Aún no hay consenso sobre el sentido de la filosofía en la obra de Jorge Luis Borges. Los ejemplos de la crítica que doy a continuación van desde aquellos que se oponen a ver en el corpus borgesiano ideas filosóficas serias (Sábalo, Massuh) hasta quienes hablan de Borges como un verdadero filósofo de América Latina (Moulines). En el medio, hay interpretaciones moderadas y muy sugestivas. Estas últimas son las más: algunas destejen los hilos filosóficos en la obra de Borges (Ñuño, (...) Dapía), otras filosofan con Borges (Champeau, Sierra Mejía) y las últimas sitúan esa obra en la historia de la filosofía de Occidente (Rest, Mateos). (shrink)

To answer the question whether I am dreaming or awake, and whether there exists an outer correlate of my representations while awake, I consider the meaning of dreaming and wakefulness in Calderón and Descartes. Then I consider the nature, origin, limits, and function that each author gives to doubting. Before concluding, I reconstruct Calderón’s and Descartes’ arguments through which the dramaturge and the philosopher somehow recover that which they previously considered realistic certainty.

Por una parte, la carta que Kant escribe a Marcus Herz el 2l de febrero de 1772 es famosa, pues ella es quizá el único documento de valor que informa sobre una década previa al criticismo durante la cual Kant dejo de publicar. Ésta es la década que va desde 1770, fecha de la De Mundi Sensibilis atque Intelligibilis Forma et Principiis: Dissertatio, y la primera edición de la Crítica de la razón pura (1781). La carta de algún modo es (...) un vistazo al “taller del pensador”, donde Kant narraría las preocupaciones filosóficas de su pensamiento. Por otra parte, la carta es ambigua todavía, porque la crítica aún no se pone de acuerdo sobre su sentido. Mis páginas defienden que esta carta es un ejemplo del carácter híbrido del pensamiento de Kant en ese período, un pensamiento que, sin mayor influencia del escepticismo, aún se debate entre anticipaciones críticas y meras repeticiones dogmáticas. (shrink)

There are some recurring symbols in the literature of Jorge Luis Borges, and once those symbols are understood, authors are admitted into the labyrinthine terrain of Borges’s mind and writing. The symbols are the labyrinth, the book, the mirror, the tiger, the courage of irony, words that are music, and the friend. The first four symbols are tools that the author uses to confuse the reader (the labyrinth), a curiosity that can never be satisfied (the book), the awareness of multiple (...) selves (the mirror), and the anticipation of death (the tiger). The other three symbols provide a certain palliative for the melancholic pessimism inspired by the first four symbols. The courage of irony and words that are music give room for a certain individual joy inside the Borgesian universe. Finally, for those who long to escape from isolation, the friend depicts a possible metaphysical opening to intimacy with other human beings. (shrink)

Tanto le debo a Lelio Fernández... La enumeración incompleta de esa deuda me lleva a mis años de filosofía en Cali, Colombia, de 1985 a 1989. En sus clases, gracias al placer por la lectura en detalle, Lelio contagiaba con la emoción de querer entender; lograba conectarnos con la historia de la cultura sin desplegar ninguna ayuda “audio-visual”; transmitía su deseo de estar siempre saboreando las obras de Baruch Spinoza (1632‒1677) y de Jorge Luis Borges (1899‒1986); se limitaba a sentarse (...) detrás de un escritorio en los salones de clase, hablando bajo y con precisión y con emoción contenida; era necesario llegar casi dos horas antes a ese salón de clase en la Universidad del Valle para no estar obligado a medio-escuchar sus pensamientos en el corredor; me ayudó en la traducción de los apartes en latín, y aún no publicados en castellano, que Umberto Eco (1932‒2016) incluyó en El nombre de la rosa; y tradujo al castellano, con Jean-Paul Margot, el Breve tratado de la reforma del entendimiento también de Spinoza. (shrink)

Current work in language models (LMs) helps us speed up or even skip thinking by accelerating and automating cognitive work. But can LMs help us with critical thinking -- thinking in deeper, more reflective ways which challenge assumptions, clarify ideas, and engineer new concepts? We treat philosophy as a case study in critical thinking, and interview 21 professional philosophers about how they engage in critical thinking and on their experiences with LMs. We find that philosophers do not find LMs to (...) be useful because they lack a sense of selfhood (memory, beliefs, consistency) and initiative (curiosity, proactivity). We propose the selfhood-initiative model for critical thinking tools to characterize this gap. Using the model, we formulate three roles LMs could play as critical thinking tools: the Interlocutor, the Monitor, and the Respondent. We hope that our work inspires LM researchers to further develop LMs as critical thinking tools and philosophers and other 'critical thinkers' to imagine intellectually substantive uses of LMs. (shrink)

This reconsideration of Hume’s classic essay “Of Miracles” via the lens of American pragmatist ways of thinking about history and power shifts our attention from Hume’s epistemic concerns about the legitimacy of witnesses and testimony to his distaste for sacred history, his critical stance regarding the social force of revelation, and his disdain for religious authority. To view Hume’s essay both as an articulation of a critical philosophy of history and as an exercise in moral dynamism (social power or, authority, (...) is a result of epistemic transactions), is to intervene in both Hume studies and Contemporary Pragmatism. (shrink)

Under the lig ht of Being and Nothingness’s the o re t ical body – Sartre’s master piece –, it is intended to discuss the essential source of human reality as “n i h i l a t i o n” and ontological lack, as well as manifestations and cons e q u e nces from this primordial human passion to be transformed to coagulated transcendence, to be transformed in Being In-itself-For-itself: to be consciousness and, at the same t i (...) me, to be a complete and finished Being, with infinite de nsity and witho u t fissures. (shrink)

An examination of David Hume's philosophy of religion that situates his conception "true religion" within the context of his overall science of human nature, his rejection of popular religion, and his Ciceronian influence"--Provided by publisher.

Drawing on recent findings, this study examines whether valence concordant electromyography (EMG) responses can be explained as an unconditional effect of mere stimulus processing or as somatosensory simulation driven by task-dependent processing strategies. While facial EMG over the Corrugator supercilii and the Zygomaticus major was measured, each participant performed two tasks with pictures of album covers. One task was an affective evaluation task and the other was to attribute the album covers to one of five decades. The Embodied Emotion Account (...) predicts that valence concordant EMG is more likely to occur if the task necessitates a somatosensory simulation of the evaluative meaning of stimuli. Results support this prediction with regard to Corrugator supercilii in that valence concordant EMG activity was only present in the affective evaluation task but not in the non-evaluative task. Results for the Zygomaticus major were ambiguous. Our findings are in line with the view that EMG activity is an embodied part of the evaluation process and not a mere physical outcome. (shrink)

English summary: Marc Andre Wiegand analyzes the neo-Kantian premises of Gustav Radbruch's legal philosophy.

Modern ethical perspectives toward the environment often emphasize the connection of humans to a broader biotic community. The full intimacy of this connectedness, however, is only now being revealed as scientific findings in developmental biology and genetics provide new insights into the importance of environmental interaction for the development of organisms. These insights are reshaping our understanding of how organism-environment interaction contributes to both consistency and variation in organism development, and leading to a new perspective whereby an “organism” is not (...) solely viewed as the adaptive product of evolutionary selection to an external environment over generations, but as continuously being constructed through systems of interactions that link an organism’s characteristics developmentally to the physical and social influences it experiences during life. This newfound emphasis on “interaction” leads to an interdependency whereby any change to an “environment” impacts the interacting “organism,” and an alteration to the “organism” eventually affects its “environment.” The causal reciprocity embedded within this organism-environment interdependency holds implications for our moral obligations to environments, given their compulsory role in shaping all organisms including ourselves. (shrink)

La distinción sexo-género, introducida en la teorización feminista de los años setenta, habría puesto de manifiesto la pertinencia de distinguir entre el sexo y las representaciones socio-culturales e identitarias en las que aquel encontraría su despliegue. De la mano de Judith Butler, la teoría queer parece haber llevado esta distinción hasta el extremo, al sostener que existiría una discontinuidad radical entre los cuerpos sexuados y los géneros culturalmente construidos, y proponer una concepción performativa del género, que pondría de relieve el (...) papel central del sujeto en la configuración de su propia identidad. Sujeto que, sin embargo, ya no sería reconocido como mujer o como hombre, pues toda categoría referente a la distinción entre los sexos o entre los géneros binarios (masculino-femenino) habría sido cuestionada de forma radical. A partir de una aproximación a la distinción inicial sexo-género en el marco del debate feminista y de sus antecedentes, el objeto de este trabajo es indagar cómo se plantea esta distinción en una de las obras emblemáticas y pioneras de la filósofa norteamericana Judith Butler ―Gender Trouble―, a fin de abrir algunas líneas de discusión en torno a las aportaciones y limitaciones que habría traído consigo un discurso que nos confronta con la pregunta fundamental por la configuración de la identidad sexual y de género de la persona. (shrink)

The Confessions of Augustine can be read as a summary and presentation of the Saint’s past life, but the whole book is a book in the present, since Augustine indicates the events he has had to face, the events in the past of his life, but from the reflective today at the moment of writing. Beyond narrating experienced situations, the Confessions are a permanent self-reflection of what he remembers, of what he is, of what he expects, but all in a (...) present, describing concrete things, trying to find the reason why they are remembered and why they caused an impact on his person. A first step is to say what happened, then try to find out why it happened that way, as well as how you can say what happened. It is a confession with transcendence, to educate, to prevent, to remember, to reach the Truth, which is always present. (shrink)

En este artículo se analizan los mecanismos de democracia directa utilizados en los conflictos socioambientales en América Latina. Demuestra que dichos mecanismos están jugando un papel fundamental, al convertirse en un importante recurso de movilización y acción colectiva «desde abajo», mientras los gobiernos centrales «desde arriba» han tratado de limitar su alcance o prohibir su implementación, en la medida que pone en el debate público las consecuencias del modelo económico orientado a la apropiación extractivista de los recursos naturales.This article analyzes (...) the direct democracy mechanisms activated in middle of socioenvironmental conflicts in Latin America. It demonstrates that these mechanisms are playing a fundamental role, becoming an important resource for mobilization and collective action «from below», while central governments «from above» have tried to limit the far reaching or prohibit the implementation of that, in view of that these mechanisms puts in the public debate the consequences of the economic model aimed at extractivist appropriation of natural resources. (shrink)

In the mid XIXth century, an illustrated intellectual minority questioned the colonial mentality of the system of Spanish domination revealing in its writings an attempt at construction of the sign of woman based on liberal, progressive and post independence ideologies. Within this minority we find the Colombian writer Soledad Acosta de Samper, whose concern for the social condition of women is revealed in her work in the image of an educated woman. Using the text La mujer en la sociedad moderna (...) [Woman in Modern Society] and the novel Una holandesa en América [A Dutch Woman in America], this article analyzes two aspects of the image of women in Acosta: that of woman as a moralizer and that of religiosity. The analysis of these two themes shows Acosta’s use of the normative discourses of the period in her project of giving woman a more important social role and they become strategies to tone down the potential for transgression of the new situation for women that she desires. (shrink)

Desde la antigüedad la reflexión sobre la imagen del arte se ha erigido como una de las tareas de la filosofía, más aun, desde el arte la filosofía ha tratado temas de gran relevancia para sí misma, como la imitación y el conocimiento, luego la imaginación, el juicio, la verdad, la interpretación. La fotografía surgió como un medio de hacer imágenes que cuestionó los principios fundamentales del arte, su relación con la naturaleza, la tradicional forma de hacer imágenes hasta entonces (...) conocida; puso además en tela de juicio los temas de la representación o géneros establecidos, pero también el arte cuestionó la incursión del nuevo medio en su dominio. (shrink)

We distinguish dynamical and statistical interpretations of evolutionary theory. We argue that only the statistical interpretation preserves the presumed relation between natural selection and drift. On these grounds we claim that the dynamical conception of evolutionary theory as a theory of forces is mistaken. Selection and drift are not forces. Nor do selection and drift explanations appeal to the (sub-population-level) causes of population level change. Instead they explain by appeal to the statistical structure of populations. We briefly discuss the implications (...) of the statistical interpretation of selection for various debates within the philosophy of biologythe `explananda of selection' debate and the `units of selection' debate. (shrink)

O presente artigo tem por objetivo desenvolver uma breve análise sobre o Sínodo Diocesano, orquestrado e vivido pela Igreja particular de Santo André, no ABC Paulista, no período de 2016-2017. Ele reflete o significado e a importância de um Sínodo dentro de uma Igreja tipicamente urbana, seus desafios e suas urgências, suas inspirações e finalidades; seu lema, “o sonho missionário de chegar a todos”, o sonho salvífico de Deus, que para isso se encarna na realidade humana, inculturando-se em uma (...) determinada cultura. (shrink)

We compare various notions of algorithmic randomness. First we consider relativized randomness. A set is n-random if it is Martin-Löf random relative to ∅. We show that a set is 2-random if and only if there is a constant c such that infinitely many initial segments x of the set are c-incompressible: C ≥ |x|-c. The ‘only if' direction was obtained independently by Joseph Miller. This characterization can be extended to the case of time-bounded C-complexity. Next we prove some results (...) on lowness. Among other things, we characterize the 2-random sets as those 1-random sets that are low for Chaitin's Ω. Also, 2-random sets form minimal pairs with 2-generic sets. The r.e. low for Ω sets coincide with the r.e. K-trivial ones. Finally we show that the notions of Martin-Löf randomness, recursive randomness, and Schnorr randomness can be separated in every high degree while the same notions coincide in every non-high degree. We make some remarks about hyperimmune-free and PA-complete degrees. (shrink)