Courcelle-Seneuil, francés, humanista, economista, seguidor y admirador de Tocqueville, estuvo en Chile durante seis años, fue consejero del gobierno, dictó cursos en el Instituto Nacional, y fue admirado por todos por su seriedad y experiencia. Este estudioso cumplió papeles contradictorios: mientras un autor como Lastarria lo traduce y cita a menudo para combatir el autoritarismo de los gobiernos liberales que aplican la libertad sólo en el plano económico, por otra parte, sus alumnos en el Instituto pusieron en práctica, (...) de manera extremadamente liberal, sus lecciones de economía cuando ocuparon puestos de responsabilidad. Su rigidez empujó al país a una gran crisis económica por exceso de liberalismo económico. ¿Cómo es posible que un mismo personaje y sus enseñanzas sea utilizado por un lado para combatir el liberalismo económico y por otro dé origen a posturas librecambistas, que son un antecedente del neoliberalismo? (shrink)

En el presente artículo se analizará la propuesta teórica, del utilitarismo de la preferencia de Peter Singer, y se estudiará sus alcances y límites en relación con la defensa de un trato igualitario hacia animales no humanos. En un primer momento se presentará el modelo teórico del autor, posterior a ello, se abordarán tres críticas: a) el contraargumento de los recursos reemplazables; b) la determinación de la vida de los animales no humanos como valor intrínseco, y c) importancia del tratamiento (...) del concepto de derechos de los animales. Al finalizar, se evaluará la propuesta de Singer a la luz de estas críticason el fin de tener una propuesta teórica más coherente que ofrezca una defensa hacia las otras especies distintas a la humana. (shrink)

O objetivo do meu artigo é criticar a compreensão utilitarista do agente moral como átomo racional que está disposto invariavelmente a agir de acordo com o não sofrimento. Minha hipótese é a de que o utilitarismo esvazia os seres humanos de suas motivações para oferecer uma imagem opaca do agente moral. Por isso, ele é incapaz de solucionar dilemas morais que envolvem, por um lado, o autossacrifício por razões afetivas e, por outro, conflitos que opõem culturas distintas. Meu ponto é (...) que não é necessariamente imoral a ação de um agente o qual sacrifica a solução ótima (proposta pelo cálculo utilitário e que privilegia a maioria), em nome de uma motivação afetiva, que julga que uma vida pode valer mais do que outra, nem o sofrimento é necessariamente imoral em todas as culturas de modo uniforme. (shrink)

According to an attractive conception of love as attention, discussed by Iris Murdoch, one strives to see one’s beloved accurately and justly. A puzzle for understanding how to love another in this way emerges in cases where more accurate and just perception of the beloved only reveals his flaws and vices, and where the beloved, in awareness of this, strives to escape the gaze of others - including, or perhaps especially, of his loved ones. Though less attentive forms of love (...) may be able to render one’s continued love coherent and justifiable in these cases, they risk further alienating the beloved precisely because they are less attentive and because of the operations of the beloved’s shame. I argue that attentive love is well-suited to alleviate this problem of alienation, but that in order to do so, it must be supplemented with grace. I propose a conception of gracious love as an affectionate love for the qualities of human nature, distinguishing this from a love of humanity, and show how this complex emotion, in being responsive to the complexities of shame, is able to alleviate the problem of alienation. (shrink)

Desde la perspectiva de la crítica al antijuridicismo foucaultiano expuesta por Giorgio Agamben en Homo sacer, en el presente trabajo abordamos la cuestión del derecho y su relación con la vida en la genealogía de la racionalidad política moderna, desarrollada en los cursos de Michel Foucault en el Collège de France de los años 1978-1979. Nuestro objetivo es mostrar las modalidades que adopta esta relación a través de los conceptos de integración marginalista y de utilitarismo político, de golpe de Estado (...) permanente y de heterogeneidad de las formas jurídicas. A partir de estas nociones, nos proponemos, además, una confrontación con la lectura realizada por Agamben. (shrink)

El problema de la cotidianidad no es estudiado en muchos autores marxistas, y menos en los años 1960, cuando Sánchez Vázquez analiza esta temática en su tesis doctoral Sobre la praxis. Predomina entonces en teorías marxistas, la concentración en los aspectos económicos y políticos. La conciencia cot..

Was man Fruhe Neuzeit nennt, ist durch ausserordentliche Ereignisse gepragt, die die uberlieferten Welterklarungen in Frage stellen. Nicht nur die Erfahrungswelt andert sich, auch die Welt der Wissenschaft. Wunderbar ist etwas, das bestehende Diskurse nicht bestatigt, sondern herausfordert. Es widerspricht dem Gewohnten und ist erklarungsbedurftig. Die Kernfrage ist nun, bis wohin es im Kontext der Fruhen Neuzeit gelang, das Wunderbare zu erfassen und zu erklaren, und von welchem Punkt an die traditionellen Diskurse vom Wunderbaren widerlegt und falsifiziert wurden, so dass (...) neue Ordnungen gesucht werden mussten. Wie weit konnen traditionelle Ordnungen im Interesse von Erklarungen erweitert und verandert werden? Gelingt es den neuen Ordnungen, das Wunderbare aufzulosen und als 'Explanandum' logisch aus anderen Tatsachen und ubergeordneten Naturgesetzen abzuleiten? Wie wird die Konkurrenz zwischen den Diskursen in den zeitgenossischen Texten erortert? Der vorliegende Band umfasst Beitrage renommierter Wissenschaftlerinnen und Wissenschaftler aus dem In- und Ausland, die sich dem Wunderbaren im Zugriff der Vernunft in der fruhen Neuzeit aus unterschiedlichen Blickwinkeln widmen. (shrink)

The order of discovery can have a profound effect upon the way in which we think about the function of a gene. In E. coli, recA is nearly essential for cell survival in the presence of DNA damage. However, recA was originally identified, as a gene required to obtain recombinant DNA molecules in conjugating bacteria. As a result, it has been frequently assumed that recA promotes the survival of bacteria containing DNA damage by recombination in which DNA strand exchanges occur. (...) We now know that several of the processes that interact with or are controlled by recA, such as excision repair and translesion synthesis, operate to ensure that DNA replication occurs processively without strand exchanges. Yet the view persists in the literature that recA functions primarily to promote recombination during DNA repair. With the benefit of hindsight and more than three decades of additional research, we reexamine some of the classical experiments that established the concept of DNA repair by recombination, and we consider the possibilities that recombination is not an efficient mechanism for rescuing damaged cells, and that recA may be important for maintaining processive replication in a manner that does not generally promote recombination. BioEssays 23:463–470, 2001. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

We prove that every monadic second-order property of the unfolding of a transition system is a monadic second-order property of the system itself. An unfolding is an instance of the general notion of graph covering. We consider two more instances of this notion. A similar result is possible for one of them but not for the other.

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In every undirected graph or, more generally, in every undirected hypergraph of bounded rank, one can specify an orientation of the edges or hyperedges by monadic second-order formulas using quantifications on sets of edges or hyperedges. The proof uses an extension to hypergraphs of the classical notion of a depth-first spanning tree. Applications are given to the characterization of the classes of graphs and hypergraphs having decidable monadic theories.

Cet ouvrage étudie la langue du vrai dans la première modernité. La vérité dépend-elle d'une belle énonciation? Y a-t-il des règles institutionnelles spécifiques d'énonciation de la vérité? Pourquoi la doctrina constitue-t-elle l'horizon de tout savoir et de tout enseignement prétendant à la vérité?

"Dans l'Espagne du XVe au XVIIe siècle, avec les grands voyages et les explorations de mondes inconnus, l'art de bâtir des palais ou des jardins, d'écrire un voyage expérimental ou une quête mystique, de peindre des paysages et des gloires célestes témoigne d'un renouvellement du regard - philosophique, alchimique, théologique, politique. Habiter le monde s'inscrit dans une perspective géométrique et mystique de l'infini et de l'éternité. Il y aurait peut-être là la marque d'une spécificité hispanique. L'ouvrage s'articule autour de quatre (...) parties consacrées aux palais, jardins et demeures spirituelles, aux merveilles de l'univers de Séville à Mexico, à la mystique des paysages et à la magie naturelle, à la représentation de l'infini" --. (shrink)

entre judaïsme, christianisme et islam Dominique de Courcelles. PRÉFACE Le fou de Dieu - celui qui, déployant la logique du discours de Paul sur la folie de la Croix, échange la folie aux yeux du monde contre la sagesse aux yeux de Dieu,  ...

Summer 2010 was marked by one of the worst environmental disasters ever experienced on a global scale. Following the explosion of the oil rig Deepwater Horizon on April 20—the drilling platform for British Petroleum—thousands of tons of crude oil spilled into the Gulf of Mexico. As a result, water and energy came together in ways that had the potential to do tremendous damage to the land and the air, which were invaded by an oil slick and toxic gases. This was (...) clearly a man-made crisis, which the world watched with shock and dismay. In the aftermath of this event and the chaos caused by greed and incompetence, it is important to remind humanity of what it might have forgotten. Ancient philosophy .. (shrink)

On June 13, 323 BCE, Alexander the Great, king of the Greeks, died at Babylon at the age of thirty-three. He had conquered a large part of the known world—the oikoumenē of the Greeks—and he had pushed back the eastern limits of the universe by advancing into India as far as the basin of the Ganges. He had also done everything in his power to give birth to a myth around his person, a myth that endures to this day. Alexander (...) came to power in 336 BCE, at the age of twenty, after his father, Philip II, king of Macedon, had been assassinated. He was the cherished pupil of Aristotle, who followed him in his ventures and dedicated a treatise to him entitled Rhetoric to Alexander. He went to war in Asia against the .. (shrink)

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La passion de l'unité : tel semble avoir été l'un des principaux moteurs de l'activité diplomatique et intellectuelle du cardinal Nicolas de Cues (1401-1464).

The study of graph structure has advanced in recent years with great strides: finite graphs can be described algebraically, enabling them to be constructed out of more basic elements. Separately the properties of graphs can be studied in a logical language called monadic second-order logic. In this book, these two features of graph structure are brought together for the first time in a presentation that unifies and synthesizes research over the last 25 years. The author not only provides a thorough (...) description of the theory, but also details its applications, on the one hand to the construction of graph algorithms, and, on the other to the extension of formal language theory to finite graphs. Consequently the book will be of interest to graduate students and researchers in graph theory, finite model theory, formal language theory, and complexity theory. (shrink)

The guise of the good thesis can be understood as an attempt to distinguish between human motivations that are intelligible as desires and those that are not. I propose, first, that we understand the intelligibility at stake here as the kind necessary for the experience of reactive attitudes, both negative and positive, to the behavior and motivations of an agent. Given this, I argue that the thesis must be understood as proposing substantive content restrictions on how human agents perceive objects (...) of their desires; it cannot be a purely formal constraint. Moreover, while proponents of the guise of the good thesis who posit substantive content restrictions on human desire are right to do so, they are mistaken to claim that we always desire the apparently good. Instead, I propose a different limit: the naturally attractive. This alternative to the guise of the good thesis nonetheless captures the compelling idea that human desires are intelligent, quasi-perceptual responses to the world. (shrink)

Philosophers are now wary of conflating the “fittingness” or accuracy of an emotion with any form of moral assessment of that emotion. Justin D’Arms and Daniel Jacobson, who originally cautioned against this “conflation”, also warned philosophers not to infer that an emotion is inaccurate from the fact that feeling it would be morally inappropriate, or that it is accurate from the fact that feeling it would be morally appropriate. Such inferences, they argue, risk committing “the moralistic fallacy”, a mistake they (...) claim is widespread throughout the work of contemporary and historical moral philosophers. I argue that many basic and familiar forms of moral assessment of the emotions are not subject to these arguments. I illustrate this by reconsidering the idea that to assess an emotion as “fitting” is to assess it as what a virtuous person would feel. After showing how assessments akin to this “virtue-theoretical” notion of fit may be prevalent even outside of the Aristotelian tradition, I suggest some more charitable and philosophically productive interpretations of the philosophical views of the emotions that D’Arms and Jacobson criticize, and argue that we cannot coherently theorize about the fittingness conditions of the emotions in a morally neutral way. (shrink)

This is the first English translation of a compelling and highly original reading of Epicurus by Jean-Marie Guyau. This book has long been recognized as one of the best and most concerted attempts to explore one of the most important, yet controversial ancient philosophers whose thought, Guyau claims, remains vital to modern and contemporary culture. Throughout the text we are introduced to the origins of the philosophy of pleasure in Ancient Greece, with Guyau clearly demonstrating how this idea persists through (...) the history of philosophy and how it is an essential trait in the Western tradition. With an introduction by Keith Ansell-Pearson and Federico Testa, which contextualizes the work of Guyau within the canon of French thought, and notes on both further reading and on Epicurean scholarship more generally, this translation also acts as a critical introduction to the philosophy of Guyau and Epicurus. (shrink)

Carlos Astrada’s early thought is characterized by a fundamental concern: the possibility, for human beings, of establishing new “ideals” and “values” capable of supplanting the old, capitalist ones. The aim of this article is to identify the different scopes of Astrada’s concept of ideal. In the first section, some bases to consider the philosophy of life underlying the Astradian theoretical proposals are established. The article will thereafter be divided into three other sections, which follow the chronology of Astrada’s works. In (...) the first part, the “ideal” is conceptually treated as an operative element in history, for which it is considered to what extent Jean-Marie Guyau would have influenced Astrada’s thought, something neglected by the existing literature. The second part deals with the relationship between the concepts of “ideal” and “life”. It will be shown how Astrada aimed to challenge the “idealist” and “empiricist” positions, which he considers equally unilateral to elaborate an ethics according to “the new times”. Astrada would have looked for an “intermediate position” between both perspectives, i.e., what he called “vital synthesis”. This could have been possible thanks to a philosophical dialogue with Georg Simmel, Manuel García Morente, José Ortega y Gasset, and Oswald Spengler. In the third part, the ideal is analyzed as an element capable of giving a guiding sense to the growing accumulation of human activities, marked by specialization, in an operation that can be interpreted under the romantic key of “recovering” the Totality. For this, the philosophical dialogue that Astrada had with both Georg Simmel and Rudolf Eucken is analyzed. (shrink)

Participation in healthcare decision-making is considered to be an important right of minors, and is highlighted in both international legislation and public policies. However, despite the legal recognition of children’s rights to participation, and also the benefits that children experience by their involvement, there is evidence that legislation is not always translated into healthcare practice. There are a number of factors that may impact on the ability of the child to be involved in decisions regarding their medical care. Some of (...) these factors relate to the child, including their capacity to be actively involved in these decisions. Others relate to the family situation, sociocultural context, or the underlying beliefs and practices of the healthcare provider involved. In spite of these challenges to including children in decisions regarding their clinical care, we argue that it is an important factor in their treatment. The extent to which children should participate in this process should be determined on a case-by-case basis, taking all of the potential barriers into account. (shrink)

ABSTRACT What is the ethical significance of the suffering of nonhuman animals? For many, the answer is simple. Such suffering has clear moral significance: nonhuman animal suffering is suffering, suffering is something bad, and the fact that it is bad gives us reason to alleviate or prevent it. The practical problem that remains is how to do this most efficiently or effectively. I argue that this does not exhaust the ethical significance of certain evils, once we consider how the existence (...) of those evils may detract from the meaning of human life, even on fully “naturalistic” conceptions of meaning in life. I will draw a distinction between what I will call “spiritual” problems and “moral” problems and consider why moral philosophers may be well suited to addressing both problems, as long as the domain of the ethical is not taken to be exhausted by the domain of the moral. Finally, I will elaborate on why marking a distinction between these problems—the moral and the spiritual—may help illuminate some disagreements between Utilitarians and their opponents about the ethical significance of the suffering of nonhuman animals. (shrink)