Si es cierto que Tocqueville apreció grandes virtudes en el sistema democrático, tampoco dejó de señalar sus peligros. Con arreglo al diagnóstico de Tocqueville, sobre sus contemporáneos –y por ende sobre todos nosotros– actuarían incesantemente dos pasiones opuestas: la necesidad de ser conducidos y el deseo de ser libres. No sabiendo acabar con ninguna de tales inclinaciones contradictorias, nos esforzaríamos por satisfacer ambas a la vez., concibiendo un poder único, tutelar, todopoderoso, pero elegido por los ciudadanos. La dialéctica entre igualdad (...) y libertad representa el núcleo de sus inquietudes. Los trabajos reunidos aquí fueron debatidos en el Ateneo madrileño al cumplirse 150 años del fallecimiento de Tocqueville. Todos ellos nos invitan a revisitar las múltiples facetas de un autor imprescindible, si queremos revisar los avatares de la democracia y proceder a repensar cómo deberíamos actualizar sus reglas de juego. (Este volumen se inscribe dentro del Programa sobre “Cultura de la Legalidad” TRUST-CM liderado por José María Sauca). Diálogos con clásicos europeos La Colección Clásicos europeos (que dirige Roberto R. Aramayo) pretende rescatar del olvido algunos textos fundamentales para comprender mejor nuestro presente, al poner en valor la impronta que han legado a Europa y al mundo determinados pensadores europeos. Como complemento a esa colección de textos, este volumen sobre Tocqueville prosigue la serie de Diálogos con clásicos europeos, que quisiera cumplir en castellano un papel similar al jugado por los Companions filosóficos de Cambridge. Conviene seguir dialogando con ciertos autores que forman parte del entramado de nuestro acervo cultural, pues no en vano el diálogo es condición sine qua non del filosofar. (shrink)

Theoretical problems concerning concepts of systems and measurement of behavior were encountered during experimental studies of the effects of electrical stimulation of the brain on the social behavior of a monkey colony. General problems involved in the description and measurement of behavior of natural systems, and especially of organisms are discussed. In animals with differentiated brain the general process of stimulation may be divided into four subprocesses: input, throughput, transput and output. Categories of behavior, temporal and spatial units, and logical (...) rules of homogeneity for sorting data and comparing measurements and categories, are discussed. Simple behavioral units are divided into: 1. Individual a. static or postural b. dynamic or gestural 2. Social a. static b. dynamic. Complex behavior is divided into: 1. Simultaneous 2. Sequential 3. Syntactic 4. Roles. The process of interpretation of data by the observer is assumed to be dependent upon actual behavior of the system, techniques of observation and experimentation, theoretical and technical processes of analysis, and synthesis and integration of data. Expression of behavior in mathematical terms insures greater accuracy than descriptive methods and enables data to be processed with computers. (shrink)

Background Contemporary societies are rife with moral disagreement, resulting in recalcitrant disputes on matters of public policy. In the context of ongoing bioethical controversies, are uncompromising attitudes rooted in beliefs about the nature of moral truth?Methods To answer this question, we conducted both exploratory and confirmatory studies, with both a convenience and a nationally representative sample (total N = 1501), investigating the link between people’s beliefs about moral truth (their metaethics) and their beliefs about moral value (their normative ethics).Results Across (...) various bioethical issues (e.g., medically-assisted death, vaccine hesitancy, surrogacy, mandatory organ conscription, or genetically modified crops), consequentialist attitudes were associated with weaker beliefs in an objective moral truth. This association was not explained by domain-general reflectivity, theism, personality, normative uncertainty, or subjective knowledge.Conclusions We find a robust link between the way people characterize prescriptive disagreements and their sensibility to consequences. In addition, both societal consensus and personal conviction contribute to objectivist beliefs, but these effects appear to be asymmetric, i.e., stronger for opposition than for approval. (shrink)

La lectura de Rousseau imprime un “giro político” en el pensamiento kantiano y las cuestiones políticas no solo atraviesan toda la “década del silencio”, sino que se hallan presentes en la primera y tercera de sus Críticas. De hecho, Kant dedicará la tercera de sus célebres preguntas a dilucidar esta problemática con su “historia filosófica” o filosofía de la historia. En este contexto se acuña lo que he llamado un imperativo elpidológico, porque la confianza en sí mismo resultará fundamental para (...) no sucumbir al desánimo que suscita el absurdo espectáculo de la historia humana. Los conflictos de nuestras inclinaciones egoístas, el antagonismo de la insociable sociabilidad, servirán para desplegar nuestras mejores disposicio-nes naturales, como si se guiaran por un plan establecido indistintamente por la Naturaleza, la Providencia o el Destino. En definitiva, la política es vista como una condición de posibilidad de nuestra vida moral y no como su corolario. (shrink)

Los textos recopilados aquí nos invitan a explorar los múltiples laberintos que plantea la polifórmica noción de responsabilidad, una categoría que se ha vuelto central e imprescindible en nuestro horizonte actual. Ciertamente, se impone introducirnos y avanzar por los vericuetos, a veces pobremente iluminados, de los complejos laberintos de la responsabilidad: el incremento de la desigualdad fruto de la globalización económica, la guerra de Irak y sus funestos corolarios, catástrofes ecológicas como la del Prestige o el cambio climático, los vertiginosos (...) avances de la biotecnología, el desolador y trágico atentado del 11 de marzo, plantean graves interrogantes respecto al valor de la responsabilidad en el mundo actual dado que unas decisiones políticas y técnicas imprudentes, precipitadas, conllevan espirales de violencia, horror y devastación que nos estremecen. Todo ello nos exige, imperiosamente, replantear el significado y alcance de la noción de responsabilidad desde la reflexión ética, desde la filosofía social y política e igualmente desde la filosofía de la ciencia y la tecnología. (shrink)

Whether Nietzsche’s genealogical critique of morality is best understood as an internal or as an external critique remains a matter of controversy. On the internalist interpretation (Ridley, Owen, Merrick ), the genealogical enterprise takes as its starting point the perspective being criticized, gradually revealing it to be untenable ‘from within.’ On the externalist interpretation (Leiter, and arguably Geuss, Williams, and Janaway ), this constraint is lifted; the starting point of the critique need not be the perspective being criticized, but may (...) be that of someone who already suspects the latter to be untenable. According to a common objection to ‘external critique’ interpretations, the limited-scope objection, since an external critique to a value-system could only work on an audience whose members were predisposed to abandon that system of values, ‘external critique’ interpretations impose a severe limitation on the transformative potential of Nietzsche’s project. ‘Internal critique’ interpretations, by contrast, can seem hard to reconcile with the polemical character of On the Genealogy of Morality (which lends the book its subtitle, Eine Streitschrift) and with Nietzsche’s frequent remarks to the effect his works were addressing a particular, ‘higher,’ kind of individual. -/- The overarching goal in this paper is to call into question the usefulness of the ‘internal-external’ or ‘immanent-transcendent’ dichotomy for understanding Nietzsche’s genealogical critique. I argue that the apparent usefulness of the distinction between external and internal critiques when approaching Nietzsche’s works rests on the assumption that any critique of values must itself be grounded on values that function as evaluative-critical standards. If the assumption is right, then one of two things, either the values that are deployed as standards coincide with those that are the target of critique, in which case the critique is internal, or they are not (etc.). Thus the assumption is liable to render us forgetful of a third possibility, that of a critical strategy that does not work by deploying (internal or external) values as standards of critical assessment, but by revealing something about the nature of value, and more precisely about the origin of any individual’s commitments to their values. -/- On the view that I defend, one of the crucial steps of Nietzsche’s genealogical method is to bring his reader to realize that any individual’s commitment to their values is expressive of and rooted in their commitment to preserve their way of life. Realizing this does not require that the reader abandon their own values. But it does require that they acknowledge that were they committed to a relevantly different way of life, they would subscribe to different values. And this, in turn, suffices to bring about a transformation in their understanding of and relationship to those commitments through the further realization that it is ultimately always up to them to undertake the project of taking distance from and ‘re-evaluating’ those values. (shrink)

Apoptosis is now widely recognized as a common form of cell death and represents a mechanism of cell clearance in many physiological situations where deletion of cells is required. Peptide growth factors, initially characterised as stimulators of cell proliferation, have now been shown to inhibit death in many cell types. Deprivation of growth factors leads to the induction of apoptosis, i.e. condensation of chromatin and degradation in oligonucleosomesized fragments, formation of plasma and nuclear membrane blebs and cell fragmentation into apoptotic (...) bodies which can be taken up by neighbouring cells. Here we discuss the mechanism(;s) by which growth factors may inhibit apoptosis. (shrink)

I argue that rather than dismiss Foucault’s first book, Mental Illness and Personality, as an “apologetic exposition of Pavlov’s reflexology,” we ought see it as a valuable source documenting Foucault’s change of attitude towards psychology and the history of science in the early 1950s. I argue that there are two distinguishable strands that make up the text. The ‘frame’ of the book—the introduction, first chapter of the second part and conclusion of the book—is expressive of a critical attitude towards psychology, (...) and indicative of rather sophisticated conception of the history of science as a critical history aimed at bringing into view the unscientific forces that shape scientific labor. The ‘main body’ of the text—the first part and the second chapter of the second part—by contrast, reads as the history of the steady dialectical progress of the psychological sciences towards an ever more accurate understanding of mental illness. It is thus indicative to a naïve approach to psychology and to its history. The tension between the two strands of the book thus documents the starting point of Foucault’s then shifting attitudes toward the psychological sciences and the history of science, and the set of questions and sources that lead him to problematize his understanding of and approach to the latter. (shrink)

We analyze the prestige of 1,500 scholars in economics, sociology, and management who have Spanish and French institutional affiliations operationalized by their h-index in Scopus and Google Scholar. We use a negative binomial count model to examine how some individual factors affect the h-index from both databases. The results show a non-monotonic relationship between the researchers’ career length and their h-index. There is a positive and statistically significant relationship between total research output and the h-index. The share of publications in (...) English over total publications has also a positive and statistically significant effect on the h-index, except in a single case, while the share of publications in other foreign languages does not have such effect. Finally, we found that the effects of the number of citations received by documents in English and by those in the vernacular language on the h-index vary according to the database, the country, and the discipline in question. (shrink)

Cassirer’s thought took a radical turn in his mature life, comparable to the one that Kant went through in his last days, and in both cases this was motivated by the political events that they witnessed: the French Revolution in Kant’s case, and the National Socialist ideology in Cassirer’s case. In this work I canvass Cassirer’s way of articulating his own political thought by constantly reclaiming the philosophy of Kant, whose work he never stops referring to, and by constantly reclaiming (...) the values defended by the Enlightenment’s project as a whole, in order to defend, among other things, the idea of a republican constitution and thereby the Weimar Republic. Cassirer decided to fight against Nazism in the field of History of Ideas, choosing Leibniz, Rousseau, Kant and Goethe as his allies. The second part of this work emphasizes this parallelism by unfolding the premises of Kant’s republicanism. (shrink)

Así como Hume despertó a Kant del sueño dogmático y Rousseau le descubrió el mundo moral, Diderot le habría hecho acceder al universo de la política. El último Kant podría estar muy influido, sin saberlo, por el Diderot que convirtió la Historia de las dos Indias en la "Biblia de las revoluciones", así como por el de la Enciclopedia. Se defiende la tesis de que todo el proyecto ilustrado tendría una índole radical, y conviene matizar la distinción entre Ilustración moderada (...) e Ilustración radical, toda vez que los puntos en común parecen superar a las discrepancias. Spinoza y Heine podrían resultar útiles para enfatizar este parecer. (shrink)

This article introduces the perspectivist interpretation of Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality, characterized by two core theses. According to the results thesis, the three treatises of GM introduce three types of critical results, respectively: psychological claims about the value of morality for the interests of various character types; physiological claims about its value for the ‘progress of the species’; and medical claims about its value for health. According to the distinction thesis, the critical results of GM are descriptive, while (...) their reader-specific implications are normative. This interpretation illuminates the genealogical method of GM by answering four fundamental questions about its historical method, the history of morality that it reveals, the critical results of GM, and their intended therapeutic effects. Challenging the widespread assumption that the critical results of GM are evaluative claims, the perspectivist interpretation reveals the novelty of Nietzsche’s “new demand” for a critique of values not only relative to his predecessors’ approach to critique, but also to his own previous works. GM offers a critique that is grounded on factual claims, at once extramoral and external to morality, and internal to its readers’ evaluative perspectives, even those who remain beholden to moral values. Consequently, its authority and therapeutic efficacy are not threatened by discrepancies between it and its readers’ affective-evaluative preferences. (shrink)

Sociotype is a concept that allows a more comprehensive understanding about biosociology of undiagnosed rare diseases (URD). Sociotype is related to a genotype and a phenotype and it is an expression of the individual life world in society. In this paper, semiotic and hermeneutic analysis of papers published and selected about URD is developed. Te perspective followed in this research is aligned with the works of Barbieri and Peirce. Papers with the most social content have been selected and those with (...) a more biomedical content have been rejected. Te semiotics analysis has been divided in genotypic, phenotypic and sociotypic, and related to the hermeneutical perspective. It has been possible to understand the basis of semiotics elements of URD. Te general conclusion is that URD is a particular sociotype with a determined set of social characteristics. Tis paper opens research on the biosemiotic and hermeneutic perspective about URD. (shrink)

Insults elicit intense emotion. This study tests the hypothesis that one's social image, which is especially salient in honour cultures, influences the way in which one reacts to an insult. Seventy-seven honour-oriented and 72 non-honour oriented participants answered questions about a recent insult episode. Participants experienced both anger and shame in reaction to the insult. However, these emotions resulted in different behaviours. Anger led to verbal attack (i.e., criticising, insulting in return) among all participants. This relationship was explained by participants’ (...) motivation to punish the wrongdoer. Shame, on the other hand, was moderated by honour. Shame led to verbal disapproval of the wrongdoers behaviour, but only among the honour-oriented participants. This relationship was explained by these participants’ motivation to protect their social image. By contrast, shame led to withdrawal among non-honour-oriented participants. (shrink)

Durante las cuatro últimas décadas, Javier Muguerza ha contribuido como nadie a la modernización del pensamiento español, dando a conocer y comentando lo mejor que se publicaba en otras lenguas, particularmente a lo tocante a la filosofía analítica, a la teoría crítica y a las corrientes morales y políticas anglosajonas y alemanas, además de tener muy en cuenta todo lo que se escribía en español y prestar una especial atención al espíritu del pensamiento práctico kantiano. La deuda que con él (...) tiene contraída la filosofía en castellano es muy difícil de calcular. En el libro Disenso e incertidumbre. Un homenaje a Javier Muguerza, un grupo de importantes filósofos analiza su obra en profundidad ofreciendo al lector la oportunidad única de conocerla desde múltiples puntos de vista. (shrink)

Si no estoy equivocado, nuestro acervo cultural nos hace asociar casi automáticamente a la culpa con un concepto religioso, de raigambre judeocristiana para ser más precisos, mientras que al mismo tiempo tiende a identificar la responsabilidad con una categoría eminentemente jurídica. La culpa se presenta como algo estrechamente vinculado con el pecado y la religión o, a lo sumo, con el psicoanálisis, en tanto que la responsabilidad suele circunscribirse de oficio al ámbito del derecho penal o relacionarse protocolariamente con la (...) esfera política. Sin embargo, aunque las palabras «culpa» y «responsabilidad» no se prodiguen demasiado en los diccionarios consagrados a la ética, sí constituyen conceptos claves de la reflexión moral. Mi propósito aquí es presentarlos como dimensiones o vertientes complementarias de nuestra conciencia. Desde luego, cualquiera puede asumir una determinada responsabilidad sin sentirse culpable y, a la inversa, siempre hay quien prefiere regodearse con su sentimiento de culpabilidad sin sentirse responsable por la causa del mismo, pero lo suyo es que ambas nociones vayan de consuno y la culpa sea un síntoma de responsabilidad o que atender a las propias responsabilidades ahuyente cualquier asomo de culpabilidad por nuestra parte. (shrink)

Aquí se presenta la primera traducción española del texto kantiano Sobre el mal radical tratado como el artículo que fue originalmente publicado en una revista y, por consiguiente, no tanto como el primer capítulo de La Religión dentro de los límites de la sola razón. Se intenta hacer ver que, tal como cuando trata el argumento moral sobre la existencia de Dios, Kant nos habla del ateo virtuoso como héroe moral de su formalismo ético, aquí la religión sólo sirve para (...) dibujar mejor los contornos de las piezas claves del pensamiento ético kantiano: la libertad y la responsabilidad o imputabilidad moral, que constituyen el auténtico credo kantiano y sólo se dejan asociar con una fe “reflexiva”. (shrink)

We trace here the layout of Cassirer’s intellectual itinerary, highlightning the growing political commitment in his thought as he faces the national socialist ideology from the vantage point of history of ideas and his philosophy of the symbolic forms, invoking in this sense the spirit of Enlightenment in general and Kant in a very particular way as well. Cassirer’s ideological rebuttal of Nazism begins in 1928 with his hommage to the Weimar Republic and reaches up to 1945 with The Myth (...) of State. Here however it is presented an interpretation of the dangerously moral meaning that Judaism had for the totalitarian ideology of National Socialism. (shrink)

The digital era provides quick access to a lot of data that is often poorly substantiated and frequently designed to disinform or deny evidence that is inconvenient to certain interests. The constant and continuous use of technological devices that provide instant gratification imbues us with a certain arrogance, as if we could fulfill all our desires by sliding our finger across a screen. This relentless immersion in virtual reality blurs the real facts, the veracity of which we come to distrust, (...) preferring the dogmatic and incontestable certainties provided by hoaxes and so-called “alternative facts”. Inhabiting this parallel reality makes us disregard our responsibility towards others. That is why we must vindicate the cultivation of philosophy and ethical reflection as antidotes to the philosopher’s stones offered to us by those who pretend to be soothsayers whose guidance will solve all our problems. As we want perennial and instant certainties, we distrust everyone and everything. Like uncertainty, other of our most human traits are precisely trust and responsibility. Without them we become dehumanized. (shrink)

Con su filosofía de las formas simbólicas Cassirer reflexiona sobre una infinitud inmanente que ya fue anunciada por el pensamiento kantiano. Los textos kantianos pueden ser leídos en clave simbólica, como sucede sin ir más lejos con su teoría de los postulados relativos a una existencia divina y un alma inmortal. El faktum de la razón, la libertad humana que reconocemos gracias a nuestra conciencia moral, nos permite franquear cualquier límite bajo la convicción de que podemos hacer cuanto nos dicte (...) autónomamente nuestro deber. Somos un animal simbólico cuyo universo ético y cultural nos permite transformar la realidad persiguiendo asintóticamente renovados horizontes utópicos. Como bien dice Cassirer en Hacia una metafísica de las formar simbólicas, es el futuro simbólico del ser humano lo que desborda los límites de su existencia finita. Esa es la razón de que Kant culmine toda su obra con una Metafísica de las costumbres. (shrink)