding difficult arguments, and continually motivating the material with examples. Consequently this can be used as a reference, for self-teaching or for first-year graduate courses. (shrink)

InWisdom, Information and Wonder, Mary Midgley tackles the question at the root of our civilization: What is knowledge for?

A questão dos letramentos e da inovação demonstram-se fundamentais em períodos históricos como o atual, onde as práticas de ensino-aprendizagem tornam-se cada vez mais complexas, que requerem novas abordagens teóricas para compreendermos possibilidades alternativas de ensino. Tendo estas questões em mente, este artigo visa indicar relações possíveis entre o antifundacionismo, o pensamento de Paul Feyerabend e os letramentos científicos. Em um primeiro momento indicaremos questões relativas ao antifundacionismo, e em seguida verificaremos como tal questão se efetiva no pensamento de Feyerabend. (...) Finalizaremos avaliando como esta abordagem pode fundamentar novas práticas educacionais. (shrink)

In the Philippines, all transplant centers are mandated by the Department of Health (DOH) to have a Hospital Transplant Ethics Committee (HTEC) to ensure that donations are altruistic, voluntary and free of coercion/commercial transactions. This study was undertaken primarily to describe the organizational and functional profile of existing HTECs and identify areas for improvement. This is a descriptive cross‐sectional study. There was variation in their logistical arrangements (support from hospital, filing systems, office spaces), operations (length and frequency of meetings, number (...) of referrals) and membership (composition, qualifications, occupation, training). The approval rate for donor‐recipient pairs is high with the majority of cases made by living non‐related donors. Appropriate reasons were cited for rejection. The perception of HTECs is that they are competent and confident in their decision‐making. However, there is a need to standardize HTEC composition, provide operating procedures and additional training which can be done by the DOH. (shrink)

En quoi consiste, ou devrait consister, l'éthique professionnelle en enseignement? Comment se manifeste-t- elle dans les gestes pédagogiques? Selon quels critères peut-on la juger? Comment développer l'éthique professionnelle dans le cadre des formations initiale et continue en enseignement? En tenant compte du contexte social et culturel du Québec, des principes éthiques déjà énoncés par le ministère de l'Education ainsi que des lois, codes et conventions ayant des incidences sur la pratique enseignante, les auteures présentent des éléments à considérer pour la (...) réflexion éthique sur l'agir professionnel. Elles proposent des clarifications conceptuelles et un certain nombre de repères et de balises afin de guider les enseignants et de stimuler la discussion sur l'éthique professionnelle, non seulement dans la classe, mais aussi dans l'école et dans la société. (shrink)

We know we have thoughts, but are we aware that we have styles of thought? This book, written by one of the most gifted and celebrated social thinkers of our time, is a contribution to understanding the rules of the different styles of thinking. Author Mary Douglas takes us through a range of thought styles from the vulgar to the refined. Throughout this fascinating journey, Thought Styles shows us how the different styles work and how outsiders can learn the (...) styles of insiders. The discussion ranges from the style of folklore to the styles of therapy, shopping, religion, and animal rights. The result is a book full of insight. Readers will find themselves thinking in new ways about the mechanics of communication in everyday life. Professionals and researchers in sociology, communication, and anthropology will especially appreciate this auspicious new book. (shrink)

How is hope to be found amid the ethical and political dilemmas of modern life? Writer and philosopher Mary Zournazi brought her questions to some of the most thoughtful intellectuals at work today. She discusses "joyful revolt" with Julia Kristeva, the idea of "the rest of the world" with Gayatri Spivak, the "art of living" with Michel Serres, the "carnival of the senses" with Michael Taussig, the relation of hope to passion and to politics with Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto (...) Laclau. A dozen stimulating minds weigh in with their visions of a better social and political order. The result is a collaboration - of writing, of thinking, and of politics - that demonstrates more clearly than any single-authored project could how ideas encountering one another can produce the vision needed for social change. (shrink)

"Charming, interesting, thought-provoking and a great read." Rosalind Hursthouse The daughter of a pacifist rector who answered "No!" when his congregation asked him "Is everything in the bible true?", perhaps Mary Midgley was destined to become a philosopher. Yet few would have thought this inquisitive, untidy, nature-loving child would become "one of the sharpest critical pens in the west." This is her remarkable story. Probably the only philosopher to have been in Vienna on the eve of its invasion by (...) Nazi Germany in 1938 and dance in Trafalgar Square on VE day seven year later, she studied philosophy at Oxford in the same year as Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Anscombe and Philippa Foot, all of whom became close friends. Midgley tells us in vivid and humorous fashion how they cut a swathe through the arid landscape of 1950s British philosophy, writing and arguing - often with each other - about the grand themes of character, beauty and the meaning of rudeness while the spectral figure of Ludwig Wittgenstein hovered in the background. She also charts the highs and lows of philosophy and academia in Britain. On joining the Reading philosophy department on £400 a year in 1949, she doubled its staff complement. But her many years at Newcastle University - where Mike Brearley, who later captained England at cricket, also used to teach - were rewarded with the closure of the philosophy department in the 1980s. The mother of three children, her journey is also one of a woman who in the 1950s and 1960s was fighting to combine a professional career with raising a family. In startling contrast to many of the academic stars of her generation, we learn that Midgley nearly became a novelist and started writing philosophy only when in her fifties, suggesting that Minerva's owl really does fly at dusk. Plainly told like her philosophy, this is an elegiac and moving account of friendships found and lost, bitter philosophical battles and of a profound love of teaching all too rarely acknowledged today. (shrink)

Plato famously promised to complement the Sophist and the Statesman with another work on a third sort of expert, the philosopher--but we do not have this final dialogue. Mary Louise Gill argues that Plato promised the Philosopher, but did not write it, in order to stimulate his audience and encourage his readers to work out, for themselves, the portrait it would have contained. The Sophist and Statesman are themselves members of a larger series starting with the Theaetetus, Plato's investigation (...) of knowledge, and the whole series relies on the Parmenides, the second part of which presents a philosophical exercise, introduced as the first step in a larger philosophical program. Gill contends that the dialogues leading up to the missing Philosopher, though they reach some substantive conclusions, are philosophical exercises of various sorts designed to train students in dialectic, the philosopher's method; and that a second version of the Parmenides exercise, closely patterned on it, spans parts of the Theaetetus and Sophist and brings the philosopher into view. This is the exercise about being, the subject-matter studied by Plato's philosopher. Plato hides the pieces of the puzzle and its solution in plain sight, forcing his students (and modern readers) to dig out the pieces and reconstruct the project. Gill reveals how, in finding the philosopher through the exercise, the student becomes a philosopher by mastering his methods. She shows that the target of Plato's exercise is internally related to its pedagogical purpose. (shrink)

This paper criticizes Langton's speech act account of MacKinnon's claim about (the subordinating force of) pornography and offers a different account of how speech might enact harmful norms and thus constitute harm.

Here is Lukcs among his friends, lovers, and peers in those important years before 1918, when he converted to Communism and Marxism at the age of thirty-nine.

Rae Langton and Jennifer Hornsby argue that there may be a free-speech argument against pornography, if pornographic speech has the power to illocutionarily silence women: women's locution ‘No!’ that aims to refuse unwanted sex may misfire because pornography creates communicative conditions where the locution does not count as a refusal. Central to this is the view that women's speech lacks uptake, which is necessary for illocutionary acts like that of refusal. Alexander Bird has critiqued this view by arguing that uptake (...) is not necessary for the illocutionary act of refusal. The Hornsby-Langton view, then, is philosophically indefensible. Here I defend the philosophical cogency of the Hornsby-Langton approach. (shrink)

Hume's Moral Philosophy and Contemporary Psychology, edited by Philip A. Reed and Rico Vitz, is a collection of 14 essays intended to explore fruitful connections between David Hume's theory of the passions and ethics and contemporary experimental and cognitive psychology. Although recent moral philosophers have become interested in psychological discoveries in order to refine their normative approach to morality by means of a better empirical understanding of the workings of the mind, this trend has been typically developed by Aristotelian scholarship. (...) Hence, the purpose of this volume is to "fill a gap in the literature" by introducing Hume as a powerful interlocutor in the field of moral psychology, and... (shrink)

Este artículo revisa el diálogo que Husserl establece con Humemientras reconstruye la génesis de la filosofía. Lo discutiréen dos partes: la primera se refiere a la “verdadera filosofía”y, la segunda, desarrolla una lectura fenomenológica delmétodo experimental de Hume. Intento explicar la evaluaciónambivalente que hace Husserl del proyecto de Hume, yproponer una manera en la que Hume pueda responder a suscríticas. Concluyo, más allá de Husserl, que Hume abrió uncamino promisorio para la fenomenología, que yo llamo una“fenomenología detrascendentalizada”.

La investigación humeana acerca de los principios de la moral parte de la pasión como motivo de la acción y al mismo tiempo pretende que su valoración ha de guiarse por la utilidad. Si bien son dos afirmaciones difíciles de combinar, la tesis del presente estudio es que la posibilidad de tender un puente entre la aspiración a la felicidad privada y el interés por el bienestar público está anclada, en su origen, en el sentimiento de benevolencia que el autor (...) descubre como principio original de la mente, pero logra sus efectos solamente en virtud de la fuerza de la simpatía y del espectáculo de la vida social y la conversación. Así, la moralidad -como posibilidad de realización de distinciones morales, de aprobar o censurar desde el punto devista del espectador- se articula y afina en el flujo incesante decontaminación y contagio de afecciones. (shrink)

The unity of aesthetic and teleological judgment, the third and earlier Critiques, is based on Kant′s discovery of a “heuristic method” for applying judgments regarding sense phenomena to abstract thought, a “second attention” which enables an “idea of the whole”. Synthetic judgment, basis for cognition and human action, depends on efficacy of non-empirical insights: the transcendental standpoint, “regulative” ideas, consciousness of “ought” and the reality of freedom, universality of natural mechanism, the principle of “fortuitous” purposiveness. The activity of reflective judgment (...) in the encounter with the beautiful, sublime, living, and two paradigmatic types of explanation, inspired by Spinoza′s distinction of extensio and cogitatio, permit Kant to bridge the gap between freedom and necessity, theoretical knowledge and morality. (shrink)

América Latina es un concepto, una construcción intelectual que intenta dar cuenta de un grupo de estados nacionales, variable en su composición pero con un núcleo estable, las ex colonias españolas y portuguesas del continente americano. Hoy no hay en América Latina un programa de desarrollo nacional alternativo a la integración al mundo capitalista global. Las experiencias nacionales que la izquierda dirige no constituyen una imagen como la que representó Cuba en los años sesenta, ni desde el punto de vista (...) de los programas ni desde el liderazgo. Lo que se construyó en las décadas de los cincuentas y sesentas fue una conciencia de la relevancia de un proyecto continental que merecía ser respaldado por una teorización del conjunto, la construcción de un objeto de conocimiento al mismo tiempo que un actor político colectivo. Como quiera que sea, esta conciencia se desarrolló alrededor de las instituciones internacionales y nacionales residentes en Santiago de Chile y comenzó a desvanecerse junto con el proyecto de Allende y la Unidad Popular. (shrink)

It is 2048 BE; the Anonyma Network, represented by a young philosopher known affectionately as Annie, offers this fiftieth anniversary edition of Mary Daly's revolutionary work of Radical Elemental Feminism, Quintessence ... Realizing the Archaic Future. Mary Daly has, for the past thirty years, been at the forefront of radical feminist thinking. Here she exposes and examines the abuses women face at the end of the twentieth century - for example, the dangerous rhetoric of the Promise Keepers; the (...) systematic rape of women in war zones like Bosnia; and the invasive manipulation of women's bodies and all of nature in genetic engineering, fertility experiments, and cloning. But she also offers a "Far-Out Vision and Hope for Wonderlusting Women" who are beginning to discover Quintessence: Spirit that fills the universe and gives it life and vitality. (shrink)

Science as Salvation discusses the high spiritual ambitions which tend to gather round the notion of science. Officially, science claims only the modest function of establishing facts. Yet people still hope for something much grander from it--namely, the myths by which to shape and support life in an increasingly confusing age. Our faith in science is abused by some scientists whose adolescent fantasies have spilled over into their professional lives. Salvation, immortality, mastery of the universe, humans without bodies, and intelligent (...) self-reproducing computers are just some of the notions and speculations that are now found--not on the pages of science fiction--but on the pages of science itself. The danger is that these concepts are given to a myth-hungry public who turn to science now that religion has lost its ability to create myth. Science as Salvation discusses the function and meaning of such fantasies. Midgley examines the need for and the use of myth in science, and how science and religion are related. She argues that we need to develop a realistic understanding of scientific imagination and its importance. Taking them seriously as symptoms of a genuine myth-hunger, it suggests that the proper function of science may need to include wider perspectives, which would make it plain that such desperate, compensatory dramas are unnecessary. (shrink)

A leader in the modern commentary on ethics and philosophy, Mary Warnock casts a critical eye over her life and times.