Suenan timbres, by the Colombian poet Luis Vidales, is an urbanely rural work. The fact that flowers, spiders, cats and landscapes are found in these short poems-vignettes –all of which are a reflection of a city in the process of modernization–; confirms how interested was the author in the idea that his poetic project could erode the barrier separating the cultural and natural spheres. Bearing this in mind, the article attempts to show that the intersubjective dialogue between the two spheres (...) is not peaceful, balanced or horizontal. On the contrary, the article, through a philosophical analysis based on the ideas of ecocriticism, seeks to reveal that underlying this dialogue, there is the desire of modern men to dominate, control and subdue nature to the laws and rule of culture. (shrink)

Gracias al invaluable aporte hecho por Foucault, hoy sabemos que la transición del acto de tortura de un espacio público y abierto a un espacio cerrado y secreto trajo consigo una serie de repercusiones filosóficas, políticas y físicas de gran complejidad. No obstante, vale la pena significar que, dentro del contexto de las dictaduras militares del cono sur, el acto de la tortura –si bien fiel a su naturaleza cerrada, inaccesible y secreta– evidenció en ciertos casos una regresión atávica a (...) espacios que si bien no eran públicos sí eran abiertos: los registros de los hombres y mujeres que tras ser sedados, golpeados y brutalmente enceguecidos fueron arrojados al mar, las montañas, los volcanes y el desierto chileno así lo confirman. Debido a esto, los rasgos físicos de la geografía chilena terminan siendo constituidos por los cuerpos anónimos de todas estas personas. Por eso, en su afán por re-construir tanto el cuerpo de la nación chilena como los cuerpos de los torturados, con su INRI (2004) Raúl Zurita apela a una inversión filosófica y física de la geografía chilena. Si bien es cierto que dicha inversión cosmogónica confirma que la redención está negada para estas almas, el despliegue astuto del recurso de la metalepsis, como concatenación metonímica que ya de por sí es, permite que estos cuerpos, antes fustigados, concebidos siempre como ajenos al país, irónicamente terminen por configurar la fisionomía misma de un Chile zuritano en el que los términos “democracia” y “muerte” resultan estar ligados de manera indisoluble. (shrink)

In the second half of the 20th century, Latin American poetry has had to deal with representing the phenomenon of forced disappearance in its various poetic productions. Some of those have incubated in the Central American civil wars, the dictatorial regimes of the Southern Cone and even in countries with supposed democratic stability such as Mexico and Colombia. Memorial de Ayotzinapa, by the Mexican poet Mario Bojórquez, and Carta de las mujeres de este país, by the Colombian poet and activist (...) Fredy Yezzed, experiment with the discursive forms of the long poem and the letter poem, respectively, to construct collective memories around a phenomenon that continues to take lives to this day. Bojórquez's text is concerned with constructing a testimony, apparently in situ, of the disappearance of the forty-three Mexican teacher trainees; Yezzed's work, for its part, refrains from referring to a specific event or place in order to provide a more complete testimony of the Colombian armed conflict, nearly seventy years old. The article analyzes the forms of the text, the subjects and their spaces of enunciation, as well as the memory strategies that are seen in both works. Thus, the testimonial status of poetry is confirmed, sometimes overshadowed by genres such as the novel and the short story. (shrink)

En este artículo, se analiza la documentación producida por autores franceses o afrancesados, en la cual América y sus procesos de independencia, en particular los hispanoamericanos, ocupan un lugar central. Se localiza un importante corpus documental que incluye libros e impresos periódicos. Algunos de ellos fueron de uso en las escuelas primarias y secundarias francesas, otros circularon entre académicos y profesores universitarios. También se analizan algunos textos provenientes de conmemoraciones americanistas, como discursos de legatarios o personalidades con prestigio político o (...) científico, y textos literarios que concursaron en variados eventos vinculados con las celebraciones y conmemoraciones de la Independencia. A partir de ellos, se proponen cinco ejes de reflexión: primero, desde la perspectiva de las representaciones sociales, políticas y culturales de las independencias hispanoamericanas, donde las preocupaciones investigativas están orientadas a lo que se dice que pasó y menos a lo que pasó. Segundo, la reiteración de la categoría influencia para pensar las relaciones decimonónicas entre América y Francia subraya la originalidad de las ideas ilustradas y la Revolución Francesa; en cambio, las revoluciones hispanoamericanas representarían una de sus consecuencias más o menos distorsionada a este lado del Atlántico. Tercero, el lenguaje hermenéutico de lo que se dice que pasó instituyó mitos políticos modernos, asociados directamente con una revolución exitosa, igualitaria, libertaria y fraterna. Cuarto, en el contexto planetario de las dinámicas de modernización política, “lo francés” debe ser pensado como una parte de los procesos de mundialización de la modernidad. Quinto, el examen social y cultural de la producción intelectual presentada permite una mirada crítica a las historias nacionales o continentales, de tal forma que se puedan comprender mejor los procesos de modernización. (shrink)

El propósito de este artículo es volver la mirada a un oficio intelectual y a un producto literario del que se podría decir que no ha enfrentado aún los desafíos que plantea la crítica literaria. El culto y el cultivo del haikú en escritores colombianos reclama hoy horizontes de comprensión propiamente literarios, ya que ante todo son, como cualquier otra expresión literaria, palabra, lenguaje, comunicación y sentido; hay en ellos campos semánticos y visiones de mundo, como hay epistemología, fenomenología e (...) ideología. Poder involucrar todo este andamiaje de reflexión y análisis no desapropiará el haikú de los escritores colombianos de su vínculo con la experiencia sensible e intuitiva recogida de la tradición japonesa. (shrink)

When, in Telos #55, we sought to evaluate the meaning and impact of French socialism in power, the verdict turned out to be peculiarly disappointing. The rhetorical question in the Introduction: “Beyond Reform or Revolution?” had already been effectively answered. As early as 1982 French socialism had revealed itself to be a “Gaullism with a Human Face” which did not have much to do either widi reform or revolution, and could provide nothing more -above and beyond the usual cliches—than a (...) continuation of the same berated but unsurpassed technocratic management of the given. Socialism had turned out to be a bad idea whose time had past. (shrink)

He was almost a year older than my father. Yet when I learned of his death on February 12 in Paris I did not have the sense of an orderly passing of generations. Julio Cortázar had the personal as well as the literary ability of remaining young. It was the combination of a nimble mind, the experimental quality of his narrative, and the uncanny resilience of his lean figure to the routine ravages of time (he looked a good 25 years (...) younger than his age). He stood tall in a generation of splendid Latin American writers. As Carlos Fuentes has remarked, he is the first figure of what is known as the Latin American boom to go. (shrink)

Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut are political philosophers in Lyon and Nantes, respectively. They have jointly directed the Collège de philosophie since 1975 and have recently collaborated in a study titled From Human Rights to the Republican Idea. In La pensée 68, which was published in Paris last October, they seek to settle scores with some of the most influential French thinkers of the past twenty years. Their book purports to deal with the intellectual heritage of the sixties in France. (...) Its central thesis claims that humanism remains the philosophical question of our times and that, from this perspective, the sixties must be revisited with a great many apologies. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.2 (2003) 31-45 [Access article in PDF] Antonio Gramsci on Surrealism and the Avant-garde E. San Juan, Jr. Surrealism provided me with what I had been confusedly searching for. I have accepted it joyfully because in it I have found more of a confirmation than a revelation. It was a weapon that exploded the French language. It shook up absolutely everything....A process of (...) disalienation, that's how I interpreted surrealism. 1In the spring of 1919, André Breton and Phillipe Soupault conducted various experiments in automatic writing. They converted themselves into machines to record the whispers of the unconscious, inspired by Rimbaud's urge for adventure in quest of cosmic knowledge and Lautreamont's conviction of art as a communal enterprise. To destroy bourgeois morality and class inequality, uphold the freedom of the imagination, and release the libidinal energies dammed up in the psyche, surrealism — Guillaume Appolinaire's term 2 — was invented from the nihilistic ruins of Dada to lay the groundwork for building a society founded on liberty and justice. In the same year the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci founded the innovative journal, L'Ordine Nuovo and advocated the factory council (modeled after the Russian Soviets) as the germ of an emergent communist society. Both initiatives were pathbreaking in challenging the orthodoxies of modernist bourgeois culture, politics, and philosophy.When Breton published his 1924 "First Manifesto of Surrealism" privileging dreams, the unconscious, the fantastic, and marvelous, Gramsci was the principal leader of the Communist Party of Italy spearheading the opposition to Mussolini's fascist takeover. Two years later, Gramsci was arrested and imprisoned until his death in 1937. In the Prison Notebooks that occupied him while in jail, Gramsci does not — as far as I am aware — refer to Breton or to surrealism directly. But in his scattered reflections on modern art and culture in general, and in his particular observations on Italian futurism (in particular, on Filippo Marinetti and Luigi Pirandello), we can [End Page 31] extrapolate the general approach Gramsci would take toward surrealism and avantgarde art as oppositional cultural practices. This exercise may clarify what a revolutionary Marxist position should be toward the philosophical or pedagogical category of the aesthetic within the field of cultural practice and artistic production, especially in the post-Cold War epoch of nation-state realignments and the reconfiguration of globalized finance capital in the new millennium.All commentators agree that Gramsci viewed the aesthetic as a category within the terrain of historical materialism and the political economy ofvalue in general. Artistic values are rooted in the social and material practices of a specific society which defines the limits of conventional artistic forms and the subject matter available to the artist. Vision or intuition and diverse raw materials (language, sounds, dance movements, and filmic images) are indissociable. Contrary to Benedetto Croce's emphasis on transcendental intuition, Gramsci valorizes the materialization of this intuition into perceptible, sensory structure, an architectonic whole produced by intellectual discipline and shaped by an integral worldview. In short, for Gramsci, the work of art is the historicization and objectification of vision/intuition.Gramsci's conception of Marxism stresses its intrinsic dialectical method, its emphasis on processes and relations within a social formation comprised of multilayered modes of production, given the necessarily uneven development of capitalism. This mode of historicizing life not only to interpret but to change it is a guide for collective action, not a dogmatic party line. "Man 'is' precisely the process of his actions," Gramsci writes, and "relative to what we have thought and seen, we seek to know what we are and what we can become, whether it is true and within what limits that we do 'make ourselves,' create our own lives and our own destinies." 3 Here, knowledge and action are oriented toward linking the past with the present in order to fashion the future. The chronotope of revolution is essentially a collage, more precisely a montage, of transformations that amalgamates contraries, oppositions, disparities.While Gramsci did not endorse Freudian theory completely except by... (shrink)

E. San Juan Jr. examines Peirce’s discourses on semiotics, ethics, and aesthetics and suggests their analogies with the radical critiques of Marx and other progressive trends.

Desde la llegada al poder de Hugo Chávez, en las elecciones de 1998, comenzó la configuración de unas nuevas relaciones de poder en el sistema político venezolano (SPV). Estas relaciones estaban determinadas por la naturaleza de los actores políticos que accedieron al poder, el funcionamiento ..

Cancer is a singular cellular state, the emergence of which destabilises the homeostasis reached through the evolution to multicellularity. We present the idea that the onset of the cellular disobedience to the metazoan functional and structural architecture, known as the cancer phenotype, is triggered by changes in the cell's external environment that occur with ageing: what ensues is a breach of the social contract of multicellular life characteristic of metazoans. By integrating old ideas with new evidence, we propose that with (...) ageing the environmental information that maintains a multicellular organisation is eroded, rewiring internal processes of the cell, and resulting in an internal shift towards an ancestral condition resulting in the pseudo‐multicellular cancer phenotype. Once that phenotype emerges, a new local social contract is built, different from the homeostatic one, leading to tumour formation and the foundation of a novel local ecosystem. (shrink)

This book considers coercion within the healing and ethical framework of therapeutic relationships and partnerships at all levels, and addresses the universal ...

En "Legal Reasons, Sources and Gaps", Raz señala que las lagunas jurídicas existen sólo cuando el derecho habla con voz incierta o cuando habla con muchas voces, pero que no hay lagunas cuando el derecho guarda silencio. En este último caso habría reglas de clausura, analíticamente verdaderas, que impiden la ocurrencia de esas lagunas. Según Raz, si hay una laguna en un sistema jurídico, entonces no es verdadero ni falso que exista una razón concluyente para ejecutar cierta acción. Así, una (...) de las contribuciones más importantes de Raz a la solución del problema de las lagunas jurídicas es subrayar que el discurso jurídico no está completamente controlado por la bivalencia. Sin embargo, a menudo se sostiene que el rechazo de la bivalencia conduce a contradicciones. Si esta afirmación fuese verdadera, entonces la solución de Raz al problema de las lagunas jurídicas se vería seriamente amenazada. En este artículo mostramos, con ayuda de una herramienta analítica sofisticada, i.e., la lógica de la verdad de G.H. von Wright, que el rechazo de la bivalencia sólo nos compromete a aceptar la conclusión trivial de que puede haber proposiciones que no son verdaderas ni falsas. Por esta razón, el trabajo de Raz todavía puede ser considerado un buen punto de partida para analizar las relaciones entre normas, razonamiento práctico y lagunas jurídicas. Sin embargo, también mostramos que para admitir proposiciones que no son verdaderas ni falsas, las tesis de Raz deben ser reformuladas. De otra manera, la tesis de que no existen lagunas cuando el derecho guarda silencio no sería compatible con el rechazo de la bivalencia. /// In his paper "Legal Reasons, Sources and Gaps", Raz says that legal gaps only exist when law speaks with uncertain voice or when it speaks with many voices, but there are no gaps when law is silent. In this later case, rules of closure, which are analytically true, prevent from the occurrence of gaps. According to Raz, if there is a gap in a legal system, then both the claim that there is a conclusive legal reason to perform a certain action, and its negation are neither true nor false. Therefore, one of the Raz's most important contributions to the solution of the problem of legal gaps is to remark that legal discourse is not altogether governed by the principie of bivalence. However, philosophers often claim that the denial of bivalence leads to a logical inconsistency. If this claim were true, then Raz's solution to the problem of gaps would be seriously threatened. In this paper we show--with the aid of a sophisticated analytical tool, i.e., von Wright's truth-logic--that the rejection of bivalence only commits us to accept the trivial conclusion that propositions can lack truth-values. For this reason, Raz's paper can still be regarded as a good starting-point for analyzing the relationships between norms, practical reasoning and legal gaps. However, we also show that in order to admit propositions which are neither true nor false, Raz's theses must be reformulated. Otherwise, the claim that there is no gap when law is silent would not be compatible with the rejection of bivalence. (shrink)

Este artículo aborda los efectos del voto preferente en el sistema de partidos políticos colombiano a la luz de las elecciones al Senado de la República entre el año 2006 y 2018. Específicamente se pregunta por los incentivos institucionales para los actores políticos en relación con la reputación partidista o personal y sus efectos reales en el comportamiento electoral de los partidos políticos. Teórica y metodológicamente se parte del paradigma post-positivista, de un enfoque neoinstitucional desde la elección racional y de (...) una metodología mixta, que combina instrumentos y técnicas cualitativas con indicadores cuantitativos. Se identifica la estructura de incentivos del sistema electoral colombiano a partir de las normatividades legales utilizadas y se utilizan indicadores cuantitativos para analizar el comportamiento de los actores políticos en relación con dichos incentivos. Este ejercicio se fundamenta en la necesidad de realizar un estudio sistemático y prolongado en el tiempo de los efectos de la Reforma Política del 2003, especialmente de uno de sus instrumentos con mayor influencia en las decisiones políticas de maximización de beneficios y disminución de costos: el voto preferente. (shrink)

Machine Learning has become a popular tool in a variety of applications in criminal justice, including sentencing and policing. Media has brought attention to the possibility of predictive policing systems causing disparate impacts and exacerbating social injustices. However, there is little academic research on the importance of fairness in machine learning applications in policing. Although prior research has shown that machine learning models can handle some tasks efficiently, they are susceptible to replicating systemic bias of previous human decision-makers. While there (...) is much research on fair machine learning in general, there is a need to investigate fair machine learning techniques as they pertain to the predictive policing. Therefore, we evaluate the existing publications in the field of fairness in machine learning and predictive policing to arrive at a set of standards for fair predictive policing. We also review the evaluations of ML applications in the area of criminal justice and potential techniques to improve these technologies going forward. We urge that the growing literature on fairness in ML be brought into conversation with the legal and social science concerns being raised about predictive policing. Lastly, in any area, including predictive policing, the pros and cons of the technology need to be evaluated holistically to determine whether and how the technology should be used in policing. (shrink)

The Lasallian District of Medellin, Colombia requested Corporación Universitaria Lasallista to analyze the formation process received by postulants to De La Salle Brothers in Istmina, Colombia, from 2002 to 2010. Academic, religious, pedagogical, apostolic and personal formation experiences received there were analyzed in this case study –from a qualitative approach– by means of semi-structured interviews and focus groups. Personal and apostolic formations stand out among the results due to the characteristics of Istmina as a proper place for sensibilization and subjugation (...) in proof of vocation. However, the reach of integral formation is questioned because academic formation presented meaningful deficiencies. In conclusion, even though formation experiences in vulnerable contexts are appreciated –and contextualization of learning is deemed meaningful–, participants agree in the necessity of developing strong competences to face educational and apostolic practices. (shrink)

En varias oportunidades, el filósofo francés Maurice Merleau-Ponty plantea que hay una "carne del lenguaje" que se puede entender como la comprensión paradójica de sí y del otro en el seno mismo del lenguaje; esta "carne" está en relación con el desarrollo de la vida humana y da testimonio del cambio en los individuos que, observándose a sí mismos, quieren ser individuos nuevos a cada momento. Siguiendo a Merleau-Ponty, el presente ensayo se propone reconocer la condición del ser reinventado continuamente (...) por la expresión del lenguaje. On several occasions, the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty says there is a "flesh of language" that can be understood as a paradoxical understanding of self and the other within the same language. This "flesh" is related to the development of human life and bears witness to the change in individuals, observing themselves, who want to be new individuals each time. Following Merleau-Ponty, this essay proposes to recognize the condi-tion of being continually reinvented by the expression of language. (shrink)

On several occasions, the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty says that there is a "flesh of language" that can be understood as a paradoxical understanding of self and the other at the very heart of the language. This "flesh"is related to the development of human life and bears witness to the change in individuals who observing themselves want to be a new individual every time. Following Merleau-Ponty, this essay aims at recognizing the condition of being continually reinvented by the expression of (...) the language. (shrink)

RESUMEN Un atento repaso por la concepción de la violencia chulhaniana en el contexto de las formas tradicionales que han estudiado este fenómeno social permite exponer con mayor detalle y claridad esta propuesta en cuanto a la relación con el otro se refiere. Cuando lo sucedido durante el colonialismo que azotó al mundo en el transcurso de los siglos XVIII y XIX se asumía como las más peligrosas acciones cometidas en procura de la supresión de las características propias de cada (...) uno, en la medida en que los fenómenos de invasión suprimían materialmente la diferencia que poblaba el mundo, apareció la violencia de la positividad como la disposición sistémica que parte de la libertad y el consentimiento individual para, tácitamente, eliminar cualquier tipo de sentido de otredad presente en su constitución. ABSTRACT A careful review of the conception of Chulhanian violence in the context of the traditional forms that have studied this social phenomenon makes it possible to explain in greater detail and clarity this proposal as to the relationship with the other refers. When what happened during colonialism that hit the world during the 18th and 19th centuries was assumed to be the most dangerous actions committed in seeking the suppression of each other's own characteristics to the extent that invasion phenomena materially suppressed the difference that populated the world, the violence of positivity appeared as the systemic disposition that begins with freedom and individual consent to, tacitly, to eliminate any kind of sense of otherness present in its constitution. (shrink)

Market inefficiency is a latent concept, and it is difficult to be measured by means of a single indicator. In this paper, following both the adaptive market hypothesis and the fractal market hypothesis, we develop a new time-varying measure of stock market inefficiency. The proposed measure, called composite efficiency index, is estimated as the synthesis of the most common efficiency measures such as the returns’ autocorrelation, liquidity, volatility, and a new measure based on the Hurst exponent, called the Hurst efficiency (...) index. To empirically validate the indicator, we compare different European stock markets in terms of efficiency over time. (shrink)

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.