Philosophical hermeneutics has become an unavoidable reference in the field throughout the twentieth century but has seldom been extended to draw conclusions in the area of political theory. Two intellectuals that have contributed to such a project are Charles Taylor and Gianni Vattimo, although they exhibit some important differences in key aspects of this enterprise, both at the level of the conceptual premises and at that of the prescribed policies and objectives. Here I examine these thinkers’ notion of tradition – (...) an essential feature of hermeneutical theories – its ontological underpinnings, and the place each of them assign to it in sociopolitical decision-making, especially in the context of multicultural societies. In the end, I argue for the superiority of Taylor’s model of understanding and employing tradition in current political and moral debates. (shrink)

This essay aims to recover the conflictive nodes in T. Hobbes’ theory regarding language, science and truth. Revisiting the diverse and contradictory readings that have arisen around these areas of his work we intend to point out the tensions inherent to Hobbes’ scientific project. No definitive answer is given to close the discussion; instead we aim to offer hints to identify the author’s positions that are hard to reconcile. Thus we intend to contribute to a deeper understanding of the multiple (...) possibilities the Hobbesian text offers. (shrink)

En el presente trabajo se analiza la conexión existente entre la etapa marxista de juventud y la neoaristotélica de madurez en el pensamiento de Alasdair MacIntyre, enfatizando el problema que representa para él la posibilidad de criticar y justificar racionalmente una teoría moral. A través de una lectura comparativa de obras de ambos períodos se muestra cómo la incapacidad para dar una respuesta satisfactoria a esta preocupación temprana es una de las razones que llevan al abandono de la tradición marxista, (...) y cómo su formulación aristotélica madura busca superar esta dificultad, manteniendo constantes otros presupuestos y compromisos teóricos previos. (shrink)

Resumen: En este artículo se presenta la posición de dos filósofos asociados a la hermenéutica, Gianni Vattimo y Charles Taylor, respecto del status del conocimiento científico en el mundo contemporáneo. Mediante una somera exposición de los rasgos fundamentales de sus respectivas ontologías y epistemologías, se busca realizar una comparación crítica. En la conclusión, se defiende la superioridad del planteo de Taylor, en la medida que permite discutir la primacía del modelo científico natural sin abandonar una concepción realista del mundo y (...) de la categoría de verdad. Abstract: In this paper I present the position of two philosophers associated with the hermeneutic tradition, Gianni Vattimo and Charles Taylor, about the status of scientific knowledge in our contemporary world. Through a brief exposition of the fundamental features of their respective ontologies and epistemologies, I seek to offer a critical comparison. In the conclusion, I defend the superiority of Taylor’s formulation, inasmuch it allows to put in question the primacy of the natural science model without abandoning a realist conception of the world and of the category of truth. (shrink)

This volume has 41 chapters written to honor the 100th birthday of Mario Bunge. It celebrates the work of this influential Argentine/Canadian physicist and philosopher. Contributions show the value of Bunge’s science-informed philosophy and his systematic approach to philosophical problems. The chapters explore the exceptionally wide spectrum of Bunge’s contributions to: metaphysics, methodology and philosophy of science, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of physics, philosophy of psychology, philosophy of social science, philosophy of biology, philosophy of technology, moral philosophy, social and political (...) philosophy, medical philosophy, and education. The contributors include scholars from 16 countries. Bunge combines ontological realism with epistemological fallibilism. He believes that science provides the best and most warranted knowledge of the natural and social world, and that such knowledge is the only sound basis for moral decision making and social and political reform. Bunge argues for the unity of knowledge. In his eyes, science and philosophy constitute a fruitful and necessary partnership. Readers will discover the wisdom of this approach and will gain insight into the utility of cross-disciplinary scholarship. This anthology will appeal to researchers, students, and teachers in philosophy of science, social science, and liberal education programmes. 1. Introduction Section I. An Academic Vocation Section II. Philosophy Section III. Physics and Philosophy of Physics Section IV. Cognitive Science and Philosophy of Mind Section V. Sociology and Social Theory Section VI. Ethics and Political Philosophy Section VII. Biology and Philosophy of Biology Section VIII. Mathematics Section IX. Education Section X. Varia Section XI. Bibliography. (shrink)

Political philosophy in the last decades has turned away from universal narratives of progress, on grounds that these narratives produce exclusion and justify domination. However, the universal values that underlie emancipatory political projects seem to presuppose universal history, which explains its persistence in some contemporary political philosophers committed to such projects. In order to find a response to the paradox according to which universal history is inherently exclusionary and yet necessary to uphold universal values, I examine the contrast between Adorno’s (...) and Lyotard’s perspectives on the problem of writing history ‘after Auschwitz’. For both philosophers, Auschwitz interrupts our fundamental normative and cognitive values, because any attempt to identify the meaning of the camps by means of these values misunderstands the suffering that took place in them. Yet this interruption produces a feeling that calls for the institution of new universal normative values. For Adorno, this value is a purely negative command to act in such a way that Auschwitz does not repeat itself. For Lyotard, by contrast, it is the demand to invent new idioms that make it possible to find meaning in Auschwitz. (shrink)

In this paper I review three different positions on the wave function, namely: nomological realism, dispositionalism, and configuration space realism by regarding as essential their capacity to account for the world of our experience. I conclude that the first two positions are committed to regard the wave function as an abstract entity. The third position will be shown to be a merely speculative attempt to derive a primitive ontology from a reified mathematical space. Without entering any discussion about nominalism, I (...) conclude that an elimination of abstract entities from one’s ontology commits one to instrumentalism about the wave function, a position that therefore is not as unmotivated as it has seemed to be to many philosophers. (shrink)

The paper reads Kant’s notion of radical evil as anticipating and clarifying problematic aspects of what Arendt called ‘the banality of evil’. By reconstructing Arendt’s varied analyses of this notion throughout her later writings, I show that the main theoretical challenge posed by it concerns the adjudication of responsibility for evil deeds that seem to lack recognisable evil intentions. In order to clarify this issue, I turn to a canonical text in which the relationship between evil and responsibility plays a (...) central role: Kant’s Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. Relying on an interpretation of this writing by Arendt’s mentor Karl Jaspers published in 1935, in evident connection to National Socialism, I challenge Arendt’s own interpretation of Kant’s notion of radical evil, which, I argue, represents an antecedent, rather than a contrast, to ‘the banality of evil’. For Kant, radical evil consists in the destruction of the person’s sense of responsibility, thus producing a self-exculpatory mentality such as the one that characterised Eichmann during his trial. (shrink)

In this article we present symmetric diffusion networks, a family of networks that instantiate the principles of continuous, stochastic, adaptive and interactive propagation of information. Using methods of Markovion diffusion theory, we formalize the activation dynamics of these networks and then show that they can be trained to reproduce entire multivariate probability distributions on their outputs using the contrastive Hebbion learning rule (CHL). We show that CHL performs gradient descent on an error function that captures differences between desired and obtained (...) continuous multivariate probability distributions. This allows the learning algorithm to go beyond expected values of output units and to approximate complete probability distributions on continuous multivariate activation spaces. We argue that learning continuous distributions is an important task underlying a variety of real‐life situations that were beyond the scope of previous connectionist networks. Deterministic networks, like back propagation, cannot learn this task because they are limited to learning average values of independent output units. Previous stochastic connectionist networks could learn probability distributions but they were limited to discrete variables. Simulations show that symmetric diffusion networks can be trained with the CHL rule to approximate discrete and continuous probability distributions of various types. (shrink)

In this paper we critically review Correia’s and Rosenkranz’s Nothing to Come. A Defence of the Growing Block Theory of Time, published by Springer in 2018. By taking into account the essential reliance of the book on tense logic, we bring out the existence of a conflict between their logical axioms, that presuppose truth bivalence even for statements concerning future contingents, and the principle of groundedness that they also advocate. According to this principle, a proposition Q is now groundedly true (...) as long as sometimes in the future it will be the case that there exists something that makes Q true. However, if the events that occur in 2060 do not exist unrestrictedly (for us, here in 2021), what, in reality, can possibly ground the truth (or falsity) of Q? In the second part of the paper, we concentrate on some conceptual difficulties raised by their brilliant attempt to adapt the growing block view of reality to a relativistic setting, based on what they call bow-tie presentism, according to which for each spacetime point s only s plus the spacelike-related region with respect to s exists. By extending temporal logic into a relativity-friendly spatiotemporal logic, we conclude by noting that Correia and Rosenkranz’s Nothing to Come makes very important strides in showing that there are technical ways to develop the growing block of reality into an ontology that coheres with relativity theories perfectly well, while retaining most of the distinctive content of classical growing block theory. (shrink)

The paper reads Kant’s notion of radical evil as anticipating and clarifying problematic aspects of what Arendt called ‘the banality of evil’. By reconstructing Arendt’s varied analyses of this notion throughout her later writings, I show that the main theoretical challenge posed by it concerns the adjudication of responsibility for evil deeds that seem to lack recognisable evil intentions. In order to clarify this issue, I turn to a canonical text in which the relationship between evil and responsibility plays a (...) central role: Kant’s Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. Relying on an interpretation of this writing by Arendt’s mentor Karl Jaspers published in 1935, in evident connection to National Socialism, I challenge Arendt’s own interpretation of Kant’s notion of radical evil, which, I argue, represents an antecedent, rather than a contrast, to ‘the banality of evil’. For Kant, radical evil consists in the destruction of the person’s sense of responsibility, thus producing a self-exculpatory... (shrink)

El presente estudio trata de ser una aproximación histórica al posmodernismo en una de sus vertientes: el constructivismo, la teoría que defiende que el mundo es construcción social sin correlato objetivo alguno. A través del examen de la genealogía de este perfil, el artículo se propone mostrar que el constructivismo es deudor de diversas tradiciones de pensamiento irracionalista, subjetivista e idealista, y que por ello constituye una doctrina anti y pseudocientífica.

Lyotard’s diagnosis of a ‘postmodern condition’ has been repeatedly interpreted as a disavowal of the universal aspiration of political action and judgment. This article challenges this interpretation by showing that postmodernity involves an attempt to reconsider universality in such a way that it involves dissensus rather than consensus. I proceed by reconstructing Lyotard’s critique of the idea of consensus as a ground of political action and judgment, which in his view is based on a certain model of production of scientific (...) knowledge. Then, I analyse Lyotard’s turn to Kant’s judgment of the sublime as an alternative to a consensus-based conception of universal judgments. In the judgment of the sublime, universality stems from the disagreement between the faculties, which arouses respect for universal ideas. Analogously, political judgments stem from the disagreement between heterogeneous discourses, which produces a universal call to invent new languages that make communication possible. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to clarify what is properly common to the common good and to support its irreducibility as a guarantee of overcoming an atomistic conception of civil society. We begin by addressing the notion of individual freedom and the questioning of the selfish condition of the human being. Then, we delve into the normative possibilities offered by an ethical interpretation of the common good. The difference of the common good from other notions used in late-modern discourses (...) is key in determining the intrinsic commonality of social relations. In concluding, we argue for a conception of the common good that accommodates individual freedom, understanding it no longer in isolation, but as part of intersubjectivity. (shrink)

Thomas Kuhn is mostly known for his contributions to the philosophy of science. However, it was chiefly to investigations in philosophy of language that he dedicated the last part of his career. The aim of this paper is to present a systematic view of Kuhn’s main ideas on this subject. I start by describing his theory of concept, in particular what he says about kind terms. Such terms, acquired in blocks that form contrast sets or “taxonomies,” are learned through ostensible (...) definitions. Next, I analyze Kuhn’s concepts of “meaning” and “truth.” Finally, I discuss a second type of kinds terms, not fully investigated by him, which is learned together with scientific laws. Resumo Thomas Kuhn é conhecido principalmente por suas contribuições para a filosofia da ciência. No entanto, foi em grande medida à filosofia da linguagem que ele dedicou a última parte de sua carreira. O objetivo deste artigo é apresentar uma visão sistemática das principais ideias de Kuhn sobre esse assunto. Começo descrevendo sua teoria do conceito, em particular o que ele diz sobre termos para espécie. Tais termos, aprendidos em blocos que formam conjuntos de contraste ou “taxonomias”, são aprendidos através de definições ostensivas. Em seguida, analiso as concepções de Kuhn de “significado” e “verdade”. Finalmente, discuto um segundo tipo de termo para espécies, não totalmente investigado por ele, que é aprendido junto com as leis científicas. (shrink)

The article addresses how societal inequalities shape market arrangements. While business scholars developed important work about the interplay of organizations and societal economic inequalities, less has been said about the embeddedness of markets in unequal social structures. We argue that this issue may be addressed by cross-fertilizing the sociological approach of Bourdieu and the Strategic Action Fields perspective. To demonstrate our view, we assessed the extreme case of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) recycling markets in Brazil, conducting a qualitative study based on (...) the precepts of abductive analysis and using data from different secondary sources, interviews, and participant observation. We verified the existence of correspondences between the power of strategic action fields and the positions the individuals controlling them occupy in what Bourdieu calls the social space and show how these differences enable inter field connections that tend to reproduce social hierarchies. (shrink)

This study investigates whether there is a relation between the semantics of linguistic expressions that indicate temporal distance and the spatial properties of their co-speech gestures. To this date, research on time gestures has focused on features such as gesture axis, direction, and shape. Here we focus on a gesture property that has been overlooked so far: the distance of the gesture in relation to the body. To achieve this, we investigate two types of temporal linguistic expressions are addressed: proximal (...) (e.g., near future, near past) and distal (e.g., distant past, distant future). Data was obtained through the NewsScape library, a multimodal corpus of television news. A total of 121 co-speech gestures were collected and divided into the two categories. The gestures were later annotated in terms of gesture space and classified in three categories: (i) center, (ii) periphery, and (iii) extreme periphery. Our results suggest that gesture and language are coherent in the expression of temporal distance: when speakers locate an event far from them, they tend to gesture further from their body; similarly, when locating an event close to them, they gesture closer to their body. These results thus reveal how co-speech gestures also reflect a space-time mapping in the dimension of distance. (shrink)

In recent years, democratic theorists have inquired into the aesthetic dimension of contemporary politics. Influenced by Hannah Arendt and Jacques Rancière, these scholars claim that there is an analogy between democratic politics and aesthetic experiences, since both involve the confrontation of an indeterminacy that cannot be overcome by means of rational argumentation. Contributing to this perspective, but challenging some of Rancière’s insights, this article shows the importance of Jean-François Lyotard’s writings on aesthetics for understanding what I call ‘democratic aesthetics’. This (...) aesthetics, I argue, consists in works of art that bring representation to its limits, thus arousing an experience of the unpresentable. Influenced by Immanuel Kant’s analysis of the sublime, Lyotard claims that avant-garde art, by disrupting the rules of representational art, put representation as such into question. This experience of the unpresentable contributes to cultivating a readiness to listening to voices that are not yet heard, because they lack a discourse by which to express themselves. Given that politics in postmodernity, following Lyotard, consists in shifting the dividing line between the sayable and the unsayable, avant-garde art is conductive to a postmodern politics – which, I argue, is analogous to democratic politics. (shrink)

El objetivo de este artículo es ofrecer una interpretación, en parte novedosa, del pasaje 5.54-5.5423 del Tractatus en el que Wittgenstein examina las proposiciones que representan relaciones intencionales como el juicio. La idea fundamental será que estas proposiciones se consideran como proposiciones que tratan de complejos y, en consecuencia, deberían analizarse de conformidad con el parágrafo 2.0201, lo que me llevará a desarrollar paso a paso el análisis propuesto. Adicionalmente, argumentaré que la teoría de Wittgenstein así entendida excluye la posibilidad (...) de juzgar sinsentidos, a diferencia de la teoría de Russell del juicio como relación múltiple. (shrink)

This study investigates how typological and metaphorical construal differences may affect the use and frequency of temporal expressions in English and Spanish. More precisely, we explore whether there are any differences between English, a satellite-framed language, and Spanish, a verb-framed language, in the use of certain temporal linguistic expressions that include a spatial, deictic component (Deictic Time), a purely temporal relation between two events (Sequential Time) or the expression of the duration of an event (Duration). To achieve this, we perform (...) two different types of analysis. First, we conduct an informational gain or loss analysis (Verkerk, 2013) of 1,650 of English-to-Spanish translations extracted from parallel corpora. Secondly, we compare the frequency of 33 English and 27 Spanish temporal expressions in two similar written online corpora (EnTenTen and EsTenTen, respectively) and a television news spoken corpus (NewsScape). Our results suggest that English uses “deictic directional expressions” (explicitly stating the spatial location of the temporal event,, e.g., back in those days/in the future ahead) much more frequently than Spanish, to the extent that directional information is normally excluded in English-to-Spanish translations. Also, sequential expressions (such as before that/later than) and duration expressions (during the whole day) are much more frequent in Spanish. These usage differences, explained by the variability in motion typology and metaphoric construal, open up the interesting question of how these differences in linguistic usage could affect the conceptualization of time of English and Spanish speakers. (shrink)

Resumen El presente artículo adopta como trasfondo los desarrollos teóricos sobre el lenguaje de Wittgenstein y Austin y aborda en términos comparativos la manera en que las propuestas de Habermas y Bourdieu reelaboran los hallazgos teóricos de esa perspectiva pragmática original. En particular, me interesa analizar el modo en que el carácter institucional que se atribuye al lenguaje se retoma en la teoría de la acción comunicativa de Habermas y la pragmática sociológica de Bourdieu con el propósito de mostrar y (...) confrontar dos modos posibles, distintos e irreductibles entre sí, de apropiarse de la fuerza heurística que yace en el giro pragmático inaugurado por Wittgenstein y Austin a mediados del siglo XX.By using as a background Wittgenstein’s and Austin’s reflections about language, the aim of this paper is to compare the way Habermas and Bourdieu rebuild that original pragmatic perspective. I am specifically interested in analyzing how the institutional character of language is retrieved by Habermas’s communicative action theory and Bourdieu’s sociological pragmatic, in order to show and to confront two different and irreducible ways of appropriating the heuristic power of the pragmatic turn started by Wittgenstein and Austin in the middle of the twentieth century. (shrink)

En “La religión dentro de los límites de la mera razón”, Kant afirma que “el hombre es malo por naturaleza”. Esta aseveración ha llevado a malentendidos en la literatura en varios niveles. Uno de estos se basa en la falta de atención dada al hecho que Kant intenta demostrar esta afirmación mediante una “investigación antropológica”. Por otro lado, es común interpretar este pasaje a través de lecturas como la de Allison, quien sostiene que la prueba es a priori y, por (...) ello, carece de elementos empíricos. Sin embargo, los defensores de ambas posiciones creen que tienen evidencia textual que respalda sus argumentos. En este sentido, basándonos en lo argüido por Forschner, se propone que la prueba es, de hecho, de naturaleza antropológica y que no hay evidencia textual ni sistémica que respalde posiciones como las de Allison. (shrink)

Fifteen years in the making, _Hyperpolitics _is an interactive dictionary offering a wholly original approach for understanding and working with the most central concepts in political science. Designed and authored by two of the discipline’s most distinguished scholars, its purpose is to provide its readers with fresh critical insights about what informs these political concepts, as well as a method by which readers—and especially students—can unpack and reconstruct them on their own. International in scope, _Hyperpolitics_ draws upon a global vocabulary (...) in order to turn complex ideas into an innovative teaching aid. Its companion open access website has already been widely acknowledged in the fields of education and political science and will continue to serve as a formidable hub for the book’s audience. Much more than a dictionary and enhanced by dynamic graphics, _Hyperpolitics _introduces an ingenious means of understanding complicated concepts that will be an invaluable tool for scholars and students alike. (shrink)

El universo que conocemos es un producto de la mente humana. En la experiencia fenomenológica primordial, que el hombre tiene de si mismo, se imponen dos hechos fenomenológicos: la experiencia de un mundo estable de objetos y la experiencia de un mundo de campos de realidad. El ejercicio de la razón, que le viene dada al hombre evolutivamente, lleva a preguntar cuáles son las causas reales que producen esos dos mundos. Igualmente, cuál es la verdad última del universo. La ciencia (...) moderna produce un conocimiento racional (científico) que ofrece la base para responder esas preguntas. La mecánica clásica explica qué es y cómo se produce un mundo macroscópico de objetos estables. La mecánica cuántica qué son y cómo se producen los campos de realidad, a los que accede el hombre desde su psique humana. Todo ello nos lleva a entender que el universo tiene una ontología (un modo de ser real) holístico. El hombre, ya por su auto-experiencia primordial, pero también por los resultados de la ciencia, queda abierto al conocimiento del holismo cósmico. La naturaleza holística del universo es la clave para abordar las preguntas en torno a su verdad última. El holismo sigue haciendo posible la hipótesis atea de un universo sin Dios. Pero también es verdad que, más allá del reduccionismo decimonónico, el holismo hace hoy mucho más verosímil la hipótesis de la existencia de Dios. A modo de sugerencia, el artículo concluye con una referencia a la imagen de Dios, y de la creación del universo en Dios, según el discurso alegórico de la kabala judía. (shrink)

The facts and inferences exposed in this writing, and the arguments that support it, allow us to conclude that the «extension of the mind», opened during the evolutionary process, since always and today accelerated by the work of human intervention, in no case authorizes us to consider that the «extension of mind» has changed human nature, as we have always known it. Therefore, there is no justification to speak of transhumanism, as if a new man, a «transhuman», had appeared at (...) the moment of the Singularity, whose nature had undergone substantial changes in relation to the usual human nature. For this reason, we consider that we should continue speaking of an «extensive humanism». No more. (shrink)

Una experiencia de Teatro en el IES Universidad Laboral. Muestra de Teatro Escolar Gijón.

Esta investigación reúne las voces y perspectivas de un grupo de mujeres indígenas en la zona sur andina ecuatoriana (Azuay, Cañar y Loja), y muestra la estructura social y las formas organizativas en los espacios que ocupan en el tejido social. Desde un enfoque intercultural y de género, y desde imaginarios esbozados a partir de la alteridad, la repetición y la reafirmación de estereotipos, el estudio analiza aspectos identitarios de la construcción femenina indígena en el territorio. La metodología utilizada es (...) cualitativa con herramientas etnográficas que derivan en entrevistas semiestructuradas y en la autoetnografía. Los resultados exponen el estado actual de un feminismo flagelado por la discriminación, la desigualdad, los silencios y la esencialización a las que son sometidas las mujeres indígenas no solo por su condición femenina, sino por su condición étnica y cultural. (shrink)

The probabilistic analysis of functional questions is maturing into a rigorous and coherent research paradigm that may unify the cognitive sciences, from the study of single neurons in the brain to the study of high level cognitive processes and distributed cognition. Endless debates about undecidable structural issues (modularity vs. interactivity, serial vs. parallel processing, iconic vs. propositional representations, symbolic vs. connectionist models) may be put aside in favor of a rigorous understanding of the problems solved by organisms in their natural (...) environments. [Shepard; Tenenbaum & Griffiths]. (shrink)

“The First Person” is the paper where G. E. M. Anscombe supports the thesis that “I” is not a referring word. Mainly I deal with her argument against the indexical view of “I” from the scenario of the “A” user, who refers to himself as the person who is under the special observation of the “A” user. On the one hand, I put forward that a use of “A” might have a guaranteed reference in a semantic sense: a referential use (...) of “A” as a definite description guarantees the one reference to oneself. On the other hand, the indexical view is left untouched: the reference of “A” is not fixed by the self-reference rule, and thus “I” and “A” are not indistinguishable referring words. Also I explore the idea that unlike “A”, “I” has a guaranteed reference in an epistemic sense, being immune to error through misidentification. (shrink)