Podíamos leer una noticia en EL PAÏS el pasado 20 de marzo que nos dio el punto de partida para reflexionar sobre los fenómenos actuales que giran alrededor de los consumos excesivos de alcohol. En realidad poco importa la ciudad de la que se trata porque hechos similares los estamos viviendo desde hace tiempo en diversos y múltiples municipios. La noticia versaba sobre� "la posibilidad de habilitar una zona controlada y vigilada para acoger e botellón juvenil� acotar una zona (...) en el recinto portuario, en los aledaños de la carpa de la� para acoger el fenómeno juvenil. La iniciativa contó con el respaldo unánime de los asistentes a la reunión (entre ellos dos representantes de la Autoridad Portuaria de� y la subdelegada del Gobierno). Nadie puso ninguna objeción a la propuesta y se aprobó por unanimidad, señalan fuentes del Ayuntamiento. (shrink)

Resumen El presente artículo es un estudio de los grupos budistas zen argentinos desde la perspectiva de la antropología política. El objetivo es, en primer lugar, explorar las distintas posiciones sociales que los miembros pueden ocupar al interior de un grupo zen y los sistemas nativos de clasificación social, es decir, las categorías que nombran y crean distinciones rituales. En segundo lugar, analizar la estructura de autoridad y de poder al interior de una comunidad zen, indagando los vínculos entre el (...) sistema ritual de posiciones sociales y la distribución del poder y la autoridad. La investigación etnográfica se efectuó siguiendo una metodología cualitativa, que incluyó la observación participante en los encuentros que los centros zen organizan periódicamente y la realización de entrevistas semi-estructuradas e historias de vida a sus miembros. Las conclusiones giran en torno a la importancia del ritual para la vida política de la comunidad, y la centralización del poder en la figura del maestro zen mediante la particular dinámica que evidencia la estructura de autoridad. Palabras clave: Argentina; Budismo zen; Política; Poder.The present anthropological study takes a political approach to the Argentinean Zen Buddhism groups. The first objective is to explore the variety of native social classification systems, that is to say the categories naming and creating rituals. Secondly, we try to analyze the authority and power system within a Zen community, investigating the relation between the ritual system of social positions and the distribution of power and authority. This article is based on qualitative research, which included periodic participant observation in gatherings organized by the Zen Buddhism centres and semi structured interviews with and life histories of their members. The conclusions focus on the importance of ritual for the community’s political life, and the centralization of power in the character of the Zen master, through the particular dynamics that evidences the authority structure. Key words: Argentina; Zen Buddhism; Politics; Power. (shrink)

En este trabajo ofrecemos un panorama al estudio de los sesgos. El creciente interés en ellos durante las últimas décadas radica en que estudiarlos implica hablar de cómo los seres humanos razonamos y emitimos juicios, e igualmente sobre los mecanismos y procesos que subyacen a tales capacidades, esto incluye entender cuándo y por qué frecuentemente nos equivocamos, como lo indica buena parte de la literatura en psicología cognitiva del razonamiento. Dada la existencia de los sesgos, han surgido posturas pesimistas que (...) sostienen que los sesgos muestran que los humanos son irracionales. Frente a estas, la literatura reciente ofrece visiones mas optimistas, y aduce que los sesgos pueden “desaparecer” si se tienen en consideración diferentes aspectos de tipo evolutivo. Otra postura es aquella que sostienen que la supervivencia humana no yace en la inteligencia individual sino en la colectiva. Es decir, que podemos dejar de confiar exclusivamente en el contenido de nuestra mente y en su lugar resolver los problemas colectivamente, gracias a la división de las tareas cognitivas. Para organizar la exposición dividimos el trabajo en tres enigmas de los sesgos cognitivos. El primero consiste en una discusión sobre el origen de los sesgos. El segundo concierne a su clasificación e inventarios. El tercer enigma versa sobre la unidad de análisis de la cognición humana, a saber, inteligencia individual versus inteligencia colectiva. Con estos enigmas queremos poner de manifiesto el abanico de discusiones que giran alrededor de los sesgos, sus problemas, así como la creciente fascinación por entenderlos. Estudiar los sesgos abona a la comprensión de cómo razonamos o pensamos, y esto nos ayuda a mejorar nuestro pensamiento crítico. (shrink)

Introductory essay, translation, updating and bibliography.

The financial Crunch of 2008 was easily explained by both the left and right–too easily. Each insisted that events thoroughly confirmed its own long-held views and utterly refuted those of the opposed camp. This essay argues that there are indeed new lessons to be drawn from the Crunch, lessons that involve balancing the bounty of the Invisible Hand against perils of the Prisoner's Dilemma. Liberal moral imperatives are traced to variables of Personal Choice and External Cost that are typically in (...) tension with each other and thus generate needs for institutional reconstructions that change according to time and circumstance. Personal bankruptcy protection, limited liability corporations, and intellectual property are cited as examples. It is argued that the Crunch occurred because of failure adequately to balance these variables. Three paradoxes came to a head in 2008: Paradox of Efficient Markets; Paradox of Reduced Risk; Paradox of Hard-won Knowledge. The essay concludes with suggestions concerning specific lessons to be drawn from the Crunch and a corresponding list of lessons not to be drawn. (shrink)

I was recently asked to report on editorial trends in the Hastings Center Report, past and future. What I reported is that HCR has been going in two seemingly contrasting directions. One has to do with moral decision‐making in clinical ethics—the core theme in bioethics for fifty years, but still developing. A second editorial trend is treatment of larger social and political issues that bear on health, such as public health interventions and access to health care. I could also have (...) noted a continuing stream of pieces on emerging technologies, from whole‐genome screening for newborns to artificial intelligence in clinical diagnoses to the so‐called de‐extinction of extinct animals and plants through various genetic and reproductive tricks. This January‐February 2019 issue of HCR reflects all these trends. (shrink)

Il presente studio si pone in ideale continuità con l’opera di Marcello Gigante Nomos Basileus, analisi fondamentale della nascita e delle interrelazioni tra diritto naturale, diritto divino e diritto positivo nel mondo greco, prendendo le mosse proprio dal punto in cui questi aveva interrotto la sua indagine, ossia sulle concezioni platoniche del nomos e le sue connessioni con il divino, l’anima e l’educazione. In Platone sono rintracciate le premesse teoretiche della concezione, poi diffusa in età ellenistica, imperiale e tardo-antica, e (...) solitamente attribuita agli stoici, del sovrano come nomos empsychos legge incarnata, fonte del diritto positivo in quanto è legge esso stesso. In Platone esiste uno stretto rapporto tra diritto naturale, diritto divino e diritto positivo: che il nomos empsychos sia espressione della legge di natura risulta dal principio platonico secondo cui natura è per l’uomo l’anima e principalmente la dimensione intellegibile e divina che è in essa. I governanti degni promulgano leggi positive che scaturiscono dalla loro anima divina: così può essere garantito il fondamento divino e naturale delle leggi positive. -/- . (shrink)

Interpretation of the classics in political theory seems to go in waves. For a while we had John Locke, the bourgeois thinker. Now we seem to be in a Locke-as-radical-democrat phase. Locke-the-bourgeois had problems of its own, but a radically democratic Locke -- not just the old Locke as liberal democrat but Locke as quasi-Leveller -- strains the interpretative imagination more than most; yet in recent years, several different kinds of argument have been advanced in support of it, both textual (...) and contextual. The most effective argument has proceeded by situating Locke in the context of radical Whig politics in the 1670s and '80s, the struggles over religious toleration and the royal succession, in particular the �Exclusion Crisis� of 1679-81. This contextual argument has been accompanied by various textual interpretations having to do with Locke's conceptions of property, consent, representation, the right of revolution and natural law. Among other things, these are supposed to show that while Locke had nothing explicit to say about the extent of the franchise, the weight of evidence suggests that he would have supported a fairly wide franchise, perhaps even something like the (almost) manhood suffrage advocated by the Levellers (at least according to some, and probably the most convincing, interpretations of their ideas). Most recently, in these pages, Martin Hughes, building on the work of James Tully and Richard Ashcraft in particular, has pushed the argument as far as it can probably go. His argument on taxation and suffrage has provided a motivation here for a wider exploration of Locke's views on representation, consent and the franchise. (shrink)

It is a thankless task to have to reply to Professor Murray Krieger’s “Retrospective.” Qui s’excuse, s’accuse, and since I cannot ask my readers to embark on their own retrospective of my writings and test them for consistency, I have little chance of restoring my reputation in their eyes. Hence I would have been happier to leave Professor Krieger to his agonizing, if he did not present himself the “spokesman” for a significant body of theorists who appear to have acclaimed (...) my book on Art and Illusion without ever having read it. The followers of this school of criticism—of which Professor Krieger is a prominent member—had apparently convinced themselves that the book lent support to an aesthetics in which the notions of reality and of nature had no place. They thought that I had subverted the old idea of mimesis and that all that remained were different systems of conventional signs which were made to stand for an unknowable reality. True, professor Krieger admits that I never endorsed such an interpretation of my views, and he even concedes that there are passages in Art and Illusion which contradict such an out-and-out relativism, but he wants to convince his readers that these contradictions lead precisely to the ambiguities he now proposes to analyse.If he were right that the book encourages such a misreading, all I could do would be to express my regrets for having failed to make myself sufficiently clear. Luckily I can draw comfort from the fact that unlike these literary critics, the leading archaeologist of this country, Professor Stuart Piggott, had no difficulty at all in discerning my meaning and profiting from my arguments. In his Walter Neurath Memorial Lecture of 1978, entitled Antiquity Depicted: Aspects of Archaeological Illustration, the author did me the honour of taking a statement from my book as his starting point. It is the passage at the end of part I in which I recapitulate the content of the first two chapters:What matters to us is that the correct portrait, like the useful map, is an end product on a long road through schema and correction. It is not a faithful record of a visual experience but the faithful construction of a relational mode.Neither the subjectivity of vision nor the sway of conventions need lead us to deny that such a model can be constructed to any required degree of accuracy. What is decisive here is clearly the word “required.” The form of a representation cannot be divorced from its purpose and the requirements of the society in which the given visual language gains currency.1 1. E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, 1956 , p. 90. E. H. Gombrich was director of the Warburg Institute and Professor of the History of the Classical Tradition at the University of London from 1959 to 1976. His many influential works include The Story of Art, Art and Illusion, Meditations on a Hobby Horse, The Sense of Order, Ideals and Idols, The Image and the Eye, and, most recently, Tributes. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry include “The Museum: Past, Present and Future and “Standards of Truth: The Arrested Image and the Moving Eye”. (shrink)

Whittaker, following Siebeck, pointed out the important role Plotinus assigns to the functions of imagination in psychic life. Imagination is the terminus ad quern of all properly human conscious experience; it is that faculty of man without which there can be no conscious experience. The sensitive soul is an imaginative soul below which there is Nature, or vegetative soul, which acts without being conscious. When the functions of reason are added to sensation to produce a rational human being, there is (...) conscious discursive thought as well as conscious sensation; and since the sensitive soul cannot be responsible for the imaging of rational concepts, Plotinus asserts the existence of a conceptual imagination. (shrink)

E. Rae Harcum argues that Christians do not have to give up their religious faith to keep the contributions of science. He confronts the relation between the human body and its non-material parts—the mind and spirit—and provides a way of looking at these metaphysical issues.

Este artigo procura compreender a noção de mimese na Poética de Aristóteles. Tanto nos autores do século V a.C., quanto em Platão e em Aristóteles, os cognatos de mimesis desconhecem um campo específico de aplicação, além disso, apresentam acepções – simular e emular – que por vezes se identificam e outras vezes se contradizem. Apesar desta ambivalência de mimesis e cognatos nos autores do século V a.C., e no próprio Aristóteles, na Poética o exemplo da pintura elucida melhor o sentido (...) de mimesis e cognatos no contexto das mimetikai technai (artes miméticas). (shrink)

Selected articles of Ēṭukūru Balarāmamūrti on Marxist philosophy; includes contributed on his life and work.

I hope you will agree, however, that the purpose of the museum should ultimately be to teach the difference between pencils and works of art. What I have called the shrine was set up and visited by people who thought that they knew this difference. You approached the exhibits with an almost religious awe, an awe which certainly was sometimes misplaced but which secured concentration. Our egalitarian age wants to take the awe out of the museum. It should be a (...) friendly place, welcoming to everyone. Of course it should be. Nobody should feel afraid to enter it or for that matter be kept away by his inability to pay. But as far as I can see the real psychological problem here is how to lift the burden of fear, which is the fear of the outsider who feels he does not belong, without also killing what for want of a better word I must still call respect. Such respect seems to me inseparable from the thrill of genuine admiration which belongs to our enjoyment of art. This admiration is a precious heritage which is in danger of being killed with kindness. E. H. Gombrich was director of the Warburg Institute and Professor of the History of the Classical Tradition at the University of London from 1959 to 1976. His books include The Story of Art, Art and Illusion, Meditations on a Hobby Horse, Norm and Form, Symbolic Images, The Heritage of Apelles, and In Search of Cultural History. He became a Fellow of the British Academy in 1960, a Commander of the British Empire in 1966, and was knighted in 1972. He is also a trustee of the British Museum and a foreign member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Philosophical Society. His contributions to Critical Inquiry include "Notes and Exchanges", "Standards of Truth: The Arrested Image and the Moving Eye", and, with Quentin Bell, "Canons and Values in the Visual Arts: A Correspondence". (shrink)

In this essay I wish to consider the implications for theory and practice of the following two propositions, either or both of which may be controversial, but which will here be assumed for the sake of argument: Libertarianism is the correct framework for political morality. The vast majority of our fellow citizens disbelieve. 1.

E. L. Mascall; XIV—Perception and Sensation, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 64, Issue 1, 1 June 1964, Pages 259–272, https://doi.org/10.1093/ar.