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)

In two often neglected passages of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant submits that the Critique is a 'treatise' or a 'doctrine of method'. These passages are puzzling because the Critique is only cursorily concerned with identifying adequate procedures of argument for philosophy. In this book, Gabriele Gava argues that these passages point out that the Critique is the doctrine of method of metaphysics. Doctrines of method have the task of showing that a given science is indeed a science because (...) it possesses 'architectonic unity' – which happens when it realizes the 'idea' of a science. According to Gava's novel approach, the Critique establishes that metaphysics is capable of this unity, and his reading of the Critique from this perspective not only illuminates the central role of the Transcendental Doctrine of Method within it, but also clarifies the relationship between the different parts of the work. (shrink)

This edition of Marcel's inspiring Homo Viator has been updated to includle fifty-seven pages of new material available for the first time in English, making this the first English-language edition to conform to the standard French edition. Here, Christianity's foremost existentialist of the twentieth century gives us a prodigious personal insight on `man on the way' that will reinforce and commend our own pilgrimages in hope. "Homo Viator - "Homo Viator - or as Marcel calls him, `itinerate man' - is (...) an outstanding example of the philosophy concerned, not with technical problems, but with the urgent problems of man. Marcel talks to our condition, emphasizing our urgent need of hope, thus discovering beyond the lack of stability the values on which we may depend. "A subtle mind, a dramatist as well as a philosopher, close to the texture of human experience, he goes far beyond current platitudes to show that our Western tradition contains living truths that are as essential to our contemporary life as they were to our ancestors when they discovered them." - Eliseo Vivas "The theme of Marcel's Homo Viator is close to the center of all preoccupations: man in his pilgrim condition. With great virtuosity in the use of his own philosophical method, he probes into interpersonal relations and the threat to ethical values. Marcel excels here in his concrete analyses of the attitude of hope, the family community in its temporal and supratemporal aspects, and the forgotten virtue of personal fidelity." - James Collins. (shrink)

The history of Pythagoreanism is littered with different and incompatible interpretations. This observation directs this book towards a fundamentally historiographical rather than philological approach, setting out to reconstruct the way in which the tradition established Pythagoreanism s image.".

This edition of Marcel's inspiring Homo Viator has been updated to includle fifty-seven pages of new material available for the first time in English, making this the first English-language edition to conform to the standard French edition. Here, Christianity's foremost existentialist of the twentieth century gives us a prodigious personal insight on 'man on the way' that will reinforce and commend our own pilgrimages in hope. Book jacket.

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)

The central theme of this important book is that we are paying the price of an arrogance that refuses to recognize mystery. The author invites the reader to enter into the argument that he holds with himself on a great number of problems. Written in the early 1950s, Marcel's discussion of these topics are remarkably contemporary, e.g.: * Our crisis is a metaphysical, not merely social, one. * What a man is depends partly on what he thinks he is, and (...) a materialistic philosophy turns men into things. * Can a man be free except in a free country? * Stoicism is no longer a workable philosophy because today pressure can be put on the mind as well as on the body. * Technical progress is not evil in itself, but a technique is a means that, regarded as an end, can become either an idol or an excuse for self-idolatry. State control of scientific research, leading to a concentration on new means of destruction, is a calamity. * Fanaticism is an opinion that refuses to argue, and so the fanatic is an enemy of truth. * The kind of unification that science is bringing about today is really an ironing out of differences, but the only valuable kind of unity is one that implies a respect for differences. * We must beware of thinking in terms of great numbers and so blinding ourselves to the reality of individual suffering. Our philosophical approach to being is made possible only by our practical approach to our neighbor. * We must encourage the spirit of fraternity and distrust the kind of egalitarianism that is based on envy and resentment. * No man however humble should feel that he cannot spread the light among his friends. No easy solution is offered, but the author conveys his own faith that ultimately love and intelligence will triumph. (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)

The purpose of the conference "On Pythagoreanism", held in Brasilia in 2011, was to bring together leading scholars from all over the world to define the status quaestionis for the ever-increasing interest and research on Pythagoreanism in the 21st century. The papers included in this volume exemplify the variety of topics and approaches now being used to understand the polyhedral image of one of the most fascinating and long-lasting intellectual phenomena in Western history. Cornelli's paper opens the volume by charting (...) the course of Pythagorean studies over the past two centuries. The remaining contributions range chronologically from Pythagoras and the early Pythagoreans of the archaic period (6th-5th centuries BCE) through the classical, hellenistic and late antique periods, to the eighteenth century. Thematically they treat the connections of Pythagoreanism with Orphism and religion, with mathematics, metaphysics and epistemology and with politics and the Pythagorean way of life. (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)

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)

The goal of this paper is to provide an account of the role played by logic in the context of what Husserl names the “crisis of European sciences.” Presupposing the analyses offered in the Krisis, I look at Formale und Transzendentale Logik to demonstrate that the crisis of logic stems from the deviation of its original meaning as a “theory of science” and from its restriction to a mere “theoretical technique.” Through a comparison between Aristotelian syllogistic and modern logic, I (...) show why the modern discovery of the purely formal dimension of knowledge which makes possible such a mathematical technization is a positive achievement that hinders at the same time the disclosure of the truly philosophical nature of logic. The correct appraisal of this ambiguous phenomenon will explain why the rise of modern logic represents a decisive challenge for the success of Husserl’s late phenomenological project. (shrink)

In this chapter, I investigate a problem for Kant’s claim that metaphysics can reach the status of science. The problem arises when one considers Kant’s account of the “architectonic unity” of metaphysics in the Architectonic of Pure Reason. Attaining architectonic unity is a condition for becoming a science for any body of cognitions that purports to be such. This is achieved when the cognitions belonging to a science are systematically organized according to the “idea of reason” which lies at the (...) basis of that science. However, Kant suggests that nobody can ever legitimately claim to have matched the idea of the philosopher, where this appears to imply that nobody can justifiably claim that she has fully grasped the idea of metaphysics. This generates a problem. I suggest that when Kant claims that the idea of the philosopher must remain an ideal or an archetype, he has a particular conception of philosophy in mind, that is, philosophy as a doctrine of wisdom. According to this understanding, philosophy must provide an example of how one can become virtuous. However, this is only a partial solution to our problem, for reasons that will be illustrated. (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.