The text introduces the special issue on Georges Bataille and his idea of heterology. The editors, Marina Galletti and Roy Boyne, immediately point out the novelty of Bataille’s heterology, both in the academic and political contexts of the 1920s and the present day. It is suggested that Bataille’s heterology is neither a technical-philosophical notion nor a definitive concept. Rather, heterology represents the challenge of the illicit parts of our human existence to any constituted power that proclaims itself as (...) hierarchical, authoritarian, absolute order. Heterology is the revolt of the excluded part – which Bataille sees mainly in the hidden parts of our human body – against a world made up by idealised abstractions. The different sections of the introduction illustrate how Bataille makes heterology operate as a critical and disruptive dispositive in all fields of our knowledge: art, politics, philosophy, economy. This emphasis is also to be found in the various contributions to the special issue, which are briefly discussed in the introduction. Finally, the reader is introduced to the dimension of the ‘completely other’ that Bataille’s heterology opens up and leaves incomplete, as if it were an excluded part that constantly escapes from all human efforts to grasp it firmly. (shrink)

This article aims to retrace the history of the Acéphale secret society and its role in the development of the work of Bataille, notably the unfinished project of the Atheological Summa. Based on sociological notions of the ‘secret society’ and ‘the society of men’, it updates the dual aspects of Acéphale: a diurnal or ‘political’ aspect constituted by the publication of the journal Acéphale, and afterwards by the public activity of the College of Sociology; and a nocturnal or religious side, (...) as evidenced by the activity of the secret society itself, an activity aiming to strengthen the communitarian link amongst the followers, and to open them up to what Caillois would call ‘a broader conspiracy’. (shrink)

Georges Bataille was a philosopher, writer, and literary critic whose work has had a significant impact across disciplines as diverse as philosophy, sociology, economics, art history and literary criticism, as well as influencing key figures in post-modernist and post-structuralist philosophy such as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. In recent years, the number of works published on Georges Bataille, as well as the variety of contexts in which his work is invoked, has markedly increased. In _Georges Bataille: Key Concepts_ an international (...) team of contributors provide an accessible introduction to and survey of Bataille's thought. The editors’ introduction provides an overview of Bataille’s work, while the chapters in the first section cover the social, political, artistic and philosophical contexts that shaped his thought. In the second part, each chapter engages with a key theme in Bataille’s philosophy, including: art, eroticism, evil, inner experience, heterology, religion, sacrifice, and sovereignty. The final chapter addresses Bataille’s literary writings. Georges Bataille: Key Concepts is an invaluable guide for students from across the Humanities and Social Sciences, coming to Bataille’s work for the first time. Contributors: Giulia Agostini, Elisabeth Arnould-Bloomfield, Tiina Arppe, Marcus Coelen, Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Patrick ffrench, Marina Galletti, Nadine Hartmann, Mark Hewson, Andrew Hussey, Stuart Kendall, Claire Nioche, Gerhard Poppenberg, and Michèle Richman. (shrink)

The restructured globalized economy has provided women with employment opportunities. Globalisation has also meant a shift towards self-regulation of multinationals as part of the restructuring of the world economy that increases among others things, flexible employment practices, worsening of labour conditions and lower wages for many women workers around the world. In this context, as part of the global trend emphasising Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in the 1980s, one important development has been the growth of voluntary Corporate Codes of Conduct (...) to improve labour conditions. This article reviews from a feminist interdisciplinary perspective the broad academic literature on women workers, covering the more classical debate on women workers in the industrialization process and entering into women workers in the global supply chains and women workers and corporate codes of conduct. The main argument is that this research on women workers is crucial to frame the issues of business ethics and in particular CSR and Codes of Conduct in the context of women in the global political economy. When this crucial knowledge is ignored, then the ethical policies of the companies also ignore the real situation of the women workers at the bottom of their supply chains. (shrink)

U ovom članku raspravljamo o hipotezi proširenog jastva Andyja Clarka i Davida Chalmersa, a osobito o prigovoru prema kojemu proširenom jastvu nedostaje stabilnost i kontinuitet koji su potrebni da bismo ga smatrali identičnim kroz vrijeme. Pokušavamo pokazati da je taj prigovor neodrživ. Raspravljamo i o gledištu prema kojemu se drugi tip jastva, to jest narativno jastvo, također može shvatiti kao prošireno, i tvrdimo da stabilnost i kontinuitet toga tipa jastva također nisu ugroženi ako ga proširimo izvan granica čovjekova tijela. Stoga, (...) barem što se tiče tih tipova jastva, kada razmišljamo o problemima osobnog identiteta, nije potrebno ograničiti se na internalizirano jastvo. (shrink)

The paper explores the process of the Czech journalists setting the EU agenda in the media during the ‘hot phase’ of the Czech national parliament election campaigns in 2002, 2006, and 2010. Unlike most studies that concentrated on the media agenda in the European Parliament election campaigns, we focused on periods that were neither strictly key events nor routine, but that were more intensively covered by the media and simultaneously generated more influential political representation defining national political attitudes towards the (...) EU. Articles that referred to the EU during the ‘hot phase’ were content analyzed. The results suggest that in the Czech press, the EU agenda is less and less visible, and, moreover, that it is increasingly negatively framed and reduced to an economic agenda. (shrink)

A model for U(1) gauge theories over a compact Lie group is described usingR×S 3 as background space. A comparison with other results is given. Electrodynamics equations are obtained. Finally, some considerations and observations about gravity onR×S 3 space are presented.

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2018 Heft: 220 Seiten: 155-172.

El artículo sitúa los elementos de la fisiología del arte de los escritos de madurez dentro del proyecto de transformación del ser humano que persiste a lo largo su trayectoria intelectual. En el contexto de este proyecto, la expresión artística funciona como síntoma de fenómenos que tienen un profundo origen a nivel fisiológico y que nos informan de la condición del artista creador y del público que lo acoge. El diagnóstico que Nietzsche elaborar de Wagner no sólo afecta a Wagner, (...) sino, sobre todo, a sus espectadores, la cultura y sociedad moderna, como parte del fenómeno de la décadence y del poder ascético. Finalmente se estudia la concepción de la estética como fisiología aplicada, el componente adaptativo y colectivo de los juicios estéticos, así como su uso instrumental para la política. (shrink)

(2013). Hope and Fear: The Theological Side of Framing Environmental Change. Ethics, Policy & Environment: Vol. 16, No. 2, pp. 152-155. doi: 10.1080/21550085.2013.801187.

The tetradic Lorentz-gauge invariant formulation of the SU(2) × U(1) theory in S3 × R space-time is presented and the general gauge covariant Dirac-Klein-Gordon-Maxwell-Yang-Mills equations are derived. A direct comparison of these equations to those of the SU(2) × U(1) gauge theory on Minkowskian background points out major differences effectively induced by the minimally coupling to S3 × R gravity.

En la España de los siglos XVI y XVII se desarrolla la Escolástica española. Un tiempo en el que las Universidades no contaban con programas oficiales de estudios y, por tanto, la enseñanza del Derecho era distinta en cada una de ellas. Asimismo, imperan dos corrientes doctrinales distintas: el humanismo jurídico y el mos italicus tardío. El estado de la ciencia jurídica de ese momento provoca que proliferen tratados didácticos para la enseñanza de Leyes. Uno de ellos, muy desatendido por (...) la historiografía jurídica, es Nueva Filosofía de la natvraleza del hombre, no conocida ni alcançada de los grandes filosofos antiguos, que analizamos en este trabajo en aras a contribuir con el estudio del Derecho de la Edad Moderna, pues su autor, Miguel Sabuco, se caracteriza por exponer el estado de la ciencia jurídica en ese momento y formular propuestas de mejora. (shrink)

Содерж.: Грибная лихорадка ; Прости, пожалуйста, прости.

Autoritarismo, particularismo, fanatismo, catastrofismo, terrorismo, solucionismo... son las caras de una amplia reaccion antiilustrada a la actual crisis de civilizacion. Nuestro presente se ve atrapado en una disyuntiva radical: o condenarse o salvarse. Tras esta alternativa se esconde una rendicion. Temiendo el apocalipsis o anhelando un salvador, sea un lider, un dios o un robot, estamos renunciando a la libertad y a la dignidad de la experiencia humana, estamos renunciando a la emancipacion. La pregunta que late en este ensayo es: (...) por que nos creemos tan facilmente estos relatos? Y la cuestion que se plantea es: como combatir esta fe ciega y sus formas de opresion? Desde este doble interrogante, se apuesta por una nueva ilustracion radical, es decir, por luchar contra las credulidades de nuestro tiempo y contra el temor y el oportunismo que las alimentan."--Amazon.com. (shrink)

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries marks a period of transition between the vitalistic ontology that had dominated Renaissance natural philosophy and the Early Modern mechanistic paradigm endorsed by, among others, the Cartesians and Newtonians. This paper will focus on how the tensions between vitalism and mechanism played themselves out in the context of sixteenth and seventeenth century chemistry and chemical philosophy, particularly in the works of Paracelsus, Jan Baptista Van Helmont, Robert Fludd, and Robert Boyle. Rather than argue that these (...) natural philosophers each embraced either fully vitalistic or fully mechanistic ontologies, I hope to demonstrate that these thinkers adhered to complicated and nuanced ontologies that cannot be described in either purely vitalistic or purely mechanistic terms. A central feature of my argument is the claim that a corpuscularian theory of matter does not entail a strictly mechanistic and reductionistic account of chemical properties. I also argue that what marks the shift from pre-modern vitalistic chemical philosophy to the modern chemical philosophy that marked the Chemical Revolution is not the victory of mechanism and reductionism in chemistry but, rather, the shift to a physicalistic and naturalistic account of chemical properties and vital spirits. (shrink)

Computer science advocates institutional frameworks as an effective tool for modelling policies and reasoning about their interplay. In practice, the rules or policies, of which the institutional framework consists, are often specified using a formal language, which allows for the full verification and validation of the framework (e.g. the consistency of policies) and the interplay between the policies and actors (e.g. violations). However, when modelling large-scale realistic systems, with numerous decision-making entities, scalability and complexity issues arise making it possible only (...) to verify certain portions of the problem without reducing the scale. In the social sciences, agent-based modelling is a popular tool for analysing how entities interact within a system and react to the system properties. Agent-based modelling allows the specification of complex decision-making entities and experimentation with large numbers of different parameter sets for these entities in order to explore their effects on overall system performance. In this paper we describe how to achieve the best of both worlds, namely verification of a formal specification combined with the testing of large-scale systems with numerous different actor configurations. Hence, we offer an approach that allows for reasoning about policies, policy making and their consequences on a more comprehensive level than has been possible to date. We present the institutional agent-based model methodology to combine institutional frameworks with agent-based simulations). We furthermore present J-InstAL, a prototypical implementation of this methodology using the InstAL institutional framework whose specifications can be translated into a computational model under the answer set semantics, and an agent-based simulation based on the jason tool. Using a simplified contract enforcement example, we demonstrate the functionalities of this prototype and show how it can help to assess an appropriate fine level in case of contract violations. (shrink)

This is a review of the book Mozg - kultura - socium. Kantianskaya programma v cognitivnykh issledovaniyakh by Bazhanov V.A. The author`s main aim is a reconsideration of some fundamental principles of epistemology and philosophy of science in the light of state-of-the-art advancements of neurosciences. According to the author of the book, social and cultural revolution in neurosciences has been crucially modifying the initial Kantian program of consciousness research and the modes of linguistic representation of its results. In particular, in (...) epistemology the universal concept of transcendental subject has been altered with regard to neurobiological and social data, which concern some preconditions of cognitive activity. In philosophy of science such a shift of research perspective allows to implement a naturalistic interpretation of natural sciences, clarifies the problem of empirical foundations of mathematics and sheds a new light on the problem of apriori elements of mathematical thought. The analysis of evolutionary and neurobiological preconditions of logical thought leads to the sort of revival of psychologism program in logic, which enables author to put forward an original interpretation of the problem of plurality of logical systems. Finally, some topics of social sciences as well as problems of genesis of art, ethical and religious systems, can acquire new interpretation with respect to modern investigations in cognitive science. (shrink)

One of several important issues that inform contemporary philosophy of chemistry is the issue of structural explanation, precisely because modern chemistry is primarily concerned with microstructure. This paper argues that concern over microstructure, albeit understood differently than it is today, also informs the chemical philosophy of Robert Boyle. According to Boyle, the specific microstructure of ‘chymical atoms’, understood in geometric terms, accounts for the unique essential properties of different chemical substances. Because he considers the microstructure of ‘chymical atoms’ as semi-permanent, (...) Boyle considers these stable entities as operationally irreducible, even if they are not ontologically fundamental. While it is generally believed that our contemporary concern over structural explanation is a function of modern chemistry’s emphasis on microstructure, this discussion of structural explanation in Boyle will serve as a case study to illustrate the manner in which many of our contemporary concerns have deeply historical origins and the manner in which the history of chemistry can substantively inform issues in contemporary philosophy of chemistry. (shrink)

This paper examines whether classical extensional mereology is adequate for formalizing the whole–parts relation in quantum chemical systems. Although other philosophers have argued that classical extensional and summative mereology does not adequately formalize whole–parts relation within organic wholes and social wholes, such critiques often assume that summative mereology is appropriate for formalizing the whole–parts relation in inorganic wholes such as atoms and molecules. However, my discussion of atoms and molecules as they are conceptualized in quantum chemistry will establish that standard (...) mereology cannot adequately fulfill this task, since the properties and behavior of such wholes are context-dependent and cannot simply be reduced to the summative properties of their parts. To the extent that philosophers of chemistry have called for the development of an alternative mereology for quantum chemical systems, this paper ends by proposing behavioral mereology as a promising step in that direction. According to behavioral mereology, considerations of what constitutes a part of a whole is dependent upon the observable behavior displayed by these entities. Thus, relationality and context-dependence are stipulated from the outset and this makes behavioral mereology particularly well-suited as a mereology of quantum chemical wholes. The question of which mereology is appropriate for formalizing the whole–parts relation in quantum chemical systems is relevant to contemporary philosophy of chemistry, since this issue is related to the more general questions of the reducibility of chemical wholes to their parts and of the reducibility of chemistry to physics, which have been of central importance within the philosophy of chemistry for several decades. More generally, this paper puts contemporary discussions of mereology within the philosophy of chemistry into a broader historical and philosophical context. In doing so, this paper also bridges the gap between formal mereology, conceived as a branch of formal ontology, and “applied” mereology, conceived as a branch of philosophy of science. (shrink)

El propósito de este ensayo es discutir si existe una tal cosa como una moral cristiana “específica” y cómo hemos de definirla y comprenderla. Sugiero que si existe, ella no debería ser entendida como un sistema moral que sería válido en un sentido realista, “objetivista” o convencional, sino que más bien su especificidad debería basarse en la clase de motivación a la que daría lugar. Esto quiere decir que lo que pudiéramos definir como una moral cristiana genuina es una nueva (...) ontología, una nueva manera de concebir a los seres humanos, más que un sistema normativo cuya interpretación descansaría en la autoridad y no en su validez interna o intrínseca. Su fundamentación ha de ser, entonces, “postconvencional”. Intento mostrar este punto apoyada en distintas fuentes teológicas, tales como en la teología paulina y en su impacto en distintos teólogos contemporáneos de la moral. Todos los teólogos contemporáneos citados por mí están de acuerdo en que la revelación evangélica hace posible una motivación moral autónoma que se apoya en el discernimiento personal, más que en una pretendida opinión autorizada. (shrink)

¿Por qué hay que suscribir tratados que prohiban la clonación de individuos humanos? Las implicaciones de la reciente clonación de Dolly y las posibilidades técnicamente abiertas a la clonación de humanos requiere que reflexionemos acerca de lo que estaría mal si la humanidad, ahora en un futuro que ya no esta más lejos de nuestro alcance, comienza a clonar individuos humanos. En primer lugar, examino y explico en que consiste una clonación a partir de células somáticas. En segundo lugar, analizo (...) los problemas e implicaciones del procedimiento desde el punto de vista ético. (shrink)