In the last decades, there has been a far-reaching debate about whether reason is a natural power of the human animal or a socio-historical achievement. This paper brings out and criticizes two paradigmatic views of reason entangled in that dilemma: the substantive view which construes reason as a primitive power possessing the basic forms of intelligibility; and the derivative view which traces back reason to non-rational, natural-historic processes. I approach the issue by discussing how Aristotle addresses the underlying predicament in (...) Metaphysics Theta. The predicament persuades us to overdetermine or underdetermine our natural potentiality for reason because it ignores what I call Aristotle's main insight: the understanding from which rational capacities are exercised is acquired by undertaking appropriate activities. The measure of rational capacities is neither merely naturally determined nor merely socio-historically inherited but relies on the engagement with the things falling under the purview of the pertaining activities. We must recover this Aristotelian insight, I argue, to avoid succumbing to either the substantive or the derivative view of reason. (shrink)

In his Philosophy of Mind, Hegel treats human sensibility differently in the sections on anthropology, phenomenology, and psychology. With the recent revival of Hegel’s work, there has been a lively debate about how to understand the progression from more primitive to more sophisticated human capacities. This paper differentiates three influential readings to that effect – the animals-first, the emancipatory, and the rational-first reading – and argues that they risk misconstruing mental development as a transition from one category of capacities to (...) the other. The transition is rendered in terms of either accumulation, emancipation, or maturation. But this basic picture confuses the capacities characterizing us as a kind of animal, a kind of consciousness, and a conceptually self-conscious being. This paper explains how anthropology, phenomenology, and psychology articulate complementary, but irreducible categories of human capacities. The apparently more basic capacities are abstractable aspects of those that come later in the order of presentation. The distinct kinds of capacities do not stand separately on a three-step ladder of mental development but are aspects of one singular and synchronous development of the human mind. Their particular development is mutually dependent on each other but can be properly accounted for only in distinctive categorial terms. (shrink)

Considering the dialectical structure of tragic thought in classical philosophy, one can read Nietzsche’s conception of the tragic in a dialectical way. Reading Nietzsche\'s The Birth of Tragedy in this way is justified, as long as the Apollonian and Dionysian are understood as contrasting impulses who work together in their “reciprocal necessity”. Beginning of the fifth chapter of this book, however, there is a second design of the tragic experience; here Nietzsche emphasizes that Dionysian is the affirmative dimension of the (...) tragic. This non dialectical conception of tragic, as Nietzsche builds it along his work, stresses the non necessity to justify life, the affirmation of life as it is, without deploring and rebuilding it, and without giving it an alien meaning. This conception cancels the negativity which founds the dialectical conception of the tragic, in so far as suffering, vain, and finiteness are no longer seen as opposed to life and in need of an appoint justification: they belong to it. The philosophical task is to ask: of what does the tragic of an absolute affirmation of life consist of, if the dialectic contradiction is repealed. (shrink)

Moods are usually taken to be pre-intentional affective states that tune our experience and cognition. Moreover, moods are sometimes considered to not only accompany cognitive acts, but to be understanding phenomena themselves. The following paper examines the assumption that moods represent a specific interpretative skill. Based upon that view, the semantic content of moods seems to be self-determining and to elude conceptual articulation. By contrast, I defend the thesis that the alleged inarticulable intelligibility of affective experiences is possible only due (...) to its belonging to a comprehensive theoretical horizon. For that purpose, I first analyze Heidegger’s influential account on moods in Being and Time, in order to clarify his claim that moods have their own understanding. Although Heidegger asserts that attuned understanding becomes itself when it is interpreted, he nevertheless rejects conceptual unfolding as a legitimate disclosure of the intelligible content of moods. I amend Heidegger’s account by engaging Hegel’s approach to this topic in his Philosophy of Mind. In this text, Hegel argues that feelings cannot give an account of their purport by feeling alone. Affective states not only manifest the need and urge to express themselves, but they reach their full extent when their meaning is disclosed within the entirety of the mind. It may be the case that affective states cannot always be fully clarified, but, even within a non-cognitivist account of moods, their intelligibility requires our acquaintance with articulated understanding. (shrink)

This paper discusses Hegel's conception of self-consciousness in the fourth chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit. It argues that Hegel articulates self-consciousness as a living being's capacity to conceive of itself in light of the life-form it instantiates. I start by critically reassessing the prevalent readings of the Self-Consciousness chapter, each of which focuses on one of three constitutive aspects of self-consciousness: sociality, corporeality or practicality. Second, I reconstruct how the opening of the chapter aims to reveal that the initial (...) rift between the sensory and the conceptual capacities of consciousness is resolved by the unity of consciousness as a life-form. Third, I discuss the specification of this life-form as Geist and argue that, by introducing the notion of Geist, Hegel indicates that the generic capacity of the human being to conceive of itself in light of its life-form always particularizes itself in a conception of human life that determines a historic and social form of life. Fourth, I outline how the master-slave dialectic illustrates the interdependency between sensory and conceptual capacities. Hegel's tale undermines the assumption of a self-contained capacity for reason by displaying how conceptual capacities, actualized by a living being, rely from the outset on objective constraints. I conclude by contending that the Self-Consciousness chapter paves the way for the central role that the idea of life plays in the Logic in exemplifying the objectivity of the concept. (shrink)

Hegel und Heidegger teilen die Ansicht, dass das, was den Bedeutungsgehalt von Begriffen konstituiert, in ihrer unmittelbaren Verständlichkeit verborgen liegt. Dieser Gedanke bildet den Kern einer Konzeption der Negativität im Sinne einer Auffassung der Art und Weise, in der Sinn von Latenz geprägt ist. Hegel und Heidegger verstehen aber die Natur jener Latenz und das Verhältnis von Sinn und Begriff verschieden. Denn mit einer solchen Konzeption der Negativität ist die Frage verbunden, ob die Konstitution von Sinn begrifflich artikulierbar ist und (...) ob Sinn überhaupt begrifflich verfasst ist. Dieser Frage geht das Buch nach, indem es Hegel und Heidegger in ein Gespräch bringt, um den Stellenwert des begrifflichen Vermögens in der Konstitution und Artikulation von Sinn zu klären. Dabei wird eine Kritik an der Auffassung formuliert, dass die Quelle von Sinn nichtbegrifflich und unbegreiflich ist, und argumentiert, dass nur die begriffliche Artikulation von Bedeutungen die semantische Fülle der Welt verbürgt. (shrink)

All these extracts are linked by his general epistemology, especially his distinction between two types of knowledge: ‘paradisiac’ or Type 1, which is that of everyday awareness and the current methods, concepts and presuppositions of the sciences of nature and humanity, plus mathematics and philosophy, and accumulates in ‘plus knowledge’ and resolves problems in standard ways; and ‘Luciferican’ or Type 2, which opens up the ‘mysteries’ of new realms of reality which do not fit the current methods, concepts and presuppositions, (...) and so results in ‘minus’ knowledge, the awareness that there are things which at the moment we cannot understand. For these ‘mysteries’ new methods, concepts and presuppositions are required, which ‘abyssal’ categories can supply, ones below those we normally employ and may be aware of. It is part of man’s role in the cosmos to reveal such mysteries.. (shrink)

La Alianza de Dios con los hombres constituye lo esencial de la Revelación. El primer texto que menciona la Alianza es el relato de la Creación, y el segundo aparece en los Evangelios, cuando Jesús anuncia la Nueva Alianza en su sangre. Pero no son dos Alianzas, la Antigua y la Nueva, sino una y la misma.God´s Covenant with men contitutes the essence of Revelation. The first text to give account of a Covenant is the narration of Creation ant the (...) last one appears in the Gospels, when Jesus announces the New Covenant through his blood. Nevertheless, there are not two covenants, an Old one and a New one. In the Bible, the different narrations of covenants are a renewal of the unique Covenant. It´s man who is summoned to change his attitude in order to answer, always in a more profound way, to God´s call. (shrink)

L'éthique bachelardienne est une éthique simple, mais pas du tout simpliste : l'homme du théorème est complété par l'homme du poème. Mais si l'éthique est une direction de la pensée qui doit maîtriser notre avenir, la poétique est la source ontologique de cette pensée. C'est-à-dire, la liberté de rêver doit être à l'origine de la liberté créatrice de la pensée ou de l'homme des théorèmes. En fait, il ne s'agit pas d'une éthique fermée dans les modèles artificiels d'une pensée techniciste, (...) mais toujours d'une éthique soutenue, à l'origine, par une poétique de la pensée ouverte. (shrink)

The divisions that mark my subject are three. The first is that point where the world begins--where it appears from out of the mystery of non-being. The second lies somewhere between its progeny and its future--the times between beginnings and ends where we, the beneficiaries of our being-here, come together to sing a celebration of the wonder that it happened at all, and then intone the fear of its ending. The third division is a speculation on ends--our own and the (...) ending of the world. I use these divisions to locate a something that comes from nothing onto a historical tradition that imposes a value on the progression of that something, and so requires a judgment on all that has passed. I first discuss these through religious attempts to invest life and history with purpose--for they form the major explanatory traditions of Western culture and are a thematic source of much of its greatest art. I continue with an art-critical approach where themes of process and purpose are located in artworks through their stylistic histories and ambitions. I indicate how present art, when open to reconstitute such themes, could change the nature of today's efforts to give art polemical purposes, and so provide new reasons for its making. I conclude with some stories, unevenly biographical, partly fictional, which I offer as parables for the developed themes and their transformations. This last aim is to elucidate a view of art as providing specific symbols for a cosmology of beginning, living, and ending. (shrink)

The research on stem cell-based therapies has greatly expanded in recent years. Our text attempts to seek those religious and ethical challenges that stem cell therapy and research bring into debate. Our thesis is that bioethics can defend its principle without a religious background. We will develop our argumentation on three major points: firstly, a comparison between secular ethics and religious views will clarify why stem cell therapy and research are important from a scientific point of view, addressing the very (...) center of the human being; in our view, being based on secular society, bioethics can answer the challenges of stem cell therapy and research; secondly, following Hans Jonas' perspective on experimenting on humans, we seek to understand the philosophical guidance that sciences dealing with stem cell need; thirdly, we will map the ethical guidelines for clinical translational research that have been adopted by the International Society for Stem Cell Research. . (shrink)

Although David Mitrany’s international thought is not usually associated with the concept of the international anarchy, I argue that his analysis actually compares two forms of anarchical order. The first form is the order associated with the relations between states, while the second is his functional alternative to this order. The functional approach is anarchical in the sense that it remains an order without an orderer. In first analysing the dynamics and failings of the inter-state order, and then suggesting pragmatic (...) process-orientated solutions to those failings, I argue that Mitrany follows a similar approach to his classical realist contemporaries. (shrink)

As Roger Ariew shows, one of the most fascinating challenges for the authors trying to create a Cartesian complete course on philosophy was coming up with a Cartesian Logic based on the existing texts of the master. Were the few simple rules from the Discourse on Method the "logic" of Descartes? Were the Rules for the Direction of the Mind "logic"? How can we even have a logic without syllogism? When looking at the authors studied by Ariew one finds that (...) the best that they could come up was adding some Cartesian elements on what remains basically a traditional Aristotelian Logic. It seems that there was no Cartesian Logic after all.I want to show here that Cartesian Logic is something else, not exactly... (shrink)

This book is written for middle and high school students, for teachers and for those with a passion for math, containing 150+1 problems (which are followed by solutions) to make it more accessible to the reader. The last problem (150+1), a very interesting one, leaves some space for comments and generalizations. The book is a collaboration between a multi-awarded student at Romania’s National Mathematics Olympiad (Carina Maria Viespescu, student in year 10 at Liceul International of Informatics Bucuresti), a teacher from (...) Colegiul National “Fratii Buzesti” din Cravoia and prof. Dr. Emeritus Florentin Smarandache from the University of New Mexico. A couple of problems are proposed by colleagues, and their names indicated in footnotes. (shrink)

Wittgenstein accepts the linguistic hypothesis about science according which science is the corpus of significant propositions. The epistemological problem can be divided into the problem of demarcation and the problem of justification. The answer to the demarcation problem consists in a criterion for significant propositions. Wittgenstein proposes a syntactical criterion. A proposition has sense if it is composed of elementary propositions and logical operators. The domains that contain senseless propo- sitions must be excluded from the scientific field. Wittgenstein’s solution to (...) the justification problem consists in the hypothesis of identity between tautology and necessary truth. In this way, the logical decision methods may be extended to the epistemo- logical decision. Wittgenstein’s epistemological conclu- sion is that only mathematics and logic (but not physics) are justified, because their propositions are tautologies. (shrink)

Any religion has an ethical component. Thus, the examination of ethical problems is very important for religious studies. Consequentialism is an ethical doctrine according to which a fact is good only if it has good consequences. In order to avoid infinite regression, there is the need for a moral foundation in conformity with the criterion of goodness. The consequentialists proposed various criteria for goodness, such as pleasure, happiness or utility. Any fact will be judged as good only if its consequences (...) belong to the moral basis. The correctness of ethical judgments depends on the analysis of consequence relations. This study takes into account material and strict implication as representations of consequence. Both of them generate ethical paradoxes. If consequence is represented by material implication, according to the Manichean ethics, a fact is either good or bad; there are no neutral ethical facts. If consequence is analyzed by strict implication, the necessary facts will not have a moral value. The present study is to suggest an original solution to these paradoxes. (shrink)