This article aims to clarify the sharp contrast between the “short path” of Heideggerian ontology and the “long path” adopted by Ricoeur as a representation of the many necessary mediations in the constitution of his philosophical anthropology. Heidegger breaks into contemporary thought with the publication of his treatise “Being and Time” (1927) as a kind of direct settlement in the field of ontology. In contrast, Ricoeur is seen - and sees himself - as a thinker of conceptual mediations in his (...) long itinerary, since adherence to Husserlian phenomenology and subsequent hermeneutic inflection, passing through confrontations with Freudian psychoanalysis, structuralism and analytical philosophy, to the creation of the book “Oneself as Another” (1990). However, the two philosophers built their works on the common horizon of hermeneutics; therefore, are there possible points of convergence between them? And how could we interpret the relevance of this possible interlocution? These questions cannot be answered without a thorough comparative reading. This text does not intend to answer them, but only to suggest elements for further investigations. (shrink)

Nota do tradutor: O escopo da psicologia é o primeiro capítulo do tratado The principles of psychology (Os princípios de psicologia) de William James (1842-1910), publicado originalmente em 1890. Nesse capítulo inaugural, James enfrenta uma questão central e perene na psicologia: a necessidade (e dificuldade) da demarcação do campo psicológico. Como representante de uma tradição que ainda falava da psicologia no singular, James vê na multiplicidade de assuntos, métodos e problemas da psicologia um desafio para uma disciplina que se pretendia (...) científica. De um lado, era necessário assumir o caráter plural dos assuntos que merecem ser agrupados pela palavra psicologia, negando um reducionismo grosseiro, que, em favor de uma integração teórica, alijasse a “vida mental” de sua riqueza imanente. De outro lado, havia ainda a esperança de uma sistematização que pudesse evitar a completa fragmentação do campo psicológico. A história parece ter mostrado que a preocupação de James era, de fato, legítima, pois o que se viu a partir do século XX foi o fracasso de diferentes sistemas de psicologia, levando a um círculo vicioso no qual a dificuldade de demarcação do campo psicológico fragmenta cada vez mais a psicologia, o que, por sua vez, torna ainda mais distante a possibilidade de se encontrar critérios que possam sistematizar toda essa diversidade. Nesse sentido, O escopo da psicologia não é apenas uma introdução ao livro Os princípios de psicologia, mas uma introdução à psicologia moderna. (shrink)

Contemporary popular culture is riddled with references to Mexican drug cartels, narcos, and drug trafficking. In the United States, documentary filmmakers, journalists, academics, and politicians have taken note of the increasing threats to our security coming from a subculture that appears to feed on murder and brutality while being fed by a romanticism about power and capital. Carlos Alberto Sánchez uses Mexican narco-culture as a point of departure for thinking about the nature and limits of violence, culture, and personhood. (...) A Sense of Brutality argues that violent cultural modalities, of which narco-culture is but one, call into question our understanding of “violence” as a concept. The reality of narco-violence suggests that “violence” itself is insufficient to capture it, that we need to redeploy and reconceptualize “brutality” as a concept that better captures this reality. Brutality is more than violence, other to cruelty, and distinct from horror and terror—all concepts that are normally used interchangeably with brutality, but which, as the analysis suggests, ought not to be. In narco-culture, the normalization of brutality into everyday life is a condition upon which the absolute erasure or derealization of people is made possible. (shrink)

Seria oportuno, ou mesmo viável, confrontar Tomás de Aquino, frade dominicano do século XIII, e Paulo Freire, mestre e filósofo de nossos dias? Este livro aposta que sim. Verifica e convida a verificar como dois gênios, bem atentos aos diferentes momentos históricos, souberam enfrentar os problemas fundamentais da inteligência, do estudo, da cultura, da linguagem e da consciência. Entra pela análise harmoniosa dos textos e contextos das grandes obras de Tomás de Aquino e de Paulo Freire. Empenha-se na descrição cuidadosa (...) dos seus paradigmas intelectuais e pedagógicos. Assim, o livro oferece uma boa contribuição a professores e estudantes de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas. E será muito bem-vindo para todos aqueles que se interessam pelo universo da educação, da pedagogia e da cultura, além da busca metódica de ciência, técnica e sabedoria em vista da desejada globalização humana do nosso planeta Terra"--Provided by Publisher. (shrink)

El objetivo de este artículo es definir la concepción del acto involuntario de Francisco Suárez y mostrarla como un medio que permite comprender y profundizar en su teoría de la acción humana. En esta cuestión, el Doctor Eximio parte de presupuestos elaborados por Tomás de Aquino que amplía y adapta siguiendo sus propias tesis metafísicas y teológicas sobre la relación entre Dios y las creaturas. Mostraremos cómo Suárez vincula el verdadero involuntario con el _simpliciter_, lo forzado, necesario e indeseado, dejando (...) al _secundum quid_ como un acto mixto en el que la libertad y la voluntad, pese a las injerencias externas, no quedan anuladas. Por último, subrayaremos las consecuencias de la definición suareciana de lo involuntario sobre la noción de libertad, haciendo patente que tanto una como otra serían imposibles fuera del marco teórico que él sustenta, caracterizado por la eficiencia humana (y su dependencia de la divinidad) y no por la premoción física. (shrink)

La tecnología biomédica, especialmente la genética, podrá ser previsiblemente aplicable para intervenciones que no tendrán carácter terapéutico, sino de “mejora” de las capacidades o aptitudes de los seres humanos. Ante estas prácticas, que según algunos resucitan la idea de eugenesia, distintos autores han negado que sean aplicables sin más las prevenciones desarrolladas frente a la eugenesia histórica. Además, reivindican una eugenesia liberal que librada de las decisiones estatales y conf iada a las decisiones individuales pasaría a estar justif icada o (...) incluso a ser moralmente obligatoria en la medida que supusiese un benef icio para los descendientes. En este artículo se def iende que aunque las acusaciones que se le hacían a la eugenesia histórica no son, en efecto, aplicables, eso no signif ica que se trate de unas prácticas y de una teoría exenta de problemas. Particularmente se examina en qué consistiría una “mejora” y se sostiene que determinadas intervenciones, aun constituyendo mejoras en un determinado contexto, no por ello han de reputarse necesariamente como aceptables, como es el caso de las mejoras discriminatorias. Por último, como muchas mejoras lo son únicamente en términos posicionales, se cuestiona si no están más cerca del darwinismo social que de la propia eugenesia. (shrink)

The wide use of the word “cloning” in public discussion could lead to a confusion in the judgement of different situations. The variety of legal regulation of cloning in Europe shows examples of these confusions. But there are some other reasons that make difficult a complete legal regulation of scientific research on cloning.

A partir do estudo dos Princípios de Filosofia Cartesiana e da Ética de Spinoza, buscaremos explicitar o problema do anticartesianismo em três movimentos críticos específicos de natureza metódica, metafísica e ética: primeiro, a conversão do método empregado nos Princípios de Descartes; segundo, a crítica ao “dualismo substancial”; e, por fim, a crítica à teoria cartesiana do livre-arbítrio.

Theories related to cognitive sciences, Human-in-the-loop Cyber-physical systems, data analysis for decision-making, and computational ethics make clear the need to create transdisciplinary learning, research, and application strategies to bring coherence to the paradigm of a truly human-oriented technology. Autonomous objects assume more responsibilities for individual and collective phenomena, they have gradually filtered into routines and require the incorporation of ethical practice into the professions related to the development, modeling, and design of algorithms. To make this possible, it is pertinent and (...) urgent to bring them closer to the problems and approaches of the humanities. Increasingly transdisciplinary research must be part of the construction of systems that provide developers and scientists with the necessary bases to understand the ethical debate and therefore their commitment to society. This article considers two theories as articulating axes: Blumenberg’s, coming from the field of philosophy, for whom the process of technification and especially the implementation of mathematical models in their algorithmic form leads to an emptying of meaning and therefore makes programmers who implement their functions to be alien to the concerns that gave them origin; Daston’s, belonging to the field of the history of science and according to which the division of labor in the processes of technification of the calculation implies a kind of subordination in which those who implement the inventions of a small group of privileged mathematicians ignore the procedures that put them into operation. Given these two theories, the black box models prevalent in AI development, and the urgency of establishing explanatory frameworks for the development of computational ethics, this article exposes the need to give a voice to the cultural history of consciousness for promoting the discussions around the implementation of mathematical algorithms. The paper takes as a reference the different points of view that have emerged around the study of technological ethics, its applicability, management, and design. It criticizes the current state of studies from a humanistic perspective and explains how the historical perspective allows promoting the training of software engineers, developers and creators so that they assume intuitions and moral values in the development of their work. Specifically, it aims to expose how cultural history, applied to the study of consciousness and its phenomena, makes those involved in this technological revolution aware of the effect that they, through their algorithms, have on society in general and on human beings in particular. (shrink)

El surgimiento y consolidación en el seno de la clase obrera de un estrato social —la burocracia sindical— que, aunque tenga su origen en dicha clase, con el tiempo adquiere privilegios e intereses que lo llevan a defender posiciones contrarias a la independencia política de los trabajadores, desarticulándolos políticamente y subordinándolos al Estado burgués, es un fenómeno universal del capitalismo. En este artículo, describiremos los intentos realizados por el zarismo ruso de crear artificialmente una burocracia sindical bajo la égida de (...) la policía entre 1898 y 1905. La peculiaridad de la experiencia rusa durante los años inmediatamente anteriores a la revolución de 1905 reside en el hecho de que no tuvo lugar, como ocurrió usualmente en otros países, mediante el otorgamiento de la libertad de huelga, de reunión y de asociación a los trabajadores y mediante la cooptación gradual de su estrato dirigente por el Estado burgués, sino como resultado de una iniciativa del Ministerio del Interior, y dentro de él de la Policía Secreta (Ojrana), en contraposición tanto a la política oficial del zarismo, que no legalizó los sindicatos hasta 1906, como a la del Ministerio de Finanzas, que controlaba a los inspectores de fábrica y era particularmente sensible a las presiones de los capitalistas. Las contradicciones de dicha política estallaron con la masacre perpetrada por el zarismo durante el “Domingo Sangriento” del 9 de enero de 1905, que dio comienzo a la primera revolución rusa y condujo a la legalización parcial de la actividad sindical. (shrink)

Noche: La presencia de la ausencia, la disolución de la persona en la noche, el horror de ser, la realidad de lo irreal hacen que la noción de il y a �más que a Dios nos lleve a la ausencia de Dios, a la ausencia de todo ente�. Amanecer: No ser consciente de la existencia de ese supuesto centro inalterable de la persona dentro del tiempo no quiere decir que no seamos capaces de explicar la alterable y relativa identidad personal (...) de otras maneras. Día: Soy yo quién fluye, pero yo no estoy en el flujo como un apoyo de donde la vida fluya; yo estoy fluyendo en mi propia realidad. Esto no es similar a una egología, no significa que todo exista y sea amado por mí, sino que quiere decir que todo es visto y amado por mí. (shrink)

Este trabajo defenderá la universalidad de la metáfora en arte (Arthur Danto), contra quienes piensan (Davidson, Carrol, Vilar) que en él la atribución de propiedades expresivas es literal y no metafórica. Se defiende la tesis de que la metáfora artística es como un símbolo tensivo que apunta a significados (epífora) y al mismo tiempo crea presencia (diáfora). Gracias a ambos elementos el arte crea presencia, crea realidad o transfigura lo usual y le otorga súbitas y asombrosas posibilidades de presencia, a (...) las cuales se corresponde no sólo con los sentidos, sino también con el afecto, el entendimiento y la imaginación. (shrink)

In 1836, at 19 years of age, Colombian philosopher José Eusebio Caro wrote a sociological and anthropological treatise titled Mecánica social that illustrates in context the reception of French philosophy in 19th-century Colombian philosophical thought. The purpose of this paper is to present critically Caro’s theory of the will and to bring to light the philosophical sources from which he draw, especially physiology and its role as theoretical basis for both ideology and a new “scientific” anthropology that could, in turn, (...) provide support for a science of morals and legislation, a major goal of French radical liberal thought. (shrink)

Family, bioethics, and contemporary assertion of rights Família, bioética e reivindicação contemporânea de direitos The starting point of this article is a historical approach to the contemporary origins of the current right recognition movement in relation to the family. Also, through a philosophical-legal research into its essential features, the author proposes an interdisciplinary reflection on the links between such movement and a new anthropological and legal conception of family driven by a particular use of biotechnology. Some alternative critical proposals to (...) this way of thinking by authors from the legal, psychoanalytic and philosophical fields are also explored. Finally, the article concludes with a discussion on the need for broadening the philosophical and anthropological bases of the debate on the family in order to overcome the ideological bias of legal reforms underway. Para citar este artículo / to reference this article / para citar este artigo Hoevel C. Familia, bioética y reivindicación contemporánea de los derechos. pers. bioét. 2018; 22: 247-262. DOI: 10.5294/pebi.2018.22.2.4. (shrink)

Thought: A Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.

La tesis de este trabajo es que, respecto de los actos emocionales, en Zubiri se puede hablar de un "sentimiento primordial de realidad". Esta idea nunca se ha afirmado como tal puesto que algunos textos oscuros del autor parecían impedirlo. Reinterpretando no obstante esos textos se ha podido llegar a sostener que la "determinación" intelectiva de la que habla Zubiri no entra "formalmente" en contradicción con la existencia de un acto inmediato y radical de carácter emocional. Se trata de un (...) acto específico, en una unidad con el acto intelectivo y volitivo, en el que se actualiza la realidad como bella, como "belleza real". (shrink)

Se interpreta el relato del Génesis 11 como un factum de la condición humana, cuya historicidad nos es legada por la tradición judeocristiana. El relato bíblico supone para el temprano pensamiento occidental un reconocimiento de que la lengua (su pluralidad) juega un papel fundamental en la configuración del lazo social. Según Gadamer, el problema con el relato del Génesis 11 consiste en que induce a una visión inapropiada del lenguaje desde el punto de vista ontológico. La aproximación que se intenta (...) –siguiendo a Heidegger- destaca que la configuración ontológica del hombre lo muestra como un ser inmediatamente social y comprensivo. The hermeneutic circle and confusio linguarum, or how comprehension is possible The tale of Genesis 11 is usually interpreted as a factum of human condition, whose historicity is bequeathed to us by the Judeo-Christian tradition. For early Western thought, the biblical tale means the recognition of (the plurality of) language's key role in shaping social bonds. According to Gadamer, the problem with the story of Genesis 11 is that it induces an inappropriate view of language from an ontological point of view. The approach attempted here –following Heidegger– points out that the ontological configuration of man displays him as an immediately social and supportive being. (shrink)

El artículo es una propuesta de lectura del poema de Parménides. Contra la exégesis que de él han hecho las interpretaciones tradicionales estrechándolo en el inmovilismo, el autor enfatiza una idea de habla que permite acoger la diferencia irreductible entre cosa y palabra, cuyas consecuencias son fundamentales para el pensamiento: en lugar del modo dialéctico, la relación presencia-ausencia se lleva a cabo en una escritura que concibe el ser como donación (de sentido) y el pensamiento como máscara.

Although language processing seems to resist age advancement, linguistic changes in aging are the reflection of systematic decline in cognitive and energy resources. However, aging does not affect language in a global way, being predominant a marked deterioration of production versus a relative maintenance of comprehension at various levels. This review provides updated information on the changes occurring in linguistic aging, focusing on lexical-semantic processing and the role of sociodemographic factors such as education, socioeconomic status and gender; In addition, a (...) brief approach to linguistic processing in the fourth age is attached. As a result, literature shows that lexical-semantic processing is asymmetric; older adults maintain their vocabulary and conceptual knowledge, however, they fail in tasks of access and lexical availability, with notable increase in events of the tip of the tongue associated with dependence on the psycholinguistic variables of the word. At the same time, the educational and socioeconomic level can influence lexical-semantic performance of the older adult, given its relation with the cognitive reserve and the greater elaboration of compensatory strategies. (shrink)

Many condensed matter systems are such that their collective excitations at low energies can be described by fields satisfying equations of motion formally indistinguishable from those of relativistic field theory. The finite speed of propagation of the disturbances in the effective fields (in the simplest models, the speed of sound) plays here the role of the speed of light in fundamental physics. However, these apparently relativistic fields are immersed in an external Newtonian world (the condensed matter system itself and the (...) laboratory can be considered Newtonian, since all the velocities involved are much smaller than the velocity of light) which provides a privileged coordinate system and therefore seems to destroy the possibility of having a perfectly defined relativistic emergent world. In this essay we ask ourselves the following question: In a homogeneous condensed matter medium, is there a way for internal observers, dealing exclusively with the low-energy collective phenomena, to detect their state of uniform motion with respect to the medium? By proposing a thought experiment based on the construction of a Michelson-Morley interferometer made of quasi-particles, we show that a real Lorentz-FitzGerald contraction takes place, so that internal observers are unable to find out anything about their ‘absolute’ state of motion. Therefore, we also show that an effective but perfectly defined relativistic world can emerge in a fishbowl world situated inside a Newtonian (laboratory) system. This leads us to reflect on the various levels of description in physics, in particular regarding the quest towards a theory of quantum gravity. (shrink)

One can intend the actions of others, even when one believes such actions are not under one’s control. Call the objects of intentions “ends”; the ends that consist (partly or wholly) of other people’s actions “social”; and the ends that consist of things one believes one cannot control “recalcitrant”. The thesis, then, is that one can intend recalcitrant social ends. I present a positive argument in favor of this idea, and then argue against some purported conditions on the possible content (...) of intentions that would rule out the possibility of intending such ends. The positive argument is the following: intentions are realized by a certain cluster of dispositions. One can come to be so disposed towards recalcitrant social ends. So one can come to be disposed toward such ends in the manner that realizes an intention. So one can intend recalcitrant social ends. The conditions against which I argue are known in the literature as the Own Action Condition, the Control Condition, and the Settle Condition. I present cases where, intuitively, agents genuinely intend ends that would be ruled out by these conditions. (shrink)

Reductionism has dominated science and philosophy for centuries. Complexity has recently shown that interactions—which reductionism neglects—are relevant for understanding phenomena. When interactions are considered, reductionism becomes limited in several aspects. In this paper, I argue that interactions imply nonreductionism, non-materialism, non-predictability, non-Platonism, and non-Nihilism. As alternatives to each of these, holism, informism, adaptation, contextuality, and meaningfulness are put forward, respectively. A worldview that includes interactions not only describes better our world, but can help to solve many open scientific, philosophical, and (...) social problems caused by implications of reductionism. (shrink)

There is a broad consensus that the study of social institutions is one of the fundamental concerns of the social sciences. The idea that phenomenology has ignored this topic is also widely accepted. As against this view, the present paper aims at demonstrating that especially Schutzian phenomenology—that is, the social-phenomenological tradition started by Alfred Schutz and continued by Thomas Luckmann and Peter Berger, among others—provides rich insights on the nature and workings of social institutions that could contribute to enriching the (...) current social-scientific debate on the issue. In order to show this, the authors attempt to unearth and systematically reconstruct Schutz’s and Berger and Luckmann’s insights on social institutions and to confront them with current approaches. (shrink)