El trabajo adopta como marco general la ética de la alteridad de E. Levinas, desde la que intenta explorar la mala respuesta que los estados receptores dan a los otros, los emigrantes ilegalizados. La hipótesis en juego apunta a una contradicción radical interna la ética política de esos estados. Por un lado, adoptan la ética liberal que subyace a los derechos humanos universales pero, por el otro, se identifican con la ética realista comunitarista que defiende los intereses de sus ciudadanos (...) y legitima el no reconocimiento de la ciudadanía de los emigrantes ilegalizados. En segundo lugar el trabajo trata de contextualizar esta situación en un marco histórico y filosófico más amplio y llega a la colonización europea moderna que inspira, en el plano filosófico, la legitimación hegeliana de la esclavización colonialista de los otros y, en consecuencia, del racismo implícito en ella. Esta “ética” racista y esclavista resurge con la llegada de los emigrantes a Europa no forma de neorracismo. Frente a ella y a su legitimación hegeliana se levanta la ética de la alteridad en figuras como Charles Taylor y, sobre todo, Levinas que, paradójicamente, se distancian de individualismo abstracto y posesivo del igualitarismo liberal. (shrink)

Palabras en memoria de Eduardo Bello pronunciadas en la sesión inaugural del V Congreso Internacional de la Sociedad Académica de Filosofía, celebrado del 2 al 4 de febrero de 2011 en La Laguna (Tenerife).

El trabajo enfoca la emigración desde la ética de la alteridad de Emmanuel Levinas, lo cual exige ciertas decisiones metódicas. Primero reivindicar para la alteridad la misma legitimidad filosófica de categorías consoliddadas como la identidad. Después explorar las diferencias internas a la alteridad en su despliegue temporal o histórico y espacial o (multi)cultural. Tercero, asociar la alteridad a la ética y sus diferencias para, en cuarto lugar, centrar el argumento en la alteridad ética de Emmanuel Levinas articulada, como se sabe, (...) en torno a la categoría del “otro” que, al presentarse como “rostro”, aparece como la expresión de la vulnerabilidad misma. Esta vulnerabilidad abstracta – en quinto lugar – se concreta como vulnerabilidad migratoria, efecto de condiciones socio-culturales determinadas cuyo portador, el emigrante (sobre todo el musulmán y el subshariano) encarna por derecho propio la figura filosófica del otro levinasiano y su interpelación por la justicia. En este contexto, finalmente, la responsabilidad asimétrica se revela como la imposibilidad de que los interpelados no den/demos una respuesta. . (shrink)

RESUMENEl trabajo aborda el problema antropológico y moral de la comprensión de la alteridad a partir de una lectura crítica de la obra de Levinas. Asimismo, esta lectura lleva a examinar, bajo la imagen del extranjero, las consecuencias morales y políticas de la institucionalización de la alteridad.PALABRAS CLAVEALTERIDAD-EXTRANJERIA-LEVINASABSTRACTThe paper approaches the anthropological and moral problem of alterity from a critical reading of Levinas' works. Furthemore, the reading points to examine, under the image of the foreigner, the moral and political consequences (...) of institutionalising alterityKEYWORDSOTHERNESS-FOREIGNESS-LEVINAS. (shrink)

Este artículo aborda la contextualización de la ética de Butler en un marco teórico que da por supuesta la perspectiva deconstructiva y que, por su parte, es reconstruido de acuerdo a dos criterios, las nociones de “matriz disciplinal” y de “paradigma”. Mediante ellas se trata de proporcionar un sistema de conceptos o categorías usuales en la teoría ética en general, pero redefinidas en términos butlerianos. Estas categorías a las que nos referimos son la acción, los sujetos, los juicios y los (...) criterios morales y, que, aplicadas a la ética de Butler, dan lugar a una ética precaria en la que la humanidad normativa se revela como imposible universalmente y, por tanto, no puede ser utilizada como “fundamento” de un juicio moral universal. Por ejemplo, la que se sugiere mediante las manifestaciones de duelo por la humanidad de “los nuestros”, víctimas de la violencia, de las que queda excluida estructuralmente la humanidad de “los otros”. (shrink)

This paper aims to analyze Diotima’s definition of eros as a desire to beget and give birth in beauty. The main problem lies in the use of the notions of kuêsis, tokos, genesis and gennêsis. We will distinguish the meanings of each term and show that the erotic relationship is focused on the preservation of that which the lover already carries within himself. On this basis, and by using some passages from the Phaedrus, we seek, finally, to explain why science (...) belongs to the realm of generation. (shrink)

¿Qué cabida tienen, o pueden tener, las éticas y las políticas de la alteridad en el horizonte filosófico actual? En el contexto de la filosofía española reciente, la obra de Gabriel Bello Reguera (Dehesas, León, 1943) ha afrontado el reto ético-político que plantea el tomarse en serio la alteridad. Ha desarrollado su carrera académica en la Universidad de La Laguna como catedrático de Filosofía Moral y en su trayectoria cabría señalar tres giros fundamentales, si bien relacionados entre sí. (...) El primero podemos derivarlo del impacto de la lectura de la obra del neopragmatista Richard Rorty, que incidió en su crítica al fundamentalismo autoritario de la tradición filosófica despertó su interés por la narratividad, ligada a la conversación, como herramienta edificante de la ética. El segundo es debido a la influencia del pensamiento de Emmanuel Lévinas, a partir del cual problematiza las relaciones entre las categorías éticas de identidad, diferencia y alteridad. El tercero, y más reciente, le llevará al terreno del análisis de las migraciones internacionales en su contexto postcolonial como acuciante asunto necesitado, precisamente, de un nuevo marco filosófico, ético y político. En este libro colectivo, a través de la obra de Gabriel Bello, afrontamos con rigor la contextualización de las éticas y las políticas de la alteridad, proseguimos la discusión en torno a estas a la vez que elaboramos, conjuntamente, un balance crítico de una línea de investigación, de sus posibilidades y límites. Con todo ello, además, seguimos la tradición de prestar reconocimiento y gratitud a nuestros maestros y a nuestras maestras. En este caso, reconocemos la trayectoria docente e investigadora del Profesor Gabriel Bello Reguera y su dedicación rigurosa y concienzuda a la vida universitaria. Su obra, que, recorre cuatro décadas, es testimonio de cómo la filosofía en el contexto del Estado español, tras abandonar el erial instigado por el franquismo, participa de los debates transnacionales actuales en los que las éticas y las políticas de la alteridad, especialmente, plantean desafíos insoslayables. Hemos, pues, recreado el ritual académico del Homenaje, algo tan central en la filosofía alemana como la Festschrift, con el deseo de dotarlo del sentido más relevante que, a nuestro juicio, puede tener: el del debate intelectual crítico. (shrink)

This volume of essays brings together leading commentators from both sides of the Atlantic to provide an introduction to Badiou's work through critical studies ...

This discussion of pride, shame, and guilt centers on the beliefs involved in the experience of any of these emotions. Through a detailed study, the author demonstrates how these beliefs are alike--in that they are all directed towards the self--and how they differ. The experience of these three emotions are illustrated by examples taken from English literature. These concrete cases supply a context for study and indicate the complexity of the situations in which these emotions usually occur.

What are human rights? What makes a particular human rights claim ‘genuine’ or ‘valid’? These are difficult questions with which current philosophical literature on human rights is concerned. They are also the same kind of questions that legal philosophers asked about Law throughout the 20th century. Drawing from the similarities between the two fields, I attempt to do with the concept of human rights something similar to what Ronald Dworkin accomplished with that of Law in Law’s Empire. First, I offer (...) a critique of the two dominant perspectives on human rights—the Orthodox and Political views—that is similar in character to Dworkin’s Semantic Sting objection to Legal Positivism. Second, I sketch an alternative, Dworkinian-inspired framework that seeks to develop the notion of human rights as an interpretive concept. According to this framework, different accounts of human rights are to be understood as expressing different interpretations of the point (or purpose) of human rights practice. (shrink)

This essay undertakes an examination that combines a reconstruction of Hegel’s system of needs with a critical analysis of that system. The reconstruction begins by unraveling the philosophical framework Hegel uses in his Philosophy of Right. It presents the evolution of abstract right and morality towards an ethical life and explains why a civil society becomes nec-essary. Furthermore, it explores the interconnectedness of individuals in the system of needs and how freedom may actualize in civil society based on Hegel’s work. (...) Following the recon-struction and the moments of reason in a free-market society, the paper takes a critical point of view upon the system presented by Hegel. It predominantly follows the critique of Marx and demonstrates how, in a free-market society, the freedom provided is only a formal one. In the second part of the critique, the scope of the paper opens up to further points of criticism against a system of needs, especially how sustainability and global inequality may develop on a international scale without any limitations in a globalized market. The essay ties back said points of criticism into Hegel’s philosophy and presents where they were already indicated in Hegel’s philosophy and how they stay relevant all the way up until modern times. In conclusion the paper shows that the exploration of Hegel’s system of needs remains a compelling discourse, regarding freedom and social equality. (shrink)

This article aims to offer a fresh analysis of two passages in the extensive necromancy episode in Lucan's Bellum Ciuile: the ritual to reanimate the dead soldier's corpse (6.667–73), and the surgical procedure Erichtho then proceeds to undertake (6.750–7), resembling the practice of a vivisection. The study will focus mostly on the strong connection of magic to medical traditions in antiquity, with a commentary on, and analysis of, these verses through the lenses of medical vocabulary, themes and motifs. It ultimately (...) concludes that Lucan was familiar with the language and characteristics of the medical tradition, enriched his report with them, and was playing with his audience's knowledge of the same. (shrink)

From mass murder to genocide, slavery to colonial suppression, acts of atrocity have lives that extend far beyond the horrific moment. They engender trauma that echoes for generations, in the experiences of those on both sides of the act. Gabriele Schwab reads these legacies in a number of narratives, primarily through the writing of postwar Germans and the descendents of Holocaust survivors. She connects their work to earlier histories of slavery and colonialism and to more recent events, such as South (...) African Apartheid, the practice of torture after 9/11, and the "disappearances" that occurred during South American dictatorships. Schwab's texts include memoirs, such as Ruth Kluger's _Still Alive_ and Marguerite Duras's _La Douleur_; second-generation accounts by the children of Holocaust survivors, such as Georges Perec's _W_, Art Spiegelman's _Maus_, and Philippe Grimbert's _Secret_; and second-generation recollections by Germans, such as W. G. Sebald's _Austerlitz_, Sabine Reichel's _What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?_, and Ursula Duba's _Tales from a Child of the Enemy_. She also incorporates her own reminiscences of growing up in postwar Germany, mapping interlaced memories and histories as they interact in psychic life and cultural memory. Schwab concludes with a bracing look at issues of responsibility, reparation, and forgiveness across the victim/perpetrator divide. (shrink)

The primary objective of this book is to open space for rethinking the relationship between art and politics. It seeks to combat one of the fundamental assumptions that has plagued many of the previous debates on this issue: that art and politics are distinct entities definable in terms of common properties, and that they have privileged points of intersection, which can be determined once and for all in terms of an established formula. This common sense assumption is rooted in a (...) transcendent illusion according to which there are more or less fixed characteristics that unify our terms, concepts, and practices in such a way as to guarantee their meaning. Against this substantialist approach, Radical History & the Politics of Art argues for a praxeological account that begins the other way around by analyzing specific cultural practices without presupposing a conceptual unity behind them. Such an orientation is radically historicist in the sense that it recognizes that all of our practices—be they linguistic, theoretical, aesthetic or political—are historically constituted and that they are necessarily part of a temporal dynamic. Hence the contingent nature of the labels used to classify various practices or even identify ‘practice’ as such. Radical history thereby proposes a significant departure from the extant debates on art and politics by maintaining that there is no ‘art’ or ‘politics’ in general, nor a singular relation between them. There are only historically constituted practices in various conjunctures, some of which have been labeled, through practical acts of denomination, as ‘artistic’ or ‘political.’ Instead of proposing one more response to the oft-repeated question ‘what is the relationship between Art and Politics?’ this book seeks to overcome the presuppositions that plague such a question. It thereby changes the very nature of the investigation by asking: ‘how do the diverse aspects of practices identified as ‘aesthetic’ and ‘political’ overlap, intertwine and sometimes merge in precise socio-historical force fields of action? (shrink)

During the oppressive reign of Louis XIV, Gabrielle Suchon (1632–1703) was the most forceful female voice in France, advocating women’s freedom and self-determination, access to knowledge, and assertion of authority. This volume collects Suchon’s writing from two works—Treatise on Ethics and Politics (1693) and On the Celibate Life Freely Chosen; or, Life without Commitments (1700)—and demonstrates her to be an original philosophical and moral thinker and writer. Suchon argues that both women and men have inherently similar intellectual, corporeal, and spiritual (...) capacities, which entitle them equally to essentially human prerogatives, and she displays her breadth of knowledge as she harnesses evidence from biblical, classical, patristic, and contemporary secular sources to bolster her claim. Forgotten over the centuries, these writings have been gaining increasing attention from feminist historians, students of philosophy, and scholars of seventeenth-century French literature and culture. This translation, from Domna C. Stanton and Rebecca M. Wilkin, marks the first time these works will appear in English. (shrink)

Suppose one hundred prisoners are in a yard under the supervision of a guard, and at some point, ninety-nine of them collectively kill the guard. If, after the fact, a prisoner is picked at random and tried, the probability of his guilt is 99%. But despite the high probability, the statistical chances, by themselves, seem insufficient to justify a conviction. The question is why. Two arguments are offered. The first, decision-theoretic argument shows that a conviction solely based on the statistics (...) in the prisoner scenario is unacceptable so long as the goal of expected utility maximization is combined with fairness constraints. The second, risk-based argument shows that a conviction solely based on the statistics in the prisoner scenario lets the risk of mistaken conviction surge potentially too high. The same, by contrast, cannot be said of convictions solely based on DNA evidence or eyewitness testimony. A noteworthy feature of the two arguments in the paper is that they are not confined to criminal trials and can in fact be extended to civil trials. (shrink)

This chapter explores logical semantics, that is, the structural meaning of logical expressions like connectives, quantifiers, and modalities. It focuses on truth-theoretical semantics for formalized languages, a tradition emerging from Carnap's and Tarski's work in the first half of the last century that specifies the meaning of these expressions in terms of the truth-conditions of the sentences in which they occur. It considers Tarski-style definitions of the semantics of a given language in a stronger metalanguage, Tarski's impossibility results, and attempts (...) to overcome them in the post-Tarskian tradition. (shrink)

Many oppose the use of profile evidence against defendants at trial, even when the statistical correlations are reliable and the jury is free from prejudice. The literature has struggled to justify this opposition. We argue that admitting profile evidence is objectionable because it violates what we call “equal protection”—that is, a right of innocent defendants not to be exposed to higher ex ante risks of mistaken conviction compared to other innocent defendants facing similar charges. We also show why admitting other (...) forms of evidence, such as eyewitness, trace, and motive evidence, does not violate equal protection. (shrink)

This book of tightly woven dialogues engages prominent thinkers in a discussion about the role of culture-broadly construed-in contemporary society and politics. Faced with the conceptual inflation of the notion of 'culture,' which now imposes itself as an indispensable issue in contemporary moral and political debates, these dynamic exchanges seek to rethink culture and critique beyond the schematic models that have often predominated, such as the opposition between "mainstream multiculturalism" and the "clash of civilizations." Prefaced by an introduction relating current (...) cultural debates to the critical theory tradition, this book examines the politics of culture and the spirit of critique from three different vantage points. To begin, Gabriel Rockhill and Alfredo Gomez-Muller provide a stage-setting dialogue, followed by discussions with two major representatives of contemporary critical theory: Seyla Benhabib and Nancy Fraser. Working at the horizons of this tradition, Judith Butler, Immanuel Wallerstein, and Cornel West then provide important critical perspectives on cultural politics. The book's concluding section engages with Michael Sandel and Will Kymlicka, who work out of the Rawlsian tradition yet are uniquely concerned with the issue of culture, broadly understood. The epilogue, an interview with Axel Honneth, returns to the core issue of critical theory in cultural politics. Ranging from recent developments and progressive interventions in critical theory to dialogues that incorporate its insights into larger discussions of social and political philosophy, this book sharpens old critical tools while developing new strategies for rethinking the role of 'culture' in contemporary society. (shrink)

The literature on algorithmic fairness has examined exogenous sources of biases such as shortcomings in the data and structural injustices in society. It has also examined internal sources of bias as evidenced by a number of impossibility theorems showing that no algorithm can concurrently satisfy multiple criteria of fairness. This paper contributes to the literature stemming from the impossibility theorems by examining how informational richness affects the accuracy and fairness of predictive algorithms. With the aid of a computer simulation, we (...) show that informational richness is the engine that drives improvements in the performance of a predictive algorithm, in terms of both accuracy and fairness. The centrality of informational richness suggests that classification parity, a popular criterion of algorithmic fairness, should be given relatively little weight. But we caution that the centrality of informational richness should be taken with a grain of salt in light of practical limitations, in particular, the so-called bias-variance trade off. (shrink)

Smith argues that, unlike other forms of evidence, naked statistical evidence fails to satisfy normic support. This is his solution to the puzzles of statistical evidence in legal proof. This paper focuses on Smith’s claim that DNA evidence in cold-hit cases does not satisfy normic support. I argue that if this claim is correct, virtually no other form of evidence used at trial can satisfy normic support. This is troublesome. I discuss a few ways in which Smith can respond.