From the first books published by Jean-Paul Sartre, it is possible to observe the criticism that the French author makes to the Western metaphysical tradition, directed specifically at philosophers of modernity. For example, L'imagination and L'Imaginaire are two texts dedicated to questioning “the great metaphysical systems”. Furthermore, in these early investigations, Sartre discovers a principle that would allow him to elabo- rate his work Being and nothingness. What is this principle? The main objective of this essay is to determine this (...) principle and its importance in the elaboration of Being and nothingness. In order to achieve this purpose, I will analyze Sartre's criticism of modern philosophers (Descartes and Hume) and his proposal to overcome what Sartre himself calls: the “naive metaphysics of the image” (1978, p. 9), which is nothing more than the fact of reifying the image. (shrink)

"In this paper, my purpose is to take into serious consideration Adorno’s explicit conception of the artwork as a force field. With this expression he intends to emphasize the inner constitution of the artwork as a movement of antagonistic tensions, a dynamic of elements that are not simply juxtaposed, but dialectically interacting with one another. In a similar configuration, the aesthetic experience of the artwork consists in letting their friction explode to its extreme, achieving a balance which remains nevertheless substantially (...) precarious and inconclusive, ready to be immediately set in motion again. Thanks to the aesthetic trait of the force field, these tensions are brought to unity in a way that it does not suppress the enactment of antagonisms, but keeps their multiplicity alive: Homer’s tale of Penelope as an allegory of art. Keywords: Adorno – force field – antagonisms". (shrink)

Desde inicios del siglo xx la filosofía parecía haber despachado la legitimidad del realismo, llamando a la descripción del mundo dentro de los límites de nuestra subjetividad. El agotamiento y los problemas de esta premisa filosófica han sido finalmente enunciados y señalados por el realismo especulativo. En el presente artículo mostramos de qué manera tres de sus representantes más reconocidos, Meillassoux, Harman y Gabriel, llevan a cabo esta tarea. Pero para evitar una posición ingenua, este realismo se expresa de forma (...) especulativa, es decir, a partir de argumentos lógicos, matemáticos y abstractos que no carecen de problemas. Después de una breve exposición de sus filosofías, presentamos problemas centrales en ellas que se derivan de una falta de reflexión sobre los recursos lógicos y matemáticos que emplean explícita o implícitamente. Mostramos que la constante en todos ellos consiste tanto en un desconocimiento de las paradojas de autorreferencia que ponen en juego, como en la falta de una teoría de relaciones reales que explique las relaciones sujeto-objeto y objeto-objeto. Concluimos con una breve referencia a Fréredic Nef para mostrar qué puntos debería considerar una teoría general de relaciones. (shrink)

After the so-called Hegelian verdict, Adorno is the first philosopher who devotes such an intense attention to natural beauty within his aesthetic speculations. This central – although unfairly bypassed – moment could be fruitfully analysed through the figure of landscapes, thematized throughout Adorno’s constellation of texts. In this framework, the landscape represents more than a mere backdrop, but rather a significant theoretical spot to concretize the connection between the aesthetic performativity and the beauty of nature. Therefore, by means of a (...) careful reading of Adorno’s various formulations on the topic, this paper aims to show how the philosopher overcomes the traditional and immediate antithesis between nature and culture or even technique. More importantly, it will be investigated how a genuine aesthetic experience of nature – also in the image of a landscape – should be configurated, in order to hopefully feel its now mutilated silence again. (shrink)

El autor trabaja en este artículo una de las obras más citadas y controvertidas del Hegel de su periodo maduro cual es los Principios de la Filosofía del Derecho o Derecho Natural y Ciencia Política, comúnmente conocida como Filosofía del Derecho y desarrolla algunos temas que permanecen como cuestiones abiertas al debate o como aspectos objetables, tanto en su teoría del espíritu objetivo como en su interpretación.

Interest in the intersection between bilingualism and cognitive control and accessibility to neuroimaging methods have resulted in numerous studies with a variety of interpretations of the bilingual cognitive advantage. Neurocomputational Emergentism (or Neuroemergentism for short) is a new framework for understanding this relationship between bilingualism and cognitive control. This framework considers Emergence, in which two small elements are recombined in an interactive manner, yielding a non-linear effect. Added to this is the notion that Emergence can be captured in neural systems (...) using computationally inspired models. This review poses that bilingualism and cognitive control, as examined through the Neuroemergentist framework, are interwoven through development and involve the non-linear growth of cognitive processing encompassing brain areas that combine and recombine, in symbiotic and parasitic ways, in order to handle more complex types of processing. The models that have sought to explain the neural substrates of bilingual cognitive differences will be discussed with a reinterpretation of the entire bilingual cognitive advantage within a Neuroemergentist framework incorporating its neural bases. It will conclude by discussing how this new Neuroemergentist approach alters our view of the effects of language experience on cognitive control. Avenues to move beyond the simple notion of a bilingual advantage or lack thereof will be proposed. (shrink)

El autor sigue a Ana Arendt para examinar el tema de la responsabilidad personal bajo dictadura. Ante el argumento de que no había opciones pues se era una ‘ruedecilla del engranaje’, afirma que el mal menor no deja de ser un mal, y que la verdadera pregunta moral no es ‘por qué obedeciste’ sino ‘por qué ayudaste’.

This essay returns to Jacob Taubes’s messianism in order to short-circuit a contemporary political and conceptual impasse between left- and right-wing Schmittianisms. It first seeks to expose the limits of both Schmitt’s originary political theology and post-war Italian Marxist rehabilitations of Schmitt, which, it is argued, remain caught in the same political-ontological matrix. To answer the question of what (if anything) might come after political theology, the essay turns to Jacob Taubes’s “counter-political theology” in order to find an alternative genealogy (...) for modern democracy, not in Schmitt’s Christian conservative hierarchy, but in the antinomian and heretical elements within the Judaeo-Christian tradition. In conclusion, the essay argues that Taubes transforms the political theological impasse and makes possible a new reading of the contemporary political false choice we face between democracy and authoritarianism, liberal pluralism and populism. (shrink)

The contribution describes some aspects related to the representation of special curves; recalling mechanisms created specifically for the design of these curves, which have particular characteristics. Through the construction of a simple apparatus, consisting of two pendulums—which oscillate at the same time- it is possible to graphically reproduce Lissajous’ experiments on the commuting vibrations of the diapasons. This equipment was first built by Samuel Charles Tisley (London 1829-Unknown), under the name of harmonographer. The contribution aslo illustrates the essential characteristics of (...) the harmonograph—born as a means of analysing vibrations—but which, by its principle belongs to mechanics, for its applications to acoustic science and geometry for the ability to draw “harmonious” curves. (shrink)

Inspired by Columbus, Spaniards set out on an adventurous voyage of the circumnavigation of the globe and, to their surprise, encountered a new continent.This is the essential fact. There were no preliminaries, no previous knowledge, but an abrupt and unexpected meeting between a handful of men who represented the mentality of Spain at the end of the 15th century and an immense geographical panorama that slowly and continuously unfolded, populated by beings for whom there was not even a name and (...) who represented native cultures in different stages of devopment with no previous contact with Europeans, almost diametrically opposed in values, concepts and mentalities to what the transatlantic navigators represented and brought with them. (shrink)

En sus primeros escritos fenomenológicos, Jean-Paul Sartre sostiene la tesis de que la conciencia es exterioridad pura, es decir, no existe interioridad en la conciencia que pudiese albergar instancias metafísicas, como lo podría ser el yo, el cogito, el inconsciente, etc. Ya para El ser y la nada, el filósofo francés mantendrá dicha tesis, profundizándola y estableciendo un diálogo con su teoría del ser. En esta medida, el artículo se propone explorar tal relación, para conocer el lugar que ocupa la (...) noción de conciencia en el Ser y la nada. (shrink)

This paper examines how international law contributes to contemporary understandings of transitional justice with respect to reparations for victims of gross and systematic human rights abuses. The author surveys the jurisprudence of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights through 2003 to determine how the Court’s practice can be used to guide the formulation of reparatory policies during political transition. Recognizing that the direct application of Inter-American case law to situations of mass atrocity is not always viable in practice, the author (...) analyzes regional human rights jurisprudence, particularly that relating to compensation, to determine what role the Court’s rules can and cannot play as a reference for policymakers and societies faced with the challenge of designing a reparations program. He concludes that while landmark Court decisions like Velásquez Rodríguez provide general normative guidance, there are significant obstacles to extending to the transitional justice context many of the measures, amounts, and formulas relied upon by the Court in awarding compensation. The fairness of compensation outside the courtroom cannot be determined with reference to predetermined rules, but depends on the factual context in which the measures are adopted including the number of victims involved. A better source of comparative inspiration is found in the Court’s growing practice of adopting non-monetary reparations measures to deal with moral harm. (shrink)

The settler-colonial and republican principles of early U.S. politics tend to be studied as paradoxical ambitions of American nation-building. This article argues that early republican thought in the United States developed through what I call ‘ideological code-switching’, a vernacular practice that allowed popular actors to strategically vacillate between anti-colonial and neo-colonial discourses as complementary principles of revolutionary change. I illustrate these claims by tracing a genealogy of anti- and neo-colonial thought from the founding of the United States to its transnational (...) emergence in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. I demonstrate that ideological code-switching first appeared as a rhetorical strategy among the Federalist debates, where Publius argued for the feasibility of expansionist republics via a hemispheric account of American exceptionalism. These appeals to hemispheric unity remained salient into the nineteenth century among groups like the ‘Republicans of ‘Nacogdoches’, a militia comprised of Indigenous, Mestizo, and White actors that mobilized an attack on Spain and founded the Republic of Texas in April of 1813. Drawing on archival research, I turn to the U.S.-Mexico borderlands as an example of the way marginalized groups instrumentalized links between anti- and neo-colonial politics to envision their position in the rapidly evolving landscapes of transnational revolution. (shrink)

Con una belleza literaria incomparable, la Comedìa refleja la cosmovisión católica que vertebra la Cristiandad medieval, que tuvo su máximo exponente filosófico y teológico en santo Tomás. A lo largo de todo el itinerario poético, vemos la impronta del Aquinate presente en el meollo de la narración. Aquí analizaré cómo la cuestión teológica fundamental del gobierno divino del mundo permea la Comedìa, tanto en su estructura formal como en ciertos aspectos concretos del viaje de Dante. A partir de dicha premisa, (...) estudiaré las consecuencias que ello tiene en ese orden jurídico manifestado en la «arquitectura» del infierno, cuyo dintel es elocuente: «Giustizia mosse il mio alto fattore; / fecemi la divina podestate, / la somma sapienza e ‘l primo amore». Finalmente, abordaré la proporcionalidad de las penas que sufren los condenados, como indicador de la medida natural de los castigos dictados por justicia divina. (shrink)

This essay has two goals. The first is to define the behavioristic study of natural events and to classify behavior. The second is to stress the importance of the concept of purpose.Given any object, relatively abstracted from its surroundings for study, the behavioristic approach consists in the examination of the output of the object and of the relations of this output to the input. By output is meant any change produced in the surroundings by the object. By input, conversely, is (...) meant any event external to the object that modifies this object in any manner. (shrink)

La polarización, los populismos y la posverdad forman tres fenómenos sociopolíticos fundamentales para comprender cómo se está orientando la política en los sistemas demoliberales. La polarización política se suele entender como un proceso dinámico de activación de las divisiones entre dos o más grupos sociales en el transcurso de los debates públicos que puede terminar con una ruptura comunicativa o una comunicación fallida. Si bien los especialistas no coinciden a la hora de definir el populismo, se puede comprender como una (...) forma concreta de construir el pueblo mediante un discurso que contrapone este al anti-pueblo. La posverdad se referiría a una tendencia cultural donde las verdades de hecho sufren una merma en favor de las verdades vivenciadas subjetivamente. Estos fenómenos tienden a ser percibidos por una buena parte de la sociedad y del mundo académico como una amenaza grave para las bases pluralistas y reflexivas de la democracia. Sin embargo, esa consideración está decantada normativamente. Este artículo trata de explorar un marco referencial diferente, el emotivismo, y cómo, desde este ángulo, toman sentido los tres conceptos clave: polarización, populismo y posverdad. (shrink)

La percepción puede proponerse como uno de los factores centrales que propician el inicio de procesos semiósicos. La complejidad de esta primera fase cognitiva exige una perspectiva trans e interdisciplinar. Así, desde una postura biosemiótica, trataremos de proponer uno de los conceptos centrales de esta novel teoría, a saber, ‘biosemiosis’. Para ello, nos apoyaremos en ciertos experimentos emanados de las neurociencias. Esta vinculación, en la actualidad, ya no debe resultar extraña si comprendemos que, en nuestro caso, el ser humano es (...) una entidad compuesta por dos esferas fundamentales: la biológica y la cultural. Nos encontramos en un momento en el que el Universo puede entenderse como una enorme red interconectada. Así, la cooperación entre diferentes campos del conocimiento permitirá una mejor comprensión de dichas redes. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: References.

El interés por caracterizar la noción del entendimiento científico es relativamente nuevo, no obstante que el término ha sido ampliamente utilizado en la literatura científica y filosófica, sin mencionar muchas otras. Como aportación a las investigaciones actuales sobre esta noción, el objetivo del siguiente escrito es presentar un análisis crítico de la relación entre el entendimiento científico y las emociones.

In the context of life sciences, we are constantly confronted with information that possesses precise semantic values and appears essentially immersed in a specific evolutionary trend. In such a framework, Nature appears, in Monod’s words, as a tinkerer characterized by the presence of precise principles of self-organization. However, while Monod was obliged to incorporate his brilliant intuitions into the framework of first-order cybernetics and a theory of information with an exclusively syntactic character such as that defined by Shannon, research advances (...) in recent decades have led not only to the definition of a second-order cybernetics but also to an exploration of the boundaries of semantic information. As H. Atlan states, on a biological level "the function self-organizes together with its meaning". Hence the need to refer to a conceptual theory of complexity and to a theory of self-organization characterized in an intentional sense. There is also a need to introduce, at the genetic level, a distinction between coder and ruler as well as the opportunity to define a real software space for natural evolution. The recourse to non-standard model theory, the opening to a new general semantics, and the innovative definition of the relationship between coder and ruler can be considered, today, among the most powerful theoretical tools at our disposal in order to correctly define the contours of that new conceptual revolution increasingly referred to as metabiology. This book focuses on identifying and investigating the role played by these particular theoretical tools in the development of this new scientific paradigm. Nature "speaks" by means of mathematical forms: we can observe these forms, but they are, at the same time, inside us as they populate our organs of cognition. In this context, the volume highlights how metabiology appears primarily to refer to the growth itself of our instruments of participatory knowledge of the world. (shrink)

In 1985, when I graduated from medical school, I thought that medicine in 2018 would be more advanced than it is today. Coloring that view were the dizzying medical advances made from 1950 to 1980, three decades that were Figure 1 Major biomedical advances as a function of the time perhaps the most innovative period in modern medicine. Recent times have seen fewer revolutionary advances, although remarkable progress continues to be made in certain areas, including imaging of disease, the treatment (...) of retroviral infections such as those caused by HIV and hepatitis C virus, nucleic acid-based diagnostics, and cancer immunotherapy. The critical question is not whether we are continuing to make progress... (shrink)

Original, or 'old', institutional economics (OIE) – also known as 'institutionalism' – played a key role in its early stages; it could be said that it was once the 'mainstream economics' of the time. This period ran approximately from the first important contributions of Thorstein Veblen in 1898 to the implementation of the New Deal in the early 1930s, where many institutionalists played a significant role. However, notwithstanding its promising scientific and institutional affirmation, institutional economics underwent a period of marked (...) decline that spanned from the mid-1930s to the late 1980s, when a new season for institutional economics was set in motion. In order to cast some light on this complex issue – without any claim of completeness – we have organised the work as follows: in the first section we consider the main interpretations of this phenomenon. In the subsequent sections we analyse a number of 'endogenous' aspects which might have played a significant role in the period of decline: (i) the relations of institutional economics with Keynes's macroeconomic theory; (ii) the links between theoretical and empirical analysis and the supposed lack of a clear theory; (iii) the interdisciplinary orientation. (shrink)

When stressing how ‘Christian pastoral power’ defined the specificity of ‘governmental power’, Foucault never explicitly acknowledged the German debate on modernity or theological-political issues. My hypothesis is that – whatever the actual reasons for this omission might be – this oversight is symptomatic of Foucault’s unique interpretation of the role of Christianity in Western culture and of his different approach to the theme of power. After analysing the positions of two of the leading exponents of the German debate, Karl Löwith (...) and Carl Schmitt, the essay substantiates this hypothesis by looking at Foucault’s investigations of pastoral power. In particular, the essay aims to demonstrate how the latter’s apparent omissions are linked to Foucault’s challenge to two central questions in the 20th-century debate on modernity, namely: (1) the possibility of interpreting modern political revolutions as expressions of a linear and secularized vision of history; and (2) the centrality of the category of sovereignty in the definition of Western power. (shrink)

An analysis of theological and philosophical understandings of debt and its role in contemporary capitalism. Max Weber’s account of the rise of capitalism focused on his concept of a Protestant ethic, valuing diligence in earning and saving money but restraint in spending it. However, such individual restraint is foreign to contemporary understandings of finance, which treat ever-increasing consumption and debt as natural, almost essential, for maintaining the economic cycle of buying and selling. In The Debt of the Living, Elettra (...) Stimilli returns to this idea of restraint as ascesis, by analyzing theological and philosophical understandings of debt drawn from a range of figures, including Saint Paul, Schmitt and Agamben, Benjamin and Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, and Foucault. Central to this analysis is the logic of “profit for profit’s sake”—an aspect of Weber’s work that Stimilli believes has been given insufficient attention. Following Foucault, she identifies this as the original mechanism of a capitalist dispositif that feeds not on a goal-directed rationality, but on the self-determining character of human agency. Ascesis is fundamental not because it is characterized by renunciation, but because the self-discipline it imposes converts the properly human quality of action without a predetermined goal into a lack, a fault, or a state of guilt: a debt that cannot be settled. Stimilli argues that this lack, which is impossible to fill, should be seen as the basis of the economy of hedonism and consumption that has governed global economies in recent years and as the premise of the current economy of debt. Elettra Stimilli is research fellow of theoretical philosophy at Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, Italy. Arianna Bove is the translator of many books, including Factory of Strategy: Thirty-Three Lessons on Lenin, by Antonio Negri. (shrink)

Reconstructing the genetic traits of the Last Common Ancestor and the Tree of Life are two examples of the reaches of contemporary molecular phylogenetics. Nevertheless, the whole enterprise has led to paradoxical results. The presence of Lateral Gene Transfer poses epistemic and empirical challenges to meet these goals; the discussion around this subject has been enriched by arguments from philosophers and historians of science. At the same time, a few but influential research groups have aimed to reconstruct the LCA with (...) rich-in-detail hypotheses and high-resolution gene catalogs and metabolic traits. We argue that LGT poses insurmountable challenges for detailed and rich in details reconstructions and propose, instead, a middle-ground position with the reconstruction of a slim LCA based on traits under strong pressures of Negative Natural Selection, and for the need of consilience with evidence from organismal biology and geochemistry. We defend a cautionary perspective that goes beyond the statistical analysis of gene similarities and assumes the broader consequences of evolving empirical data and epistemic pluralism in the reconstruction of early life. (shrink)

Immanence is a key concept in Gilles Deleuze's thought. It emerges in 1968, in the book Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza and it is a focus until his last text. Immanence is a concept steeped in theological resonances, which disturbs Western metaphysics and politics. But, according to Deleuze, immanence is not really a concept, rather it is a ‘plan’. ‘The plan of immanence’ is the ‘prephilosophical’ working plan of philosophy. The point is that, according to Deleuze, philosophy cannot be understood only (...) conceptually, although it begins with the creation of concepts. Here, rather, what is at stake is a prephilosophical origin of philosophy itself. This relationship between the plane of immanence and philosophy is the most important aspect that some of best-known exponents of contemporary Italian philosophy have inherited from Deleuze. The focus of this essay is on three expressions of the plane of immanence in the sense of Deleuze that have been developed in contemporary Italian Thought: the ‘constituent power’ of politics in Antonio Negri; the ‘impersonal’ in Roberto Esposito; and the ‘potentiality’ in Giorgio Agamben. (shrink)

El artículo desentraña la relación entre Carl Schmitt y Jacob Taubes en sus interpretaciones sobre el Leviathan de Thomas Hobbes y la teología política. El jurista del nazismo y el rabino mantienen posiciones opuestas sobre el filósofo inglés hasta el punto de encontrar Taubes en Spinoza una alternativa aún por desarrollar. Frente a la interpretación de Schmitt que situaba a Spinoza como origen de la enfermedad que condujo a la muerte del Leviatán, Taubes lo sitúa en Pablo de Tarso (“primer (...) judío liberal”) y la separación entre interino y externo en el mesianismo paulino. (shrink)

This article focuses on a religious structure that is intrinsic to the contemporary mechanisms that have enabled the global domination of economic power: faith in the market. Following Foucault’s transition from biopolitics to governmentality, this article articulates the mechanism that generates the ability for human beings to give shape and value to their lives. Through a reading of Schmitt and Hayek, as well as an updated reading of Weber’s thesis on the origin of capitalism, this article argues that we must (...) turn our attention to the Christian motifs that shape our contemporary understanding of the ‘economy’. (shrink)