Oscar Masotta (Buenos Aires, 1930- Barcelona, 1979) is all but forgotten now, except perhapsin the field of Lacanian studies. This is because in the 1970s,Masotta would challenge the master psychoanalyst on hisown turf, creating his own post-Lacanian school of psychoanalysisin Barcelona. But in 1965, aged just 27, Masottataught at the University of Buenos Aires, lectured at theDi Tella, and edited a book series on communication andmedia. A product of the newly open post-Perón era." Page 91.. This is the first (...) exhibition organized with materials from the archive Juan Acha, and includes reactivations of non-object-based art and artistic documentation. (shrink)

By reading mainly Heidegger’s “What Is Metaphysics?,” the aim of this paper is to illuminate the ontological revelatory function of the nothing that occurs in anxiety. The two parts of this paper describe the same night of anxiety. While the first part shows this night from the point of view of the movement or sweep of anxiety, the second studies this same night from the point of view of the ontological revelatory role of the nothing and its negative logic of (...) disclosure. It is crucial for my analysis to keep apart two different meanings of the nothing. There is the nothing as being’s totally other (nihil negativum), on the one hand, and the nothing as Being, on the other. While with this second meaning one dwells in the realm of the ontological, it is the first meaning-which is the focus of this paper-that secures our access to it. Resumen Mediante la lectura principalmente del texto “¿Qué es metafísica?” de Heidegger, el objetivo de este artículo es iluminar la función reveladora ontológica de la nada que ocurre en la angustia. Las dos secciones de este artículo describen la misma noche de la angustia. Mientras que la primera sección muestra esta noche desde el punto de vista del movimiento o vaivén de la angustia, la segunda estudia esta misma noche desde el punto de vista del papel revelador ontológico de la nada y su lógica negativa de desvelamiento. Para nuestro análisis es crucial mantener separados dos sentidos distintos del concepto de nada: por un lado, está la nada como lo totalmente otro con respecto al ente (nihil negativum); y por el otro lado, la nada como Ser. Si bien con este segundo significado uno habita en el ámbito de lo ontológico, es el primer significado, el cual es el tema central de este artículo, el que asegura nuestro acceso a él. (shrink)

The slime mould Physarum polycephalum has been used in developing unconventional computing devices for in which the slime mould played a role of a sensing, actuating, and computing device. These devices treated the slime mould as an active living substrate, yet it is a self-consistent living creature which evolved over millions of years and occupied most parts of the world, but in any case, that living entity did not own true cognition, just automated biochemical mechanisms. To “rehabilitate” slime mould from (...) the rank of a purely living electronics element to a “creature of thoughts” we are analyzing the cognitive potential of P. polycephalum. We base our theory of minimal cognition of the slime mould on a bottom-up approach, from the biological and biophysical nature of the slime mould and its regulatory systems using frameworks such as Lyon’s biogenic cognition, Muller, di Primio-Lengelerś modifiable pathways, Bateson's “patterns that connect” framework, Maturana's autopoietic network, or proto-consciousness and Morgan's Canon. (shrink)

Dorian Gray pays a hefty price for years of sin and vice in this completely unabridged edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray.

I argue that a standard formulation of hinge epistemology is host to epistemic relativism and show that two leading hinge approaches (Coliva’s acceptance account and Pritchard’s nondoxastic account) are vulnerable to a form of incommensurability that leads to relativism. Building on both accounts, I introduce a new, minimally epistemic conception of hinges that avoids epistemic relativism and rationally resolves hinge disagreements. According to my proposed account, putative cases of epistemic incommensurability are rationally resolvable: hinges are propositions that are the objects (...) of our belief-like attitudes and are rationally revisable in virtue of our overarching commitment to avoid systematic deception in our epistemic practices. (shrink)

El pensamiento ético de Averroes apenas ha sido estudiado y ello a pesar de que es el único filósofo islámico medieval del que se conserva un Comentario a la principal obra aristotélica sobre el tema, la Ética nicomáquea. El eje del presente trabajo es precisamente un nuevo análisis de ese Comentario a través de los conceptos de eudaimonía o felicidad, philía o amistad y tò díkaion o justicia.

In Zoopolis, Donaldson and Kymlicka argue that intervention in nature to aid animals is sometimes permissible, and in some cases obligatory, to save them from the harms they commonly face. But they claim these interventions must have some limits, since they could otherwise disrupt the structure of the communities wild animals form, which should be respected as sovereign ones. These claims are based on the widespread assumption that ecosystemic processes ensure that animals have good lives in nature. However, this assumption (...) is, unfortunately, totally unrealistic. Most animals are r-strategists who die in pain shortly after coming into existence, and those who make it to maturity commonly suffer terrible harms too. In addition, most animals do not form the political communities Zoopolis describes. The situation of animals in the wild can therefore be considered analogous to one of humanitarian catastrophe, or to that of irretrievably failed states. It matches closely what a Hobbesian state of nature would be like. This means that intervention in nature to aid nonhuman animals should not be limited as Donaldson and Kymlicka argue. (shrink)

"La democracia neopopulista es incluyente de la plebe, de los de abajo", mientras que, en tiempos de globalización, la democracia liberal tiende a conformar "la fachada gestional de las políticas del gran capital internacional", sostiene Roberto Follari, pensando en el presente latinoamericano. Doct..

I argue against the Standard View of ignorance, according to which ignorance is defined as equivalent to lack of knowledge, that cases of environmental epistemic luck, though entailing lack of knowledge, do not necessarily entail ignorance. In support of my argument, I contend that in cases of environmental luck an agent retains what I call epistemic access to the relevant fact by successfully exercising her epistemic agency and that ignorance and non-ignorance, contrary to what the Standard View predicts, are not (...) modal in the sense that knowledge is. After responding to objections, I conclude by sketching an alternative account of ignorance centered on the notions of epistemic access and epistemic agency. (shrink)

Some evolutionary psychologists contend that the best way to discover the functions of our present psychological systems is by appealing to the notion of functional mesh, that is, the assumed tight fit between a trait's design and the adaptive problem it is supposed to solve. In this paper, I argue that there exist theoretical considerations and empirical evidence that undermine this assumption of optimal design. Instead, I suggest that cognitive systems are constrained by what I call bounded functionality. This proposal (...) makes use of Jacob's (1977) notion of evolution as a bricoleur and Simon's (1981) idea that problems can have ``satisficing'' solutions. Functional mesh will thus be shown to neglect constraints that are necessary to explain the evolution of psychological mechanisms. (shrink)

The recently published book Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology 1 has had quite an impact on the ongoing debate about the existence of God.

An individual's health, genetic, or environmental-exposure data, placed in an online repository, creates a valuable shared resource that can accelerate biomedical research and even open opportunities for crowd-sourcing discoveries by members of the public. But these data become “immortalized” in ways that may create lasting risk as well as benefit. Once shared on the Internet, the data are difficult or impossible to redact, and identities may be revealed by a process called data linkage, in which online data sets are matched (...) to each other. Reidentification, the process of associating an individual's name with data that were considered deidentified, poses risks such as insurance or employment discrimination, social stigma, and breach of the promises often made in informed-consent documents. At the same time, re-ID poses risks to researchers and indeed to the future of science, should re-ID end up undermining the trust and participation of potential research participants. The ethical challenges of online data sharing are heightened as so-called big data becomes an increasingly important research tool and driver of new research structures. Big data is shifting research to include large numbers of researchers and institutions as well as large numbers of participants providing diverse types of data, so the participants’ consent relationship is no longer with a person or even a research institution. In addition, consent is further transformed because big data analysis often begins with descriptive inquiry and generation of a hypothesis, and the research questions cannot be clearly defined at the outset and may be unforeseeable over the long term. In this article, we consider how expanded data sharing poses new challenges, illustrated by genomics and the transition to new models of consent. We draw on the experiences of participants in an open data platform—the Personal Genome Project—to allow study participants to contribute their voices to inform ethical consent practices and protocol reviews for big-data research. (shrink)

Is there progress in philosophy? This question is addressed along the three sections of this article. In the introductory section a comparison with similar questions which may be posed in connection to the arts and the sciences is made. A preliminary result of such comparison is that the same as in science the notion of progress in philosophy should be understood in an epistemic sense. However, if a notion of epistemic progress useful in the case of science is applied, a (...) negative conclusion concerning the existence of such progress in philosophy may be easily reached.. In fact, a usual way of arguing for such negative conclusion is to recall the lack of consensus around any proposed solution of main philosophical problems and, hence, the existence of seemingly endless controversies around them. But against such conclusion I argue that a particular notion of progress – involving conceptual or intellectual enlargement and articulation – is more appropriate to the nature of philosophy. Once such notion is adopted, consensus ceases to be a necessary condition for progress. In the second section, after defining the notion of controversial field as a set of interrelated controversies, a classification of main positions vis-a-vis philosophical controversial fields is proposed. The main distinction is between the mainstream view according to which lack of consensus and endless controversies are, to use Kant´s words, the “scandal of philosophy” and an alternative view, advocated by Russell and Rescher, who praise the controversial status of philosophy as a way of preserving the plurality of our basic value commitments. Though recognizing the merits of those views, a serious flaw affecting all of them is pointed out, namely, their lack of attention to the actual development of controversial fields. After introducing such historical focus, the differences between different types of controversial fields are described. In particular, the difference between progressive and regressive types. Moreover, the differences between different stages in the development of controversial fields such as refocusing and substitution are also described. In the last section the preceding conceptual scheme is illustrated by sketching the development of twenty century philosophy of science through its main stages and controversial fields. Finally, an answer to the question posed at the beginning is provided: it is possible to assert the existence of progress in philosophy, in the sense introduced above, but only within the limits of controversial fields. If there is also progress between controversial fields is a question that may be doubted. It is not, in any case, dealt with in this article. (shrink)

Reconstruction is a central notion in Dewey’s account of inquiry and in his metaphilosophical commitments. In his work, Dewey made a call for reconstruction of philosophy, in the reconstruction of central notions of the discipline, like knowledge, logic, truth, the good, reason, and experience. Inquiry itself is reconstructive, according to Dewey, involving the transformation of an indeterminate situation into one which is determinate and understood. Dewey’s philosophical views should therefore be of interest to those taking part in the recent turn (...) towards revisionary philosophical methodologies, like conceptual engineering, explication, and amelioration. In light of the recent developments in revisionary methodologies, I aim to explore Dewey’s conception of concepts in relation to the conceptual engineering literature, suggesting that it provides a useful conception of concepts for conceptual engineering, and to suggest a Deweyan model of philosophical inquiry where concepts are the objects of inquiry. In both cases, I hope to show a productive interaction between Dewey’s ideas and contemporary discussions of conceptual engineering. (shrink)

If Cicero's Republic and Agustine's City of God are studied in parallel, and the Somnium Scipionis is specifically compared to De civitate Dei XXII, and the theme of the souls' immortality and of justice is also examined, it seems possible to show that Cicero's Republic contributed decisively to the general design of the City of God. Both republics, moreover, in a more general way, share with Plato's Republic certain common characteristics that are here pointed out.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Why Theory?Oscar Martín (bio) and Simone Pinet (bio)Theory is, of course, a medieval word, brought from Greek into Latin from a common root (theastai) that also gives us theater, linked through shared meanings related to speculation, contemplation, and so forth. It is used in the Bible, and its English modern use, according to the Oxford english dictionary, probably comes from a medieval Latin translation of Aristotle. The dictionary (...) does not direct us to any specific translation, but prompts us to compare with Italian and, of course, French usage. In French, however, the word théorie was not used until quite late. In fact, it appeared for the first time in French in a 1584 translation of Antonio de Guevara, the famous Spanish court preacher and man of letters whose oeuvre was translated, imitated, and plagiarized in France, Italy, Germany, and England during the sixteenth century. In Spanish, the word theoria had begun its vernacular life a few years before in the writings of Fernando de Herrera.Theoria is already documented by Antonio de Nebrija’s Vocabulario español-latino of 1495, listed between “speculation” and “species” and designating the contemplative and the art of speculation, from theory to the perception of its quality. It is appropriate that Spanish would give theory to the West, sharing with it a point of view or, better, a series of perspectives or miradores, as María Rosa Menocal would call them, from which to look back into or beyond cultural and literary practices [“Visions of al-Andalus”]. For Medieval Iberia was, as this collection of essays purports to be, not a space or a history but a shifting and fluid gaze on the conflicting world surrounding the different literary and cultural works dealt with in this issue.Reluctant at best, and most of the time resentful of theoretical approaches to the study of literature and culture, medievalism found in Hispanism a surprising and most loyal ally. If in most Spanish departments critical theory pushed its way into the study of later periods, to the point that today even the mourning itself (or celebration) of the agony of theory is done from a theoretical standpoint, Hispanomedievalism remained suspicious longer, and sharpened its words on statistics and “scientific” claims to authority. Its close relationship to historical research, however, also made this philology vulnerable to the practices of interpretation. And it is as a will to interpretation that theory has managed to place itself within and outside the criticism of medieval Iberian literature and culture in insightful and renewing ways—including collective projects similar to the present one. Marina Brownlee’s contribution to this volume in this sense offers a most telling guiding thread of this continued approach to the discipline, which she helped revitalize through her participation in the project the new Medievalism. More recently, Josiah Blackmore and Gregory Hutcheson, also contributing to the present volume, sparked a lively debate, as showcased in a forum published by La corónica, with their project Queer iberia: sexualities, cultures, and crossing from the Middle ages to the renaissance. But a host of monographs and single-authored books in recent years have come to inhabit and enliven medieval studies as Hispanism has grown into the most important area of foreign language studies. [End Page 3]Theories find themselves in the articles for this special issue by way of a development from within. There is no application, no rigid use of conceptual frameworks to revisit texts, but an interior process of thought on and through the texts and cultural practices analyzed that produces theoretical insights. While a variety of methodologies and theoretical positionings can be identified, both explicitly and not, from speech-act theory to deconstruction, from Žižek to Badiou, postcolonialism to politics, these seem to emerge from within, as if the obvious result of the need to think questions posed from slightly different standpoints than they have been up until now. All of the articles reflect on very well-known texts and periods, pondering about a discipline, its methodologies, even the nature of its object of study. These articles do not dismiss previous work, but they do bring it under a new light.At a... (shrink)