This review will develop a theme from the theoretical contrast between Max Weber and Adorno approach of the concept of “progress”, read by their discussions on, respectively, “The Meaning of Wertfreiheit in Sociology and Economics” (1917) and “Fortschritt”, (Progress, 1962). After establishing a comparison between both writings and their theoretical tools, we shall identify the differences in resources by the critical and traditional theory elements. The opposition shall become more distinctly as the comparison reach the historical examples from their readings (...) on Art History. Weber has employed a general bias to equate musical productions and painting, as Adorno, on the other hand, forecast something quite different as he followed the same guideline, the technical progress. (shrink)

A partir de uma revisão bibliográfica do século XVIII, resgataremos elementos que estavam naraiz da concepção universalista de homem desse século, como pertencente ao continuum da natureza.Com recurso aos métodos da antropologia estrutural, analisaremos nosso objeto que está situado nosdomínios do pensamento científico do século XVIII. O principal objetivo consistirá em identificar erecuperar a influência de alguns “mitos” acerca de seres antropomorfos, recuperando a origem dealgumas representações gráficas desses seres. A partir de algumas fontes de Rousseau e seuscontemporâneos, esboçaremos algumas (...) versões desses mitos para, ao final, aplicarmos recursos a queLévi-Strauss recorreu diante de elementos sincrônicos e anacrônicos de sua análise do mitemas. (shrink)

In the following pages, the main proposal is to indicate how Max Weber has dialogued directly with some prerogatives from Kant’s Critic of practical Reason, following the reception of Wilhelm Windelband’s concept of “responsibility” (Verantwortlichkeit) and his theory of values. In sight of these influences, in this paper will be argued how Weber adherence to the neo-Kantian value concept has made possible a review on the categorical imperatives, which has turned his reading from Kantian philosophy to the proposal of an (...) antinomy between the ethic of conviction and the ethic of responsibility inside the Kantian moral maxims. -/- Nessa abordagem será proposto que a recepção de Max Weber do conceito de “responsabilidade” (Verantwortlichkeit) de Wilhelm Windelband, bem como sua revisão de certos elementos da filosofia dos valores neokantiana do sudoeste da Alemanha, permitiram que Weber estabelecesse um diálogo mais direto com os pressupostos de Kant em sua Crítica da razão prática. Em vista dessas influências, o presente artigo argumentará que a maneira como Weber revisa os imperativos categóricos direcionou sua compreensão da filosofia kantiana pelo conceito de “valores”, o permitindo ainda, propor a existência de uma antinomia entre a ética da convicção e da responsabilidade no interior das máximas morais kantianas. (shrink)

Voltaire has presented in his Letters on the English different themes, from religious ethics, literacy, politics, to dramas and science. The letters present us a comparison between England and France. In this parallel we shall present how Voltaire was concerned in evaluate a high standard of taste and refinements. This paper will review some of the last letters of those, which testify about this criterion of taste as a modern point of view. We shall present in Voltaire the eminence of (...) modernity in taste, refinements and on liberty of enjoying the ecstasies of a cosmopolitan life fulfilled with entertainments and luxury. We shall present how Voltaire fought against barbarism in benefit of civilization and some how against religiosity in benefit of an ethic hedonism. (shrink)

The tragic death in Tolstoy's writings has helped both Max Weber and György Lukács in characterizing the modern pathos as a tragic contemplation of the emptiness of life. Through Tolstoy's readings, Weber and Lukács found an interesting source of denying arts and modern sciences autonomy, considering, from the aesthetics sphere, the meaningless of this new immanent reality. Both has assumed Tolstoy main theme from the same perspective, contrasting ancient and modern worldviews. Max Weber presented this theme in his disenchantment of (...) world theory and Lukács, in a very similar way, following the paradox of religious needing as a mainline. -/- O tema da morte trágica, presente nos escritos de Liev Tolstói, auxiliou tanto a Max Weber como a György Lukács a caracterizarem o pathos moderno de pressentimento da morte como uma contemplação do vazio. Weber e Lukács encontraram, através das leituras de Tolstói, uma interessante maneira de questionar a autonomia da arte e da ciência moderna, considerando pela esfera estética, como se mostra sem sentido a recente realidade imanente. Ambos assumiram o tema central das obras de Tolstói segundo uma mesma imagem, derivada do contraste entre o mundo antigo e o moderno. Max Weber adequou esse tema a sua teoria do desencantamento do mundo e Lukács, de modo muito semelhante, seguindo seu conceito do paradoxo da necessidade religiosa. (shrink)

This article intend to elucidate how Wilhelm Windelband employed the Kantian critic method without devoid its typical features, going through this, what is fundamental for the approach from speculative reason to practical reason would be identified. We understand that practical reason, as a theoretical interest, is prefigured on the first critic, and that the Kantian system suffers mutations until his second critic formulation. Windelband’s critical view, can offer the tips of how to interpreter Kant’s passage from speculative to practical reason, (...) observing the elements witch are kept, as constant elements, the third antinomy for stance, and witch one changes among the course, as the ideas of liberty and nature in both theoretical and practical sense. Windelband can unfold to notice those variations and help to understand them in the development of Kantian theories as elements not contradictories with the canon of speculative reason. (shrink)

Comments on the paper: Pluralismo y absolutismo en la crítica. Dialéctica reflexiva y política democrática a partir de M. Horkheimer y Th. W. Adorno, by Emiliano Matías Gambarotta.

There are many ways in which a speaker can confuse their audience. In this paper, I will focus on one such way, namely, a way of talking that seems to manifest a cross-level kind of cognitive dissonance on the part of the speaker. The goal of the paper is to explain why such ways of talking sound so twisted. The explanation is two-pronged, since their twisted nature may come either from the very mental states that the speaker thereby makes manifest, (...) or from how the speaker chooses to express themselves (even if there is nothing wrong with their mental states). So-called ‘Moore-paradoxical’ utterances are but one example of the phenomenon, and the explanation of what is wrong about them is subsumed under a more general explanation here—one that captures also the twisted-ness of utterances whereby questions are raised or intentions expressed. (shrink)

In this paper I present reasons for us to accept the hypothesis that suspended judgment has correctness conditions, just like beliefs do. Roughly put, the idea is that suspended judgment about p is correct when both p and ¬p might be true in view of certain facts that characterize the subject’s situation. The reasons to accept that hypothesis are broadly theoretical ones: it adds unifying power to our epistemological theories, it delivers good and conservative consequences, and it allows us to (...) assess processes of reasoning involving attitudes of suspended judgment. (shrink)

Um alinhamento responsável à alguma versão do naturalismo filosófico requer a articulação explicita e cuidadosa de um argumento em sua defesa. Em quatro passos, o texto que segue abaixo expande e examina a validade de um argumento que é frequentemente rascunhado em favor do naturalismo. Como veremos, contudo, a versão do naturalismo que esse argumento nos permite é um pouco diferente dos naturalismos filosóficos mais populares.

What I call the Doxastic Puzzle, is the impression that while each of these claims seems true, at least one of them must be false: (a) Claims of the form ‘S ought to have doxastic attitude D towards p at t’ are sometimes true at t, (b) If Φ-ing at t is not within S’s effective control at t, then it is false, at t, that ‘S ought to Φ at t’, (c) For all S, p, and t, having doxastic (...) attitude D towards p at t is not within S’s effective control at t. All three natural replies to the puzzle have been pursued. Some have claimed that doxastic attitudes like believing that p are, in fact, within our effective control, or sufficiently so. Others have claimed that doxastic ought-claims, strictly speaking, are always false. And some have denied that effective control is required for the adequacy of doxastic ought-claims in general. I here pursue and examine a different strategy. In the first part of this paper, I argue that these claims are not only each true but actually not in tension with each other in the first place. Instead of attempting to dispel the puzzle, this solution proposes to evade it instead: to solve it by properly understanding, and by thereby accepting without contradiction, all of its constitutive claims. In the second part of the paper, I argue that the evasive strategy forces us to re-think our understanding of the place of normative reasons in epistemology. More exactly, it seems to come at the cost of one central way of thinking about our reasons for having doxastic attitudes, one where such reasons are good-standing exemplars of normative reasons in general. The evasive strategy, that is, threatens to lead us very quickly to a deflationary picture of epistemic normativity: it rescues normative talk, but sacrifices normative substance. I conclude by explaining why I think this is more consequential than some have made it out to be, and by suggesting that these consequences are welcome nonetheless. (shrink)

My starting point is what I call the Normative Authority Conception of justification, where S is justified in their belief that p at t (to some degree n) if and only if their believing that p at t is not ruled out by epistemic norms that have normative authority over S at t. With this in mind, this paper develops an account of doxastic justification by first developing an account of the normative authority of epistemic norms. Drawing from work in (...) political philosophy, I argue that (a) the cognitive and evaluative commitments and concerns behind our actual practices of holding each other and ourselves accountable for our beliefs reveal which epistemic norms we have consented to be under, and that (b) it is because we have consented to be under the authority of these norms – by actually holding ourselves and others accountable to them – that they in turn have normative authority over us. By connecting the authority of epistemic norms to the authority we have over ourselves in this way, the resulting account of doxastic justification (i) explains why it can be appropriate to criticize, resent, or sanction someone for having unjustified beliefs, (ii) avoids the phenomena of normative alienation and normative parochialism, and (iii) respects the social and collective nature of epistemic justification. (shrink)

More than a school of philosophy with a defined set of beliefs and convictions, classical Cynicism represents an unconventional sect of philosophers and a way of life. This is a complete account of classical Cynicism from its beginnings in the Socratic circle to its extinction in late Roman times. In this thoroughly documented study, Navia explores various issues related to the sources of information about the Cynics, the development of Cynicism, and the principal representatives of classical Cynicism. Exploring the relationship (...) between classical Cynicism and cynicism as understood in its ordinary modern sense, the author argues that despite their common designation, they represent significantly different philosophical attitudes. This book explicates the main ideas associated with classical Cynicism and argues that, its shortcomings notwithstanding, classical Cynicism furnishes us with a wealthy source of philosophical enlightenment. Individual chapters are devoted to Antisthenes, Diogenes, and Crates, the three principal classical Cynics. Attention is given to the development and application of certain fundamental Cynic ideas and to the transformation of these ideas throughout the eight centuries during which Cynicism was an influential philosophical movement. The book provides abundant references to primary and secondary sources and includes a bibliography of over five hundred entries. (shrink)

-- 2. Sujetos, referencia y reflexión.

In this novel account of global citizenship, Luis Cabrera argues that all individuals have a global duty to contribute directly to human rights protections and to promote rights-enhancing political integration between states. The Practice of Global Citizenship blends careful moral argument with compelling narratives from field research among unauthorized immigrants, activists seeking to protect their rights, and the 'Minuteman' activists striving to keep them out. Immigrant-rights activists, especially those conducting humanitarian patrols for border-crossers stranded in the brutal Arizona desert, (...) are shown as embodying aspects of global citizenship. Unauthorized immigrants themselves are shown to be enacting a form of global 'civil' disobedience, claiming the economic rights central to the emerging global normative charter while challenging the restrictive membership regimes that are the norm in the current global system. Cabrera also examines the European Union, seeing it as a crucial laboratory for studying the challenges inherent in expanding citizen membership. (shrink)

Could global government be the answer to global poverty and starvation? Cosmopolitan thinkers challenge the widely held belief that we owe more to our co-citizens than to those in other countries. This book offers a moral argument for world government, claiming that not only do we have strong obligations to people elsewhere, but that accountable integration among nation-states will help ensure that all persons can lead a decent life. Cabrera considers both the views of those political philosophers who say we (...) have much stronger obligations to help our co-citizens than foreigners and those cosmopolitans who say our duties are equally strong to each but resist restructuring. He then outlines his own position, using the European Union as a partial model for the integrated alternative and advocating instituting EU-style supranational government, development aid, and free movement of persons in the Americas and other regions. Over time, Cabrera argues that the transformation of the global system into a cohesive network of democratic institutions would help ensure that anyone born anywhere could lead a decent life. This book will appeal to all those interested in political philosophy and the processes and potential of globalization. (shrink)

Contemporary studies in unconscious cognition are essentially founded on dissociation, i.e., on how it dissociates with respect to conscious mental processes and representations. This is claimed to be in so many and diverse ways that one is often lost in dissociation. In order to reduce this state of confusion we here carry out two major tasks: based on the central distinction between cognitive processes and representations, we identify and isolate the main dissociation paradigms; we then critically analyze their key tenets (...) and reported findings. (shrink)

“Literature and the Right to Death” is probably the most quoted of French thinker Maurice Blanchot’s texts. For decades it has been discussed by such important figures as Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, or even the writer Paul Auster. Its importance is twofold: on the one hand, it is often considered an important gateway to Blanchot’s literary thought. On the other hand, it constitutes a substantial example of the new reception of Hegel in France after the Second World War. Although there (...) is no doubt about its Kojèvo-Hegelian inspiration and its center in what we could call “literary experience”, this article intends to explore another of its layers: its relation to the discussion around humanism and the Terror, as forgotten as it was central in France at the end of the 1940’s. We will thus try to lay the foundations for a new reading of this fundamental piece in Blanchot’s production. (shrink)

Since Freud and his co-author Breuer spoke of dissociation in 1895, a scientific paradigm was painstakingly established in the field of unconscious cognition. This is the dissociation paradigm. However, recent critical analysis of the many and various reported dissociations reveals their blurred, or unveridical, character. Moreover, we remain ignorant with respect to the ways cognitive phenomena transition from consciousness to an unconscious mode. This hinders us from filling in the puzzle of the unified mind. We conclude that we have reached (...) a Kuhnian crisis in the field of unconscious cognition, and we predict that new models, incorporating partly the relevant findings of the dissociation paradigm—but also of dynamic psychology—, will soon be established. We further predict that some of these models will be largely based on the pairs representation–process and analog–digital. (shrink)

Cosmopolitanism is said by many critics to be arrogant. In emphasizing universal principles and granting no fundamental moral significance to national or other group belonging, it wrongly treats those making non-universalist claims as not authorized to speak, while treating those in non-Western societies as not qualified. This book works to address such objections. It does so in part by engaging the work of B.R. Ambedkar, architect of India's 1950 Constitution and revered champion of the country's Dalits (formerly "untouchables"). Ambedkar cited (...) universal principles of equality and rights in confronting domestic exclusions and the "arrogance" of caste. He sought to advance forms of political humility, or the affirmation of equal standing within political institutions and openness to input and challenge within them. This book examines how an "institutional global citizenship" approach to cosmopolitanism could similarly advance political humility, in supporting the development of input and challenge mechanisms beyond the state. It employs a grounded normative theory method, taking insights for the model from field research among Dalit activists pressing for domestic reforms through the UN human rights regime, and from their critics in the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party. Insights also are taken from Turkish protesters challenging a rising domestic authoritarianism, and from UK Independence Party members demanding "Brexit" from the European Union-in part because of possibilities that predominantly Muslim Turkey will join. Overall, it is shown, an appropriately configured institutional cosmopolitanism should orient fundamentally to political humility rather than arrogance, while holding significant potential for advancing global rights protections and more equitable rights specifications. (shrink)

Viruses and related infectious genetic parasites are the most abundant biological agents on this planet. They invade all cellular organisms, are key agents in the generation of adaptive and innate immune systems, and drive nearly all regulatory processes within living cells.

Foundational ontologies, central constructs in ontological investigations and engineering alike, are based on ontological categories. Firstly proposed by Aristotle as the very ur- elements from which the whole of reality can be derived, they are not easy to identify, let alone partition and/or hierarchize; in particular, the question of their number poses serious challenges. The late medieval philosopher Dietrich of Freiberg wrote around 1286 a tutorial that can help us today with this exceedingly difficult task. In this paper, I discuss (...) ontological categories and their importance for foundational ontologies from both the contemporary perspective and the original Aristotelian viewpoint, I provide the translation from the Latin into English of Dietrich's De origine II with an introductory elaboration, and I extract a foundational ontology–that is in fact a single-category one–from this text rooted in Dietrich's specification of types of subjecthood and his conception of intentionality as causal operation. (shrink)

¿Cuándo se fundan los conocimientos en razones objetivas? ¿Cómo influyen deseos e intereses? Villoro analiza sistemáticamente los conceptos epistemológicos fundamentales: creencia, certeza, saber, conocimiento, y establece sus relaciones con las razones que justifican la verdad de las creencias y con los motivos que pueden distorsionarlas. El libro desemboca en un estudio de las relaciones de creencias y conocimientos con los preceptos que rigen la vida práctica en sociedad. Las condiciones de racionalidad de las creencias aparecen entonces como condiciones de realización (...) de una vida racional y libre. (shrink)

In the 1990s, Franklin Leopoldo e Silva wrote several articles on the question of history from the Pascalian point of view. This article intends to resume these texts, showing how they present a complex and structured view on the subject. Reflecting on Pascal’s theological discussions, Leopoldo e Silva shows us how the French philosopher paves the way for a renewed conception of historicity.

This work is a self-contained elementary exposition of the theory of recursive functionals, that also includes a number of advanced results.

Esta coleccion de ensayos reune temas y preocupaciones constantes en el autor, pero enfocados desde los distintos angulos de una amplia comprension y revision de los mismos. En cada ensayo esta latente la intencion alerta del maestro y el pensador activo: "La actividad filosofica autentica, la que no se limita a reiterar pensamientos establecidos, no puede menos que ejercerse en libertad.".

Ontologies are some of the most central constructs in today's large plethora of knowledge technologies, namely in the context of the semantic web. As their coinage indicates, they are direct heirs to the ontological investigations in the long Western philosophical tradition, but it is not easy to make bridges between them. Contemporary ontological commitments often take causality as a central aspect for the ur-segregation of entities, especially in scientific upper ontologies; theories of causality and philosophical ontological investigations often go hand-in-hand, (...) and were essentially inseparable in medieval thought. This constitutes the foundation for a bridge, and this article analyzes the causality-based ontology of the late medieval philosopher Dietrich of Freiberg from the viewpoint of today's upper-ontology engineering. In this bridging attempt, it offers a translation into English of the first part of Dietrich's De origine (abbreviated title) that is a compromise between traditional scholarly translations of medieval Latin philosophical texts and contemporary ontology. (shrink)

Las respuestas de la Ética a los grandes retos del nuevo humanismo: la manipulación genética, el uso de la technología, la bioética y la ética ecológica, la ética política, los derechos de los animales, la sostenibilidad y el sistema económico globalizado.--Back cover.

Frente al agotamiento del sistema democrático occidental y sus limitaciones, Luis Villoro ve al futuro y plantea la necesidad de construir nuevos Estados y replantear las sociedades a partir de tres ejes centrales: justicia, democracia ...

The representational nature of human cognition and thought in general has been a source of controversies. This is particularly so in the context of studies of unconscious cognition, in which representations tend to be ontologically and structurally segregated with regard to their conscious status. However, it appears evolutionarily and developmentally unwarranted to posit such segregations, as,otherwise, artifact structures and ontologies must be concocted to explain them from the viewpoint of the human cognitive architecture. Here, from a by-and-large Classical cognitivist viewpoint, (...) I show why this segregation is wrong, and elaborate on the need to postulate an ontological and structural continuity between unconscious and conscious representations. Specifically, I hypothesize that this continuity is to be found in the symbolic-based interplay between the syntax and the semantics of thought, and I propose a model of human information processing characterized by the integration of syntactic and semantic representations. (shrink)

The van Wijngaarden grammars are two-level grammars that present many interesting properties. In the present article I elaborate on six of these properties, to wit, (i) their being constituted by two grammars, (ii) their ability to generate (possibly infinitely many) strict languages and their own metalanguage, (iii) their context-sensitivity, (iv) their high descriptive power, (v) their productivity, or the ability to generate an infinite number of production rules, and (vi) their equivalence with the unrestricted, or Type-0, Chomsky grammars.

Theodor W. Adorno’s letter correspondence with Walter Benjamin throughout the decade of the 1930’s entertains the central question concerning the possibility of philosophy in their intellectual milieu. The fate of this possibility for Adorno hinges on Benjamin’s work-in-progress Das Passagen-Werk—a fate that is catastrophically blocked by an uncritical tendency convicted repeatedly by the former as “undialectical.” And yet Adorno obstinately persists in clinging to the canon of a philosophically overdetermined demand he endearingly calls “my Arcades orthodoxy.” The threatening destruction of (...) the aura of this orthodoxy reaches a crisis in Adorno’s ruthless metacritique of Benjamin’s alleged undialectical treatment of aesthetic autonomy in a draft of the Kunstwerk essay, marking a critical wound in the correspondence which the following exposition tracks in the enigmatic changeover in the philosophical exigency of the said orthodoxy from prima philosophia to ultima philosophia. The lingering wound is registered in Adorno’s late philosophical work. (shrink)

The traditional model of human cognition (TMHC) postulates an ontological and/or structural gap between conscious and unconscious mental representations. By and large, it sees higher-level mental processes as commonly conceptual or symbolic in nature and therefore conscious, whereas unconscious, lower-level representations are conceived as non-conceptual or sub-symbolic. However, experimental evidence belies this model, suggesting that higher-level mental processes can be, and often are, carried out in a wholly unconscious way and/or without conceptual representations, and that these can be processed unconsciously. (...) This entails that the TMHC, as well as the theories on mental representation it motivates and that in turn support it, is wrong. (shrink)