Giorgio Agamben is a philosopher well known for his brilliance and erudition, as well as for the difficulty and diversity of his seventeen books. The interest which his _Homo Sacer_ sparked in America is likely to continue to grow for a great many years to come. _Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction_ presents the complexity and continuity of Agamben's philosophy—and does so for two separate and distinct audiences. It attempts to provide readers possessing little or no familiarity with Agamben's writings with (...) points of entry for exploring them. For those already well acquainted with Agamben's thought, it offers a critical analysis of the achievements that have marked it. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Eichmann, Empathy, and LolitaLeland de la DurantayeISometime in late 1960 or early 1961 Adolf Eichmann, jailed and awaiting trial in Jerusalem, was given by his guard a copy of Vladimir Nabokov's recently published Lolita, as Hannah Arendt puts it, "for relaxation." After two days Eichmann returned it, visibly indignant: "Quite an unwholesome book"—Das ist aber ein sehr unerfreuliches Buch—he told his guard. 1 Though we are not privy to, (...) and nor does Arendt speculate upon this officer's intentions, it is difficult to imagine that they were limited to procuring Eichmann a little "relaxation." The tale of a homicidal madman writing under observation and awaiting a trial that will consign him either to death or prolonged imprisonment—which fate spares him by felling him with a heart attack—could hardly have been very relaxing for someone at that moment writing his own memoirs and himself awaiting a trial with similar stakes.We might imagine other intentions on the part of Eichmann's guard. Could the gesture have been ironic? Or was it motivated by a dark curiosity—something of the order of an experiment? The sulphurous halo of Nabokov's book was still burning brightly in the popular consciousness of 1960. 2 Might Eichmann's guard have seen Lolita as a sort of litmus test for radical evil, and wanted to see whether the real-life villain—he who impassively organized the transport towards certain death of countless innocents—would coldly, even gleefully, approve the various and vile machinations of Nabokov's creation?This is all only speculation. In Arendt's account, she congratulates Eichmann for his indignation and moves on to other matters. In any event, given Eichmann's radical conventionality one could hardly imagine him liking—or even very well understanding—much of the book. As [End Page 311] Eichmann himself avowed, during his adult life he had read only two books, one of them being Theodor Herzl's The Jewish State. But whatever the motivations of Eichmann's guard, whatever Eichmann's degree of comprehension, and whatever congratulations Eichmann might have deserved for his disgust, the incident raises a question for the study of Nabokov's finest work which has yet to be answered.IIBefore turning to this question, let us remain with Arendt and her notorious reader for a moment. Arendt notes elsewhere that it appeared to her that Eichmann was nearly "aphasic." She comments that, "when he did succeed in constructing a sentence of his own, he repeated it until it became a cliché," and that, "his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else." Arendt offers here nothing less than a definition of thought itself. "To think" is glossed ("... namely") by Arendt as, "to think from the standpoint of someone else." Though as a definition of thought, it is hardly impressive, it nevertheless expresses something essential about Arendt's conception of thought and thinking. (3) In her view, thought is to be placed under the sign of intellectual empathy, under the sign of living in the strangeness and wonder of another's world. (Though Arendt does not mention the connection, both the language she wrote Eichmann in—English—and her native one—German—make special provision for such a sense, as he or she who is "thoughtless" is not her or she who is incapable of some form of cognition or calculation, as "thoughtless" people can indeed be very clever and very clever people have been capable of great "thoughtlessness.")Thought is thus a communal, not individualistic, thing. 4 This point is important as, though Adolf Eichmann was unlikely to have seen much of himself in the irreverent and urbane genius of Nabokov's Humbert Humbert, nor in the latter's strange eloquence, Eichmann the man and Humbert the character of the first part of the novel (to leave the repenting Humbert of the book's last pages out for the moment), share an essential trait. What Eichmann the man shares with Nabokov's literary creation is the inability or unwillingness "to think from the standpoint of somebody else." The evil they share is the... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:diacritics 33.2 (2005) 3-9 [Access article in PDF] The Suspended Substantive On Animals and Men in Giorgio Agamben's The Open Leland de la Durantaye Giorgio Agamben. The Open: Man and Animal. Trans. Kevin Attell. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2004. [O] Trans. of L'aperto: L'uomo e l'animale. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2002. [A] With a title as enigmatic as The Open, the reader might well wonder, "the open what?" Is (...) the title's adjective to stand alone? Does it need no substantive to support it? This unfamiliar title is not what one might first guess—it is not an awkward translation from the work's original title. No substantive follows in the original, and none is meant to. The idea that gives Agamben's book its title is that of an openness which is unconditioned—and perhaps unconditional, an openness which is unspecified—and perhaps unspecifiable.If the answer to the question "the open what?" can be answered with no substantive, might we ask in what this opening occurs? Between what more substantive things has an indefinable space been opened? The first answer to the question can be found in the work's subtitle—Man and Animal. The open space in question is that which separates and distinguishes man from animal. Philosophers, anthropologists, social scientists, zoologists, chemists, taxonomists—and many others—have had no small difficulty in agreeing upon the matter.Philosophers have traditionally had a low opinion of animals [cf. de Fontenay]. Descartes had especially little respect for the minds of animals and influentially classified them as automata mechanica. As Agamben notes, the great naturalist and taxonomist Linnaeus responded to this assertion with the laconic rejoinder: "Descartes obviously never saw an ape" [cf. O 23/A 30; translation modified]. Philosophers have been more eager than taxonomists to put distance between themselves and the animals—and for this reason have been particularly interested in studying what separates man from animal. The last great philosophical attempt in this regard is that of Martin Heidegger. Despite his preference for the primordial, his openness to the woods and the wilderness, his opinion of animals' faculties was not much higher than that of Descartes. In his view, animals live in an environment in which they are receptive to various stimuli, but where they have nothing approximating what we call a "world"—animals are, as he claims, "poor in world" (weltarm)—or even "without world" (weltlos). They live in such intense and incessant proximity to their environment and its stimuli that they do not see the existential forest for the environmental trees. They can never take a step away from the immediacy of their perception and for this reason cannot be said to possess a "world" in the sense that man, in Heidegger's view, does.As mentioned above, the title The Open is, for all its strangeness, not the result of [End Page 3] an awkward translation from Agamben's Italian. Its strangeness stems, nevertheless, in large part from a translation. Or, to be more precise, from two translations. The first of these is from the German. The German in question is a special one—that of the profoundly idiosyncratic technical vocabulary that Heidegger fashioned for his philosophical purposes. For Heidegger, "the open" is something literally fundamental which lay at the heart of his thought. "The open" is the space revealed to us in the moment when the world we live in, which because of our many tasks and travails we tend to take no distance from (like animals with their stimuli), opens out onto something larger. This moment of distancing ourselves from our everyday concern with means and ends, with stimuli and response, is what gives us not just an environment, but a "world." "The open" is what we find ourselves in when the bustle and haste of our environment recedes and we see that environment in all its strangeness and immensity—as a "world," greater and less graspable than our restricted and finite representations. This experience of "the open" is, for Heidegger, what makes us human, and... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Eichmann, Empathy, and LolitaLeland de la DurantayeISometime in late 1960 or early 1961 Adolf Eichmann, jailed and awaiting trial in Jerusalem, was given by his guard a copy of Vladimir Nabokov's recently published Lolita, as Hannah Arendt puts it, "for relaxation." After two days Eichmann returned it, visibly indignant: "Quite an unwholesome book"—Das ist aber ein sehr unerfreuliches Buch—he told his guard. 1 Though we are not privy to, (...) and nor does Arendt speculate upon this officer's intentions, it is difficult to imagine that they were limited to procuring Eichmann a little "relaxation." The tale of a homicidal madman writing under observation and awaiting a trial that will consign him either to death or prolonged imprisonment—which fate spares him by felling him with a heart attack—could hardly have been very relaxing for someone at that moment writing his own memoirs and himself awaiting a trial with similar stakes.We might imagine other intentions on the part of Eichmann's guard. Could the gesture have been ironic? Or was it motivated by a dark curiosity—something of the order of an experiment? The sulphurous halo of Nabokov's book was still burning brightly in the popular consciousness of 1960. 2 Might Eichmann's guard have seen Lolita as a sort of litmus test for radical evil, and wanted to see whether the real-life villain—he who impassively organized the transport towards certain death of countless innocents—would coldly, even gleefully, approve the various and vile machinations of Nabokov's creation?This is all only speculation. In Arendt's account, she congratulates Eichmann for his indignation and moves on to other matters. In any event, given Eichmann's radical conventionality one could hardly imagine him liking—or even very well understanding—much of the book. As [End Page 311] Eichmann himself avowed, during his adult life he had read only two books, one of them being Theodor Herzl's The Jewish State. But whatever the motivations of Eichmann's guard, whatever Eichmann's degree of comprehension, and whatever congratulations Eichmann might have deserved for his disgust, the incident raises a question for the study of Nabokov's finest work which has yet to be answered.IIBefore turning to this question, let us remain with Arendt and her notorious reader for a moment. Arendt notes elsewhere that it appeared to her that Eichmann was nearly "aphasic." She comments that, "when he did succeed in constructing a sentence of his own, he repeated it until it became a cliché," and that, "his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else." Arendt offers here nothing less than a definition of thought itself. "To think" is glossed ("... namely") by Arendt as, "to think from the standpoint of someone else." Though as a definition of thought, it is hardly impressive, it nevertheless expresses something essential about Arendt's conception of thought and thinking. (3) In her view, thought is to be placed under the sign of intellectual empathy, under the sign of living in the strangeness and wonder of another's world. (Though Arendt does not mention the connection, both the language she wrote Eichmann in—English—and her native one—German—make special provision for such a sense, as he or she who is "thoughtless" is not her or she who is incapable of some form of cognition or calculation, as "thoughtless" people can indeed be very clever and very clever people have been capable of great "thoughtlessness.")Thought is thus a communal, not individualistic, thing. 4 This point is important as, though Adolf Eichmann was unlikely to have seen much of himself in the irreverent and urbane genius of Nabokov's Humbert Humbert, nor in the latter's strange eloquence, Eichmann the man and Humbert the character of the first part of the novel (to leave the repenting Humbert of the book's last pages out for the moment), share an essential trait. What Eichmann the man shares with Nabokov's literary creation is the inability or unwillingness "to think from the standpoint of somebody else." The evil they share is the... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:diacritics 34.2 (2006) 3-13 [Access article in PDF] Biographical Illusion and Methodological Reality Leland De La Durantaye Pierre Bourdieu. Esquisse Pour Une Auto-Analyse. Paris: Raisons d'Agir, 2004. 1 Like his student and friend Nietzsche, Jacob Burckhardt often stressed the necessity for a scholar to work in solitude. Like Nietzsche, he also possessed a gift for acidic analogy and likened the world of academia to a group of (...) dogs sniffing one another.Few observers of the academic interactions of his time had such sharp senses as Pierre Bourdieu, and few have been as torn between solitary reflection and communal exchange. Trained by France's most elite academic institutions (such as the celebrated Parisian lycée Louis-le-Grand and the even more celebrated École Normale Supérieure), Bourdieu was grateful for the opportunities that this training afforded him. And he felt that this gratitude could best be repaid by submitting those elite academic institutions and their insular world to an unsparing critique, to unveiling the distance that separated their stated ideals from their real effects.Like Bergson and Jaurès, like Sartre and Aron, like Foucault and Derrida, Bourdieu studied that which was most difficult and most prestigious where it was most difficult and prestigious: philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure. Like those famous fellow alumni, he was a brilliant student, and like them, he longed to distinguish his personal vision from those around him. This led him to do something surprising, something that, despite their separate and significant dissatisfactions with the philosophy of their day, neither Bergson nor Sartre, neither Foucault nor Derrida ever did: he abandoned philosophy. He left what he saw as the intellectual royal road for the most pedestrian of paths—that of sociology.As he often reminded his readers, sociology was in a sorry state when he entered it. Both in academic appraisal and the popular imagination, it was considered dry and provincial. It was thought to have no true intellectual adventure in it—nothing of the ethnologist tramping through the rain forests of the Amazon, nothing of the lone philosopher working through the night on an opus to end metaphysics. It was laborious and abstract; it dealt in statistical generalities. Bourdieu repeatedly described sociology as "the pariah of disciplines."1 He had, however, a special mission for it in mind. [End Page 3]In Bourdieu's posthumous memoir Esquisse pour une auto-analyse, published in February 2004—two years after his death—by the small publishing house he helped found, Raisons d'Agir, he notes how, "a bit as a joke," he had often defined himself as "the leader of a liberation movement aiming to free the social sciences from philosophy's imperialism" [94].2 From early on in his career, he had wished to revolt against the "empire of the total philosopher"—an empire reigned over by, more than any other, Jean-Paul Sartre [cf. 25].3 Looking back upon this decisive period of his development, Bourdieu goes so far as to state that the shaping of his identity was done "against everything which the Sartrian enterprise represented for me" [37]. In historical accounts, Sartre is often given as counterfigure his friend and fellow normalien Raymond Aron. In his Esquisse, Bourdieu proposes a different, and less conventional, counterfigure for the imperial philosopher: the brilliant Austrian satirist and cultural critic Karl Kraus. Bourdieu notes the particular affection he had always felt for Kraus and attributes it to the latter's singular capacity for "critical reflectivenesss" [37]. Subtly, and appropriately, Bourdieu follows this remark with something that occurs nowhere else in his memoir: an epigram (the composing of which Kraus excelled in). Bourdieu writes: "there are a great many intellectuals who question the world, but there are very few intellectuals who question the intellectual world" [37]. The remark could not more compactly and precisely reflect what Bourdieu had aspired all his life to do: to excel in the art and science of questioning the intellectual world. 2 Leo Spitzer liked to cite Friedrich Gundolf's dictum "Methode ist Erlebnis" (method is lived experience). Nearing the end of his career... (shrink)

Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben is the rare writer whose ideas and works have a broad appeal across many fields, and his devoted fans are not just philosophers, but readers of political and legal theory, sociology, and literary criticism as well. In March 2009, Agamben was invited to speak in Paris’ Notre-Dame Cathedral in the presence of the Bishop of Paris and a number of other high-ranking church officials. His resulting speech, a stunningly lucid and provocative look at the history and (...) state of the Church and its role in society, is presented here. _The Church and the Kingdom_ is at once a pointed attack on the institutional structure of the Catholic Church and a theoretical excursus on the concepts of messianic time and economy. Presenting an exegesis of certain key passages in the New Testament, Agamben examines the philology and philosophy at the root of the Church and of its earthly reign. With its examinations of the foundational texts of the Church, which are also the foundational texts of our modern idea of economy, _The Church and the Kingdom_ reveals significant connections and parallel ideologies which are imperative to understanding the current global situation. This edition of Agamben’s text is accompanied by photographs by artist Alice Attie. Made from folded and twisted reproductions of paintings culled from Christian iconography, these works of art evoke the restless challenge that well-characterizes Agamben’s four decades of philosophy and critique. This book will be welcomed by Agamben’s many readers across the disciplines. (shrink)

Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben is the rare writer whose ideas and works have a broad appeal across many fields, and his devoted fans are not just philosophers, but readers of political and legal theory, sociology, and literary criticism as well. Agamben’s intuition and meditation are fascinating, and not least when he turns his critical eye to the mysteries and contradictions of early religion. _The Unspeakable Girl: The Myth and Mystery of Kore_ is a book of three richly detailed treatments of (...) the myth of Kore. Kore, also called Persephone, and referred to poetically by the Greeks as “the unspeakable girl,” was the daughter of Demeter and Zeus who was abducted by Hades and made queen of the netherworld. Kore and her story gave rise to a mysterious cult at Eleusis, the site of the well where Demeter mourned her lost daughter. This book opens with an innovative and insightful essay that focuses on the mysterious indeterminacy of the figure of Kore/Persephone—at once a woman and a girl, a virgin and a mother—as well as the attendant divisions of speech and silence, the sacred and the profane, the animal and the human, and the mortal and the divine. Here, tracing these dichotomies, Agamben is in top form, able to articulate paradoxes that in another writer’s hands might be ineffable. In the second and third parts of the book the reader is treated to a series of beautiful paintings by acclaimed artist Monica Ferrando, as well as her translation of crucial Greek and Latin source materials. As a whole, _The Unspeakable Girl_ will not only be welcomed by Agamben’s many readers across the disciplines, but also by enthusiasts of classical mythology in general. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Image and SilenceGiorgio AgambenTranslated by Leland de la Durantaye (bio)[End Page 94]In the Roman pantheon there is a goddess named Angerona, represented with her mouth bound and sealed (ore obligato signatoque).1 Her finger is raised to her lips as if to command silence. Scholars claim that she represents, in the context of pagan mystery cults, the power of silence, although there is no consensus among them as (...) to how to understand this power. Etymologically speaking, myein, the root of the Greek word mysterion, means “to close the mouth, to silence.” At the beginning of the sacred rites in Eleusis a herald “commanded silence” (epittatei tēn siōpen). It is said that that the initiates into these Eleusinian mysteries were required to maintain absolute silence concerning what they had seen and heard during their initiation. Our question is how to understand this silence. Was it a prohibition aimed at keeping a secret doctrine from the uninitiated? Or did it concern, instead, something truly impossible to say?To begin we might ask what sense there might have been in the obligation to remain silent given that it was possible for anyone—including slaves, and thus, potentially, the entire population of Athens—to be initiated into the mysteries. In his early work, “On Philosophy,” Aristotle affirmed that, “the initiates do not need to learn something (mathein ti), but, instead, to be disposed to something, to experience and to undergo something (pathein kai diatethēnai).”2 It would therefore be possible that in the ancient mystery cults the initiate did not learn a doctrine that could be expressed in words (yet had to remain secret), but, instead, experienced something essentially silent, something impossible to say. “A great awe in face of the gods,” we read in the Homeric ode to Demeter, “silences the voice.”3The impossibility of speaking—and the power of silence—has two forms, one joyful and the other disturbing. In myth muteness is often associated with rape. The Romans tell the story of Lara who was punished for her inclination to gossip by being rendered mute and who was then raped in a sacred wood by Mercury (who took advantage of her impossibility of speaking). Before being transformed into a swallow Philomela was raped by Tereus, who cut off her tongue to prevent her from recounting his misdeed. Persephone, raped, kidnapped, and conducted to Hades, remained there silent as the dead. In every one of these cases silence is the painful experience of a privation of speech, of being unable to say what one wishes to say.In Gnostic mythology, the preexisting, eternal, uncreated God contains within himself a female figure which is his silence, Sigē. From his union with Silence Thought is born. “Sigē,” we read in a Valentinian text, “is the mother of all the beings that have emerged from the Abyss. He who has failed to say the unsayable has silenced it; he who was understood the unsayable, has declared it unsayable.”4 Here too silence appears as the experience of an impossibility of saying, as a privation. It is in opposition to this abyssal figure of silence that the church fathers affirmed the primacy of the logos in which God is revealed. Nevertheless, of the power of silence Heidegger would write: “This primordial silence is more powerful than any human potentiality. No one, on his or her own, has ever invented language—that is, has been strong enough to break the power of this silence.”5 [End Page 95]In Kafka’s parable on Ulysses, we are told that the silence of the Sirens is more perilous than their song, and that Ulysses—who realized, as his ship neared them, that the Sirens were silent—put on an act to protect himself from this silence, plugging his ears with wax and having his men tie him to the mast.6 In Kafka’s retelling of the tale, the silence of the Sirens represents a zero degree of song and, following a stubborn tradition that sees in absence the most extreme form of presence, also represents an at once zero and ultimate degree of reality. In this sense Heidegger could write... (shrink)

"Center for the Study of Language and Information, Leland Stanford Junior University.".

From classic aesthetic theories to fresh aesthetic methods, this volume is an accessible introduction to the main topics in contemporary aesthetics: the media-technological challenges, transcultural aesthetics and aesthetic methodology.

With the advent of the cloud computing model allowing a shared access to massive computing facilities, a surging demand emerges for the protection of the intellectual property tied to the programs executed on these uncontrolled systems. If novel paradigm as confidential computing aims at protecting the data manipulated during the execution, obfuscating techniques (in particular at the source code level) remain a popular solution to conceal the purpose of a program or its logic without altering its functionality, thus preventing reverse-engineering (...) on the program even with the help of computing resources. The many advantages of code obfuscation, together with its low cost, makes it a popular technique. This paper proposes a novel methodology for source code obfuscation that can be used together with other traditional obfuscation techniques, making the code more robust against reverse engineering attacks. Three program complexity metrics are used to define three different single-objective combinatorial optimization versions of the problem, which are solved and analysed. Additionally, three multi-objective problems are defined, those considering each of the selected metrics together with the program execution time, in order to avoid strong obfuscations penalizing the performance. The goal of the defined problems is to find sequences of LLVM optimizations that lead to highly obfuscated versions of the original code. These transformations are applied to the back-end pseudo-assembly code (i.e., LLVM Intermediate Representation), thus avoiding any further optimizations by the compiler. Classical genetic algorithms (GAs) are used to solve the studied problems, namely a basic cellular GA for the single-objective problems and the popular NSGA-II for the multi-objective ones. The promising results show the potential of the proposed technique. (shrink)

Includes bibliography: p. 7-12 and bibliographical references.

Se presenta la traducción de un trabajo redactado por W. V. O. Quine para la asignatura sobre Psicología avanzada, impartida por el profesor John Beebe-Center en Harvard. Se trata de un texto inédito que Quine entregó en la primavera de 1931. En este escrito se demuestra un conocimiento exhaustivo del estado de la entonces joven disciplina psicológica, de sus nombres más relevantes y de sus escuelas más sobresalientes en la época. El primer y último apartados contienen elementos de interés historiográfico (...) y filosófico para los expertos e interesados en el pensamiento de Quine. Los apartados segundo y tercero muestran el dominio de la materia desde distintos puntos de vista diferentes, a saber: la óptica, la fisiología ocular, la psicología de la percepción y, por supuesto, la historia de la filosofía que subyace a los planteamientos de las distintas escuelas psicológicas. Se presenta acompañado de una introducción que vincula las ideas que aparecen en este trabajo con cuestiones relevantes en la actualidad para la Filosofía de la Psicología y la Neurociencia computacional en su debate con el Naturalismo. (shrink)

The aim of the present paper is to provide a logical reconstruction of the Marxian Theory of Value. This reconstruction is based upon the concept of abstract as opposed to that of homogeneous labor.labour is a social relation that holds in a market economy, whenever the profit rate is uniform; it consists in a comparison of the different labors through the exchange relationship. The author proved in a different place that there exists a mathematical representation of abstract labor which is (...) unique up to similarity transformations. The existence of this function -- which is none other than the value function -- is the basis of the present axiomatization, which includes detailed reconstructions of two of the most important models of the theory. (shrink)

El libro desarrolla un análisis de la hermenéutica en general para centrarse luego en la pregunta religiosa. Destaca la necesidad de ambos niveles del preguntar y también de algún tipo de respuesta. Las religiones aparecen en este estudio como intentos de respuesta a la pregunta del ser humano por lo absoluto.

Algunos autores contrarios a la práctica constitucional actualmente dominante han defendido una rigidez constitucional “mínima” como una forma “débil” del constitucionalismo en la que la voluntad mayoritaria puede identificar el alcance de los derechos fundamentales por encima de las determinaciones judiciales. El objetivo de este trabajo es plantear algunas reflexiones críticas sobre dicha propuesta, adoptando para ello como parámetro normativo la racionalidad intrínseca de la práctica constitucional contemporánea en las democracias liberales. Dicha argumentación crítica avanza del siguiente modo: en primer (...) lugar, se discute la distinción formal entre sistemas de control jurisdiccional “fuerte” y “débil”; en segundo lugar, se pone en duda la supuesta relevancia de la reforma constitucional en la concreción histórica de los derechos básicos; y, por último, se rechaza la rigidez constitucional mínima entendida como parte de un modelo constitucional genuinamente alternativo diseñado para superar la práctica constitucional dominante. (shrink)

Resumen El presente artículo, inspirado en la idea de Vernant de que la razón griega es “hija de la ciudad”, aborda el vínculo existente entre las circunstancias políticas y sociales de Éfeso y el pensamiento heraclíteo. En efecto, a partir de la tensión que se produjo entre la realidad histórica en que vivió Heráclito y el resultado de su propia reflexión sobre ella, el filósofo desarrolló una idea de organización de la ciudad, según la cual una pólis debería ser gobernada (...) por el mismo principio rector del universo -i. e. el lógos-, lo cual, en términos prácticos, se traduciría en un modelo político monárquico.This paper, inspired by Vernant’s belief that Greek reason is “a creature of the city”, explores the connection linking Heraclitus’ thought to the political and social circumstances prevailing at Ephesus. Indeed, the tension arising from Heraclitus’ own historical framework and this philosopher’s resulting outlook on it led him to conceive of a rule for organizing a city, according to which a pólis should be governed by the same principle guiding the universe -i. e. the lógos-, which would materialize in concrete form as a monarchical government. (shrink)

El presente estudio intenta identificar el pensamiento filosófico que se esconde en la obra de K. Rahner. La filosofía de Rahner no es algo meramente ocasional, sino algo expresamente buscado y tenido constantemente en cuenta en la teología que desarrolla. El autor intenta hacer una exposición unitaria que la filosofía de Rahner desarrolla de una manera muy dispersa y casi siempre encajada bajo puntos de vista teológicos.

The aim of the present paper is to attack some of the conceptual problems that arise when the framework of mathematical learning theory is applied to the description of the behavior of the firm, in setting prices and production quotas, in a competitive market. The goal is to depict the process by which the firm fixes prices and production quotas as a stochastic learning process. A solution to such problems is proposed which is based on statistical-decision concepts. The conceptualization of (...) the behavior of the firm by means of concepts pertaining to mathematical learning theory gives rise to certain mathematical problems, which are formulated here in rather precise terms. (shrink)

Criticisms of the “container” model of pregnancy picturing female and embryo as separate entities multiply in various philosophical and scientific contexts during the last decades. In this paper, we examine how this model underlies received views of pregnancy in evolutionary biology, in the characterization of the transition from oviparity to viviparity in mammals and in the selectionist explanations of pregnancy as an evolutionary strategy. In contrast, recent evo-devo studies on eutherian reproduction, including the role of inflammation and new maternal cell (...) types, gather evidence in favor of considering pregnancy as an evolved relational novelty. Our thesis is that from this perspective we can identify the emergence of a newhistoricalindividual in evolution. In evo-devo, historical units are conceptualized as evolved entities which fulfill two main criteria, their continuous persistence and their non-exchangeability. As pregnancy can be individuated in this way, we contend that pregnant females are historical individuals. We argue that historical individuality differs from, and coexists with, other views of biological individuality as applied to pregnancy (the physiological, the evolutionary and the ecological one), but brings forward an important new insight which might help dissolve misguided conceptions. (shrink)

La Doctrina penal contemporánea recurre al principio de ultima ratio para satisfacer la tarea principal de reducir al máximo la arbitrariedad del Derecho penal, pues a través de su significado, la legitimidad del delito y de la pena se somete a la condición de la inexistencia axiológica y empírica de otros recursos jurídicos menos drásticos para solventar idóneamente el conflicto que genera su apertura. No obstante, la deriva punitivista en que ha degenerado la necesaria expansión del Derecho penal en la (...) sociedad del riesgo, pone en duda su verdadera capacidad limitadora, especialmente por su escasa vinculación a los poderes públicos. Pero nada más lejos de la realidad, el desarrollo actual de la Dogmática de los Derechos Fundamentales permite a la Doctrina penal afirmar que, en el Estado constitucional, el Derecho penal mínimo es a su vez el Derecho penal máximo permitido por la Constitución. (shrink)

(Ch. 6) les conceptions de Constant en matière économique et sociale. (ch. 7) l'influence de Constant.

The notion of fitness is usually equated to reproductive success. However, this actualist approach presents some difficulties, mainly the explanatory circularity problem, which have lead philosophers of biology to offer alternative definitions in which fitness and reproductive success are distinguished. In this paper, we argue that none of these alternatives is satisfactory and, inspired by Mumford and Anjum’s dispositional theory of causation, we offer a definition of fitness as a causal dispositional property. We argue that, under this framework, the distinctiveness (...) that biologists usually attribute to fitness—namely, the fact that fitness is something different from both the physical traits of an organism and the number of offspring it leaves—can be explained, and the main problems associated with the concept of fitness can be solved. Firstly, we introduce Mumford and Anjum's dispositional theory of causation and present our definition of fitness as a causal disposition. We explain in detail each of the elements involved in our definition, namely: the relationship between fitness and the functional dispositions that compose it, the emergent character of fitness, and the context-sensitivity of fitness. Finally, we explain how fitness and realized fitness, as well as expected and realized fitness are distinguished in our approach to fitness as a causal disposition. (shrink)

La reciente publicación de Ilustración, progreso, modernidad, aparece como una excusa para volver a dar cuenta de la relevancia de la historia de los conceptos como parte vital de nuestras formas de investigar el pasado. Para ello conviene empezar por situar los tres conceptos que la edición ha tenido en cuenta, entendiéndolos como conceptos útiles para la comprensión de lo que representa la Sattelzeit. Una vez ello nos ha permitido dar cuenta de los principales alementos del enfoque koselleckiano, tendremos en (...) cuenta las críticas que el enfoque recibe desde otras formas de concebir la historia del pensamiento político. Por último, conectaremos la Begriffsgeschichte con la propuesta del contextualismo de Cambridge. (shrink)

La crítica kantiana legó una doble herencia a la biología decimonónica: su noción de ciencia basada en el mecanicismo newtoniano configuró epistemológicamente la teoría de la evolución darwinista, mientras que su comprensión de los organismos se tradujo en una morfología teleológica. En este artículo planteamos dos cuestiones en torno la relación entre las ideas de Kant y Darwin: 1) si Kant habría considerado a Darwin el Newton de la biología, a lo que, con matices, respondemos afirmativamente; 2) si la física (...) newtoniana es hoy suficiente para naturalizar lo orgánico. Nuestra respuesta negativa se fundamenta en las ciencias de la autoorganización y la evo-devo, que permiten plantear la naturalización de la concepción kantiana de los organismos. (shrink)