Al contrario que en Europa, el sentimiento de lo sublime se entiende en América como la armonía entre técnica y naturaleza, primero desde un nuevo romanticismo y, en la actualidad, desde el llamado «tecnorromanticismo», en el que lo sublime se emancipa de las ataduras seculares de la ética, la religión y la política, para ligarse por primera vez a lo cotidiano. El idilio americano se aproxima a la categoría estética de lo sublime analizando la «americanización» de este concepto.

The aim of this article is to analyze the relationship between the thought of Jean François Lyotard and the american abstract expressionism. Firstly, we will study the ideas of Lyotard about Kantian aesthetics. Secondly, we will focus on the theme of the sublime. Finally, we will tackle the study of the concept of time that determines the connection between Lyotard and abstract expressionism.

En 1976, mientras Milton Friedman recoge el Premio Nobel de Economía por sus logros en los campos del análisis del consumo y la teoría monetaria, el punk expande su mensaje de disonancia empujando los límites de lo decible hacia espacios hasta entonces poco conocidos. En ese mismo momento bandas como Iron Maiden comienzan a generar imaginarios extraños que canalizan algunas tendencias sociales; las pistas de baile exploran nuevas formas de relación cultural, y el espíritu nihilista de Iggy Pop flota en (...) el ambiente. La década de 1970 es la década del extrañamiento, en la que el sueño económico de la posguerra se deshace provocando la aparición en el horizonte de una “nueva” forma de revisar la construcción de la vida cotidiana: el neoliberalismo. En paralelo a este proceso, y en dirección opuesta, existe una búsqueda de respuestas a nivel cultural. Respuestas que no pretenden salvar nada, sino ahondar en la miseria de ese mismo tiempo. Ahí aparecen el punk y otros movimientos que pronto son devorados por el mercado. Pero ¿desde dónde se nos ha contado esta historia de derrotas? ¿Hemos aceptado que la historia de nuestras derrotas culturales sea narrada por la maquinaria neoliberal? Quizá debamos plantarnos y pensar otras formas de narrar una década, la de los setenta, en cuya estela seguimos. Este libro es un intento radical y novedoso de explorar este periodo donde cultura y política se cruzan a través de la música"--Publisher's description. (shrink)

Cancers rely on multiple, heterogeneous processes at different scales, pertaining to many biomedical fields. Therefore, understanding cancer is necessarily an interdisciplinary task that requires placing specialised experimental and clinical research into a broader conceptual, theoretical, and methodological framework. Without such a framework, oncology will collect piecemeal results, with scant dialogue between the different scientific communities studying cancer. We argue that one important way forward in service of a more successful dialogue is through greater integration of applied sciences (experimental and clinical) (...) with conceptual and theoretical approaches, informed by philosophical methods. By way of illustration, we explore six central themes: (i) the role of mutations in cancer; (ii) the clonal evolution of cancer cells; (iii) the relationship between cancer and multicellularity; (iv) the tumour microenvironment; (v) the immune system; and (vi) stem cells. In each case, we examine open questions in the scientific literature through a philosophical methodology and show the benefit of such a synergy for the scientific and medical understanding of cancer. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to argue against the received view among Unamuno scholars that Miguel de Unamuno was defending a sort of pragmatic argument for religious faith and that his notion of religious faith as “querer creer” (“wanting to believe”) is to be identified with William James’s “the will to believe”. As I will show in this paper, one of the aspects that makes Unamuno’s reasoning philosophically relevant is his ability to formulate a non-pragmatist defense of religious faith (...) without a prior commitment to the truth of any religious or theological statement and grounded in our longing for an endless existence through God’s Salvation. (shrink)

Wittgenstein's examination of Private Language Argument and Solipsism in the Philosophical Investigations implies no critics to his earlier theory maintained in the Tractatus. On the contrary, both are inspired by the same idea, namely, the impossibility of finding a thinking subject merely on the ground of thought itself.

Cultural evolution studies are characterized by the notion that culture evolves accordingly to broadly Darwinian principles. Yet how far the analogy between cultural and genetic evolution should be pushed is open to debate. Here, we examine a recent disagreement that concerns the extent to which cultural transmission should be considered a preservative mechanism allowing selection among different variants, or a transformative process in which individuals recreate variants each time they are transmitted. The latter is associated with the notion of “cultural (...) attraction”. This issue has generated much misunderstanding and confusion. We first clarify the respective positions, noting that there is in fact no substantive incompatibility between cultural attraction and standard cultural evolution approaches, beyond a difference in focus. Whether cultural transmission should be considered a preservative or reconstructive process is ultimately an empirical question, and we examine how both preservative and reconstructive cultural transmission has been studied in recent experimental research in cultural evolution. Finally, we discuss how the relative importance of preservative and reconstructive processes may depend on the granularity of analysis and the domain being studied. (shrink)

The first half of this article follows Mario Bunge’s early realist moves, his efforts to articulate the achievements of theoretical physics as gains in the quest for objective truth and understanding, particularly in the context of the fights against the idealist and subjectivist interpretations of quantum mechanics that, at least until the mid-1970s, prevailed in physics. Bunge’s answers to the problems of quantum mechanics provide a good angle for understanding how his realist positions grew on the “battlefield.” The second half (...) discusses Bunge’s general conception of the scientific realist stance and confronts it with some current approaches to realism in the mainstream literature. (shrink)

The aim of this chapter is to analyse the concept of love —understood in the broad and Christian-inspired sense of love as agape-charis love— in relation to the animes Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z. I first comment on the character of Piccolo —and how his friendship with Son Gohan— leads to him losing all his original villainous traits. I argue that the evolution of the character of Piccolo through his friendship with Son Gohan illustrates the philosophical claim that a (...) loving and giving of oneself to the other —far from being a sign of weakness— is a courageous and self-affirming exercise. The result may move the individual to an inner transformative experience that leads to the enjoyment of a renewed and authentic life that is worth living. I then argue that Son Goku’s respectful attitude towards his opponents is ultimately a loving attitude. Last, I argue that it is the inspiring and loving example of Son Goku that ultimately explains why characters such as Vegeta —who are at first presented as villains— end up losing their villainous traits after fighting against Son Goku. (shrink)

Among the wide variety of experiences linked to academic work, there are some intense affective experiences that are more directly related to the conceptual development that the learners will achieve because they are intrinsically linked to the activity displayed during the acquisition of knowledge, such is the case of curiosity, confusion and surprise. These epistemic emotions that occur during learning activities are aimed at the conceptual content of the individual's beliefs. The objective of this work is to theoretically explore the (...) idea that the conceptual development that occurs in educational contexts depends on the development of an affective tendency with an intersubjective base that serves as a background to the advent of epistemic emotions in social learning situations. The confidence with which a learning situation is faced is a general tendency (an epistemic attitude) fruit of the individual's trajectory that functions as a background for the activities in which knowledge is acquired. An adequate understanding of the relationships between epistemic emotions, confidence and knowledge can generate ideas that promote the consolidation of this attitude as a facet of learning in school. As pedagogical implications of this conceptual model, some common epistemic emotional patterns are presented in asymmetrical relationships between teachers and children. (shrink)

Introduction: Jai Mata Di (praise the mother goddess) -- Sutra 1: Samadhi, or yogic ecstasy -- Sutra 2: realization, or the practice of yoga -- Sutra 3: the Siddhis, or the magical powers -- Sutra 4: absolute freedom.

In Ockhamist branching-time logic [Prior 67], formulas are meant to be evaluated on a specified branch, or history, passing through the moment at hand. The linguistic counterpart of the manifoldness of future is a possibility operator which is read as `at some branch, or history (passing through the moment at hand)'. Both the bundled-trees semantics [Burgess 79] and the $\langle moment, history\rangle$ semantics [Thomason 84] for the possibility operator involve a quantification over sets of moments. The Ockhamist frames are (3-modal) (...) Kripke structures in which this second-order quantification is represented by a first-order quantification. The aim of the present paper is to investigate the notions of modal definability, validity, and axiomatizability concerning 3-modal frames which can be viewed as generalizations of Ockhamist frames. (shrink)

The aim of this chapter is to analyze the movie Fight Club, directed by David Fincher, written by Jim Uhls, and first released in the fall of 1999. The movie is based on the homonym novel by Chuck Palahniuk, published in 1996. I will argue that Fight Club is to be understood in primarily existentialist, nonethical, and nonevidential terms, showing the struggle felt by each and every one of us to find a convincing answer to the question of what (if (...) anything) counts as an authentic life that is worth living. Moreover, I will argue that the movie does not merely illustrate the struggle and the existential angst it engenders; it also advances, if not strictly speaking a theoretical answer grounded in an indisputable philosophical reasoning, then at least a practical way to face it. It is only after positively endorsing the claim that absolutely nothing (whatever it may be) externally imposed on a person can give their life ultimate meaning that a person is free to engage in a conscious, laborious, and exhausting attempt at self-affirmation, a full and positive endorsement of one’s own authenticity. (shrink)