Los cuatro pertenecían a una generación que mantuvo contacto directo con Wittgenstein, Carnap o Russell. La potencia conceptual de la filosofía analítica sobrevuela, por fortuna, a sus protagonistas y no se extingue con ellos.

In the hundred years since its publication, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus has become a contemporary classic with the peculiarity that it is surrounded by an aura of mystery: what is really Wittgenstein’s aim in writing the Tractatus, how are we to understand the last two propositions of the Tractatus that enjoin us to detach ourselves from the book itself and keep silent, can the Tractatus be anything other than a positivist and anti-metaphysical treatise, and so on? Here we will argue that (...) the answer to these questions must consider what the ethical meaning of the Tractatus might be and, closely related to that, what its importance is and that of the ineffable in general. (shrink)

El presente trabajo nació como una reflexión posterior a la traducción del libro de Stanley Cavell Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman. La reflexión era necesaria habida cuenta de las dudas suscitadas por la traducción del título del libro. Para ser más exacto, la reflexión giraba en torno a las lágrimas que forman parte de la primera parte del título, las lágrimas vertidas por las mujeres desconocidas que protagonizan los melodramas analizados en el libro. En mi opinión, (...) llegar a entender la razón y la naturaleza de esas lágrimas es clave para comprender lo que Cavell nos viene contando desde hace cinco décadas. Por ello, lo que sigue intenta reunir mis propios comentarios sobre la obra de Cavell en general, con la justificación de la traducción final del título: Más allá de las lágrimas. (shrink)

From a pre-publication review by the late Austrian economist, Don Lavoie, of George Mason University: -/- "The book's radical re-interpretation of property and contract is, I think, among the most powerful critiques of mainstream economics ever developed. It undermines the neoclassical way of thinking about property by articulating a theory of inalienable rights, and constructs out of this perspective a "labor theory of property" which is as different from Marx's labor theory of value as it is from neoclassicism. It traces (...) roots of such ideas in some fascinating and largely forgotten strands of the history of economics. It draws attention to the question of "responsibility" which neoclassicism has utterly lost sight of. It is startlingly fresh in its overall approach, and unusually well written in its presentation. ... It constitutes a better case for its economic democracy viewpoint than anything else in the literature." . (shrink)

Is morality rational? In this book Gauthier argues that moral principles are principles of rational choice. He proposes a principle whereby choice is made on an agreed basis of cooperation, rather than according to what would give an individual the greatest expectation of value. He shows that such a principle not only ensures mutual benefit and fairness, thus satisfying the standards of morality, but also that each person may actually expect greater utility by adhering to morality, even though the choice (...) did not have that end primarily in view. In resolving what may appear to be a paradox, the author establishes morals on the firm foundation of reason. Gauthier's argument includes an account of value, linking it to preference and utility; a discussion of the curcumstances in which morality is unnecessary; and an application of morals by agreement to relations between peoples at different levels of development and different generations. Finally, he reflects on the assumptions about individuality and community made by his account of rationality and morality. (shrink)

After centuries of philosophical explorations of the remote and the elevated, in our work we give credibility to the possibility that the time has come for philosophy to conquer back the ordinary. Nor only we assume this, but we would also conclude that the main task of philosophy is the recovery of the ordinary (world). A task that also helps to understand what philosophy is or should be or could be. We intend to explore philosophy traditional reluctance to the ordinary (...) and its tendency to look for answers far from it explaining the reasons it has for it. Secondly we would explore the ordinary world itself, trying to characterize it and what does inhabiting it mean. And finally we would look at some philosophical problems (mainly epistemological and moral problems, but not exclusively) from the perspective that gives a philosophy that finds itself comfortable in the ordinary world. (shrink)

This chapter argues for a notion of time that allows time travel. In order to time traveling to happen, in contrast to Presentism, the chapter demonstrates that we can change the past and we have some place where to travel. It shows the advantages of a non-presentist ontology that advocates for indeterminacy of future facts based not on its absence of truth-value, but on the overdetermination of future facts. The conclusion is that to break the causal chain is impossible in (...) we are placed in the same causal line. But if we rethink the time traveling as a trans-world traveling, it is possible to open a new causal line anytime that someone travel in time, to the past as well as to the future. (shrink)

I THE NATURE OF MAN To understand morals and politics, understand man. Leviathan , 'that mortal god, to which we owe under the immortal God, our peace and ...

Dramatic changes or revolutions in a field of science are often made by outsiders or 'trespassers,' who are not limited by the established, 'expert' approaches. Each essay in this diverse collection shows the fruits of intellectual trespassing and poaching among fields such as economics, Kantian ethics, Platonic philosophy, category theory, double-entry accounting, arbitrage, algebraic logic, series-parallel duality, and financial arithmetic.

The Logic of Leviathan The Moral and Political Theory of Thomas Hobbes.

Here a group of philosophers, economists and political theorists discuss the work of David Gauthier, which seeks to show that rational individuals would accept certain moral constraints on their choices. The possibilities and limitations of a contractarian approach to issues of justice is analyzed.

Instead of the half-century old foundational feud between set theory and category theory, this paper argues that they are theories about two different complementary types of universals. The set-theoretic antinomies forced naïve set theory to be reformulated using some iterative notion of a set so that a set would always have higher type or rank than its members. Then the universal u_{F}={x|F(x)} for a property F() could never be self-predicative in the sense of u_{F}∈u_{F}. But the mathematical theory of categories, (...) dating from the mid-twentieth century, includes a theory of always-self-predicative universals--which can be seen as forming the "other bookend" to the never-self-predicative universals of set theory. The self-predicative universals of category theory show that the problem in the antinomies was not self-predication per se, but negated self-predication. They also provide a model (in the Platonic Heaven of mathematics) for the self-predicative strand of Plato's Theory of Forms as well as for the idea of a "concrete universal" in Hegel and similar ideas of paradigmatic exemplars in ordinary thought. (shrink)

Partiendo de la perspectiva filosófica actual, este volumen recoge la controversia "explicación-comprensión”, desde sus orígenes en Dilthey hasta los planteamientos que trascienden el aspecto puramente metodológico. En el libro se realiza una evaluación crítica de la transformación que la discusión ha tenido en el ámbito de la filosofía contemporánea y la productividad teórica e interés que tiene en diferentes ámbitos, como los de las ciencias humanas y sociales. Un debate que refleja la autocomprensión de la filosofía en el siglo XX (...) y que se desarrolla al hilo de la formación de los problemas filosóficos y de las corrientes de pensamiento que indirectamente contribuye a formar. Con contribuciones de destacados especialistas, las cuestiones abordadas recogen diferentes aproximaciones que van desde los planteamientos históricos, fenomenológicos, analíticos y hermenéuticos, hasta los de la teoría crítica. Algunos de los autores cuyas aportaciones merecen especial atención son: Von Wright, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Popper, Kuhn, Gadamer, Davidson, Merleau-Ponty, Arendt y Habermas. (shrink)

The Sociosexual Orientation Inventory (SOI; Simpson & Gangestad 1991) is a self-report measure of individual differences in human mating strategies. Low SOI scores signify that a person is sociosexually restricted, or follows a more monogamous mating strategy. High SOI scores indicate that an individual is unrestricted, or has a more promiscuous mating strategy. As part of the International Sexuality Description Project (ISDP), the SOI was translated from English into 25 additional languages and administered to a total sample of 14,059 people (...) across 48 nations. Responses to the SOI were used to address four main issues. First, the psychometric properties of the SOI were examined in cross-cultural perspective. The SOI possessed adequate reliability and validity both within and across a diverse range of modern cultures. Second, theories concerning the systematic distribution of sociosexuality across cultures were evaluated. Both operational sex ratios and reproductively demanding environments related in evolutionary-predicted ways to national levels of sociosexuality. Third, sex differences in sociosexuality were generally large and demonstrated cross-cultural universality across the 48 nations of the ISDP, confirming several evolutionary theories of human mating. Fourth, sex differences in sociosexuality were significantly larger when reproductive environments were demanding but were reduced to more moderate levels in cultures with more political and economic gender equality. Implications for evolutionary and social role theories of human sexuality are discussed. Key Words: culture; gender; mating; reproduction; sex differences; sex roles; sexual strategies; sociosexuality. (shrink)

The principle of alternate possibilities (PAP), making the ability to do otherwise a necessary condition for moral responsibility, is supposed by Harry Frankfurt, John Fischer, and others to succumb to a peculiar kind of counterexample. The paper reviews the main problems with the counterexample that have surfaced over the years, and shows how most can be addressed within the terms of the current debate. But one problem seems ineliminable: because Frankfurt''s example relies on a counterfactual intervener to preclude alternatives to (...) the person''s action, it is not possible for it to preclude all alternatives (intervention that is contingent upon a trigger cannot bring it about that the trigger never occurred). This makes it possible for the determined PAPist to maintain that some pre-intervention deviation is always available to ground moral responsibility. In reply, the critic of PAP can examine all the candidate deviations and argue their irrelevance to moral responsibility (a daunting prospect); or the critic can dispense with counterfactual intervention altogether. The paper pursues the second of these strategies, developing three examples of noncounterfactual intervention in which (i) the agent has no alternatives (and a fortiori no morally relevant alternatives), yet (ii) there is just as much reason to think that the agent is morally responsible as there was in Frankfurt''s original example. The new counterexamples do suffer from one liability, but this is insufficient in the end to repair PAP''s conceptual connection between moral responsibility and alternate possibilities. (shrink)

La filosofía del lenguaje ordinario se caracteriza por haber dirigido el foco de la atención filosófica hacia los usos ordinarios, informales o cotidianos del lenguaje. Nació en Oxford a finales de la primera mitad del siglo xx gracias a los trabajos pioneros de J. L. Austin y de los notables pensadores que formaban parte del grupo de debate e investigación que él dirigía. Pero también en Cambridge, alrededor de las mismas fechas, se produjo un giro filosófico similar gracias al trabajo (...) de Ludwig Wittgenstein. (shrink)

Tras haber contendido en el siglo XX con diversas críticas bien fundamentadas, como las de cariz procedimentalista, el conjunto de ideas éticas, antropológicas y políticas conocido por Perfeccionismo se reincorpora en plena forma al actual debate sobre las formas de la vida en común y sus asuntos en juego: ciudadanía, multiculturalismo, fuentes de normatividad, teorías de la justicia, horizontes de lo político, etc. Hoy día, parece claro que una sociedad justa y equitativa requiere la presencia de una riqueza ética propia (...) de una democracia reflexiva; a todo ello, desde luego, puede contribuir una noción renovada de perfeccionismo. De ello y de la contribución que las ideas perfeccionistas hacen a la moral y la política en las complejas sociedades contemporáneas se ocupan los trabajos aquí recogidos. (shrink)

El lenguaje ha sido objeto de la reflexión filosófica desde los orígenes de la filosofía y sigue generando controversia e interés en la actualidad. El presente volumen reúne trabajos que bucean en la historia de la filosofía del lenguaje, exploran su relación con la filosofía analítica, presentan críticamente las aportaciones algunas de sus principales figuras y analizan muchos de los problemas que la convierten en una de las disciplinas filosóficas más apasionantes.

Ludwig Wittgenstein llevó a cabo la redacción de las notas que conforman Sobre la certeza durante los últimos años de su vida. Publicadas póstumamente en un único volumen en 1969, los especialistas en la obra de Wittgenstein consideran este un texto esencial dentro de su desarrollo filosófico y una aportación clave a la epistemología. Para Avrum Stroll, su importancia en este campo es incluso equiparable a la de la Crítica de la Razón Pura de Immanuel Kant. Sobre la certeza desarrolla, (...) con el característico estilo de Wittgenstein, una nueva manera de superar el escepticismo basada en la distinción categorial entre la creencia y su fundamento último. El presente volumen reúne trabajos que exponen en detalle esta nueva filosofía de Wittgenstein (para algunos la tercera) y aportan nuevas perspectivas acerca de la epistemología en su obra, junto al estudio de su influencia en otros filósofos contemporáneos. (shrink)

¿Es Wittgenstein un pensador escéptico o antiescéptico? Si es lo segundo, ¿cuáles son sus argumentos? Este libro trata de esas importantes cuestiones desde una doble perspectiva más fundamental. De un lado, ¿cuál es la importancia que el escepticismo puede haber tenido en el pensamiento de Wittgenstein? O, en otras palabras, ¿de qué manera puede contribuir el escepticismo a lograr una mejor comprensión de la filosofía wittgensteiniana? Del otro, inversamente, ¿arroja la filosofía de Wittgenstein alguna luz sobre cuál es exactamente el (...) problema que el escepticismo pone sobre la mesa de la filosofía? Los trabajos aquí reunidos se ocupan de estos y otros temas relacionados con el escepticismo epistemológico, el escepticismo semántico y el escepticismo metafilosófico. (shrink)

Spirituality and storytelling can be resources in aging successfully and in dying well given the constraints of modern day Western culture. This paper explores the relationship of aging to time and the dynamic process of the life course and discusses issues related to confronting mortality, including suffering, finitude, spirituality, and spiritual closure in regard to death. And, finally, the role of narrative in this process is taken up.

The use of remember–know judgments to assess subjective experience associated with memory retrieval, or as measures of recollection and familiarity processes, has been controversial. In the current study we had participants think aloud during study and provide verbal reports at test for remember–know and confidence judgments. Results indicated that the vast majority of remember judgments for studied items were associated with recollection from study , but this correspondence was less likely for high-confidence judgments . Instead, high-confidence judgments were more likely (...) than remember judgments to be associated with incorrect recollection and a lack of recollection. Know judgments were typically associated with a lack of recollection , but still included recollection from the study context . Thus, although remember judgments provided fairly accurate assessments of retrieval including contextual details, know judgments did not provide accurate assessments of retrieval lacking contextual details. (shrink)