Purpose As part of an international study of knowledge of and attitudes to Snowden’s revelations about the activities of the National Security Agency/Government Communications Headquarters, this paper aims to deal with Mexico, taking its socio-cultural and political environment surrounding privacy and state surveillance into account. Design/methodology/approach A questionnaire was answered by 160 Mexican University students. The quantitative responses to the survey were statistically analysed as well as qualitative considerations of free text answers. Findings Snowden’s revelations have had a limited influence (...) over Mexican youngsters’ attitudes toward privacy and state surveillance, although there is a great awareness by Mexican young people of individual rights issues. Practical implications The study results imply a need to build a collective awareness of the importance of the right to privacy and its responsibilities, the available technological options for individuals to exert their own privacy and security and the democratic means to agree and enforce appropriate legal restrictions on state surveillance. Social implications The results of this study based indicate an urgent necessity for providing Mexican youngsters with opportunities to learn more about privacy, liberty, individual autonomy and national security. Originality/value This study is the first attempt to investigate the social impact of Snowden’s revelations on Mexican students’ attitudes toward privacy and state surveillance as part of cross-cultural analyses between eight countries. (shrink)

I refer to the social embodiment of creative intelligence as creative democracies. Today’s world pose great challenges and serious threats to human life and cannot be faced by just having new ideas or more knowledge and thoughts. Today’s world requires the power to face the unknown, a key feature of intelligence. Hence the urgent need of societies to mutate into creative democracies. We need to begin with a strong base. We need an understanding and development of human life from its (...) foundations and the simplicity of its origin in the creative freedom of reality and its intra-active intelligence, the power of all humans in our global world to meet and share meaning and interests. This essaysuccinctly highlights their foundations, prefaced by three cautionary reflections. (shrink)

In this work, I offer an interpretation of the principle of individuation and the ontological status of individual bodies in the work of Margaret Cavendish. By proposing an alternative to the mechanical model of natural philosophy, Cavendish must approach the metaphysics of matter from a different angle. Such a perspective can offer fruitful elements to understand the complex and diverse landscape of natural philosophy in Early Modern Philosophy. I contextualize Cavendish’s natural philosophy and its relation to the developments of other (...) early modern approaches. Section 1 is dedicated to an overview of Cavendish’s natural philosophy. In Sect. 2, I present the difficulty concerning the individuation of bodies in modern philosophy in order to reveal the background in which Cavendish develops her position. Before turning to the analysis of the central passages in which Cavendish explores the problem of individuation, in Sect. 4, I introduce the basic tenets of her metaphysics in Sect. 3. Finally, in Sect. 5, I turn to motion and its causes, given its fundamental role in individuation. (shrink)

This paper argues that satire constitutes a particularly effective strategy for feminist philosophy through an analysis of Simone de Beauvoir’s account of motherhood. Feminists have grappled at length with how to interpret Beauvoir’s focus on the unpleasantness of pregnancy and challenges of motherhood. In this paper, I suggest a new interpretive strategy. My view is that Beauvoir’s disparaging depiction of motherhood cannot be read by the letter; rather, it is an exercise in satire. By overemphasizing its strangeness and difficulty, Beauvoir (...) dethrones motherhood as the pinnacle of feminine existence, transforming it from women’s only possible destiny into a contingent feature of existence. My underlying contention here is that such feminist satirizing speaks to the aims of feminist philosophy more generally: the satirical subversion of our buried assumptions opens the possibility of imagining the world anew. (shrink)

«Així doncs, qualsevol activitat que emprenem, la nostra acció més quotidiana, ens demana un esforç de la voluntat. En la consagració de les nostres forces a véncer totes les dificultats que se’ns presenten a diari ens determinen a nosaltres mateixos. Solament hem de vigilar de no cedir en el nostre afany de superació. Perquè si el treball que tenim per davant al llarg d’una existència el deixàvem de colp algun dia per algun motiu sobtat, això seria com una mort en (...) vida, com una rendició. Però no podem renunciar a ser nosaltres mateixos, sinó que ens hem de guanyar pas a pas, dia a dia». (shrink)

In this work I analyze the phenomenon of political polarization on the internet. I argue that the approach centered on the filter bubble and echo chambers has shortcomings. To solve them, I propose the concept of artificial polarization. This concept refers to the process by which the expressive uses of communication, such as flaming or moral grandstanding, provoke fictitious forms of polarization. Recognizing the artificial polarization will allow a better understanding of the polarization processes in the network and their effects (...) on the democratic debate. (shrink)

In debates concerning the consequence argument, it has long been claimed that [McKay, T. J., and D. Johnson. 1996. “A Reconsideration of an Argument Against Compatibilism.” Philosophical Topics 24 (2): 113–122] demonstrated the invalidity of rule (β). Here, I argue that their result is not as robust as we might like to think. First, I argue that McKay and Johnson's counterexample is successful if one adopts a certain interpretation of ‘no choice about’ and if one is willing to deny the (...) conditional excluded middle principle. In order to make this point I demonstrate that (β) is valid on Stalnaker's theory of counterfactuals. This result is important and should not be neglected, I argue, because there is a particular line of objection to the revised formulations of the consequence argument that does not succeed against the original version. (shrink)

In this article I analyze the academic reception of Jonathan Haidt’s seminal article _The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social intuitionist approach to moral judgment_. My thesis is that in the spheres of philosophy and psychology, this article was initially studied within the neurocentric paradigm, which dominated the field of scientific reflection in the fifteen years following its publication. This neurocentric reading established a specific interpretation of the text with several limitations. However, more recently a digital paradigm has (...) emerged and come to prevail in academia, providing a new perspective from which to return to Haidt’s text. Indeed, this approach makes it possible to unravel elements of the famous article that in the neurocentric paradigm went unnoticed by researchers. Moreover, the digital paradigm manages to better integrate Haidt’s seminal article into his later work as a whole. (shrink)

In this article I analyze the academic reception of Jonathan Haidt’s seminal article _The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social intuitionist approach to moral judgment_. My thesis is that in the spheres of philosophy and psychology, this article was initially studied within the neurocentric paradigm, which dominated the field of scientific reflection in the fifteen years following its publication. This neurocentric reading established a specific interpretation of the text with several limitations. However, more recently a digital paradigm has (...) emerged and come to prevail in academia, providing a new perspective from which to return to Haidt’s text. Indeed, this approach makes it possible to unravel elements of the famous article that in the neurocentric paradigm went unnoticed by researchers. Moreover, the digital paradigm manages to better integrate Haidt’s seminal article into his later work as a whole. (shrink)

v. 1. Estética, fenomenología y hermenéutica -- v. 2. Filosofía de la ciencia, filosofía del lenguaje y filosofía de la psiquiatría -- v. 3. Ética y filosofía política, filosofía de la religión e historia de la filosofía.

Scott Sehon argues that the conception of determinism employed in the Consequence Argument is implausible because it rules out the logical possibility of the laws of nature being violated. Sehon says, for instance, that determinism is incompatible with the logical possibility of an interventionist God. His objection to the Consequence Argument boils down to a way of reading the box in what is implied by van Inwagen's conception of determinism. Sehon reads the box as logical necessity, and this clearly precludes (...) the logical possibility of the laws of nature being violated. However, I argue that determinism as employed in the argument is not implausible. First, I try to show that it is legitimate to read the box of □ as either metaphysical or logical necessity depending on the account of laws that one assumes. If one accepts a fully Humean account of laws, then the box should be read as logical necessity. Nevertheless, I argue that this is not a problem for the Humean. On the other hand, if one reads the box as metaphysical necessity, which is mainly motivated by the dispositional account of laws and might be motivated by Armstrong's account, then determinism is compatible with the logical possibility of the laws being violated. (shrink)

Abstract:In one of his last interviews before his passing, Jean-Luc Nancy talks about his own engagement with and eventual departure from Heidegger's work.

In this paper I assess the adequacy of no-conspiracy conditions employed in the usual derivations of the Bell inequality in the context of EPR correlations. First, I look at the EPR correlations from a purely phenomenological point of view and claim that common cause explanations of these cannot be ruled out. I argue that an appropriate common cause explanation requires that no-conspiracy conditions are reinterpreted as mere common cause-measurement independence conditions. In the right circumstances then, violations of measurement independence need (...) not entail any kind of conspiracy (nor backwards in time causation). To the contrary, if measurement operations in the EPR context are taken to be causally relevant in a specific way to the experiment outcomes, their explicit causal role provides the grounds for a common cause explanation of the corresponding correlations. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with the reappraisal of Husserl’s ontology and epistemology, sketched in book one of Ideen. The main issue is Husserl’s theory of essence and essential insight. I present the fundamental distinction between facts and essences, and, over and above it, Husserl’s defense of an a priori knowledge based on essential insight as well as his partition of the whole realm of a priori knowledge into a formal set of material, regional ontologies. I will show how the theory (...) of essential insight presented in Ideen gives rise to several criticisms, namely those made by Neo-Kantians, like Rickert and Natorp. In the last part, I will show how the mathematical concept of an invariant under a group of variations was the leading case for Husserl’s mature notion of eidetic insight. (shrink)

En el presente trabajo reflexionamos en torno a una serie de textos en los que Michel Foucault se pregunta por estatuto de la crítica. La cuestión nos parece volverse reflexivamente sobre el propio Foucualt y por ello intentaremos evaluar de qué manera, con sus propios recursos conceptuales, se puede determinar el estatuto de su propio discurso. Para ello recorreremos dos caminos: (i) su rechazo de la noción de ideología que lo pone en tensión con algunas de las tradiciones mayores del (...) pensamiento crítico. La cuestión es aquí: ¿cómo es posible la crítica sin la ideología y sin la verdad?; (ii) la recuperación foucaultiana de la actitud crítica (en los textos sobre Kant y la pregunta Was ist Aufklärung?). A partir de allí Foucault recupera la problemática de la modernidad en términos de una “ontología histórica del presente”. Ambos caminos se cruzan, ya que las observaciones sobre una “política de la verdad” (lo otro de la crítica de la ideología comprometida con una verdad aséptica) se refuerzan con las de la cuestión del gobierno en términos de una “inservidumbre voluntaria”. En ambos casos, la práctica de la crítica, que subjetiviza desujetando, plantea la cuestión de la libertad. -/- We analyze Michel Foucault’s question for the status of critique and its reflexive return over Foucault himself: How Foucault’s discourse, qua critique, should be understood? We will drive two paths: (i) the refusal of the notion of ideology, where the question is: How to think of critique without ideology and truth?; (ii) the Foucauldian recovery of the “critical attitude” (in the texts on Kant’s answer to the question Was ist Aufklärung?) and of the problem of modernity, along the lines of a “historical ontology of the present”. There is a crossroad of (i) and (ii), since the remarks on a “politics of truth” (as opposite to an “ideology critique” committed with an aseptic truth) reinforces mutually with the problem of the government, faced along the lines of an art of the “voluntary inservitude”. In both cases, practice of criticism that subjectifies desubjugating, poses the question of liberty. (shrink)

The concepts of “radicalism” and “extremism” have been the focus of increasing scholarly attention in recent years, but, surprisingly, there has not been the same kind of effort to specify their opposites, such as the concept of “moderation.” In this article I argue that because “radicalism” and “extremism” have been defined in generally negative terms, we may deepen and refine our understanding of moderation once we are equipped with a more neutral conception of radicalism. Accordingly, I propose a new approach (...) to the study of radical ideologies by comparing them to literary genres. Just as literary genres use tropes that constrain our reading of a text, radical ideologies use tropes—as, for example, the Marxists’ use of “reactionary” or “bourgeois”—that refer to a much wider background dichotomy, on which they base their arguments to discredit those of their opponents or to reinforce those of their supporters. Using this approach, I show how the Marxist theorist and leading German politician Eduard Bernstein (1850–1932)—one of the founders of modern Social Democracy—made a step-by-step critique of the Social Democratic Party’s orthodox Marxist tropes and core narrative that thoroughly undermined their arguments. Bernstein, I further suggest, was a particularly good example of a political moderate because he did not altogether reject the claims of his radical Marxist opponents but rather accepted those parts of their reasoning that he considered valid. By thus opening the way for constructing an anti-radical Marxist narrative, Bernstein’s example shows how moderates can “steal a page” from the radicals’ playbook to create alternative narratives whose central opponents are the radicals themselves. I conclude by briefly discussing two contemporary thinkers—Norberto Bobbio and Karl Popper—who went further than Bernstein in the development of a fully fleshed anti-radical narrative. (shrink)

Resumen: En este trabajo examino la concepción hegeliana del límite intentando clarificar sus principales características.Comienzo ubicando la filosofía hegeliana en el contexto filosófico más general del idealismo alemán, entendiendoeste movimiento como aquel comprometido en el proyecto de proporcionar una deducción trascendental de loabsoluto. Dado este contexto, procedo a examinar las críticas de Hegel a a la filosofía de Kant, principalmente en la“introducción a la Fenomenología del espíritu . El artículo concluye evaluando la adecuación de la elucidación deltratamiento hegeliano del problema (...) del límite mostrando como esta noción funciona en la interpretación del tratamiento hegeliano de la certeza sensorial en la fenomenología. -/- The problem of limit according to Hegel. In this paper I focus Hegelian conception of limit trying to clarify its main features. I begin locating Hegel’s philosophy in the broader philosophical context of German Idealism, understanding it as the intellectual movementconcerned with the project of providing a transcendental deduction of the Absolute. Having this as a background, Iexamine Hegelian critique of Kantian philosophy, mainly in the “Introduction” of Phenomenology of Spirit, and I conclude the paper testing the way I elucidated the problem of limit in this paper showing how this notion can beused to interpret the treatment of “sense certainty” in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. (shrink)

This paper takes a phenomenological perspective regarding the difficulties encountered in daily life by man in prehistory. I argue that the economics of beingnecessarily establishes man as a being that must make choices. Of these, man must eventually arrive at the realization that higher, rather than lower choices will safeguard human survival, well being and allow for prosperity. The economics of being is a form of identifying economic choice-making as a natural disposition of man’s. It is the latter condition that (...) makes man act in the world. However, even though man must act, action cannot be blind. Instead, human action is motivated and guided by man’s sense of interiority. That is, man’s existential capacity for self-reflection is also what can deliver us to autonomous rule. This form of reflective choice-making is a creative act. The paper attempts to trace this aspect of the human condition back to prehistory, in order to demonstrate that societies, institutions, invention, technology, artistic creation and economic responsibility come about as the result of human industriousness. None of the aforementioned are creations of modern man. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the convergence of the positions of Wittgenstein and Althusser. The discussion on the political implications of Wittgenstein?s thought has revolved around the possibility (or impossibility) of taking his ideas as standpoints for a critical view of the social dimension, around its legitimacy, reach and strength. However, translating Wittgenstein?s thoughts into an Althusserian materialistic position leads to an understanding of the critiques within the former?s work that does not hinge on their warranty as a point of view, (...) but to the effects of deconstructing the philosophical discourse which seeks to unify and to arrange hierarchically the evidences (certainties) constitutive of the different language games in which the social is displayed. I will conclude this paper with some remarks on the distinction --borrowed both from Wittgenstein and Althusser-- between philosophy as an ideological-theoretical practice and as a critical-theoretical practice that follows from my analysis. (shrink)

This piece is one of among a handful that seek in the first instance to reveal the origin of African philosophy as an academic discipline, the source of its unity and distinctiveness. The discipline of African philosophy originates in tragedy, out of pain, confusion and rage stemming from colonial destruction; destruction that is responsible for what Fanon calls the ‘negro neurosis' caused by what Biko would describe as the unbearable fusion of colonised and coloniser. I argue that the birth of (...) African philosophy as an academic discipline is largely responsible for its character and, crucially, for its distinctive creative possibilities. South African Journal of Philosophy Vol. 27 2008: pp. 285-295. (shrink)

In this paper I assess the adequacy of no-conspiracy conditions employed in the usual derivations of the Bell inequality in the context of EPR correlations. First, I look at the EPR correlations from a purely phenomenological point of view and claim that common cause explanations of these cannot be ruled out. I argue that an appropriate common cause explanation requires that no-conspiracy conditions are re-interpreted as mere common cause-measurement independence conditions. In the right circumstances then, violations of measurement independence need (...) not entail any kind of conspiracy (nor backwards in time causation). To the contrary, if measurement operations in the EPR context are taken to be causally relevant in a specific way to the experiment outcomes, their explicit causal role provides the grounds for a common cause explanation of the corresponding correlations. (shrink)

This piece is one of among a handful that seek in the first instance to reveal the origin of African philosophy as an academic discipline, the source of its unity and distinctiveness. The discipline of African philosophy originates in tragedy, out of pain, confusion and rage stemming from colonial destruction; destruction that is responsible for what Fanon calls the ‘negro neurosis’ caused by what Biko would describe as the unbearable fusion of colonised and coloniser. I argue that the birth of (...) African philosophy as an academic discipline is largely responsible for its character and, crucially, for its distinctive creative possibilities. (shrink)

Alan Gewirth’s Reason and Morality justifies certain fundamental moral principles and develops morality out of the basic structure of action. Contemporary literature exposes a critical flaw in the second stage of Gewirth’s argument contending that Gewirth fails to create agent-neutral moral claims. In order to provide a transfer of interests between agents, the solution to Gewirth’s problem, I argue that certain Rawlsian concepts buttress and are consistent with Gewirth’s argument for the normative structure of action.

This article argues that curriculum work can benefit from signifiers of Bildung to promote democracy in public education. The argument is built on the premise that cultural and intellectual traditions that value Bildung presume a link between the inner cultivation of the individual and the development of better societies (Horlacher 2017). I start by presenting Mouffe’s (2000) democratic paradox and how pluralism is the defining feature of liberal democracies. Based on how curriculum work is a standard of public education (Hopmann (...) 1999), I state that the curriculum must formalise pluralism in education and convey the democratic paradox in educational terms. With reference to Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory, I then argue that such a laborious task can be achieved in the curriculum with the aid of signifiers of Bildung. Signifiers of Bildung are discursively empty and cannot acquire a definite meaning. Because of this, they make it possible to speak of the student and the society of liberal democracies while impeding a too narrow comprehension of what they are and ought to be. Therefore, to implement signifiers of Bildung in the curriculum can help establish both a standard of public education and limits to popular sovereignty. However, their use must undergo careful scrutiny, and teachers must remain free to interpret them. (shrink)

I intend to understand from a phenomenological point of view the relationship between figurative consciousnesses (Bildbewusstsein) and other non-original presentations (Vergegenwiirtigungen) such as expectations, recollections or fantasies. I centre my analyses in the difference between figurative consciousness, on the one hand, and a modality of fantasy I cal! “daydream consciousness”, on the other. I stress that figurative consciousness implies apure observational ego, whereas day-dream consciousness is a free construction of the ego’s own personal story. The freedom of”day dream consciousness” has, (...) nevertheless, some important constraints. I emphasize the constraints that come from the passive and affective life of the ego. Finally, I propose new criteria for the phenomenological differentiation between the several kinds of acts of non-original presentation. (shrink)

I discuss, from a phenomenological point of view, the distinction between judgments and norms. I stress the limits of the husserlian canonical analysis in order to rightly account for the sense and content of normative intentionality. Based on some Kelsian insights, I draw a clear distinction between judgments and norms, criticizing some classical trends coming from Husserl himself that consider norms as a kind of intentionality founded upon objectifying acts. However, taking distance from Kelsen, Kaufmann, and Cossio, I stress that (...) the ought-proposition (Sollsatz) cannot be a good rendering of the sense-content of norms, based on the phenomenological distinction between the intentional matter and the quality of intentional acts. Finally, I propose my own account based on the concept of ‘ductive force’. I stress that the ductive force of norms cannot be identified witb simple coercion. [ show that there is, even inside the juridical sphere, a variety of ductive forces, going from sheer coercion to council and recommendation. To end, I stress the centrality of the concept of “ductive force” for a phenomenology of the social world. (shrink)

I sketch an analysis of observing as a particular attitude one can take regarding the surrounding world. I stress some particular features of observation, like the cancelling of the vital engagement. in the world, and the delight that pure observation involves. Then I move to a description of figurative consciousness and its image-world. In the final part, 1 try to show how watching movies displays a new type of observation, based on the empathic connection with the characters, the emergence of (...) a virtual body, and a self-decentered life, where the ego is not an onlooker, but something like an “ in-looker”. (shrink)

I offer an outline of an integrated phenomenological analysis of free fantasy and of fictional worlds. My main concern amounts to stress the scissions entailed in free fantasy and in the consciousness of fictional objects: a scission of the I, and a scission of the experience. Firstly, I offer a somewhat new characterization of the presence of the objects of free fantasy, which disconnects any possible relationship of those objects with a real perception as the leading form of an originally (...) giving consciousness. My leading example is daydream. Secondly, I take the Husserlian analysis of neutralization as a conceptual tool to explain the consciousness of fictional worlds, against a new tendency for interpreting these worlds in light of the concept of “possible world”. The two approaches converge to a twofold characterization of the mode of being of fictions and of the modality of presence of the objects of fantasy. (shrink)

I discuss Husserl’s concept of norm, and its relevance for a phenomenology of practical reason. I confront Husserl with Wilhelm Wundt, Hans Kelsen, and Carl Schmitt about, respectively, what a norm is, about the relation between theoretical and normative sciences, and, finally, about the creation of political concepts within European culture. In the last section, I develop some theoretical insights about the constitutive character of normative consciousness, abandoning Searle’s distinction between constitutive and regulative rules. I stress also the importance of (...) a phenomenology of plural and collective subjectivity in order to develop a phenomenological theory of state and normative experience. (shrink)

In this paper, I present the main traits of the phenomenological thinking of Abranches de Soveral. I start with the work of his master Miranda Barbosa explaining the criticisms he address to the Husserlian phenomenology. I show Soveral’s approach to phenomenology is framed by the conceptions of Barbosa and the problems that, for him, phenomenology cannot answer in an accurate way. In this context, I present the fundamental tenets of Soveral’s rejoinder to his master, showing how phenomenology can be rearranged (...) in order to formulate and to answer “the fundamental problem of knowledge”. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss Berkeley’s theories about vision, perception of distance, and the foundations of Geometry. I start with Locke’s answer to Molineaux’s problem and the criticisms Berkeley addressed to it. I explain the fundamentais of Berkeley’s theory about our cognitive shaping of the visual field and the type of connections that visual data establishes with data from the haptic field. I show how interesting are Berkeley’s conceptions for a phenomenology of perception, and, eventually, I carried some phenomenological evidence (...) against Berkeley’s too much strict location of the idea of distance in the haptic field alone. (shrink)

In what follows, I intend to address an issue which is at the boundaries of the phenomenological method of reflective explication, and that, in this sense, points to some limitations of the phenomenological approach to consciousness and mind. I am referring to an aporetic situation that is at the heart of the phenomenological analysis of passivity. On the one hand, phenomenology shows, at least indirectly, a passive life that is beyond the first steps of the activity of the ego in (...) the receptive, affective life. This is something that is beyond the rising of an ego, and from which a phenomenology of the ego-form of subjective life could be addressed. On the other hand, the analytic and conceptual tools of the phenomenological method have no grips on this basic realm of subjective life. As a result, Husserl’s analysis of passivity starts with the evidence of a pre-affective, pre-egoic realm, from which a phenomenology of the ego could be developed. However, Husserl’s analyses end up with the denegation of this dimension, as if it was invisible for the phenomenological method. As a consequence, the starting point of the analysis is not passivity proper, but rather the primitive forms of receptivity, which is already a first layer of the activity of the ego. Instead of an analysis of the ego-polarization (the “birth” of the ego), the egoic layer of conscious life is simply presupposed. A phenomenology of the ego-form is, thus, at the same time promised and denied. This aporetic situation is visible in the alteration of the concept of a passive pre-givenness in Husserl’s Analysis Concerning Passive Synthesis. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss the consistency and accuracy of Husserl’s sketch of a theory about non-declarative sentences in the last chapter of Logical Investigations. Whereas the consistency is acknowledged, the accuracy is denied, because Husserl’s treatment of non-declarative phrases such as questions or orders implies that those phrases contain, in some way, a declarative sentence and an objectifying act. To construct a question like “is A B?” as being equivalent to a pseudo-declarative sentence such as “I ask whether A (...) is B” is, however, a false phenomenological analysis, because to ask o r to order or to beg is not to assert. I turn, then, to John Austin ‘s theory of performative (as opposed to constatative) utterances and illocutionary acts in order to find a more accurate approach to the logical-semantic content of non-declarative sentences. Eventually, I show how this Husserlian theory of non-declarative sentences has a negative impact on the phenomenological theory of social ·acts and communication. (shrink)

In this paper, I start with the opposition between the husserlian project of a phenomenology of the experience of time, started in 1905, and the mathematical and physical theory of time, as it comes out from the special theory of relativity, by Einstein, in the same year. Although the contrast between the two approaches is apparent, my aim is to show that the original program of Husserl’s time theory is the constitution of an objective time and a time of the (...) world, starting from the intuitive giveness of time, i.e., from time as it appears. To show this, I stress the structural similarity between the original question of time, by Husserl, and the problem of a phenomenology of the space constitution, as it was first developed in the husserlian manuscripts of the XIX century, in which we find the threefold question of the origin of our space representation, of the geometrization of intuitive space and the constitution of transcendent world space. Finally, I reconsider some of Husserl’s main theses about the phenomenological constitution of objective time in the light of the main results of special relativity time-theory, introducing several corrections to central assumptions that underlie Husserl’s theory of time. (shrink)

In this paper I criticize political realism in International Relations for not being realistic enough, for being unrealistically pessimistic and ultimately incoherent. For them the international arena will always be a place where a battle of wills, informed by the logic of power, is fought. I grant that it may be true that the international political domain is a place where such battles are fought, but this alleged infelicitous situation does not in and of itself entail the normative pessimism informing (...) their assessments of the international domain, and it does not entail the recommendations offered by political realists, particularly relating to balance of power concerns. Their lack of realism stems from total or partial blindness to the proper and coherent ideals that ought to be informing their analyses of the international domain. Such blindness does not allow them properly to grasp what actually is the case. As we can only properly understand what an eye is by knowing the ideal that defines eyes — proper vision — so too we can only properly identify the movements of the international political arena in relation to ideals that ultimately define this arena, ideals that stem from a proper understanding of the human person. Following an Aristotelian teleological technique of analysis, I show that ideals are a constitutive part of the international domain and I recommend an alternative to political realism, namely, realistic idealism. (shrink)

What, if any, are the limits of the Husserlian concept of Gegebenheit? Is there a limit beyond which nothing can be seen by the phenomenologist? In asking these questions, we allude to a distinction typical of Kantian criticism: “Grenze” or “Schranke”, limit or boundary? These same questions are reformulated in a famous review of Ideen I by Paul Natorp, a Marburg neo-Kantian who directly attacks the unlimited scope Husserl gives to the phenomenological principle of intuition. From a phenomenological point of (...) view, however, the Achilles’ heel of the critical method lies in the impossibility of accessing by intuition, beyond phenomena, the thing-in-itself. A major consequence is that the phenomenological dissolution of the “Grenze” prescribes a limitless opening to the horizon of phenomena. But if we can speak of a limitless openness, it is because in a certain way everything gives itself to be seen. What kind of vision is this? And what kind of Gegebenheit is at work here? The Husserlian answer lies in the recovery of a concept, the “idea in the Kantian sense”, without its counterpart, the “limit”, whereas for Kant as well as for Natorp it is precisely the concept of “limit” that characterizes the gnoseological status of the “idea”. (shrink)

En este trabajo se analiza la cuestión de la ontología y metafísica de las normas jurídicas, i.e., qué tipo de entidades son las normas jurídicas y cómo estas entidades adquieren existencia. Con respecto a la primera pregunta, se rechazan las posiciones que sostienen que las normas jurídicas sean: (i) entidades abstractas e independientes de otras entidades, o (ii) entidades concretas y dependientes de otras entidades. En cambio, se defiende que las normas jurídicas son entidades abstractas y dependientes de otras entidades. (...) En cuanto a la segunda pregunta, se rechazan las posiciones que sostienen que dicha relación de dependencia sea correctamente explicada por (i) la noción de causalidad o (ii) por la noción de superveniencia. En cambio, se defiende que esta relación de dependencia es correctamente explicada por una noción liberal de fundamentación (grounding). (shrink)