Bruno Latour have been included among the ranks of social constructivism since the 1990’s. In this paper, we analyze one of Latour’s most cited -and criticized- papers, in which he sustained that to say that Ramses II died because of tuberculosis was a nonsense, as ridiculous as to say the he died “of machine gun fire”. To do that, we will contextualize his text in its historical period of production, we will identify Latour’s ontological commitments, and we will introduce his (...) theory on the construction of facts and what he calls circulating reference. We will conclude that Latour was right, neither Ramses II died because of tuberculosis, nor he is a social constructivist. (shrink)

The following paper aims to develop the theoretical and practical consequences, philosophical presuppositions, and intellectual aporias to which the reader of Rosi Braidotti is confronted in her approach of an ethics of becoming and the ethical relationships of a transposed or posthuman subject. We take for this purpose two almost marginal examples of her book Transpositions, namely, the human relationships developed with Tamagotchis and other technologies and the so-called “ethics of the penultimate cigarette” which is framed in the “transposition of (...) death.” Braidotti’s posture will be examined and criticized on the light of authors who have reflected, also almost marginally, on the same problems and their contextualization in contemporary and modern philosophy. We intend to show that the author’s claims presume to be schizophrenic and, indeed, she maintains an unfortunate schizophrenic proposal. (shrink)

At present, the critical views of meritocracy have spread to the point that it has come to identify itself both in the academic sphere and in the media with the expression of a kind of unsupportive rhetoric on the part of those privileged people who carry it out the idea of individual merit to avoid moral and legal obligations related to equality. Two examples of this trend are The Tyranny of Merit according to Michael Sandel, and in Spain, the recent (...) essay by César Rendueles Against Equal Opportunities. This article tries to place such criticisms in the narrow field of the meritocracy’s perceptions regarding a certain “arrogance” as a matter of “style”, refuting the substance of these critical views of merit. At the same time, some measures are pointed out to resolve the tension between the principles of merit and equality. (shrink)

The article takes Helmuth Plessner’s Political Anthropology from 1931 as a postfoundationalist theory of society avant la lettre - which is very similar to the later works of Claude Lefort, Ernesto Laclau, and Chantal Mouffe. Or, the article takes Plessner’s essay as an ‘ontology’ of the Political. After introducing remarks on the historical debates, in which Plessner aimed to intervene, his theory of the Political is reconstructed, within the three categories of ‘unfathomability’, of the constitutive outside, and of the vulnerability (...) of the human body. In a third and last step, Plessner’s most central and most problematic category for the Political - the ‘popular existence’ - is discussed: The ‘people’ is made visible as being a key notion of postfoundational theories of modern democracy, for it is - beneath the ‘Individual’ - one of the imaginary foundations, one of the foundational outsides of a democratically instituted collective. (shrink)

The fundamental principles of the classical utilitarian school characterize this trend as an administrative and legal criminology. This had two implications. On the one hand, the motives, and ultimate causes of the behavior and the unequal consequences of an arbitrary rule were ignored. On the other hand, the role of the judge was reduced to enforcing the law, while it was up to the judge to set a penalty for each offence. At the end of the nineteenth century, these principles (...) saw the gradual emergence of another punitive episteme that had emerged as a result of the colonization of the legal space by the positive sciences and etiological action programs. This was not a planned and pre-established course, but the confluence of a series of theories and programs for penal prevention that Michel Foucault summarized as the realization that the law was increasingly functioning as a norm. Now, criminality, besides being the object of scientific interest, also constitutes the indicator of a social problem and therefore its insertion in an economy of changing power. (shrink)

The article analyzes and interprets the feeling of nature in the work of Miguel de Unamuno, within the framework of his poetic philosophy, highlighting his affinity with Rousseau. Selecting and analyzing some of his writings, the feelings of fullness and tranquility that Unamuno experiences in contact with nature are tackled. In his love of nature, personalizing the living, don Miguel found both the joy of living and the peace that it made him recover strength to start new battles. Far from (...) the agonist Unamuno, the analyzed writings reveal the contemplative who enjoys life and experiences its fullness. (shrink)

This article seeks to problematise the opposition between democracy and republic that is at the foundation of political philosophy. Following this horizon, firstly, it explores the reason that allows political thought, on the one hand, to recognise the merit of democracy as the founding act of a republic, but, on the other, to ignore its role within already founded political bodies. Secondly, and with the help of Louis Althusser’s perspective, it is suggested that this ambiguous and paradoxical role of democracy (...) can be interpreted from a mystifying way of understanding ideology that is present in the most hegemonic political philosophies. Finally, it is proposed to approach the relationship between democracy and the body politic from Althusser’s reading of Machiavelli in his text Machiavelli and Us. (shrink)

Is the dilemma between social commitment and commitment to knowledge inevitable for intellectuals? This paper, based on the thought of Leopoldo Zea, and through a hermeneutical, analytical-conceptual, critical-evaluative, and theoretical-constructive method, argues that these commitments are not only compatible, but also implicate each other. To argue this point, it elaborates a conceptualization of the figure of intellectuals and his social commitment, according to which it is proper to them to articulate his theoretical activity to ethical and political transtheoretical activity, while (...) preserving the autonomy of theoretical activity and seeking universal knowledge. The article has a double importance: on the one hand, it makes a reformulation of the valid ideas of Zea in this regard; on the other hand, it offers a scheme with a claim of general validity regarding a now as ever urgent social problem: intellectuals’ social commitment and his commitment to knowledge. (shrink)

This paper examines Hannah Arendt’s reception of the Aristotelian philía. First, we expose the notes of the philía in his Nicomachean Ethics and the political projection of friendship as synaísthesis. Secondly, we argue that in a relevant fragment of “Truth and Politics” and in Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, Arendt finishes clarifying her notion of friendship as a political and worldly bond. There she does not allude to Aristotle, but to Kant and his reflections on the sense of taste.

Nostalgia refers to that painful experience due to the impossibility of recovering a past whose memory provokes a feeling of comforting happiness and which, nevertheless, inevitably attracts us. This leads us to a reiterated tendency to remember in search of that space of familiarity, of sense, which we know is lost, although we trust that it’s still redeemable. In this article we will analyze this possibility of reencounter that, in its expression, enables a potential recognition of oneself, that is, an (...) opportunity to reaffirm the past-present continuity that reinforces the unfolding of a life project today, looking at the future. (shrink)

In his best-seller The Burnout Society, Byung-Chul Han maintained that the immunological dispositive is not compatible with global capitalism. In this article, I argue, against Han, that the capitalism we inhabit produces countless immunological devices, and not just in times of pandemic. In particular, I emphasize the affective dimension of these mechanisms, the configuration of desire they generate. When carrying out this reflection, I highlight the complexity of immunity: since it can be considered a defense system that activates forms of (...) rejection towards the strange, identified as a risk for a body assumed in an identitarian way. However, immunity can also be understood in symbiotically terms, as a system of protection and care strategies, not tied to preserving the border between self and not-self, the proper and the improper, but dependent on a relational understanding of life. (shrink)

This paper proposes freedom as the condition of possibility for the construction of trust in human relationships. The methodology used is a review of the scientific literature of the most recent moral and political philosophy. As a result of the dialogue between different positions, it is discovered that freedom, despite being present in the act of trust, is forgotten in the discussion around trust, a forgetfulness that has as its main causes the assumption that trust is natural and the confusion (...) between the propensity to trust and the act of trusting. All this leads to proposing an approach of the act of trusting that starts from the freedom of the trustee and the trustor. (shrink)

This paper introduces the hypothesis that boredom may be a decisive factor in the social outbreak that took place in Chile in 2019. It is based on another hypothesis that postulates that boredom can become a political emotion capable of unleashing a revolution when it affects an entire community. The main objective of the work is to explain the theoretical, philosophical framework in which the second hypothesis is inscribed and to give reasons why, if this is true, it could be (...) applied to the specific case of Chile. In this sense, an unpublished definition of the concept of boredom is first outlined and the literature that describes boredom as a reactive and political emotion is examined. Then, the Chilean socio-political context of the last forty years is analyzed in search of isolatable factors that may be related to the experience of boredom. Lastly, an original line of research is proposed on which to work to test both hypotheses in a broader project that aims to be able to predict when a social system is on the verge of collapse because of boredom. (shrink)

Starting on Bourdieu’s approach to precariousness, this article analyzes this phenomenon as a new flexible norm that displaces the Fordist social norm. The authors argue, based on Gramsci’s study of Fordism, that precarization creates a mechanism of discipline for the legitimization of the loss of both labour and social rights, destroying the Keynesian social pact. Such disciplining happens coercively, both by the use of new technologies and by the generalization of the function of Marx’s industrial reserve army to all productive (...) strata; and also, by consensus, through a transformation in the work culture, leading to a “new flexible man” with a flagrant loss of its autonomy. (shrink)

This paper addresses two of the objections that can be raised against the presence of a project of social philosophy in Negative Dialectics. First, I argue that the continuity of Adorno’s social diagnosis with Lukács’ theory of reification should be nuanced by interpreting the core of his social theory as an analysis of the process of subsumption that occurs with the autonomization of social objectivity. Secondly, I present the notion of constellation as the core of Adorno’s epistemological argument in Negative (...) Dialectics and I challenge the idea of an incompatibility between the negative dialectic and social sciences. This is pursued through a discussion of the relation with Max Weber’s ideal types and the affinity between Adorno’s epistemological program and the theoretical models of Edward P. Thompson and David Harvey. (shrink)

This paper endorses the idea that an ethical and political perspective on precariousness would be informed by a social theory. Nancy Fraser’s Critical Theory of Justice is a good sample of this requirement. The aim of her critical account consists in to identify the social contradictions of capitalism to make a proper diagnosis of our current era. The diagnosis is the beginning to analyze the emancipatory options, entangled with those contradictions, to find out the society’s sense of justice. According to (...) that, this paper deals with the recent adjustments in Fraser’s Social Critical Theory of Justice that focuses on the new orders of subjection in our current societies. So, I will reenact her work from her debate with Habermas on gender in the ‘80s to her current theorization of capitalism as an institutionalized social order. (shrink)

The notion of responsibility seeks to establish a connection between agents and some harm or injustice, imposing on them the duty to make things right. The identification of responsibilities is therefore a fundamental step in the work of fighting against injustices, by imposing concrete obligations on particular agents. However, our globalizing world puts in crisis the traditional assumptions on which this idea is based. In this article I examine the reasons for this crisis and I offer alternative interpretations to avoid (...) the problems identified. I argue in favour of adopting a structural perspective that leaves aside the interactional point of view of ethics. (shrink)

We propose a reconsideration of John Dewey’s criticisms of Walter Lippmann’s ideas taking as guiding theme the arguments put forward in the successive reviews that Dewey wrote on Lippmann’s works. We maintain that the ideas that Dewey launched in these reviews pointed in a direction that became more explicit in the 1930s, when Dewey responded with socialist discourse to a Lippmann who appealed to something more that the authority of trained experts to counteract the drifts of democracy. According to our (...) view, the debate they held not only revealed two visions of the relationship between democracy and popular will, but also two discrepant conceptions about the economic bases of an open society and the necessary conditions for freedom exercise. (shrink)

This article aims at two objectives, the first is to prove the insufficiency of the Kantian ethics matrix to give an account of vulnerability and precarity that are part of human existence. We will show how the “losing” side of ethical theories of modernity, offer a richer frame to asses human interdependency. Our second objective is to pose the hypothesis about a relation between those discourses of freedom as autonomy and the negation of human vulnerability and hence of the relegation (...) or subalterization of the ethical arguments based on care. (shrink)

Las siguientes páginas versan sobre el giro antropológico que se produce en la obra de José Ortega y Gasset en lo que sería el tránsito entre la razón moderna, a la que filósofo español se adhiere en su mocedad –época en que Ortega se decanta por la cultura occidental que con sus raíces en Grecia concibe como la cultura esencial–, y la razón histórico-vital, que, abierta a la pluralidad cultural, se impone en su pensamiento en los primeros años de la (...) década de los años 20 del siglo que dejamos atrás. Frente a la razón moderna europeísta de su pensamiento inicial, Ortega propone en la década de 1920, un tipo de razón vital que incorpora la idea del sentido histórico que es el elemento que definirá de aquí en adelante su pensamiento antropológico. El monismo culturalista que el filósofo español elogiaba en sus primeros años como intelectual, deja paso con el tiempo a un pluralismo de culturas característico de la contemporaneidad. (shrink)

In the present article it is proposed to think about the possibility of an ethics in times of precariousness; on the one hand, through the figure of the Other that appears as a Face in E. Lévinas’ ethics of responsibility, as it is received by Butler in Precarious Life. And, on the other hand, through a proposal to re-read, which we believe it is necessary, the passage known as the “Parable of the Good Samaritan”, key-text in our pre-understanding-hermeneutical background about (...) the link between ethics and openness to the Other. That re-reading would help us to think about the possibility of an ethics that articulates care as assistance to the Other and delegation to an “Other” of the Other, that is usually forgotten. (shrink)

Este trabajo afronta dos de las objeciones que cabe aducir contra la presencia de un proyecto de filosofía social en Dialéctica negativa. En primer lugar, se matiza la continuidad del diagnóstico social de Adorno con la teoría lukacsiana de la cosificación, interpretando el núcleo de su teoría social como un análisis del proceso de subsunción que se produce con la autonomización de la objetividad social. En segundo lugar, se presenta la noción de constelación como núcleo del razonamiento epistemológico de Adorno (...) en Dialéctica negativa y se cuestiona el argumento acerca de su incompatibilidad con el trabajo de las ciencias sociales, analizando su relación con respecto al método de los tipos ideales de Max Weber y su afinidad con los modelos teóricos de Edward P. Thompson y David Harvey. (shrink)

El presente ensayo reconsidera las críticas de John Dewey a Walter Lippmann tomando como eje los argumentos esgrimidos en las sucesivas reseñas que Dewey fue haciendo de las obras de Lippmann. Se sostiene que las críticas que Dewey lanzó en estas reseñas, así como luego en The Public and its Problems ya apuntaban en una dirección que quedó más explícita en los años treinta, cuando Dewey respondió con lenguaje socialista a un Lippmann que apelaba a algo más que a la (...) autoridad de expertos para contrarrestar las derivas de la democracia. En el debate que mantuvieron, no solo se pusieron en juego dos visiones de la relación entre democracia y voluntad popular, sino dos concepciones discrepantes sobre las bases económicas de una sociedad abierta y las condiciones necesarias para el ejercicio de la libertad. (shrink)

This text explores the potential of a political philosophy of vulnerability, feminist and egalitarian, focused on analyzing, publicizing and criticise the processes of mass production of precarity. The intersection of the main axes of power is identified as a producer of intersectional inequalities, following the intersectional approach of P. H. Collins and N. Yuval-Davis. The situations of vulnerability/precarity induced are connected to the normative dimension through the concept of intersectional injustice following the contribution of I. M. Young. It concludes with (...) a balance of the new social and political ontology of vulnerability as the basis for a feminist political philosophy. (shrink)

Human Capital is a familiar concept in critical analysis on neoliberal subjectivity. However, it is not usual to see its nominal presence accompanied by a detailed study about the economic theories in which it appears. This paper sets out to shed light on the categories and the theoretical frameworks of Human Capital theories on the basis of the texts of its main authors. And all that with a double intention: first, to construct a more comprehensive approach to neoliberalism’s subjectivity models, (...) particularly in labor matters; second, to genetically understand the ethical and political horizons of contemporary societies. (shrink)

Vulnerability, understood as a negative aspect of criminalization under immune considerations, constitutes itself as a creative and transformative force that makes it possible to think about a life in common sustained through care and affirmative protection of life. The development of this idea requires three specific stages: in the first, it is described the current democracy as a government technique whose management depends on vulnerable populations; in the second, it is reviewed criminalization as a specific form of immune control; and (...) finally, it is recognized vulnerability as the basis of a new way of democratic life, departing from the attention of certain social groups that have been criminalized due to their precariousness. (shrink)

One of the most relevant manifestations of precarious work is the dualization of the labour market, which involves a sharp difference between the unprotected workers who have a high risk of being unemployed and the protected workers who do not. As a result, it is plausible to think that there is some conflict of interest between groups of workers. Nonetheless, I argue that an adequate political theory must account for whether there are underlying affinities and capacity for collective action between (...) the two groups. To explore this possibility, I first present the republican conception of the common good and then the labour model derived from it. Finally, I explain that, even in their current situation, these groups of workers still maintain deep shared interests. (shrink)

The following pages deal with the anthropological turn produced in the work of José Ortega y Gasset in relation to the transit between the modern reason, to which the Spanish philosopher is joined in his youth—a period in which Ortega opts for the western culture as an essential one, due to the Greek roots of Europe—, and the historical and vital reason, which is open to the cultural plurality and dominates his thought from the beginning of the twenties on. Against (...) the modern and pro-European reason of his initial thought, Ortega proposes in the 1920s, a type of vital reason that incorporates the idea of historical sense that is the element that will define his anthropological thought from now on. The cultural monism praised by the Spanish philosopher in his first years as highbrow, is replaced by a pluralism of cultures which is characteristic of the contemporaneity. (shrink)

This paper examines the various theories of intergenerational justice and its implications in the practical context of pension systems. In this context the sustainability of the system appears to be compromised by demographic projections. This fact has an unquestionable relevance for the future of this very important public service and the intergenerational commitment that this implies. In this sense if a pension system wants to be fair it has to look in three directions: pensioners, workers and future generations. So, a (...) liberal-egalitarian theory becomes necessary to share the risks of demographic and financial shocks between different generations and to reduce inequality as much as possible. (shrink)

Precariousness is a concept which fundamentally refers to a lack of means. Thereafter, its nature is protean: it appears in multifarious aspects. But all of them share concepts such as scarcity, weakness, frailty, or vulnerability. At the political level, if we talk about democracy, or about the crisis of democracy, it would also be necessary to uncover, from its root, a process of progressive precarization of political life, with huge consequences for citizenry. My view is that these problems would, in (...) turn, stem from a deeper cause, which could be summarized under the following formula: democracy without citizens. (shrink)

The following exercise start from the assumption of social space—the field of action and influence in which a series of social relations converge, which differ and distribute in the social universe formulated by Pierre Bourdieu—, and the dimensions of the social world when the principles of differentiation and distribution operate, and hypothetically, the set of properties that act from them in the social universe, to give way to practices that describe experiences, both objective and subjective, of resistance anti-violence.

In the present work, we raise the question of the elaboration of an ethical and political praxis in the era of precariousness. We postulate a division intrinsic to the subject immersed in the neoliberal capitalism, whilst arguing for the continuity of said subjectivity with the ethical developments of Kant, through the resignification of its emancipatory components. We sustain that identity politics are insufficient as a means to overcome the ethics of precariousness insofar as they fail to articulate an idea of (...) universality. Against them, we argue in favor of R. Negarestani’s position about the labor that supposes the construction of a new rationality and we evaluate said project through the concept of value, necessary to conceive an alternative to an intrinsically economical order. (shrink)

Identity itself has become complex and fragmented in our age, and in this sense, perhaps conventional categories as cosmopolitanism therefore no longer suit us very well. Conceptualizing the intellectual landscape between reactionary localism and vapid universalism, is where the debate in ethical cosmopolitanism has landed today. Although it shows no real sign of theoretical resolving or slowing, cosmopolitan theory has taken more explicitly new direction connected with the project associated with Martha Nussbaum’s thought. I propose to deal in this paper (...) her ultimately and re-articulated cosmopolitan ideas. (shrink)

In this article, we will examine a hermeneutical problem raised in Chapter XI of Hobbes’s Leviathan. Namely: Why does the author refrain from describing the attack led by Brutus against Julius Caesar as the result of a conspiracy? Why instead of talking about the collective action of an organized group does he refer to a “multitude of actions performed by a multitude of men”? In order to unravel this paradox, we will analyze the category of “faction” developed by Hobbes. After (...) confirming that the republican conspiracy is easily explained by this concept and that it adapts poorly to that of an irregular crowd, we shall inquire if the key to this curious reading can be found in Hobbes’s sources. While Plutarch is unequivocal about the conspiratorial status of the group, Shakespeare does indeed problematize the matter. Correspondingly, we will argue that Hobbes may have taken into account Shakespeare’s treatment for his denial of the collective nature of the organized action against Caesar. (shrink)

The aim is to address the feminization of work by framing it within the theories that interpret the current productive paradigm in terms of “biocapitalism”. In a context in which value accumulation is increasingly based upon the exploitation of the entirety of human faculties, the boundaries of modern “political economy of patriarchy” become blurred, since former reproductive activities are now transformed into productive work and reproductive work is turned into a paradigm for work as a whole.

In this paper we explore the possibilities of a sexual ethics that responds to our times of precariousness. We sustain that the task of a reconsidered sexual ethics can contribute to a more livable life for persons rendered fragile beyond our constitutive embodied fragility. Thus, we connect Judith Butler with 20th century dialogical philosophies as well as with some analysis on sexuality and ethics in authors like Thomas Nagel and Margaret Farley. In all this a key category will be that (...) of justice. (shrink)