Quizá la "dialéctica de la Ilustración" no sea sino el equívoco de una Ilustración que no es consciente de sus dificultades. Quizá si esas dificultades hubieran sido mejor conocidas, no se hubiera culpabilizado a una "razón" cuyo peor defecto fue mostrarse ufana acerca de sus ilusorias seguridades. Este libro quiere alegar en favor de una tesis: una ilustración consciente de su propia improbabilidad no debiera sentirse decepcionada por la escasez de sus prestaciones. Acaso alrededor de los textos kantianos podamos todavía (...) hallar el ámbito en el que, más allá de la limitada lectura de Foucault, sea perceptible el sentido clásico de la Ilustración, fortalecida por su anclaje en la historia de la razón occidental, siempre con la voluntad de distanciarse de Platón y de hacer pie en las playas epicúreas y estoicas. (shrink)

Entre los filósofos contemporáneos que más han hecho por el desarrollo y la consolidación académica de la historia del pensamiento español, destaca la figura de José Luis Abellán. Este libro, escrito por algunos de los más importantes especialistas en esta disciplina, pretende clarificar críticamente la obra de Abellán y recorrer algunos de los temas a los que mayor relevancia ha concedido el autor de la vasta e imprescindible "Historia crítica del pensamiento español". El erasmismo, el mito de Cristo, la generación (...) del 98, Ortega y Gasset y sus discípulos o el exilio del siglo veinte, son algunos de los temas abordados por los autores del libro, y sobre los que José Luis Abellán nos ha ofrecido artículos y monografías imprescindibles para conocer la historia de la filosofía española. (shrink)

v. 1. Del sistema de la libertad en Fichte al primado de la teología en Schelling -- v. 2. La hegemonía del pensamiento de Hegel.

Genealogía y lógica de la ratio imperial romana -- Racionalización ética judía y religión de salvación cristiana -- La revolución teológica de Pablo y sus consecuencias -- Teología política imperial y militancia cristiana -- La teología trinitaria y el destino de la teología imperial -- Hilario, Ambrosio y el camino del catolicismo en Occidente -- Mal y salvación: Augstín de Hipona.

Esta obra es un viaje por el camino recorrido por la filosofía trascendente, que pone de relieve la pervivencia de conceptos como "sujeto", "crítica" o "reflexión". El núcleo fundamental del libro está en el estudio de la situación terminal a la que conduce el planteamiento fenomenológico husserliano y en el hallazgo de nuevos ámbitos de trascendentalidad. Puede advertirse cómo la vieja filosofía de sujeto-conciencia llega a transformarse y girar, para dar cabida a nuevos temas: la corporeidad, la intersubjetividad, el lenguaje, (...) que tradicionalmente habían sido silenciados o infravalorados. (shrink)

This article presents the main features of the work of Domenico Vandelli (1735-1816), an Italian-born man of science who lived a large part of his life in Portugal. Vandelli's scientific interests as a naturalist paved the way to his activities as a reformer and adviser on economic and financial issues. The topics covered in his writings are similar to those discussed by Linnaeus, with whom Vandelli corresponded. They clearly reveal that the scientific preparation indispensable for a better knowledge of natural (...) resources was also a fundamental condition for correctly addressing problems of efficiency in their economic allocation. The key argument put forward in this article is that the relationship between natural history and the agenda for economic reform and development deserves to be further analysed. It is indeed a central element in the emergence of political economy as an autonomous scientific discourse during the last decades of the eighteenth century. (shrink)

'Ideologies of Discrimination' considers the implications of the new genetics for understandings of personhood and for understandings of the relationship between people in groups. In particular, the essay delineates and examines the emerging notion of a 'genetic group' and considers the social implications of redefining families, racial groups and ethnic groups through express, and often exclusive, reference to a shared genome. One consequence of such redefinition has been the justification and elaboration of stigmatizing images of and discrimination against such groups-especially (...) those, such as Jews and African-Americans, that have long been identified with specific somatic characteristics. A few worrisome trends begin to emerge in the response of the American legal system to the notion of genetic groups. Among these is a shift in the locus of privacy and identity from the autonomous individual to the genetic group. This shift challenges (and threatens) long-standing Western values (including equality and liberty) that depend upon the ideological centrality of autonomous individuality. (shrink)

Hanlester Network v. Shalala ) marks the first test of the application of the Medicare-Medicaid anti-kickback statute to physician self-referral joint ventures. The most recent development in this ongoing litigation was the April 6, 1995 decision of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, holding the Hanlester Network vicariously liable for its marketing vice president's knowing and willful violation of the antikickback statute. The vice president had offered to pay physician-investors in order to induce their referrals of program-related business.The Hanlester Network (...) was a California general partnership comprised of corporations, clinical laboratories, and individual investors. In April 1987, it entered into a management agreement on behalf of the clinical laboratories with SmithKline BioScience Laboratories. (shrink)

Putnam’s John Locke Lectures and three related papers: "Literature, Science, and Reflection," which expands some of the "softer" portions of the Lectures, "Reference and Understanding," which defends a "use" or Wittgensteinian notion of understanding language, distinguishing this sharply from the role of truth and reference in explaining the success of our understanding within the broad context of our behavior and the world, and "Realism and Reason," Putnam’s APA Presidential Address, in which he puts the Kantianism or "antirealism" of the whole (...) volume in sharpest focus. Here is an exciting, agreeable, and compact expression of a new departure in Putnam’s thought, one which he is happy to find convergent with Michael Dummett’s work. (shrink)

Post-Kantian German idealism is an important influence on such contemporary approaches to philosophy as phenomenology, existentialism, and pragmatism, and because of this Seidel has undertaken an investigation of the related notions of activity and ground as they appear and develop in Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. Common to all three thinkers is an emphasis on activity as conscious, free, and functioning as the ground or source of meaning for being. Each thinker in his own way also accepts the notion of a (...) dialectical interaction between the self and the world in which subject and object reciprocally influence one another. (shrink)

The approaches in question here are exhibited in examinations of specific problems, rather than surveyed or generally summarized. Most of the volume should interest philosophers. Recent linguistic theory has been torn between the generative semanticists, who fuse syntax and semantics in maintaining that "the rules of grammar are identical to the rules relating surface forms to their corresponding logical forms", and the interpretive semanticists, who find syntactic deep structure a well-defined notion and who believe that the semantic interpretation of sentences (...) derives from inputs from several levels of linguistic structure. J. Bresnan, in "Sentence Stress and Syntactic Transformations," gives a clear and elegant version of her defense of one aspect of the interpretivist position. She argues that aspects of the stress pattern of sentences can be easily and compactly explained only if lexical items are inserted at the level of syntactic deep structure before the application of syntactical transformations. W. C. Watt’s "Late Lexicalizations" argues the generativist position that the lexical peculiarities of natural languages tend to be introduced at various stages in the application of syntactical transformations. Bresnan’s paper is particularly helpful to philosophers who want to make sense of linguist’s current arguments: her evidential appeals, reasoning, and terminology can be grasped by someone with little background in technical linguistics. The volume also includes three papers, two by Hamburger and Wexler and one by Peters and Ritchie, on the abstract theory of grammar, which has come some distance since Chomsky’s contributions. These papers follow out various aspects of the realization that, when abstractly considered, transformational, and even somewhat less powerful rules, are too powerful to allow nonarbitrary solutions to the problem of identifying the grammars of particular languages. (shrink)

This book develops Bursen's Cornell University thesis. The book is dedicated to Normal Malcolm though it contains no references to Malcolm's recent book on memory. Aside from mention of a recent Time Magazine article, there is no reference to any paper or book published after 1971. These lacunae are perhaps unfortunate. Why? Bursen energetically marshalls something like a part of Malcolm's arguments against scientific--or anyhow essentializing, mechanistic, causal, or computative--theories of memory and in artificial intelligence. Bursen purports to show that (...) mechanistic, computer simulation, or scientific theories of memory are impossible. But the actual production of reasonable approximations of human memory seem not too far away: and Bursen's arguments seem to make it as impossible for there to be a scientifically-explicable theory of a simulation of human memory capacity as for there to be such a theory of actual human memory capacity--if there's no explaining human memory than there is no explaining computer memory either. (shrink)

This book is essential for those interested in Russell, or in the philosophy of logic and mathematics. Only two of the fifteen selections are readily available elsewhere: "On Denoting" and "Mr Strawson on Referring." Amazingly, three substantial selections have never been published previously: "On the Substitutional Theory of Classes and Relations," "The Regressive Method of Discovering the Premisses of Mathematics," and "Is Mathematics Purely Linguistic?". Three other papers have appeared previously only in French : one of these is a better (...) introduction to the theory of types than the classic "Mathematical Logic as based on the Theory of Types." Finally, of the five remaining papers, which are not easily available, three are commentaries on Meinong, one is a note on the axiom of infinity, and the most substantial piece is a discussion of three notions of sets—in effect, Zermelo-Frankel, New Foundations, and Russell’s own "no-classes" theory, which required a theory of types applied to propositional functions. What is striking throughout these essays—all but one from the first decade of the century-is Russell’s persistent sympathy with some sort of realism in foundation theory, and his perception that the theory of definite descriptions, the "no-classes" proposals, and the theory of types, were very closely interrelated. Also included are three bibliographies. The chronological bibliography includes several still unpublished mss in the McMaster University Russell Archives.—J.L. (shrink)

Four papers that first appeared elsewhere, though within the last few years. Probably the best source for Chomsky’s recent technical work and a good source for his recent views about linguistic theory and about language and cognition generally. The introduction and the first two essays, "Questions of Form and Interpretation" and "On the Nature of Language," speak to the more general questions and the linguistics will not overburden the philosophical reader. From the middle sixties to the early seventies, many linguists (...) proposed ever more abstract and idiosyncratic syntactical analyses, often invoking vague and overly powerful "rules" without much concern for how they could fit within a learnable system of rules. What motivated these linguists was a desire to give some account within a rich grammar for nearly any sort of semantic, logical, or cognitive feature that comes up in our use of language. Much of Chomsky’s recent work has been concerned with a principled reduction in the power of grammatical rules; since this reduces the sorts of rules and grammars that may be proposed, it makes grammatical analyses more testable. The reduction is "principled" in that what one is after are the universal constraints of human language that derive from the child’s language acquisition capacities. In "Conditions on Transformations" and "Conditions on Rules of Grammar" Chomsky proposes various limitations on the power of transformational rules within the context of a similarly-restricted base. The logico-semantic role in the strict explication of linguistic competence is restricted to "logical form," which is read off a surface level of syntax into something like the familiar structures of predicate logic. The trace theory of movement rules is a powerful and relatively simple way of accounting for features of pronominalization and anaphor, reference and logical form, without sacrificing testability or system; it also permits the expression of some elegant generalizations and lends itself to the exploitation of the universal—particular grammar distinction. Trace theory also permits logical form to be read off from surface structure alone. And the logical form so read off appears to be the familiar variable-employing one and not the sort suggested by Montague.—J.L. (shrink)

In this book Dummett develops the view of his essay "Truth" that a full development of the Wittgensteinian "meaning-as-use" view of language will displace truth from its central position in the philosophy of language in favor of verifiability. He adds the provision, however, that one must first liberalize the extreme constructivism in favor of a suitably nonpsychologistic intuitionism. His view gradually emerges in a careful reconstruction and criticism of the most viable and coherent of Frege’s positions in philosophic logic. In (...) the process the views of Russell, Quine, Geach, Strawson, and Wittgenstein are measured, winnowed, and assessed; even Kripke’s recent claims about names and identity are dismissed in an appendix, though this is one of the few parts of the book that does not seem to compel agreement. Though undoubtedly the most masterful book ever written about Frege, and a joy to read, one can hardly call it a definitive intellectual biography: there is only one direct quote from Frege and no footnotes. But it just may be the most solid and brilliant reflection currently available on the core philosophic problems of the last hundred years.—J.L. (shrink)

David Lamb offers this book to students of Wittgenstein and analytic philosophy as an introduction to some of the important themes in Hegel's work, which such readers might wish to follow up. The publishers add on the back cover that Lamb's book also contributes to "more advanced discussions of Hegel's philosophy.".

There was genuine need for a work of this type, to serve as textbook in introductory courses on the philosophy of religion. It contains basic information, capitulation, simplification--and conveniently labels the different views.--J. L.

This is a slim volume of essays on meaning that merits use in an undergraduate or graduate course, particularly in that several contributors-Davidson, Quine, Dummett, and Geach—introduce, summarize, and illustrate the views of meaning with which they are associated. There is also a somewhat loosely-woven essay by Follesdal, [[sic]] in part relating the Anglo-American tradition to Continental formulations, and an essay by Anscombe on the first person which concludes, somewhat enigmatically, that "'I’ is not a referring expression.".