Latin American Philosophy: Value Theory

En la sección "Páginas revisitadas" del sitio web Cuba Posible y con presentación a cargo de Walter Espronceda Govantes, se reproduce en 2018 una buena parte del ensayo "América Latina en la encrucijada..." de José Ramón Fabelo, publicado originalmente en 1994. En el ensayo se muestra y argumenta por qué debe considerarse la contradictoria relación entre los valores universales y propios como el más importante problema axiológico que ha enfrentado la praxis y el pensamiento latinoamericanos, al tiempo que se proyecta (...) la solución teórica de ese problema como consecuencia posible y necesaria de su solución práctica. (shrink)

Surgida como producto del proceso de universalización de la historia, forzada a moverse hacia un eje de universalidad que no emanaba de su propia entraña, portadora, a su vez, de una singularidad histórica resultado de la mezcla creadora de las más diversas influencias culturales, América Latina no podía menos que debatirse, desde su mismo surgimiento, en un perenne conflicto entre lo universal y lo propio. La presencia (casi omnipresencia) de este asunto en el pensamiento latinoamericano no es un resultado fortuito, (...) ha sido expresión del problema más raigal que ha tenido el latinoamericano en su devenir histórico: el problema de su identidad, de la integridad de su ser histórico, de la combinación de universalidad y singularidad dentro de su propia esencia. Ha sido la historia la que ha elevado a un primer plano este problema, la que ha colocado a América Latina en una constante encrucijada entre lo universal y lo propio. (shrink)

El estudio de la justicia como valor y del lugar que ella ocupa o debe ocupar dentro de la sociedad responde en estos momentos a una necesidad más práctica que teórica. Las reflexiones que aquí presentamos se enmarcan dentro de este contexto. Se refieren a algunos presupuestos teórico-metodológicos que necesitan ser tenidos en cuenta en el estudio de la justicia como valor, pero su móvil fundamental no está tanto en la teoría misma, como sí más allá de ella, en la (...) cruda realidad práctica que reclama universalmente un mundo más justo. No se oculta entonces que estas ideas se elaboran buscando acercar respuestas teóricas y metodológicas a ese reclamo práctico, ni se obvia el hecho de que, aun cuando se piensan para todo el mundo de hoy, esto se hace desde el marco referencial concreto de la singular experiencia cubana, que ofrece un mirador muy especial cuando de pensar la justicia se trata. (shrink)

La obra de la filósofa cubana Zaira Rodríguez Ugidos (1941-1985) se inserta con derecho propio en la evolución histórica del pensamiento latinoamericano en múltiples sentidos. Especial relevancia, tienen sus ideas de corte axiológico. Motivada en lo fundamental por develar el componente ideológico de toda filosofía, el partidismo evidente del conocimiento social, el enlace de la ciencia con la realidad humana en la que se produce, la eminente profesora cubana se cruza en su camino indagatorio con el tema de los valores, (...) se detiene en él y nos ofrece una propuesta teórica que, sin proponérselo, ocupa un lugar de reconocible importancia en la evolución del pensamiento axiológico latinoamericano. (shrink)

El tema de la importancia de la filosofía puede ser abordado desde muy diversas plataformas teóricas. Nos interesa en este ensayo, sobre todo, tratar el tema de la relación entre vida y filosofía. La idea básica que deseamos desarrollar acá es que la filosofía forma parte inalienable de la vida humana misma. Partimos de la idea de que a la filosofía la necesitamos porque nos es vitalmente necesaria, es decir, porque es necesaria para la vida.

Entre las figuras que hicieron de parteaguas para la filosofía en México después del exilio español de fines de los años treinta, una cuya importancia está todavía por conocerse y difundirse es la de Eduardo Nicol, que murió apenas en 1990. Su amplia obra intelectual se articula durante alrededor de cincuenta años. En las siguientes líneas se recogen pasajes de dos capítulos que forman parte de Ideas de vario linaje, y que revelan ciertos trazos del pensamiento del pensador catalán, pertinentes (...) para la situación actual de la cultura. (shrink)

Se trata de una antología que recoge los más importantes pasajes del pensamiento sobre los valores de Risieri Frondizi (1910-1983), uno de los más importantes axiólogos de América Latina. Además de la selección de fragmentos que integra la antología, José Ramón Fabelo Corzo escribe el Prólogo (que busca ubicar a Frondizi en el contexto histórico del pensamiento axiológico latinoamericano) y el Epílogo (en el que se realiza una valoración crítica de las propuestas de este destacado pensador argentino.

Publicado originalmente como “Prólogo” al libro Risieri Frondizi. Pensamiento Axiológico. Antología ([Selección, Prólogo y Epílogo de José Ramón Fabelo]. Biblioteca Americana, Universidad del Valle-Instituto Cubano del Libro, Cali-La Habana, 1993, pp. VII-XXIII). El texto busca ubicar al filósofo Risieri Frondizi en los marcos del pensamiento sobre los valores en el contexto latinoamericano.

Puede haber diferentes tipos de educación: para el cambio o para la inmovilidad. Una actitud posible es la que podríamos calificar como pasiva, contemplativa, acrítica, conformista, nihilista, alienada. Una tal actitud no favorece en ningún sentido al cambio social, estimula una especie de espera indiferente e insensible a que el mundo tome por sí mismo el rumbo que mejor le parezca. Es una actitud que inhibe toda acción y desconfía de la propia capacidad práctica transformadora. Sin embargo, no es ésta (...) la única posibilidad educativa de nuestros días. Podemos y debemos fomentar un tipo de educación alternativo que busque formar una personalidad con un pensamiento crítico, cuestionador, con una actitud activa, práctica, optimista, con confianza en las posibilidades propias como individuo y como parte de una comunidad para el cambio social. (shrink)

This collection of new essays focuses on metaethical views from outside the mainstream European tradition. The guiding motivation is that important discussions about the ultimate nature of morality can be found far beyond ancient Greece and modern Europe. The volume’s aim is to show how rich the possibilities are for comparative metaethics, and how much these comparisons can add to contemporary discussions of the foundations of morality. Representing five continents, the thinkers discussed range from ancient Egyptian, ancient Chinese, and the (...) Mexica (Aztec) cultures to more recent thinkers like Augusto Salazar Bondy, Bimal Krishna Matilal, Nishida Kitarō, and Susan Sontag. The philosophical topics discussed include religious language, moral discovery, moral disagreement, essences’ relation to evaluative facts, metaphysical harmony, naturalism, moral perception, and the nature of moral realism. This volume will be of interest to anyone interested in metaethics or comparative philosophy. (shrink)

Throughout the present text, an account of the main contributions of Luis Villoro Toranzo will be made as a tribute to three years after his death.

In Latin America, Catholics, historic Protestants, and Pentecostals are interpreting scripture in new ways. Their diverse perspectives and methodologies challenge the global faith community to learn from one another through mutual correction and sharing.

Il s'agit d'une étude à partir de multiples sources : opinions d'hommes politiques et des premières féministes brésiliennes, archives de polices, rapports de médecins, œuvres littéraires, interview d'une personne proche du milieu (vieille couturière d'origine française). Pour s'orienter dans ces multiples sources, il faut un profond sens critique, qui ne manque pas à l'auteur. À la fin du XIXe siècle le statut de la femme brésilienne (de la maîtresse de maison aux salariées) à São Paul..

Thèse d'histoire, ce livre traite des itinéraires humains dans le réseau ferré qui, au début du XXe siècle, se répand et s'avance de l'Ouest de l'Etat de São Paulo vers celui du Mato Grosso, la Bolivie et le Paraguay, dans un projet d'intégration économique régional et de modernisation de l'intérieur du Brésil. Il existe déjà beaucoup d'études sur le chemin de fer et le rail au Brésil, mais ce livre est le seul à évoquer des expériences féminines. Des documents administratifs (...) de la com.. (shrink)

Cet article analyse quatre photographies qui révèlent différents modes de vie et de résistance combattante des femmes indigènes au Chiapas. On les voit ainsi s’organiser et transformer leur propre image. En même temps, elles construisent leur autonomie à la lumière du genre et à travers la conscience de leur statut social et de leur appartenance au peuple indigène de Mexico. « Personne ne peut nous prendre ce que nous sommes » (Commandante Esther, EZLN).

This article analyses the development and achievements of the area of History in the Tuning-Latin America Project from its launch in 2004 to its completion in 2013. Through two phases and nine general meetings, academics from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Guatemala, Mexico and Peru, along with academics from Spain, Portugal and Italy, discussed the professional formation of future generations of historians. The debate centred on the concept of “competences” as the axis of training, a concept which generated (...) innovative thinking and understanding but also friction due to specific historiographic traditions and regions. The Tuning-Latin America Project generated a significant body of documentation on the new challenges implicit in training historians in a globalized world. However, it has not received sufficient analysis from the Latin-American perspective. This article contributes to this by providing insight on the Tuning Project’s successes and limitations in Latin America, as well as evaluating its progress more than a decade after it was introduced. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate and highlight the continued suffrage of Latino families as they have struggled to provide their children with an equal education. Through providing an overview of court cases that have directly impacted the interface between Latino families and the American educationaI system, the paper provides the reader with a historical, social and cultural understanding of the politics of educating Latino children. Moreover, this backdrop provides asound foundation for illustrating the educational and family research (...) that has focused on Latino families and school partnerships and its impact on the politics of educattng Latino children. The authors end the paper by providing insight to the future of the Latino Intelegensia and the impIications it has for Latino families, schools and their communities. (shrink)

A través de un análisis políticomuy crítico en perspectiva socialista y contrahegemónica, se interpreta desde la actualidad el desarrollo geopolítico de las corrientes del neoliberlismo capitaista, la vigencia cultural e histórica de la figura literaria-revolucionaria de Caliban, en contraste con lo..

The current moment seems to be a hiatus. Not one of an empty throne, but more that of two masters of time who are fighting over the control of time - the state and the market. Beyond the transfer of sovereignty over a period of time, these reforms are above all testimony to the inexorable acceleration of contemporary temporalities. Making the transfer from the public to the private sphere, from the “master of the clocks” that is the state to the (...) new “master of time” that is the market - instantaneous and short-term oriented, on duty 24 hours a day - also means wagering on an acceleration of the economy. The implicit or explicit hope of these reforms is above all to relaunch growth, to give a new élan. To encourage savings is to reinforce investments and therefore to contribute to more rapid growth. (shrink)

This study focuses on a news framing analysis of Latin America and Latin Americans in the Spanish press. For this purpose 1,271 news articles with different Latin American countries or their citizens as main actors were examined. These news stories had been published by the main Spanish newspapers in 1999. The results reveal that attribution of responsibility, human interest, and conflict constitute the prevailing frames used by the Spanish press. Furthermore, significant differences in the considered variables in terms of main (...) country actor were observed. Venezuela and Colombia, in particular, are associated with armed conflicts, natural disasters, crimes, and accidents using human interest and conflict news frames. This leads to a necessary consideration of the consequences this type of news coverage on Latin America may generate, and whether it will reinforce stereotypes or prejudices in the Spanish audience against peoples from these countries, especially those with a high migratory influx to Spain. (shrink)

This article explores the implications of the emerging new players in the global arena of telenovelas. Latin American telenovelas have had phenomenal success in the post-communist countries of Eastern Europe. There has been an effort to localize the genre of telenovelas in some of those countries. The Croatian case emerges as a specific example because of its recent trend in the domestic production of telenovelas. Studying the political-economic aspect of this imported genre by examining debates surrounding the domestically produced Villa (...) Maria could help us understand some of the logic of the global media flow. Given the commercial development of broadcasting and the subsequent rise of U.S.- and Latin American-produced fiction, this article is an analysis of the political-economic and globalization debates that emerged in the Croatian press around domestically produced telenovela Villa Maria. (shrink)

The Mexican Reforma is often considered a classic example of the power struggles that occurred between church and state throughout the nineteenth century. However, since in this case both sides claimed to be Catholic, the most important battles in Mexico were actually intra ecclesiam. Ultimately, it was a fight over access to the sacraments that drove Mexico into civil war, transforming both the Church and society in the process. The current debate in the United States over allowing public figures who (...) violate Church teaching to receive Holy Communion should be considered within the context of the Mexican experience. (shrink)

In the past two decades, changes in the Mexican government's policies toward the 30 million Mexican migrants living in the US highlight the importance of the Mexican diaspora in both countries given its size, its economic power and its growing political participation across borders. This work examines how the Mexican government's assessment of the possibilities and consequences of implementing certain emigration policies from 1848 to 2010 has been tied to changes in the bilateral relationship, which remains a key factor in (...) Mexico's current development of strategies and policies in relation to migrants in the United States. Understanding this dynamic gives an insight into the stated and unstated objectives of Mexico's recent activism in defending migrants' rights and engaging the diaspora, the continuing linkage between Mexican migration policies and shifts in the US-Mexico relationship, and the limits and possibilities for expanding shared mechanisms for the management of migration within the NAFTA framework. (shrink)

La identidad, la denominación de un subcontinente y la búsqueda de una racionalidad propia, son los puntos que el autor del artículo retoma como sustanciales de la crítica a la filosofía latinoamericana. Los revisa de modo crítico y encuentra que desde una perspectiva histórica, una política y una económica los tres sustantivos pueden abordarse y validarse desde otras consideraciones filosóficas que no privilegia el método genealógico con el cual se habían tratado las categorías.

This article sets out to propose some characteristic features of the intellectual and ethical attitudes which, in the popular belief and scholarly communities alike, stand for ideals worthy of promoting as ones which could underpin a modern society where both believers and unbelievers can feel at home. The “ethos” is construed to be about the sort of behaviour logically stemming from a tolerant outlook on the one hand, and an intellectual commitment to a noble cause worthy of one’s efforts, on (...) the other. (shrink)

The essay attempts to outline the historical ideological ties between Spain and its former Latin American colonies, with the main accent on the period following Spain’s and most of Latin America’s conversion to democracy in the wake of the fall of the Franco regime and other Latin-American military dictatorships. The author offers a detailed analysis, focusing especially on the democratic, decidedly pro-European and left-liberal government in Spain and its impact on Latin America, most of which today shows clear leftist tendencies. (...) Also discussed are Latin-American reflections on universalism. (shrink)

Outcrops of the Paleocene/Eocene Chicontepec Formation in eastern Mexico have provided a unique opportunity to study exposed time-equivalent sections of the deepwater Gulf of Mexico Wilcox Formation. A 2012 study established a stratigraphic framework in the Tampico-Misantla Basin and identified sequence boundaries that could not be correlated globally. Fieldwork in 2008 had also established a network of paleocanyons in the basin associated with a particular “54 Ma” sequence boundary. At that time, a Paleocene turbidite basin fed from the northwest was (...) incised by a collection of northeast-facing erosional canyons that coalesced laterally into the main southeast-trending Chicontepec paleocanyon; this canyon network was filled in the Early Eocene. Using the 2012 study chronostratigraphic scheme, recent micropaleontological studies were performed on a unique outcrop containing a bitumen bed within one of these paleocanyons. The results suggest that the basin’s water level fell rapidly by at least 200 m, starting after 55.8 Ma and leading to subaerial exposure of the bathyal beds for a maximum of 850,000 years prior to canyon refill. Evidence of rooting occurs in the bathyal turbidites below the bitumen bed. At this time, the paleocanyons in the TMB were eroded by fluvial systems feeding directly into the central Gulf basin, probably a land-locked sea. The interpreted large and rapid fall and rise of the water level between 55.8 and 54.95 Ma supports the “GOM drawdown hypothesis,” i.e., that the GOM may have been isolated from the world’s oceans due to the closure of the Florida straits as the Cuban arc collided with the Bahamas and northeast Yucatán. The timing of the interpreted drawdown coincides with the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum, hinting that the PETM may have been caused or assisted by the release of methane from hydrates in the GOM margins and abyssal plain. (shrink)

Although the Gulf of Mexico has been the subject of geophysical and geologic studies for several decades, its crustal structures and opening kinematics remain poorly understood largely because of the difficulty in imaging the deeper basinal structure beneath its thick sedimentary and evaporitic layers. We have used gravity and magnetic data combined with seismic reflection and refraction data to better understand the crustal structure and basin opening kinematics. We have focused on the 700-km-long Jurassic continent/ocean transform fault that accommodated counterclockwise (...) rotation of the Yucatan Block along the eastern continental margin of Mexico. We have used recent satellite-derived gravity data to reveal the pattern of spreading ridge-transform segments in the center of the basin. We then derived on a pole of rotation that revealed the kinematics of early opening of the GOM basin and the tectonic control the continent-ocean transform fault, the Western Main Transform fault, that defined the continent-ocean boundary between continental rocks in the eastern Mexico and Jurassic oceanic crust in the western GOM. Regional magnetic anomaly data along with seismic reflection and refraction data were used to further constrain the location of the WMTF. Three 2D gravity models revealed the location of the WMTF approximately 100 km offshore eastern Mexico at its furthest point and extending onshore in southern Mexico. The gravity models found that the contact between continental and oceanic crust is marked by an abrupt increase from 6.5 to 10 km in crustal thickness. To the west of the WMTF, the eastern Mexico margin is underlain by a 60-km-wide zone of stretched continental crust. We also determined a COB for the entire GOM that was consistent with the plate reconstruction, values of crustal thickness based on seismic refraction, and fracture zone azimuths related to the Jurassic spreading system. (shrink)