Este artículo aborda el problema de las relaciones entre lo trágico y lo divino tomando como referencia fundamental el libro de María Zambrano escrito originalmente en 1955 y revisado veinte años después. Se trata de una de las defensas más lúcidas de la religión cristiana, siempre en guardia contra la forma mítica de concebir el mundo. El supuesto subyacente es que los dioses de la mitología son productos humanos, mientras que, a la inversa, el Dios cristiano crea a los hombres. (...) En ningún momento, Zambrano se advierte con la menor disposición a discutir semejante argumento. Aquí se propone una crítica a esa posición. (shrink)

El sujeto cartesiano se constituye en la subordinación de todas las facultades a la inteligencia; ella ha de imponer en todo momento y situación sus condiciones, porque de lo que se trata es de asegurar el dominio de las cosas, algo que no se consigue sin interponer al deseo, a ese deseo, un entendimiento adecuado. Y Descartes sabe muy bien que no hay entendimiento que no sea de objetos. Los seres humanos están dotados de estas facultades, que habitualmente chocan y (...) no dejan de entrar en conflicto. En la sustitución de la confusión (y la superstición) por el método, Descartes lleva a su extremo la sujeción de las demás facultades por el entendimiento, injusticia que sublevará a muchos. En este artículo se aborda este problema. (shrink)

La escritura de Paul Valéry es un reto para la filosofía y en este artículo se toma nota del comentario de Karl Löwith para ejemplificar la dificultad. El artículo se divide en cuatro partes, de las cuales sólo la primera toma en cuenta la opinión de José María Valverde; las tres siguientes analizan la posición del filósofo K. Löwith para centrar el argumento básico del poeta. Se trata de ver cómo y hasta qué punto Valéry es cartesiano, tomando en consideración (...) que, como poeta, ha efectuado una disolución o rarefacción de la subjetividad. En este movimiento, el yo puro, al que se remite, designa el límite del mundo. (shrink)

This article starts from two books by Santiago Alba Rico and Peter Sloterdijk to address the problem of nihilism, leading to Nietzsche and Heidegger to theoretically center the discussion and to conclude that the very idea of Salvation is nihilistic and belongs to its own logic. The fundamental problem can be approached as the conflict between the escape to some metaphysical or transcendent instance — the State or the Revolution, material forms of the Kingdom —or the immersion— which implies the (...) whole assumption of suffering and enjoyment —in immanence. (shrink)

El presente artículo aborda las primeras obras de Gilles Deleuze desde el ángulo que a él mismo le han merecido. Utiliza los textos, prólogos y entrevistas aparecidos en La isla desierta y otros textos (1953-1974), para proponer un comentario cuyo interés de fondo es la pregunta por la filosofía cuando a esta, sin ignorarlas, no le da por imitar a las ciencias positivas ni se presenta como sustituto de la religión.

This article deals with the problem of philosophy seen through myth, and that of the latter after the irruption of philosophy. Adorno and Horkheimer's texts on the Dialectic of Enlightenment and Giorgio Colli's text on The Birth of Philosophy are basically used to show their transfers and reconversions. The conclusion is that the scenario that opens up to lucidity is that of an innocent and ruthless game of forces within which none of them prevails absolutely and for eternity. Neither dialectic, (...) nor scientific, nor mystical: what is real is music. (shrink)

In this article we argue for an extension of Pere Alberch’s notion of developmental morphospace into the realm of cognition and introduce the notion of cognitive phenotype as a new tool for the evolutionary and developmental study of cognitive abilities.

The Mind-Brain Identity Theory lived a short life as a respectable philosophical position in the late 1950s, until Hilary Putnam developed his famous argument on the multiple realizability of mental states. The argument was, and still is, taken as the definitive demonstration of the falsity of Identity Theory and the foundation on which contemporary functionalist computational cognitive science was to be grounded. In this paper, in the wake of some contemporary philosophers, we reopen the case for Identity Theory and offer (...) a solution to the problem of multiple realizabilty. The solution is based on the necessity, at the time of establishing identity relations, of appealing to the notions of “homology” and “analogy” developed in the nineteenth century by Richard Owen. We also suggest that these notions are useful in order to correct certain shortcomings of some recent attempts at rebutting the Multiple Realizability argument. (shrink)

Recently, there has been a growing interest, both within theoretical biology and the philosophy of biology, in the possibility and desirability of a theory of development. Among the many issues raised within this debate, the questions of the spatial and temporal boundaries of development have received particular attention. In this article, noting that so far the discussion has mostly centered on the processes of morphogenesis and organogenesis, we argue that an important missing element in the equation, namely the development of (...) language and cognition in general, may play an important role in settling the issue of temporal boundaries. After examining the idea that the development of language, cognition, and action are bona fide biological processes, we explore the consequences for a general theory of development of taking them into consideration. (shrink)

It is widely assumed that functional and dispositional properties are not identical to their physical base, but that there is some kind of asymmetrical ontological dependence between them. In this regard, a popular idea is that the former are realized by the latter, which, under the non-identity assumption, is generally understood to be a non-causal, constitutive relation. In this paper we examine two of the most widely accepted approaches to realization, the so-called ‘flat view’ and the ‘dimensioned view’, and we (...) analyze their explanatory relevance in the light of a number of examples from the life sciences, paying special attention to developmental phenomena. Our conclusion is that the emphasis placed by modern-day biology on such properties as variability, evolvability, and a whole collection of phenomena like modularity, robustness, and developmental constraint or developmental bias requires the adoption of a much more dynamic perspective than traditional realization frameworks are able to capture. (shrink)

Ecological developmental biology considers the phenotype as actively produced through an environmentally informed process of individual development, rather than predetermined by the genotype. Accordingly, the genotype is viewed as one among many interactants that contribute formative elements; it is understood to do so no differently from the way other organism-internal and environmental resources do. Although the EcoDevo approach is evidently particularly apt to inform approaches to human development, which mostly takes shape in rich cultural environments, it is remarkable that, at (...) least within some highly influential circles of the linguistic sciences, the study of many distinctive human cognitive traits including language remains strongly anchored to a preformationist stance. This article brings an EcoDevo approach to the biologically focused study of language to argue that an aspect of language design commonly assumed to be “blueprinted,” namely, the lexicon-syntax interface, may instead be explained as a plastic effect of ongoing developmental processes in the mind of the child, in which designated aspects of the environment fulfill a key constructive role. (shrink)

Designers’ intentions are important for determining an artifact’s proper function (i.e., its perceived real function). However, there are disagreements regarding why. In one view, people reason causally about artifacts’ functional outcomes, and designers’ intended functions become important to the extent that they allow inferring outcomes. In another view, people use knowledge of designers’ intentions to determine proper functions, but this is unrelated to causal reasoning, having perhaps to do with intentional or social forms of reasoning (e.g., authority). Regarding these latter (...) social factors, researchers have proposed that designers’ intentions operate through a mechanism akin to social conventions, and that therefore both are determinants of proper function. In the current work, participants learned about an object’s creation, about social conventions for its use and about a specific episode where the artifact was used. The function implemented by the user could be aligned with the designer’s intended function, the social convention, both, or neither (i.e., an opportunistic use). Importantly, the use episode always resulted in an accident. Data show that the accident negatively affected proper function judgments and perceived efficiency for conventional and opportunistic functions, but not for designers’ intended functions. This is inconsistent with the view that designers’ intentions are conceptualized as causes of functional outcomes and with the idea that designers’ intentions and social conventions operate through a common mechanism. (shrink)

In this article we offer a detailed assessment of current approaches to the origins of language, with a special foots on their historical and theoretical underpinnings. It is a widely accepted view within evolutionary linguistics that an account of the emergence of human language necessarily involves paying special attention to its communicative function and its relation to other animal communication systems. Ever since Darwin, some variant of this view has constituted the mainstream version in evolutionary linguistics; however, it is our (...) contention in this article that this approach is seriously flawed, and that “animal communication” does not constitute a natural kind on which a sound theoretical model can be built. As a consequence, we argue that this communicative perspective is better abandoned in favor of a structural/formal approach based on the notion of homology, and that some interesting and unexpected similarities may be found by applying this venerable comparative method founded in the 19th century by Richard Owen. (shrink)

Structured argumentation systems, and their implementation, represent an important research subject in the area of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning. Structured argumentation advances over abstract argumentation frameworks by providing the internal construction of the arguments that are usually defined by a set of (strict and defeasible) rules. By considering the structure of arguments, it becomes possible to analyze reasons for and against a conclusion, and the warrant status of such a claim in the context of a knowledge base represents the main (...) output of a dialectical process. Computing such statuses is a costly process, and any update to the knowledge base could potentially have a huge impact if done naively. In this work, we investigate the case of updates consisting of both additions and removals of pieces of knowledge in the Defeasible Logic Programming (DeLP) framework, first analyzing the complexity of the problem and then identifying conditions under which we can avoid unnecessary computations—central to this is the development of structures (e.g. graphs) to keep track of which results can potentially be affected by a given update. We introduce a technique for the incremental computation of the warrant statuses of conclusions in DeLP knowledge bases that evolve due to the application of (sets of) updates. We present the results of a thorough experimental evaluation showing that our incremental approach yields significantly faster running times in practice, as well as overall fewer recomputations, even in the case of sets of updates performed simultaneously. (shrink)

El siguiente artículo presenta un panorama más amplio de la filosofía de Slavoj Žižek, mostrando que es parte de un grupo más amplio que denominamos “Escuela eslovena”. Es así que el artículo está compuesto por dos partes. La primera dedicada a mostrar el contexto histórico de emergencia de la Escuela eslovena. La segunda parte sostiene dos tesis: 1) hay una Escuela eslovena como sujeto impersonal que implica que leer a uno de sus miembros hace más comprensible a otro; y, 2) (...) a pesar de que no encontramos conceptos propios de esta Escuela es posible encontrar rasgos, operaciones y lecturas en común entre ellos. (shrink)

Espinosa começa a sua Ética com uma série de definições, em virtude do modelo geométrico de raciocínio que ele incorpora sistematicamente à filosofia. Assim, os comentadores analisam minuciosamente o conjunto das definições que abrem a Primeira Parte, mostrando que elas cumprem de maneira exemplar a exigência do método. Já na Segunda Parte da Ética, os mesmos comentadores manifestam dificuldade em reconhecer fidelidade irrestrita ao método. Porém, trata-se de uma dificuldade aparente. Este artigo enfoca as definições iniciais da parte II (...) da Ética, tendo por objetivo explicitar que elas se relacionam entre si de acordo com uma disposição formal precisa. Portanto, elas são escritas conforme o modelo matemático de raciocínio que Espinosa segue desde o começo da Ética. (shrink)

Las obras de Sergio Rábade contenidas en el presente volumen constituyen una de las aportaciones más valiosas de su legado filosófico. En los orígenes de la edad de la crítica, la aparición de nuevos valores asociados al conocimiento impulsó una afanosa renovación de los métodos en científicos y filósofos. Método y pensamiento en la modernidad analiza las exigencias de esta demanda en pro de un cambio real en los procedimientos de búsqueda y control de las ideas. Las complejas conexiones (...) entre el método teorizado y su práctica ocupan la atención del autor en Descartes y la gnoseología moderna. El filósofo francés, «faro de la moderna Europa», inaugura un nuevo estilo de pensar que será referencia obligada tanto para sus partidarios como para sus adversarios. Spinoza, considerado por Rábade como un «cartesiano anticartesiano», es el caso más representativo de referencialidad al autor del Discurso, aunque cargada de ambivalencia. El filósofo holandés de raíces judías entendió el cumplimiento del proyecto patrocinado por Descartes precisamente como una enmendación de los tópicos de su filosofía: el método, la sustancia divina, el hombre y las pasiones humanas (Espinosa: razón y felicidad). Los artículos insertados entre las obras del volumen no ocultan las contradicciones inherentes al pensamiento de estos dos grandes filósofos. (shrink)

Machado de Assis, no conto _A Sereníssima República_, aponta, por meio da alegoria, problemas de fundo do sistema político brasileiro. Uma espécie de cultura da fraude estaria presente nos comportamentos das aranhas, o que impossibilitaria a implantação reta e precisa da lei, bem como a instituição da paz e da _securitas_. Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, ao analisar, a partir de fontes primárias, o período em que se passa o conto, constata os mesmos problemas que Machado de Assis apontara. Os conceitos (...) políticos espinosanos são movimentados, ao final, para mostrar que em um _imperium_ no qual as leis são constantemente violadas, não se está distante do estado de natureza, com grande perigo de vida para os súditos-cidadãos. Seria este o caso da república do conto e do Brasil atual? (shrink)