The following conversation took place at the 2017 Colloquium on Violence and Religion in Madrid, Spain. Cesáreo Bandera and Adam Ericksen discuss Bandera's friendship with Girard, their disagreements about mimetic theory, and hope in these apocalyptic times. This is an edited version of the transcript of a recoded interview. You can watch the video recording at The Raven Review at ravenfoundation.org.We are in your home country.Yes. In my home country. I am from the south, from Malaga. Malaga is straight south (...) from Madrid on the coast, right across the Mediterranean from Africa. I was born there but grew up in other parts of southern Spain. Like Cordoba and Sevilla where I went to the law school, to get a law... (shrink)

Cuando observamos el apabullante momento histórico en que estamos viviendo, con el alto desarrollo tecnológico disponible, y nos informamos de los éxitos de la física teórica y física aplicada, los avances en la cosmología, la biología, la filosofía de la ciencia, los vuelcos que le damos a los conocimientos para ajustarlos a la circunstancias de la ciencia actual, observamos la conquista del hombre sobre el planeta y sus recursos, los cambios en la sociología mundial, los avances y prospección de avaneces (...) en medicina y "n" circunstancias conexas, nos parece que todo está "hecho ya", no alcanzamos a informamos de tanto. La simbología nos arropa... y también, a medida que analizamos términos como luz, oscuridad, espacio, tiempo, distancia, macro, micro, positivo, negativo, atractivo, repulsivo, pareciera que nos confundimos más, lo simple nos confunde. Aparentemente términos como infinito, comienzo y fin de las cosas, crean un caos en el cual se nos hace inaprehensible lo pequeño y lo muy grande.¿Qué es el tiempo esencial?, quizás sea la evocación del espacio esencial, y por ello, estamos interconectados, enmarañados en un solo ser, un solo ser universal, que contiene toda la energía universal, y que soporta toda la energía universal. ¿Y entonces? ¿Cómo es el asunto de la entropía... que comienza, crece y vuelve a comenzar?Debe haber una razón que explique la dinámica universal más allá del análisis de movimiento, que explique la síntesis y el análisis. En la búsqueda de querer objetivar la función abstracta tratamos de encontrar el esqueleto de las sombras en forma de energía y espacio exóticos. Buscamos algo que es de lo que no es. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Separating the Human from the Divine Cesáreo Bandera University ofNorth Carolina at Chapel Hill Myths are hard to die. One such myth concerns what happened with poetry in general, that is to say, imaginative literature or literary fiction, in the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance and beyond. Its basic outline was developed during the nineteenth century. J. E. Spingarn, for example, echoes such a myth in (...) his History of Literary Criticism in the Renaissance, first published in 1899, which has gone through many editions and reprintings since then. In it we read the following: The first problem of Renaissance criticism was the justification of imaginative literature. The existence and continuity of the aesthetic consciousness, and perhaps, in a less degree, of the critical faculty, throughout the Middle Ages, can hardly be denied; yet distrust of literature was keenest among the very class of men in whom the critical faculty might be presupposed, and it was as the handmaid of philosophy, and most of all as the vassal of theology, that poetry was chiefly valued.... The Renaissance was thus confronted with the necessity ofjustifying its appreciation of the vast body of literature which the Revival of Learning had recovered for the modern world. (3) Speaking of Savonarola's De Divisione ac Utilititate Omnium Scientiarum, written about 1492, he concludes as follows: In fine, as a reformer, he represents for us the religious reaction against the paganization of culture by the humanists. But the forces against him were too strong. Even the Christianization of culture effected during the next century by the Council of Trent was hardly more than temporary. Humanism, which represents 74Cesáreo Bandera the revival of ancient pagan culture, and rationalism, which represents the growth of the modem spirit in science and art, were currents too powerful to be impeded by any reformer, however great. (14) This general picture of the historical standing and the fate of literary fiction as we move from the Middle Ages into the modern era, is still very much with us, even though it is ill at ease with, or flatly contradicted by, undeniable historical facts. For example, the incredible notion of a "paganization of culture by the humanists" would have horrified somebody as profoundly Christian as Petrarch and, later on, Erasmus, who criticized the scholastics "in the name of a purer and simpler mode of piety and religious devotion" (Mazzeo 17). Or the mistaken idea that modern rationalism was much more hospitable to poetry than the old scholastic one. For from the seventeenth century on, as J. F. West has pointed out, the whole tide of [scientific] opinion was running strongly against poetry, metaphor, and poetic prose. The philosophers generally saw them as an obstacle to truth. Hobbes regarded metaphor as one of the hindrances to straight thinking. Rousseau thought that the philosophy of Descartes had 'cut the throat of poetry'; and John Locke, late in the century, openly regarded poetry as made up of 'pleasant pictures and agreeable visions in the fancy,' but basically misleading. (114) It is indeed true that in medieval scholasticism poetry occupies the lowest rank in the hierarchical structure of the arts and sciences. But it does have a place there. It would have never occurred to Thomas Aquinas, for example, to expel it from that position as something dangerous, something to be avoided. In fact, as he tells us at the beginning of the Summa Theologica, theology itself, the highest of the sciences, does not consider it below its dignity to make use of metaphor and other poetic devices propter utilitatem ac necessitatem. And yet it is precisely that kind of violent expulsion ofpoetic fiction that will be attempted during the Renaissance. In the words of Russell Fraser, "it is in the Renaissance, and not the Middle Ages that the artist is driven from the commonwealth" (39). It was then that the "war against poetry" intensified to fever pitch. It is, therefore, an error to imagine that those in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries who bitterly attacked poetic fiction in general and the theater in particular as a very dangerous threat to religion and morality, were fanatic hold-overs from a medieval past... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Separating the Human from the Divine Cesáreo Bandera University ofNorth Carolina at Chapel Hill Myths are hard to die. One such myth concerns what happened with poetry in general, that is to say, imaginative literature or literary fiction, in the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance and beyond. Its basic outline was developed during the nineteenth century. J. E. Spingarn, for example, echoes such a myth in (...) his History of Literary Criticism in the Renaissance, first published in 1899, which has gone through many editions and reprintings since then. In it we read the following: The first problem of Renaissance criticism was the justification of imaginative literature. The existence and continuity of the aesthetic consciousness, and perhaps, in a less degree, of the critical faculty, throughout the Middle Ages, can hardly be denied; yet distrust of literature was keenest among the very class of men in whom the critical faculty might be presupposed, and it was as the handmaid of philosophy, and most of all as the vassal of theology, that poetry was chiefly valued.... The Renaissance was thus confronted with the necessity ofjustifying its appreciation of the vast body of literature which the Revival of Learning had recovered for the modern world. (3) Speaking of Savonarola's De Divisione ac Utilititate Omnium Scientiarum, written about 1492, he concludes as follows: In fine, as a reformer, he represents for us the religious reaction against the paganization of culture by the humanists. But the forces against him were too strong. Even the Christianization of culture effected during the next century by the Council of Trent was hardly more than temporary. Humanism, which represents 74Cesáreo Bandera the revival of ancient pagan culture, and rationalism, which represents the growth of the modem spirit in science and art, were currents too powerful to be impeded by any reformer, however great. (14) This general picture of the historical standing and the fate of literary fiction as we move from the Middle Ages into the modern era, is still very much with us, even though it is ill at ease with, or flatly contradicted by, undeniable historical facts. For example, the incredible notion of a "paganization of culture by the humanists" would have horrified somebody as profoundly Christian as Petrarch and, later on, Erasmus, who criticized the scholastics "in the name of a purer and simpler mode of piety and religious devotion" (Mazzeo 17). Or the mistaken idea that modern rationalism was much more hospitable to poetry than the old scholastic one. For from the seventeenth century on, as J. F. West has pointed out, the whole tide of [scientific] opinion was running strongly against poetry, metaphor, and poetic prose. The philosophers generally saw them as an obstacle to truth. Hobbes regarded metaphor as one of the hindrances to straight thinking. Rousseau thought that the philosophy of Descartes had 'cut the throat of poetry'; and John Locke, late in the century, openly regarded poetry as made up of 'pleasant pictures and agreeable visions in the fancy,' but basically misleading. (114) It is indeed true that in medieval scholasticism poetry occupies the lowest rank in the hierarchical structure of the arts and sciences. But it does have a place there. It would have never occurred to Thomas Aquinas, for example, to expel it from that position as something dangerous, something to be avoided. In fact, as he tells us at the beginning of the Summa Theologica, theology itself, the highest of the sciences, does not consider it below its dignity to make use of metaphor and other poetic devices propter utilitatem ac necessitatem. And yet it is precisely that kind of violent expulsion ofpoetic fiction that will be attempted during the Renaissance. In the words of Russell Fraser, "it is in the Renaissance, and not the Middle Ages that the artist is driven from the commonwealth" (39). It was then that the "war against poetry" intensified to fever pitch. It is, therefore, an error to imagine that those in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries who bitterly attacked poetic fiction in general and the theater in particular as a very dangerous threat to religion and morality, were fanatic hold-overs from a medieval past... (shrink)

A sociologist who has to confront him/herself with social change cannot avoid running into subjectivity, which is seen as a clear indicator of the most recent tendencies that are going through contemporary society. The demand for subjectivity, generically considered as self-consciousness and the need for self-fulfilment, is undoubtedly a distinguishing feature of our age. The central role this concept has gained within recent sociological literature, however, coincides with the rise of a postmodern sociology, which tends to put forward a precise (...) image of subjectivity that I would call ?minimalist.? Through its call for subjectivity, postmodern sociology intends to celebrate indeed a radical freeing from the ethical, social, and relational constraints that would have oppressed human beings during modernity, which was characterized by a high degree of sociocentrism. Although I share all the contentions that aim at underlining the positive achievements of subjectivity over the constrictions and the de-personalizing forces that distressed the so-called homo sociologicus, I think we need nonetheless to distance ourselves from this new reductionism, which levels out subjectivity to its postmodern conception, and to underline instead the existence of a dual aspect in contemporary subjectivity. As a matter of fact, along with its minimalist and disengaged aspect, conceptualized in the homo psychologicus, another possible expression, called ?significant subjectivity? is emerging, which is a typical feature of the kind of human I propose to define civicus, a human who distinguishes him/herself because of the ability to become the bearer of an authentic form of responsible freedom. Consequently, we can identify two different aspects, at least, in contemporary subjectivity, notably a minimalist and a significant aspect. (shrink)

El presente artículo tiene por objeto recoger una serie de consideraciones en el ámbito de las neurociencias que podrían entrar en conflicto con la ética procedimentalista del discurso de Habermas para la realización de su democracia deliberativa. Ellas dicen relación, principalmente, con la influencia e inevitabilidad de los sesgos cognitivos y las emociones en la ruptura del diálogo. Esto servirá al propósito de introducir la pregunta de hasta qué punto es legítimo intervenir, por la vía de procedimientos y dispositivos que (...) institucionalicen la comunicación, el funcionamiento de la mente y con este el de las racionalidades comunicativas de los ciudadanos. La pregunta adquiere especial relevancia hoy, cuando ya hay empresas que, alentadas por los avances logrados por las neurotecnologías, aspiran al diseño de interfaces cerebro-ordenador que supriman la oralidad entre los agentes deliberantes y solucionen ex ante sus discrepancias mediante procesos robóticos que ponen en entredicho la continuidad de la autonomía personal, de la deliberación democrática y la racionalidad tal como les conocemos. (shrink)

Este trabajo consta de dos partes. En la primera, se intentará explicar la preponderancia global de las corporaciones a la luz de un proceso de reinterpretación permanente que realizarían ellas del concepto de utilidad empresarial. Se pondrá en evidencia esto a partir de una serie de acciones que las corporaciones emprenden y que dan cuenta, en última instancia, del ejercicio de una doctrina de la “alteridad tecnológica”. En la segunda parte, se irá deduciendo cómo es que se da esta doctrina (...) hipotética, apelando a la noción de “funcionalidad tecnológica” y al sesgo cognitivo denominado “fijación funcional”. (shrink)

Reseña del libro “La inteligencia artificial o el desafío del siglo: Anatomía de un antihumanismo radical” Autor: Éric Sadin Editorial Caja Negra Buenos Aires, 2020, 328 pp. ISBN: 978-987-1622-86-3.

In a recent article, Machina (Am Econ Rev forthcoming, 2008) suggested choice problems in the spirit of Ellsberg (Q J Econ 75:643–669, 1961), which challenge tail-separability, an implication of Choquet expected utility (CEU), to a similar extent as the Ellsberg paradox challenged the sure-thing principle implied by subjective expected utility (SEU). We have tested choice behavior for bets on one of Machina’s choice problems, the reflection example. Our results indicate that tail-separability is violated by a large majority of subjects (over (...) 70% of the sample). These empirical findings complement the theoretical analysis of Machina (Am Econ Rev forthcoming, 2008) and, together, they confirm the need for new approaches in the analysis of ambiguity for decision making. (shrink)

The management of patients suffering from chronic disorders of consciousness inevitably raises important ethical questions about the end of life decisions. Some ethical positions claim respect of human life sacredness and the use of good medical practices require allowing DOC patients to live as long as possible, since no one can arbitrarily end either his/her or others’ life. On the other hand, some currents of thought claim respect of human life dignity, patients’ wishes, and the right of free choice entail (...) allowing the withdrawal of life sustaining therapy. This could happen when patients believe their own life to be not worth living, or if therapy is not very beneficial, excessively burdensome, or even futile. Indeed, the decision to withdraw therapies in a DOC patient should be guided by reliable information about DOC diagnosis and prognosis and on how the patient would wish to be treated in such a condition. Taking into account such issues, it would be possible to make the decision that more adequately fits a DOC patient’s best interest. This review aims to overview the range of ethical issues referring to end-of-life decisions in DOC patients, with regard to the thorny debate on the sacredness and dignity of human life. (shrink)