Este artículo se interroga sobre el alcance y consistencia de la “teoría estándar de los mundos posibles” en el pensamiento de Leibniz. La tesis defendida es que el actualismo subyace en el corpus leibniziano como un fondo de tensión que impide clausurar la metafísica leibniziana de los MP a partir de una sola interpretación sobre el origen de las cosas. Para ello, se ofrece una periodización en tres etapas de las explicaciones de Leibniz al respecto: 1. un modelo actualista puro; (...) 2. un modelo emanantista y otro creacionista, ambos coexistentes e interpretables tanto en términos posibilistas como actualistas; 3. un modelo actualista de “voluntad resultante”. Nuestro objetivo no es tomar partido por uno u otro modelo, sino mostrar que todos ellos conviven en la literatura leibniziana como elementos que dislocan dentro de una única y relativamente cerrada interpretación. (shrink)

This article deals with the problem of justification of war in the light of Leibnizian natural right and deontic definitions. From an analysis of the principles of rationality on which, according to Leibniz, the justification of an act is based, it proposes “deontic types of war” - namely: justifiable wars (whether just or facultative), just wars (defensive war, war of cooperation), facultative wars (preventive war, humanitarian intervention), unjust wars (war of aggression, war of extermination, terrorism) -, which express the modality (...) according to which their agents are constrained to act, namely: authorized, necessarily justified, contingently justified or unjustified to the military action. This modalisation is illustrated by a “war casuistry”, mostly taken from Leibniz’s reflections on the wars of his time. As it will be seen, our hypothesis states that the sufficient reason for a war is at bottom identified with the principle of the best, whose application requires an examination of the consequences of action in different possible scenarios. (shrink)

Actualmente la educación requiere la autonomía en el aprendizaje de los alumnos. Por ello, se realizó la siguiente investigación usando el aula invertida como metodología para mejorar la autonomía de los alumnos en materias como Desarrollo Humano, Instrumentos de Evaluación y Estrategias de Enseñanza de la Lengua Inglesa.Desde septiembre de 2021, los alumnos del programa educativo de Técnico Superior Universitario en Lengua Inglesa, trabajaron de manera híbrida, por esta razón, la metodología del aula invertida fue una herramienta útil para desarrollar (...) las competencias requeridas por el programa educativo, además de la autonomía. (shrink)

This extended introductory article sets the scene for consideration of liquid modernity and Bauman’s recent work in general. His ideas are placed against Pollock’s concept of the ‘trans-disciplinary’. The ramifications of Bauman’s work for cultural analysis are discussed, particularly his ideas about migration, tourism, borders and the impact of global social trends on citizenship and agency. One central theme is deterritorialization - both in terms of academic disciplines and the shift from solid, defined, localized, territorialized, nation-bound modernity to the liquid (...) modern. (shrink)

Razón, poesía, historia.--La cuestión del estoicismo español.--El querer.

El presente trabajo tiene como marco de análisis general a la teoría chomskyana conocida como ‘Principios y Parámetros’. En particular, se estudia una parcela de esta, la denominada ‘Ligamiento’. En primer lugar, se hace una presentación de los aspectos generales de la teoría, atendiendo particularmente al enfoque internalista que esta adopta, y de acuerdo con el cual se buscan caracterizar los aspectos mentales y constitutivos de la Facultad del Lenguaje. Para ello, se pone especial atención a las afirmaciones del autor, (...) por lo que la presentación tiene un fuerte carácter textual. Dicha presentación posibilita identificar la estrategia que se persigue a los fines de dar cuenta del fenómeno del lenguaje y, por tanto, a la relación que se establece entre el explanandum y el explanans. A fin de encuadrar el objetivo explicativo de la teoría, se recurre a la propuesta de niveles de explicación de Marr. Posteriormente, se enmarcan los límites de la parcela Ligamiento, tras lo cual se ofrece una reconstrucción formal, la que se elabora desde la perspectiva de la Metateoría Estructuralista. Para ello, se hace una previa y detenida presentación de los datos lingüísticos, los que a modo de ejemplos paradigmáticos ilustran el tipo de fenómeno del lenguaje al que Ligamiento se aplica. Con ello se llega a una caracterización informal de las afirmaciones de Ligamiento. Finalmente, se ofrece la reconstrucción formal. (shrink)

Griselda Pollock provides concrete historical analyses of key moments in the formation of modern culture to reveal the sexual politics at the heart of modernist art, exploring the writings of Elizabeth Siddall, Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot.

Dibujar el pensamiento de Seneca es dibujar su figura viva, trazar el esquema de su persona. Seneca es un mediador que para alzarse sobre nosotros necesita de nuestra necesidad, pues solo apoyado en nuestra indigencia tiene sentido. Maria Zambrano lleva a cabo un lucido estudio de la figura y significacion del pensador cordobes y presenta una seleccion de sus escritos.

In this major book, Griselda Pollock engages boldly in the culture wars over `what is the canon?` and `what difference can feminism make?` Do we simply reject the all-male line-up and satisfy our need for ideal egos with an all women litany of artistic heroines? Or is the question a chance to resist the phallocentric binary and allow the ambiguities and complexities of desire - subjectivity and sexuality - to shape the readings of art that constantly displace the present (...) gender demarcations? (shrink)

Generations and Geographies brings together a collection of artists, critics and researchers to consider the question of sexual difference and its significance in the production and reception of visual representation by women artists.

Spectroscopy is a scientific topic at the interface between Chemistry and Physics, which is taught at high school level in relation with its fundamental applications in Analytical Chemistry. In the first part of the paper, the topic of spectroscopy is analyzed having in mind the well-known Johnstone’s triangle of chemistry education, putting in evidence the way spectroscopy is usually taught at the three levels of chemical knowledge: macroscopic/phenomenological, sub-microscopic/molecular and symbolic ones. Among these three levels, following Johnstone’s recommendations the macroscopic (...) one is the most useful for high school students who learn spectroscopy for the first time. Starting from these premises, in the second part of the paper, we propose a didactic sequence which is inspired by the historical evolution of spectroscopic instruments from the first spectroscopes invented by Gustav Kirchhoff and Robert Bunsen in 1860 to the UV–vis spectrophotometers which became common since the 1960s. The idea behind our research is to analyze the conceptual advancements through the history of spectroscopy and to identify the key episodes/experiments and spectroscopic instruments. For each of them, a didactic activity, typically an experiment, is then proposed underlining the relevant aspects from the chemistry education point of view. The present paper is the occasion to reflect on the potentialities of an historical approach combined with a laboratorial one, and to discuss the role of historical instruments and related technological improvements to teach spectroscopy. (shrink)

Hilary Putnam is one of the world’s leading philosophers. His highly original and often provocative ideas have set the agenda for a variety of debates in philosophy of science, philosophy of mind and philosophy of language. His now famous philosophical thought experiments, such as the ‘Twin earth’ and ‘the brains in the vat’ have become part of the established canon in philosophy and cognitive science. _Reading Putnam_ is an outstanding overview and assessment of Hilary Putnam’s work by a team of (...) international contributors, and includes replies by Putnam himself. Divided into clear sections, it contains chapters on key aspects of Putnam’s large body of writing, including: Scientific realism and the changes that Putnam’s thought has undergone on this topic analyticity and ontology, including the important interconnections between the views of Putnam and Quine Putnam’s arguments concerning externalist views of meaning and reference, questions of conceptual relativity, and his preoccupation with ethics through a denial of the fact–value dichotomy Putnam’s developing views on perception. Offering an excellent survey of Putnam’s work, _Reading Putnam_ is essential for those studying philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and philosophy of science, as well as for anyone interested in contemporary philosophy. (shrink)

In the literature, the pragmatic dimension of metaphors has been clearly acknowledged. Metaphors are regarded as having different possible uses, especially pursuing persuasion. However, an analysis of the specific conversational purposes that they can be aimed at achieving in a dialogue and their adequacy thereto is still missing. In this chapter, we will address this issue focusing on the classical distinction between the explanatory and persuasive uses of metaphors, which is, however, complex to draw at an analytical level and often (...) blurred and controversial also from a theoretical point of view. Building on the analysis of explanation in different theories and fields of study, we show how it can be conceived as characterized by a cognitive and a pragmatic dimension, where the transference of understanding is used pragmatically for different dialogical goals - such as informing, making a joint decision, and most importantly persuading. In this sense, the cognitive effects of understanding are not incompatible with a persuasive dialogical purpose. This theoretical proposal will be applied to examples drawn from the medical context, to show how a pragmatic approach to explanation can account for the complexity of the cases that can be found in actual dialogical contexts. (shrink)

From its very beginning, sociological thought has been concerned with a topic central to our daily lives: social distance. Since inception, the concept of social distance has referred to the relationships of familiarity and strangeness between social groups, which is experienced in the social world in terms of “We” and “They”. This article covers the main tenets of a Schutzian phenomenological approach to the study of social distance and group relationships. Specific focus is placed on the different attitudes and valuations (...) of the in-group towards the out-group considered as a stranger, the invisible excess of meaning that emerges in these types of social relationships and the conceptual construction of the Other that explains the phenomenon of discrimination. (shrink)

In 2018, the Bauman Institute and the Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory & History, both based at the University of Leeds, initiated a transdisciplinary programme to assess the legacies of Zygmunt Bauman, whose prolific writings we felt to be profoundly relevant to the multiple challenges of the 21st century. In this special issue of Thesis Eleven, we are marking just over three years since the death of Zygmunt Bauman by bringing together some of the contributions to that programme in order (...) to revisit, elaborate, and crucially to extend his intellectual archive. Taking Bauman’s revision of contemporary social realities as a point of departure, each of the participants in this special issue re-examine – critically but also generously – the many questions Bauman asked, tried to answer, and imbued on the way with new and sometimes shocking insights. This paper surveys those contributions by way of introducing the special issue. (shrink)

Bracha Ettinger (formerly known as Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger) is an Israeli-born Paris-based artist, analyst and feminist theorist who has produced over the last decade a major theoretical intervention through a tripartite practice. This article offers an expository introduction and overview of core aspects of her theoretical contribution while relating it to major trends in feminist and general cultural theory of subjectivity, hysteria, memory, trauma and the aesthetic. Organized in several parts, each section addresses the developing vocabulary, terminology and significance of (...) her work. With core concepts are Matrix, metramorphosis, trans-subjectivity, co-poïesis, co-emergence and co-affection, Ettinger’s theory opens out beyond the blind spots of advanced feminist thought. From its independent and original theorization of subjectivity-as-encounter and an-other sexual difference, Bracha Ettinger challenges our attempts to think about femininity associated with the work of Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray. Linked to, but distinct from, the philosophical speculations of Deleuze and Levinas, this work creates a transferential theoretical space for Jewish and feminine difference, sexuality, subjectivity and the traumatic residues of modern catastrophe that has major repercussions for cultural, aesthetic, ethical, political and psychoanalytic theory. (shrink)

Leading scholars offer new readings of Degas1 representations of the family, prostitution, city life and leisure in which looking at women is shown to be a complex and ambiguous process. One major topic of the book is the encounter between feminism and art history. Having put images of women1 on the agenda of cultural analysis, feminist interventions in the theory and analysis of representation have created a diverse and intricate field of interpretation which now supersedes that formulation. These essays challenge (...) art history to confront issues of spectatorship, the interface of class and gender, identification and the politics of vision. This illustrated collection is thus a major contribution to debates on representation and sexuality. (shrink)

Probability as understood today, namely as a quantitative notion expressible by means of a function ranging in the interval between 0–1, took shape in the mid-17th century, and presents both a mathematical and a philosophical aspect. Of these two sides, the second is by far the most controversial, and fuels a heated debate, still ongoing. After a short historical sketch of the birth and developments of probability, its major interpretations are outlined, by referring to the work of their most prominent (...) representatives. The final section addresses the question of whether any of such interpretations can presently be considered predominant, which is answered in the negative. (shrink)

This paper proposes a conversation between Charlotte Salomon and Edvard Munch that is premised on a reading of Charlotte Salomon’s monumental project of 784 paintings forming a single work Leben? oder Theater? as itself a reading of potentialities for painting, as a staging of subjectivity in the work of Edvard Munch, notably in his assembling paintings to form the Frieze of Life. Drawing on both Mieke Bal’s critical concept of “preposterous history” and my own project of “the virtual feminist museum” (...) as a framework for tracing resonances that are never influences or descent in conventional art historical terms, this paper traces creative links between the serial paintings of these two artists across the shared thematic of loneliness and psychological extremity mediated by the legacy of Friedrich Nietzsche. (shrink)

This article takes as its provocation Marx's intriguing statement about the disjunction between the flowering of Greek art and the underdeveloped stage of social and economic development made as an epilogue to the Introduction to the Grundrisse in order to ask what are the relations between that which has been considered art and what Marx calls `production as such'. In the elaborated conditions of contemporary capitalist societies, we can ask: Is art still being made? To examine this question I juxtapose (...) what Bauman has called `thinking sociologically' with a proposition that art thinks aesthetically. So how can art historians deal with that challenge of thinking aesthetic practices both socially and historically? I track a genealogy of art historians (Clark, Antal, Shapiro) who have attempted to think socially about artistic practices. This leads into a section about the necessity for both sociological and aesthetic education if we are to avoid totalitarianism or free-market individualism (Bahro). Finally, thinking sociologically, by taking as a case study the work of Aby Warburg, I explore the technological conditions of art historical production itself particularly in relation to photography and the way this shapes our access to the image. Warburg represents the possibility of another model for art historical thinking about the image as Kulturwissenschaft, a parallel to Sozialwissenschaft in its ambition and relation to the great intellectual revolutions c.1905 (Freud, Bergson, Einstein, Hussserl). Like Marx, Warburg questioned the continuity of the imaginary space of art thinking in the age of technological industrialism. Where art is now, where art history is, are not just sociological questions to which Marx might offer a dismal answer. I conclude that what is necessary is a constructive conversation between thinking sociologically and thinking aesthetically, knowing synthetically and knowing for oneself — curricular issues made more intense by the shared conditions in which all intellectual production is being transformed in contemporary sites of intellectual practice, the university, by `production as such' leading thought to risk the same fate as art in contemporary society, as Marx hypothesized. As a final thought, I suggest that in contemporary art work that confronts trauma and catastrophe, often using new technologies as aesthetic processes, we may find a counter-argument. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to investigate what epistemic role, if any, do appeals to representations play in cognitive neuroscience. I suggest that while at present they seem to play something in between a minimal and a substantive explanatory role, there is reason to believe that representations have a substantial contribution to the construction of neuroscientic explanations of cognitive phenomena.

: The coloniality of power is understood by Anibal Quijano as at the constituting crux of the global capitalist system of power. What is characteristic of global, Eurocentered, capitalist power is that it is organized around two axes that Quijano terms "the coloniality of power" and "modernity." The coloniality of power introduces the basic and universal social classification of the population of the planet in terms of the idea of race, a replacing of relations of superiority and inferiority established through (...) domination with naturalized understandings of inferiority and superiority. In this essay, Lugones introduces a systemic understanding of gender constituted by colonial/modernity in terms of multiple relations of power. This gender system has a light and a dark side that depict relations, and beings in relation as deeply different and thus as calling for very different patterns of violent abuse. Lugones argues that gender itself is a colonial introduction, a violent introduction consistently and contemporarily used to destroy peoples, cosmologies, and communities as the building ground of the "civilized" West. (shrink)

Dal "disegno su sabbia" delle donne australiane alle terrecotte delle donne del Camerun, dai retablos peruviani agli altari vodou degli immigrati haitiani a New York, dalla "Casa del popolo" del regno di Bandjoun alle "vetrinette" italiane degli anni Sessanta, dai malanggan e dai manufatti annodati dell'Oceania alla topologia dei nodi, dai bologan del Mali alla "Potlatch Collection" rimpatriata nei nuovi musei indigeni del Canada, dalle maschere gelede degli Yoruba alla figura ubiqua e mediatica di Mami Wata, i saggi di questo (...) volume evidenziano le valenze operative dell'arte: sia nell'arena sociale e politica contemporanea, cui appartengono anche le "tradizioni", sia nel campo cognitivo e religioso. A lungo confinata ai soli territori esotici delle culture "primitive" e limitata da un'eccessiva dipendenza dalle categorie interpretative occidentali, la riflessione antropologica sull'arte e sull'estetica trova oggi un nuovo respiro teorico, e un nuovo fascino. (shrink)

The statement that an important dualism runs throughout sociological literature belongs to what can be called extended “sociological common sense”. In this context, Alfred Schutz’s phenomenology is often used critically as a paradigmatic example of subjectivism, as it supposedly places exclusive emphasis on actors’ “subjective” interpretations, thereby neglecting “objective” social structures such as power relationships. This article proposes that not only do those characterizations have dualistic grounds, but they also disregard the explicit intention of phenomenology to overcome the dualism between (...) subjectivism and objectivism. The various criticisms directed at the Schutzian paradigm will be confronted with an analysis of the phenomenon of power based on Schutz’s theory of the life-world, in particular his theory of relevance. This theoretical perspective will be replenished by reflections on power as a meaning selection, which specifically allow the hiatus of subjectivism and objectivism to be overcome. (shrink)

In this Chapter, Maria Kronfeldner discusses whether psychological essentialism is a necessary part of dehumanization. This involves different elements of essentialism, and a narrow and a broad way of conceptualizing psychological essentialism, the first akin to natural kind thinking, the second based on entitativity. She first presents authors that have connected essentialism with dehumanization. She then introduces the error theory of psychological essentialism regarding the category of the human, and distinguishes different elements of psychological essentialism. On that basis, Kronfeldner connects (...) historical, socio-psychological, and philosophical insights in order to show that although essentialism can act as a catalyst for dehumanization, it is not necessary for it. Examples relate to dehumanization in the context of colonialism and evolutionary thinking, to the history of dehumanizing women from Aristotle to 19th-century craniology, and to contemporary self-dehumanization and ‘lesser mind’ attribution. (shrink)

The coloniality of power is understood by Anibal Quijano as at the constituting crux of the global capitalist system of power. What is characteristic of global, Eurocentered, capitalist power is that it is organized around two axes that Quijano terms “the coloniality of power” and “modernity.” The coloniality of power introduces the basic and universal social classification of the population of the planet in terms of the idea of race, a replacing of relations of superiority and inferiority established through domination (...) with naturalized understandings of inferiority and superiority. In this essay, Lugones introduces a systemic understanding of gender constituted by colonial/modernity in terms of multiple relations of power. This gender system has a light and a dark side that depict relations, and beings in relation as deeply different and thus as calling for very different patterns of violent abuse. Lugones argues that gender itself is a colonial introduction, a violent introduction consistently and contemporarily used to destroy peoples, cosmologies, and communities as the building ground of the “civilized” West. (shrink)