This article tries to explain a current typical paradox: contemporary art, although desacralized by modern secularism and the application of Enlightenment reason to every field of life, still keeps many of its former sacred features. This sacrality is analyzed from three different points of view tied to three main elements of art, understanding the latter as a communication process: the artist, the artwork itself and the aesthetic experience. The conclusion is the same in all three cases: the survival of sacred (...) nature in the artistic field in contrast to its weakening or full vanishing in the ideological general field of western culture. (shrink)

This study looks at the emerging branch of everyday aesthetics from the perspective of the fracture which exists in its core, as a result of the double reading of the everyday: the first, which elevates it to the realm of the extraordinary and the second, in which it remains strictly ordinary. Our purpose here is to repair this fracture by turning to David Hume’s functionalist aesthetics, where disinterest and utility are reconciled through sympathy and the affective experience of otherness that (...) it provides. Once transferred to the everyday sphere, sympathy facilitates understanding between these two versions, since the aesthetic appreciation of everyday objects or common activities requires, like the second version, that they remain in the practical environment and, like the first, to see something special in them, which is the possibility of one’s own or another’s well-being. (shrink)

This study looks at the emerging branch of everyday aesthetics from the perspective of the fracture which exists in its core, as a result of the double reading of the everyday: the first, which elevates it to the realm of the extraordinary and the second, in which it remains strictly ordinary. Our purpose here is to repair this fracture by turning to David Hume’s functionalist aesthetics, where disinterest and utility are reconciled through sympathy and the affective experience of otherness that (...) it provides. Once transferred to the everyday sphere, sympathy facilitates understanding between these two versions, since the aesthetic appreciation of everyday objects or common activities requires, like the second version, that they remain in the practical environment and, like the first, to see something special in them, which is the possibility of one’s own or another’s well-being. (shrink)

Este trabajo afronta la deriva escéptica de la estética reciente, que ha cuestionado muchas verdades asumidas por la estética moderna, en especial las que hicieron prevalecer el arte sobre el no-arte. La estructura de poder así generada y ahora descubierta se aborda aquí desde el enfoque de las injusticias epistémicas de Fricker, relacionándolas con la conocida como estética de lo cotidiano al haber sido éste desprovisto tradicionalmente de su capacidad hermenéutica y testimonial por no responder al patrón artístico dominante. Lo (...) cotidiano aparece entonces como correctivo a las injusticias cometidas por la estética moderna al elevar el arte a dogma de fe. (shrink)

Este trabajo pretende aproximar dos realidades aparentemente contrapuestas como son la experiencia romántica de lo sublime y la emergente estética de lo cotidiano. Pero quiere hacerlo desde un enfoque distinto del de Thomas Leddy, que basado en el carácter extraordinario de los objetos y procesos normales de la vida, acaba haciendo de lo irrelevante diario, algo grande y atemorizante. Para nosotros, la experiencia sublime de lo cotidiano exige tomar la cotidianeidad como pura cotidianeidad, según aparece en Yuriko Saito. Esto lleva (...) a fijarse en aspectos distintos de los establecidos por la estética moderna para lo sublime, como el sentimiento de asombro y la pequeñez, con los que se traza aquí un recorrido histórico alternativo para esta experiencia a través de pensadores como Burke, Schopenhauer, Ortega y Gasset y Carolyn Korsmeyer. (shrink)

Este trabajo recupera el vaticinio hegeliano sobre la muerte del arte para demostrar, en contra de lo defendido por el discurso artístico postmoderno, que el arte actual no sólo no ha llegado a su fin, sino que goza de más salud que nunca. La razón es la ampliación sin límites de su concepto como consecuencia de un doble fenómeno: la desestetización del propio arte y la estetización de la vida, con las que el arte parece haber traspasado, al igual que (...) el objeto sublime, los límites de lo pensable, abocando así a la reflexión estética a un amargo aunque también sabroso estremecimiento. (shrink)

El concepto de negatividad recorre el pensamiento dialéctico de Adorno en su intención de rebatir u oponerse a lo establecido, de rescatar del sometimiento y el olvido a las víctimas de cualquier voluntad de dominio. Este deseo de recuperación se asocia aquí al restablecimientode las emociones negativas en la reflexión estética anglosajona actual, en especial el asco, que despreciado en la tradición estética moderna en nombre del placer, permite advertir una voluntad de dominio similar a la denunciada por Adorno y (...) un enfoque dialéctico análogo al suyo también, en la reciente pretensión de devolverle a este afecto su dignidad. (shrink)

A political discourse of peace marked the distribution and use of radioisotopes in biomedical research and in medical diagnosis and therapy in the post-World War II period. This occurred during the era of expansion and strengthening of the United States' influence on the promotion of sciences and technologies in Europe as a collaborative effort, initially encouraged by the policies and budgetary distribution of the Marshall Plan. This article follows the importation of radioisotopes by two Spanish research groups, one in experimental (...) endocrinology and one in molecular biology. For both groups foreign funds were instrumental in the early establishment of their laboratories. The combination of funding and access to previously scarce radioisotopes helped position these groups at the forefront of research in Spain. (shrink)

This essay presents the early days of human cytogenetics, from the late 1950s until the mid 1970s, as a historical series of images. I propose a chronology moving from photographs of bodies to chromosome sets, to be joined by ultrasound images, which provided a return to bodies, by then focused on the unborn. Images carried ontological significance and, as I will argue, are principal characters in the history of human cytogenetics. Inspired by the historiography of heredity and genetics, studies on (...) visual cultures, the conceptualization of circulation, and the sociology of pregnancy, I suggest that cytogenetics, through its focus on pregnancy, pregnant women, and their offspring, found strategic living materials that stabilized human chromosome studies as a biomedical, post-eugenics practice. The historicity of each path displays a wide circulation of objects, tools, and methods that condensed on images that shared in the centuries-old visual expertise that medicine and botany had manufactured. (shrink)

The notion of “individuality” in Plotinus is one of the most discussed. Throughout the Enneads, the problem of the individual subject arises from the complexity in understanding the relation between man and soul. To the intelligible man, also known as the inner or first man, a second man is added, so that “we have come to be the pair of them” 14.28-30). This question has been extensively addressed from different angles that lead either to a purely structuralist solution, or to (...) its criticism and the search for a more stable definition of subjective identity. The thesis that we will defend in this article, and that will indicate our position in the debate, tries to give a new perspective of the issue alluding to the sphere of life and its forms. The continuity between the different men will be determined by the continuity between their different forms of life, a primary issue to which the problem of individuality and the different modes of consciousness are subject. (shrink)

Alongside the renowned male pioneers of medical cytogenetics, many women participated in investigations at the laboratory bench and the bedside, both in Europe and the Americas. These women were committed to this new biological and clinical practice—cytogenetics, the origins of contemporary genetic diagnosis—and contributed to the creation of new biological concepts and settings centered on the study of chromosome imaging. This paper will review the contributions made by a group of woman scientists from a wide geographical distribution, situating their names (...) and research agendas within the history of a field dating back to early plant and insect cytogenetics. Rather than an exhaustive compendium of women geneticists, this essay presents a kind of historical reconstruction that can be achieved by placing women at center stage in their geographies and networks of circulating cytogenetic knowledge and practices thereby relating a history of genetic images though the work carried out by women, retrieving their agency and constructing an inclusive history of an influential contemporary biomedical practice as it gained increasing influence in the laboratory and the clinic. (shrink)

The complexity of the epistemological framework developed in the philosophy of Iamblichus does not allow to be captured from the polarity that underlies the categories of rational and irrational. After the projection of such categories, the core of this philosophy remains itself misunderstood. In this paper we intend to point to the need for a hermeneutic that respects the Neoplatonism that, from their own internal assumptions, display models that allow open understanding about the meaning and coherence of this thought. A (...) serious approach to the texts foregrounds the importance of the method. This must accompany the complexity of its meaning without projecting beyond categories that hide their cores basic sense, attempting an inside their outlines. The deployment of this path indicates the result of the demonstration of the precariousness of certain exegetical lines that tend to hide behind the projection of conceptual parameters strangers, basic access key to this thought. (shrink)

El presente artículo contiene una aproximación historiográfica al desarrollo de la Ilustración en Alemania, considerando las características específicas de la misma frente a Inglaterra o Francia, así como sus etapas. Se expone asimismo la tipología de sus ideas principales elaborada por Norbert Hinske y se hace balance acerca de su posible vigencia e interés para la actualidad, con atención especial a la idea de una razón humana universal y de la destinación del ser humano.

Las áreas rurales remotas en proceso de decrecimiento poblacional son altamente vulnerables y sensibles a los movimientos poblacionales, tanto a la salida como a la llegada de nueva población que engrose las cifras de la población local. El artículo explora el impacto que tuvo la crisis del 2008 en las migraciones prorrurales que se dirigían hacia este tipo de áreas rurales. Para ello se analiza el caso de la comarca de Las Batuecas-Sierra de Francia, en Salamanca. El trabajo de campo, (...) de naturaleza cualitativa, consiste en una serie de entrevistas semiestructuradas a informantes clave y nuevos residentes. El análisis permite observar el impacto de la crisis en un doble sentido: una migración forzada por la crisis como último recurso de supervivencia y una migración vinculada a aspiraciones de tipo medioambiental que encuentra en la crisis el impulso para poner en marcha un deseo que permanecía en estado latente. (shrink)

El desarrollo de la competencia comunicativa en una lengua extranjera y el estudio de los fenómenos lingüísticos a través del análisis del discurso y de la pragmática son dos pilares funda-mentales en la formación de estudiantes que eligen las Humanidades como ámbito para sus estudios universitarios. En el marco de la adquisición de una segunda lengua con finalidades académicas y didácticas esta comunicación presenta una refexión desde la docencia sobre la adquisición de español como vehículo para el conocimiento de la (...) realidad multicultural y diversa del mundo hispanohablante reflejada en la fraseología y en el discurso oral. (shrink)

From the mid-1960s onwards, a set of Spanish molecular biology research groups emerged in Spain. The factors contributing to this included: the return of a group of molecular biologists from their postdoctoral period abroad, the negotiations for the return of Spanish-born Nobel prize winner Severo Ochoa from New York, the negotiations for Spanish membership in the European Conference of Molecular Biology, and national policy towards university reform. As a result, the early molecular biologists’ research groups began to be recognised as (...) research schools by Spanish authorities and postgraduate courses and new research centres for molecular biology were set up. Foreign influence in the whole process was crucial. (shrink)

En este artículo se repasan algunas de las líneas de investigación más influyentes en el área de los estudios sobre biología y género y libros publicados al respecto por un grupo creciente de autoras. Como es habitual entre los estudios de género, en este caso los referentes a la biología cuentan con estudios sobre investigadoras en el área de la biología, mujeres que participaron activamente en la generación de saberes y prácticas de esta disciplina, por una parte, y con trabajos (...) sobre los sesgos epistémicos de género y sobre el androcentrismo en el conocimiento biológico, por otra. La genealogía se relaciona con la autoridad y ésta con el género como agencia en las ciencias y las experimentaciones contemporáneas. (shrink)

This essay details a historical crossroad in biochemistry and microbiology in which penicillin was a co-agent. I narrate the trajectory of the bacterial cell wall as the precise target for antibiotic action. As a strategic object of research, the bacterial cell wall remained at the core of experimental practices, scientific narratives and research funding appeals throughout the antibiotic era. The research laboratory was dedicated to the search for new antibiotics while remaining the site at which the mode of action of (...) this new substance was investigated. This combination of circumstances made the bacterial wall an ontology in transit. As invisible as the bacterial wall was for clinical purposes, in the biological laboratory, cellular meaning in regard to the action of penicillin made the bacterial wall visible within both microbiology and biochemistry. As a border to be crossed, some components of the bacterial cell wall and the biochemical destruction produced by penicillin became known during the 1950s and 1960s. The cell wall was constructed piece by piece in a transatlantic circulation of methods, names, and images of the shape of the wall itself. From 1955 onwards, microbiologists and biochemists mobilized new names and associated conceptual meanings. The composition of this thin and rigid layer would account for its shape, growth and destruction. This paper presents a history of biochemical morphology: a chemistry of shape – the shape of bacteria, as provided by its wall – that accounted for biology, for life itself. While penicillin was being established as an industrially-manufactured object, it remained a scientific tool within the research laboratory, contributing to the circulation of further scientific objects. (shrink)

Se analizan en este artículo las características simbólicas del género en el espacio de lo sagrado. Para ello se realiza un estudio de la imagen del budismo que los publicistas vienen haciendo en los últimos tiempos. Oriente ha identificado virtudes como la compasión y la sabiduría con géneros que nuestro marco cultural ha cambiado por completo. Se ejemplifican las conclusiones con un breve análisis publicitario, que emplea imágenes, tanto visuales como narrativas, del budismo en un intento de proporcionar un valor (...) añadido a los productos publicitados. En el proceso de mostrar las virtudes “budistas” asociadas al producto, cambia el género de las mismas adaptándolas a nuestro modo occidental de entenderlas. (shrink)

El estudio del cine como medio para el análisis sociológico es poco frecuente todavía en nuestro país. Existen numerosos artículos analizando el cine desde diversos ángulos, también el femenino, especialmente roles como el de la mujer fatal en el cine negro. Pero es menos habitual emplear este formato como parte de un método analítico del que extraer un reflejo social de lo que las pantallas proyectan y, a un tiempo, contribuyen a legitimar como base de una sociedad futura. No obstante, (...) existen pocos medios que sean capaces de reflejar el gran cambio acaecido en la historia reciente de la sociedad española. Este interés documental incrementa su potencial al enfocar en primer plano a las mujeres. Este artículo es una contribución a estudiar un campo tan atractivo como es el cine de migraciones a través de la óptica de los imaginarios sociales. (shrink)

We study twentieth-century biological sciences as experimental sciences by historically reconstructing the uses of experiments. Concepts like artificial, natural, and inventions, are handled so as to show how much current biological thought has been constructed on the basis of the invention of different kinds of experiments, instruments, and technical devices, experimental systems, and ideas concerning the fonctioning of nature. It is suggested that the frontier that may separate the natural from the artificial has already been crossed. Human intervention in the (...) natural phenomena through reproducible experiments hints to a view of current biological knowledge as a permanent invention of nature. (shrink)

RESUMO: Este ensaio investiga um conceito que tem origem entre os gregos - o diálogo – e se desloca para o campo educacional brasileiro. O trabalho pedagógico de Paulo Freire e o pensamento do hermeneuta Hans Georges Gadamer constituem nossa base teórica. Deseja-se demonstrar que a dialogicidade é um elemento relevante e emancipatório e interfere na formação dos sujeitos e na construção de saberes de forma significativa. Paulo Freire na obra Pedagogia do oprimido realiza uma análise fenomenológica do cotidiano educacional (...) e uma reflexão refinada desse processo e vai além da compreensão quando recomenda o diálogo como alternativa para um fazer pedagógico vivo e transformador. Há uma dissonância entre o que foi validado por Freire e a realidade escolar no Brasil em diferentes níveis e modalidades. Outra perspectiva que tem chamado atenção de estudiosos do campo educacional e que trata do diálogo é a Hermenêutica Filosófica de Gadamer; discute-se a possibilidade compreensiva da hermenêutica, nos moldes como fora pensado pelo hermeneuta, poder auxiliar nas bases de justificação da educação, favorecendo o debate acerca das racionalidades envolvidas no fazer pedagógico que nessa trilha parece superar os modelos de normatividade da modernidade técnico-científica, que declara o poderio da objetividade. Este estudo quer compreender a noção de diálogo vivo nesses autores e discutir sobre sua efetividade em nossos dias. (shrink)

This article exposes the neoplatonic element present in the metaphysics of causality elaborated in the seventeenth century by Leibniz. It explains this question in relation with medieval Neoplatonism, whose metaphysics of the Verb appears as the nucleus of the explanation of the relationship between causality and otherness.