This research explores the transformative role of the Global South in innovative jurisprudence concerning (cultural) collective rights, transcending its conventional perception as a mere recipient of legal norms. Focusing on the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR), the study investigates the impact of landmark cases worldwide and their potential challenges to the (neo)liberal capitalist system. Through an analysis and categorization of judgments, the research reveals that although the IACtHR has recognized collective rights through innovative interpretations, it falls short of posing (...) a significant challenge to private property and capitalism. Additionally, it emphasizes the need for a collective and concrete vision of rights to achieve meaningful transformation. The study also finds a potential alliance among peripheral regions to foster innovative jurisprudence through court dialogue, which may lead to a more substantial transformational role in safeguarding collective rights. (shrink)

[EN]The heuristic versatility of foresight is increasingly positioning this anticipatory instrument as a key resource to promote more responsible research and innovation practices. In a context where foresight's multiple heuristic potential is sometimes wrapped up in a promissory rhetoric that could lead to its being taken for granted, this article underlines the need to understand the emergence of these heuristics as being dependent on how foresight's dynamics unfold. By acknowledging the existence of more "open" or "closed" forms of foresight (which (...) in turn can articulate more "open" or "closed" anticipations), the article argues that the degree of "openness/ closure" of foresight activities is constituted during the ex-ante, ex-dure and ex-post processes, and according to the relations underlying their constructive dynamics. The main conclusion reached is that a pre-condition for foresight practices to become "instruments for" responsible innovation is to make them "subjects of" responsibility simultaneously. This involves monitoring the socioepistemic relations whereby foresight practices are designed and executed, as well as monitoring how their emergent heuristics are translated into action. (shrink)

[EN]This work will focus on some aspects of descriptive names. The New Theory of Reference, in line with Kripke, takes descriptive names to be proper names. I will argue in this paper that descriptive names and certain theory in reference to them, even when it disagrees with the New Theory of Reference, can shed light on our understanding of non-existence statements. I define the concept of descriptive name for hypothesised object. My thesis being that DNHOs are, as I will specify, (...) descriptions: a proposition expressed by the utterance ‘n is F’, where ‘n’ is a DNHO, is not singular at all; it is a descriptive proposition. To sum up, concerning proper names, the truth lies closer to the New Theory of Reference, but descriptivism is not altogether false. As for DNHOs descriptivism is, in some cases, the right fit. (shrink)

The three main naturalistic approaches to culture the Epidemiological account (Sperber 1996; Atran 1990, 2002; Sperber and Claidière 2006), Memetics (Dawkins 2006 [1976], Dennett 1996) and the Standard Evolutionary approach (Boyd and Richerson 1988 [1985], Mesoudi 2011) reduce it to a set of representational items that are shared by individuals in a population by non-genetic means. Thats why I see those three approaches as versions of what I call the Itemic View of Culture (IVC). I argue that, by that reduction, (...) the IVC is missing a key element in the subject matter of culture: an element that is best captured by the notion of constraints (Barwise and Perry 1983). I call my approach the Constraint-Based Approach (CBA), and I conceive it as an account that situates conventional constraints, and the simple attunement to those constraints by individuals, as the fundamental building blocks of culture. On their grounds, other kinds of attunements can be distinguished, and a natural account of explicit representational items and our cultural knowledge of them can be built. In this sense, the CBA is a necessary fundamental requirement for the IVC. (shrink)

It is not hard to see how two visions of nature are intertwined in Darwin’s Journal of Researches: one vision, the province of romantic authors depicting the sentiments awakened by certain landscapes, the other, the domain of natural scientists describing the world without reference to the aesthetic qualities of the scenery. Nevertheless, analyses of this double perspective in Darwin’s work are relatively rare. Most scholars focus on Darwin, the scientist, and more or less ignore the aesthetic aspects of his work. (...) Perceiving the gradual transformation of Darwin’s world view, however, depends on analyzing the two different modes in which Darwin approached and perceived the world. While one can, on occasion, find commentaries on the beauty of the natural world in Darwin’s early work, the passage of time produces a modification in the naturalist’s manner of perceiving nature. This does not, however, mean that Darwin ceases to find beauty in nature; on the contrary, the disenchantment, in Max Weber’s words, that Darwin’s theory produces should not be understood in a pejorative, but rather in a literal sense. The theory of evolution, in effect, divests nature of its magical character and begins to explain it in terms of natural selection, according it, in the process a new and more intense attraction. In the present work, the metaphysical implications of this new vision of the world are analyzed through the eyes of its discoverer. (shrink)