This rich and varied collection of essays addresses some of the most fundamental human questions through the lenses of philosophy, literature, religion, politics, and theology. Peter Augustine Lawler and Dale McConkey have fashioned an interdisciplinary consideration of such perennial and enduring issues as the relationship between nature and history, nature and grace, reason and revelation, classical philosophy and Christianity, modernity and postmodernity, repentance and self-limitation, and philosophy and politics.

The film, as the term itself implies, entails a recording and a particular kind of writing. Nonetheless, this is not enough to consider it as a social object. It needs a formal and narrative structure and, above all, it needs an inscription in order to give it a sociality based upon its diffusion. The amateur movies represent a perfect example of this condition: they are often recordings without any inscription and remain within a very narrow communicative circle. They certainly document (...) something, but they do not have the form of a social object. Grizzly Man (Werner Herzog, 2005) is a movie by a director who did not shoot the most impressive scenes of it. Is Herzog an impostor? Certainly not. He is simply the man who gave an inscription to the amateur movies he found, transforming them into social objects. (shrink)

In spite of their striking differences with real-life perception, films are perceived and understood without effort. Cognitive film theory attributes this to the system of continuity editing, a system of editing guidelines outlining the effect of different cuts and edits on spectators. A major principle in this framework is the 180° rule, a rule recommendation that, to avoid spectators’ attention to the editing, two edited shots of the same event or action should not be filmed from angles differing in a (...) way that expectations of spatial continuity are strongly violated. In the present study, we used high-density EEG to explore the neural underpinnings of this rule. In particular, our analysis shows that cuts and edits in general elicit early ERP component indicating the registration of syntactic violations as known from language, music, and action processing. However, continuity edits and cuts-across the line differ from each other regarding later components likely to be indicating the differences in spatial remapping as well as in the degree of conscious awareness of one's own perception. Interestingly, a time–frequency analysis of the occipital alpha rhythm did not support the hypothesis that such differences in processing routes are mainly linked to visual attention. On the contrary, our study found specific modulations of the central mu rhythm ERD as an indicator of sensorimotor activity, suggesting that sensorimotor networks might play an important role. We think that these findings shed new light on current discussions about the role of attention and embodied perception in film perception and should be considered when explaining spectators’ different experience of different kinds of cuts. (shrink)

Se exponen las prácticas docentes de las educadoras de párvulos, que cumplen una función reproductora del nacionalismo que es internalizado en las niñas y niños como la ciudadanía chilena. Para ello, configuran un escenario lúdico que ritualiza la conducta cívica y patriótica, por medio de conmemoraciones cívicas fundadas en el belicismo de la guerra del Pacífico, sin considerar la realidad cosmopolita y de diversidad cultural presente en las aulas nortinas. A partir de esto, proponemos una nueva perspectiva respecto de (...) la realización de actos cívicos en la educación parvularia, para hacerlos más inclusivos y acordes a la realidad cultural de la región de Tarapacá, la más multicultural de Chile. This paper describes the teaching practices of pre-school teachers who play a reproductive role of nationalism internalized in children as Chilean citizenships. This happens as the result of a ludic scenario that ritualizes civic and patriotic conduct, through civic commemorations based on the Pacific war, regardless both the cosmopolitan reality and cultural diversity present in classrooms in the Northern part of Chile. Considering this, we propose a new perspective on conducting civic events in early childhood education, to make them more inclusive and consistent with the cultural reality of the region of Tarapacá, Chile's most multicultural region. (shrink)

El presente trabajo investiga las tesis sobre el poder civil de Alonso de la Veracruz que buscan incorporar en la comunidad política española a los habitantes autóctonos del Nuevo Mundo, tesis que suelen relacionarse con F. de Vitoria y el tomismo español, y que últimamente son consideradas parte del republicanismo novohispano elaborado desde la periferia americana. Se busca demostrar que su propósito era aplicar una teoría de derechos naturales, sin que ello implique participación política de los indios americanos. Se analiza (...) la postura del fraile frente a la diversidad cultural y la guerra contra los indios. The paper explores Alonso de la Veracruz's theses on civil power, which sought to integrate the native inhabitants of the New World into the Spanish political community. These theses, which have usually been associated with F. de Vitoria and Spanish Thomism, have recently come to be considered part of a Novohispanic republicanism developed in the American periphery. The article seeks to show that the purpose of such theses was to apply a theory of natural rights that did not entail the political participation of the indigenous population, as well as to analyze Veracruz's position regarding cultural diversity and the war against the indigenous peoples. (shrink)

Este texto pretende analizar el análisis del liberalismo que Michel Foucault realizó en sus últimos cursos del Collège de France. Tal análisis pasa por una redefinición del concepto de poder, entendido como guerra, y una reflexión sobre los conceptos de seguridad y población, modos a través de los c..

Fazer a genealogia do poder nunca foi o propósito claro de Foucault. No entanto, a questão do poder foi tema recorrente em suas investigações a ponto de estudiosos do trabalho do filósofo sugerirem uma divisão e organização de seu trabalho a partir de três eixos teóricos. Dentro dessa perspectiva, a analítica do poder marcaria a trajetória filosófica de Foucault na década de 1970. De fato, até 1994, ano de publicação do conjunto de textos, entrevistas e conferências de Foucault no Dits (...) et écrits, a questão da analítica do poder era majoritariamente conhecida a partir de livros como Surveiller et punir e Histoire de la sexualité I: la volonté de savoir. Com o início da publicação dos cursos no Collège de France a partir de 1997 as interpretações a respeito da analítica do poder sofrem um alargamento. Mas é somente em 2015 que a totalidade dos cursos de Foucault no Collège de France foram publicados, abrindo um importante caminho para a investigação a respeito das primeiras reflexões a respeito do poder. No presente artigo procuramos mostrar como os primeiros passos da analítica do poder de Michel Foucault se dá a partir de um contexto gauchiste ainda configurado em termos de dinástica do saber. Nesse sentido, procuramos mostrar como o período da dinástica corresponde a um esboço teórico, tentativas primeiras de conceituação do poder, marcadamente desenvolvido em contraposição com o marxismo. Essa contraposição se dá sobretudo na recusa tanto do esquema marxista de infra-superestrutura, quanto do modelo contratualista de sociedade estatal. (shrink)

A partir das premissas lançadas por Michel Foucault nos cursos do Collège de France de 1975-1976, intitulado Em defesa da sociedade, esse artigo pretende pensar o papel da guerra civil na sociedade hodierna. Ao propor a guerra como princípio basilar das relações de poder, Foucault revela a confluência paradoxal entre a guerra civil e uma espécie de estatização do biológico, o que ele denominou de biopolítica da espécie humana. De modo similar, o autor italiano Giorgio Agamben lança (...) em 2015 a obra Stasis. La guerra civile come paradigma político, e assevera como a guerra civil se transformou em um limiar de politização fundamental no Ocidente. (shrink)

O artigo pretende explorar, a partir de Michel Foucault, a ligação entre biopolítica, neoliberalismo e a chamada guerra às drogas, a fim de tentar esclarecer as motivações econômicas e políticas que fundamentam o tipo de combate às drogas que impera no mundo contemporâneo. O Brasil não está distante desse tipo de política que, apoiada em discursos legitimadores, tais como o discurso médico e mesmo o psicologizante, estabelecem não apenas a partilha entre os que devem viver e os que precisam (...) morrer, como também as condições para justificar toda forma de exclusão e desqualificação das populações periféricas, justificativa que, em última instância, também repercute na formulação das leis. (shrink)

... PREFACE Paul Gochet (Liege) "[...] une entite physique ne peut etre envisagee que comme une sorte de concretisation, de consolidation locale dans un ...

It is widely agreed that fiction is necessarily incomplete, but some recent work postulates the existence of universal fictions—stories according to which everything is true. Building such a story is supposedly straightforward: authors can either assert that everything is true in their story, define a complement function that does the assertoric work for them, or, most compellingly, write a story combining a contradiction with the principle of explosion. The case for universal fictions thus turns on the intuitive priority we assign (...) to the law of non-contradiction. My goal in this paper is to show that our critical and reflective literary practices set constraints on story-telling which preclude universal fictions. I will raise four stumbling blocks for universal fictionalists: the gap between saying and making true, our actual interpretive reactions to story-level contradictions, the criteria we accept for what counts as a story in our literary practices, and the undesirability of the universal fictionalist’s closure principles. (shrink)

The premise that every work belongs to an art-kind has recently inspired a kind-centred approach to theories of art. Kind-centred analyses posit that we should abandon the project of giving a general theory of art and focus instead on giving theories of the arts. The main difficulty, however, is to explain what makes a given kind an art-kind in the first place. Kind-centred theorists have passed this buck on to appreciative practices, but this move proves unsatisfactory. I argue that the (...) root of this dissatisfaction stems not from the act of kicking the can down the road, but from not kicking it far enough. The missing ingredient, I argue, is a notion of convention which does the work of marking the difference between art and non-art for a given physical medium. (shrink)

It is widely believed, among philosophers of literature, that imagining contradictions is as easy as telling or reading a story with contradictory content. Italo Calvino’s The Nonexistent Knight, for instance, concerns a knight who performs many brave deeds, but who does not exist. Anything at all, they argue, can be true in a story, including contradictions and other impossibilia. While most will readily concede that we cannot objectually imagine contradictions, they nevertheless insist that we can propositionally imagine them, and regularly (...) do, simply by entertaining a text which prompts us to do so. I argue that this narrative does not bear scrutiny for two main reasons. First, because propositional imagining is beside the point, where truth in fiction is concerned; evaluating truth in fiction engages the cognitive architecture in ways that prohibit the mobilization of merely propositional imagination to that end. And second, because it is not obvious, given the strategies usually suggested, that we ever propositionally imagine contradictions in the first place—in fact, it seems we go out of our way to avoid directly imagining them. (shrink)

Por medio de la práctica de la historia el presente se reúne con su actualidad a través de la “cuestión de la revolución”. Primero el fascismo, despuésla guerra y, finalmente, el estalinismo, están en el fondo de la reflexiónde Michel Foucault. En su obra, el retorno de la revolución es nuestroproblema, como bien lo muestra el comentario que da en enero de 1983 deltexto de Kant, “¿Qué es la Ilustración?”, donde las dos preguntas “¿Quées la Aufklärung?” y “¿Qué es (...) la Revolución?” son las dos formas bajo lascuales Kant ha planteado la cuestión de su propia actualidad. (shrink)

Schopenhauer’s invective is legendary among philosophers, and is unmatched in the historical canon. But these complaints are themselves worthy of careful consideration: they are rooted in Schopenhauer’s philosophy of language, which itself reflects the structure of his metaphysics. This short chapter argues that Schopenhauer’s vitriol rewards philosophical attention; not because it expresses his critical take on Fichte, Hegel, Herbart, Schelling, and Schleiermacher, but because it neatly illustrates his philosophy of language. Schopenhauer’s epithets are not merely spiteful slurs; instead, they reflect (...) deep-seated theoretical and methodological commitments to transparency of exposition. (shrink)

Michel Weber, Éléments de routine ayurvédique. Autonomie, rituel et ascèse, Les Éditions Chromatika, 2021. (978-2-930517-82-7 ; pdf 978-2-930517-83-4 ; 104 pp., 14€) -/- L’Ayurvéda propose une philosophie de vie qui articule un vaste système métaphysique (une cosmologie théorique) avec une visée thérapeutique profonde (une anthropologie pratique). -/- À la croisée de la théorie et de la pratique, on trouve la routine (« dinacharya ») dont le but est de susciter l’individuation et la solidarité, c’est-à-dire l’autonomie (de chacun) respectueuse de la (...) communauté (de tous). Ce faisant, elle constitue une ascèse dont l’efficacité a été longuement éprouvée et rarement égalée. (shrink)

En este artículo se busca identificar las características de la grilla belicosa foucaultiana, explicitar los usos que Michel Foucault ha hecho de la misma, revisar los beneficios teóricos que se siguen de ello y considerar su potencialidad para hacer inteligibles acontecimientos de incidencia local actual. A este respecto, se pretende sostener que aun cuando, en nuestros días, las relaciones de fuerza en las sociedades occidentales se hayan investido en el orden del poder político, la grilla de la guerra sigue (...) teniendo vigencia al momento de hacer inteligibles los antagonismos que las atraviesan. (shrink)

‘Philosophical dialogue’ indicates both a form of philosophical inquiry and its corresponding literary genre. In its written form, it typically features two or more characters who engage in a discussion concerning morals, knowledge, as well as a variety of topics that can be widely labelled as ‘philosophical’. Our philosophical dialogue takes place in Krakow, Poland. It is a rainy morning and two strangers are waiting at a tram stop. One of them is dressed neatly, and cannot stop fidgeting with his (...) closed umbrella. The other was caught unprepared by the morning downpour and water is dripping from his worn, soaked jacket. (shrink)

Francis Sparshott introduced the term ‘remote art’ in his 1982 presidential address to the American Society for Aesthetics. The concept has not drawn much notice since—although individual remote arts, such as palaeolithic art and the artistic practices of subaltern cultures, have enjoyed their fair share of attention from aestheticians. This paper explores what unites some artistic practices under the banner of remote art, arguing that remoteness is primarily a matter of some audience’s epistemic distance from a work’s context of creation. (...) I introduce palaeoart—the depiction of extinct prehistoric fauna and flora, especially from the Mesozoic—as a paradigmatic case of remote art, showing that its remoteness is secured both by the deceptively rich cognitive load required for its creation and appreciation, and by its existence at the margins of the institutional artworld, which ensures that this cognitive loading is largely obscured. Too often, remote art is not just inscrutable, it is invisible to us. (shrink)

The question of how we should engage with a philosopher’s racial thought is of particular importance when considering Kant, who can be viewed as particularly representative of Enlightenment philosophy. In this article I argue that we should take a stance of deep acknowledgment when considering Kant’s work both inside and outside the classroom. Taking a stance of deep acknowledgment should be understood as 1) taking Kant’s racial thought to be reflective of his moral character, 2) Kant being accountable for his (...) racial thought and 3) being willing to consider the possibility that Kant’s racial thought is consistent with and inextricable from his moral philosophy. Alternative forms of engaging with Kant’s racial work have either moral or pedagogical failings, which range from simply teaching the history of philosophy uncritically to outright deception. A stance of deep acknowledgement will allow philosophers to understand how Kant’s racial thought interacts with his moral philosophy and allow instructors to teach philosophy in a historically contextualized approach so as to not alienate students whose demographic was disparaged by Kant. (shrink)

The denial of voting rights to certain types of persons continues to be a moral problem of practical significance. The disenfranchisement of persons with mental impairments, minors, noncitizen residents, nonresident citizens, and criminal offenders is a matter of controversy. This book makes a contribution to this largely neglected yet key topic.

In whose voice does the criminal law speak, and why does it matter? Miriam Gur-Arye argues that the answer to the first question depends on the kind of duty violated by the crime at issue. In some cases (say, election fraud or tax evasion), the criminal law speaks in the voice of the polity—but in other cases (say, murder or rape), it speaks in the voice of human beings. Or so argues Gur-Ayre. Not surprisingly, perhaps, a lot depends on what (...) one means by the voice of the criminal law. In this paper, I defend two related arguments. First, the criminal law typically claims to speak in the voice of the polity, even if, in practice, it often fails to do so. Second, where the criminal law does speak in the voice of the polity, its doing so can contribute to its own justification. (shrink)

At Outlines of Pyrrhonism (PH) 2.227–8, Sextus Empiricus argues that certain entities which his adversaries hold to be one and the same for different individuals are in fact not. This he does by, among other things, considering the truth-value of sentences of which the subject is a common noun, thereby drawing an interesting connection between metaphysics and semantics. In this article, I provide a careful analysis of Sextus’ arguments at PH 2.227–8 and explore the origins and limits of such a (...) connection. In particular, I argue that Sextus’ argument at PH 2.227 probably reflects a Stoic argument against Aristotelian essences, thereby relying on specifically Stoic doctrines about universals and common nouns, whereas his next argument at PH 2.228 targets accidents. If this is true, it follows that the overall structure of PH 2.227–8 fits well with the typically Aristotelian distinction between essence and accident. (shrink)

Comment Bachelard, fils d'un cordonnier, professeur de physique et chimie, a-t-il pu devenir cet humaniste aussi savant que philosophe, aussi penseur que poète? Il n'a pas emprunté les chemins balisés, ceux des élites universitaires et culturelles. Il a contrarié les pronostics et les conventions. Il s'est adjugé contre vents et marées le droit de penser par lui-même en bousculant les frontières des savoirs et de la culture et en dérangeant les us et coutumes établis. "Un ouvrage aussi lumineux que la (...) destinée et l'oeuvre de Gaston Bachelard. Au plus près de sa vie et de sa pensée". (Philippe Meirieu). (shrink)

This article compares the ‘enfranchisement lottery’, a novel method for allocating the right to vote, with universal suffrage. The comparison is conducted exclusively on the basis of the expected consequences of the two systems. Each scheme seems to have a relative advantage. On the one hand, the enfranchisement lottery would create a better informed electorate and thus improve the quality of electoral outcomes. On the other hand, universal suffrage is more likely to ensure that elections are seen to be fair, (...) which is important for political stability. This article concludes that, on balance, universal suffrage is prima facie superior to the enfranchisement lottery. Yet the analysis shows that the instrumental case for the ‘one person, one vote’ principle is less conclusive than democratic theorists usually suppose. (shrink)

In 1976 Raymond Williams commented, ‘Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language.’ Such implied difficulty has not prevented Bloomsbury Academic, since the 2000s, from publishing around forty series of their well-produced and generously illustrated Cultural Histories, with, according to their website, a further fifty in progress. Each series contains six volumes, each book covering, in theory, the same chronological period (antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the age of empire and (...) the modern age), though there is some variation depending on precise topic. The idea is that one can use these books not only to read ‘horizontally’ about a subject across time, but also ‘vertically’ through different subjects in the same period – a idea made easier by the e-texts of the series on Bloomsbury's website. (shrink)

Emmanuel Levinas’s work on the ethical responsibility of the face-to-face relation offers an illuminating context or clearing within which we might better appreciate the work of Simone Weil. Levinas’s subjectivity of the hostage, the one who is responsible for the other before being responsible for the self, provides us with a way of re-encountering the categories of gravity and grace invoked in Weil’s original account. In this paper I explore the terrain between these thinkers by raising the question of eating (...) as, in part, an ethical act. Weil’s conception of grace refers to the state of decreation in which the utter humility of the self moves toward a kind of disintegration and weightlessness. This weightlessness, which Weil contrasts to the gravity of terrestrial weight, might be thought of in terms of the subject’s fundamental responsibility for the other, especially in terms of the injunction “Thou shalt neither kill nor take the food of thy neighbour.” Taking the place of the other, taking the food from the mouth of the other, is the ethical dilemma facing the subject as hostage and an elaboration of this situation may provide us with steps toward a radical questioning of anorexia as—at least inpart—an ethical rather than purely medical condition. (shrink)

This article advances three claims. The first is that the standard instrumentalist case for minimal age and sanity requirements for voting is weak and inconclusive in such a way that the evaluation of such requirements should be made exclusively on the basis of procedural fairness considerations. The second claim is that fairness requires the inclusion of all and only those persons who have the franchise capacity: the minimum necessary cognitive and moral powers to experience the benefits of enfranchisement. The third (...) and final claim is that current age and sanity prerequisites for voting in most places fail to comply with the demands of fairness and ought to be revised. (shrink)

Este artículo supone una aproximación a la práctica de la pintura como medio privilegiado para suspender nuestra habitual reducción de lo visible al mundo predeterminado de las categorías y funcionalidades, potenciando la apertura de una mirada atenta al aparecerse mismo de las cosas. A partir de la correspondencia entre autor y espectador a través de una mirada formadora, buscamos reivindicar la experiencia estética del mundo para tomar consciencia de nuestra relación sensible con lo observado en su desnuda extrañeza, donde nuestro (...) papel no es el de la dominación cognoscitiva, sino el de la participación y la diferencia. (shrink)

Nesse artigo, empreenderemos uma reflexão sobre a analítica do poder em Michel Foucault. Nossa intenção é percorrer a produção foucaultiana a partir de meados dos anos setenta até início dos anos oitenta, buscando compreender os deslocamentos ou “reviravoltas” pelos quais o conceito de poder sofreu ao longo do tempo. Procuraremos mostrar que é possível identificar três momentos na pesquisa de Foucault. Em primeiro lugar, ao tentar se afastar da tradicional compreensão jurídica-discursiva do poder, ele introduz uma análise inédita a respeito (...) da dinâmica do poder disciplinar e dos micropoderes que compõem o campo social. Pode-se considerar esse um deslocamento, de modo geral, em relação à tradição política ocidental. Com o curso Em defesa da sociedade encontramo-nos diante de uma modificação na compreensão do poder, ao identificá-lo como guerra ou luta. Por fim, com a introdução dos conceitos de biopoder/biopolítica, Foucault é levado a uma grande expansão de suas pesquisas, tematizando conceitos que não faziam parte de seu interesse até então, como, por exemplo, o conceito de Estado. É nesse contexto que o conceito de governo fará sua entrada nas reflexões de Foucault. Entendemos que o conceito de governo se configura como um refinamento e, igualmente, deixa mais ampla e complexa sua análise do poder a fim de dar conta do presente político. (shrink)

This article compares the ‘enfranchisement lottery’, a novel method for allocating the right to vote, with universal suffrage. The comparison is conducted exclusively on the basis of the expected consequences of the two systems. Each scheme seems to have a relative advantage. On the one hand, the enfranchisement lottery would create a better informed electorate and thus improve the quality of electoral outcomes. On the other hand, universal suffrage is more likely to ensure that elections are seen to be fair, (...) which is important for political stability. This article concludes that, on balance, universal suffrage is prima facie superior to the enfranchisement lottery. Yet the analysis shows that the instrumental case for the ‘one person, one vote’ principle is less conclusive than democratic theorists usually suppose. (shrink)