In the past, philosophy, as it was brought to life originally by the ancient Greeks, was based on the audacious premise that the cosmos is intelligible, that human reason can come to understand reality at least in part. In the early to mid-twentieth century, however, philosophy was declared dead on both sides of the analytic-continental divide, so it seems appropriate to ask whether philosophy has a future and, if so, what sort of future this could and should be. In this (...) essay, I first look at the claims of philosophy’s demise and their philosophical milieu, focusing on Martin Heidegger, Bertrand Russell, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Then I suggest a reason for the dire forecast, namely, the aftermath of what has been called the “Second Thirty Years’ War,” and respond to objections that can be raised against this explanation. Finally, I indicate the sort of future that I think we should envision for philosophy. (shrink)

La propuesta fenomenológica de Husserl, aunque se inició con un estudio sobre la naturaleza del número y las funciones matemáticas, abarca mucho más que eso. Se conocen una serie de ensayos editados póstumamente en el tomo XXI de la serie Hussserliana que abarcan los años 1890-1908, y que se enfocan en comprender los avances de la geometría (euclidiana y no euclidiana) y el papel que desempeña en la constitución del espacio físico. Los estudios sobre geometría euclidiana y no euclidiana continuarían (...) así la investigación de Filosofía de la aritmética, ya que ambos comparten los Grundgedanken, es decir, el conjunto de herramientas y temas relacionados con la noción de representación simbólica. El objetivo de este artículo es presentar de manera general los principales problemas a los que Husserl se enfrenta en relación con temas geométricos y espaciales. Se intentará reconstruir, de manera histórico-crítica, aspectos esenciales sobre los temas y problemas de la filosofía de la geometría tal y como Husserl la desarrolla en sus primeras obras fenomenológicas. (shrink)

It is a consensus to locate the origin of the reflexive foundations of modern semantics in Frege's work. Since Frege's distinction between two components of meaning (sense and reference), however, semantics has been forced to lead a double life. Among its first receptions, in Russell's famous article (1905), the first unresolved criticism of this solution was that: It is not possible to split semantics into a theory about two classes of objects without their yielding one and the same thing under (...) lower and higher conditions of instantiation (depending on the function used to identify it). But even Russell could not avoid a crisis. It is not possible to reconcile semantic coordination for a set of non-classical extension of instantiation and encoding (possible instances, counterfactual truth values, etc.) while preserving the classical properties of signification. This article covers these moments with a rough diagnosis: modern semantics has a reflexive ceiling. It is unable to model the contingent features of an "object" without oversizing itself to deal with various constraints on that object adapted to various strategies of intensional and modal specification. In order to model idealized conditions of assertability (Putnam), one must filter the sentences that pass Tarskian test using non-sematic parameters – like the parameter of coherence of a scientific paradigm. It cannot keep that model without stopping being semantic. We conclude with a response to attempts to give semantic status to complex scientific reasoning, and a suggestion as to how to locate the philosophical origin of this claim. (shrink)