En este trabajo se analiza el concepto de Estado racional mediante tres perspectivas que de modo explícito o implícito se encuentran en el Fundamento del derecho natural de Fichte. Con la intención de mostrar la centralidad del concepto de Estado, en primer lugar se trata la perspectiva de la superfluidad y sus límites ; en segundo lugar se trata la perspectiva de la coacción, que también brinda un concepto de Estado negativo. En tercer lugar se trata la perspectiva que, sin (...) caracterizarlo negativamente, no obstante no alcanza una comprensión positiva del Estado, donde éste sea el concepto central de la filosofía social, política y económica de Fichte. Finalmente, a partir de El Estado comercial cerrado y Los caracteres de la edad contemporánea se esboza una clasificación sobre los diferentes conceptos de Estado desarrollados y contenidos bajo una unidad de sentido. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation, one important issue is which of the concepts works as a foundation for the others. People, nation, language, state, or education are all possible candidates to take a central place. First, this paper analyzes the problems presented by the notions of “people” and “nation,” such as their ambiguous and even contradictory aspects. Second, we focus on how the concept of education needs a solid ground from which an educational plan can develop. Finally, (...) we show that the fundamental concept of Fichte’s Addresses is the same one as in his Natural Right: the State. According to Fichte, only the rational State can guarantee the realization of education, people, and nation. (shrink)

En este comentario bibliográfico queremos mostrar la relevancia de Los caracteres de la edad contemporánea de Fichte, cuya traducción castellana se ha reeditado recientemente. En primer lugar, presentamos la obra y sus aspectos fundamentales dentro de la evolución del pensamiento de Fichte. También presentamos un breve panorama de la literatura y las particularidades de esta edición. En segundo lugar, analizamos cada uno de los grandes momentos de Los caracteres y los conceptos implicados; por ejemplo, el plan del universo, las épocas, (...) la vida, la religión verdadera, etc. En tercer lugar, queremos enfatizar lo que a nuestro entender es el concepto más importante de esta obra de Fichte: el concepto de Estado absoluto. Aquí realizamos algunas consideraciones sobre las interpretaciones habituales. Y en todo este comentario intentamos reflexionar sobre la compleja relación entre el filósofo y la comprensión de su propia época. (shrink)

Hildegard of Bingen’s mystical and cognitive experience uniquely combines the visual and auditory dimensions of the knowledge, in her own account, revealed to her by divine wisdom. According to Hildegard, the hidden meaning of her visions was communicated to her by a voice from the sky; thus the auditio allows her to understand the uisio, while the uisio allows her to remember the message of the auditio. Moreover, as we shall see, the Rhenish magistra apparently finds pleasure in the knowledge (...) of the natural world, an intellectual pleasure about which she does not speak directly but which is clearly shown in her works. In this paper, on the basis of Hildegard’s definition of scientia, I will try to determine what she understands by ‘knowledge’ and use her notion of praescientia Dei as a measure for the analysis of the distinct visions of the universe set out in two of her works, the Sciuias and the Liber diuinorum operum. There we can see that, despite the divine inspiration to which she attributes her wo... (shrink)

In recent years, the publication of the studies on the transmissibility in mammals of the H5N1 influenza virus and synthetic genomes has triggered heated and concerned debate within the community of scientists on biological dual-use research; these papers have raised the awareness that, in some cases, fundamental research could be directed to harmful experiments, with the purpose of developing a weapon that could be used by a bioterrorist. Here is presented an overview regarding the dual-use concept and its related international (...) agreements which underlines the work of the Australia Group Export Control Regime. It is hoped that the principles and activities of the AG, that focuses on export control of chemical and biological dual-use materials, will spread and become well known to academic researchers in different countries, as they exchange biological materials and scientific papers. To this extent, and with the aim of drawing the attention of the scientific community that works with yeast to the so called Dual-Use Research of Concern, this article reports case studies on biological dual-use research and discusses a synthetic biology applied to the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, namely the construction of the first eukaryotic synthetic chromosome of yeast and the use of yeast cells as a factory to produce opiates. Since this organism is considered harmless and is not included in any list of biological agents, yeast researchers should take simple actions in the future to avoid the sharing of strains and advanced technology with suspicious individuals. (shrink)

In the last years the reputation of medical, economic, and scientific expertise has been strongly damaged by a series of false predictions and contradictory studies. The lax application of statistical principles has certainly contributed to the uncertainty and loss of confidence in the sciences. Various assumptions, generally held as valid in statistical treatments, have proved their limits. In particular, since some time it has emerged quite clearly that even slightly departures from normality and homoscedasticity can affect significantly classic significance tests. (...) Robust statistical methods have been developed, which can provide much more reliable estimates. On the other hand, they do not address an additional problem typical of the natural sciences, whose data are often the output of delicate measurements. The data can therefore not only be sampled from a nonnormal pdf but also be affected by significant levels of Gaussian additive noise of various amplitude. To tackle this additional source of uncertainty, in this paper it is shown how already developed robust statistical tools can be usefully complemented with the Geodesic Distance on Gaussian Manifolds. This metric is conceptually more appropriate and practically more effective, in handling noise of Gaussian distribution, than the traditional Euclidean distance. The results of a series of systematic numerical tests show the advantages of the proposed approach in all the main aspects of statistical inference, from measures of location and scale to size effects and hypothesis testing. Particularly relevant is the reduction even of 35% in Type II errors, proving the important improvement in power obtained by applying the methods proposed in the paper. It is worth emphasizing that the proposed approach provides a general framework, in which also noise of different statistical distributions can be dealt with. (shrink)