La constatación de que nuestro universo está constituido de unos y los mismos elementos materiales en cualquier lugar en que podamos observarlo nos lleva directamente a la postulación de un único principio y causa del único proceso universal al que se debe cuanto existe. Y en ese trance parece inevitable preguntar: ¿cómo ha surgido Todo? Todo, aquí, significa cuanto hay; sin excepción alguna. Esta visión puramente física del Universo puede denominarse naturalismo universal, entendiendo el término naturalismo como traducción del término (...) aristotélico physis en su célebre definición. (shrink)

La cultura del agua debe ser vinculada de forma especial a las manifestaciones del patrimonio cultural intangible de los pueblos, como las tradiciones orales o escritas, la simbología o los rituales, que conforman lo que llamamos los Imaginarios del Agua. Estos deben ser analizados y deconstruidos a la luz de los nuevos paradigmas, como la hermenéutica y la ecocrítica. De este modo, la mitografía ayuda a perfilar el significado profundo de la cultura del agua ante las nuevas demandas medioambientales, educativas (...) y culturales del siglo XXI, en un contexto donde el agua ya no es solo un recurso estratégico, sino un bien cultural ligado al desarrollo local y a las políticas de sostenibilidad. Por ello, al conocer las tradiciones ancestrales y los imaginarios en torno al agua, y al sensibilizar a los alumnos con los valores plurales de estas manifestaciones culturales --que siempre van encaminados al respeto y al conocimiento del patrimonio natural y cultural--, contribuimos de forma decisiva a la gobernanza del agua y a la gestión sostenible y responsable de los recursos hídricos, pues sin duda el principal problema de la sostenibilidad será la educación de los ciudadanos. Water culture must be linked in a special way to expressions of intangible cultural heritage of peoples, such as oral or written traditions, symbols or rituals that make up what we call the imaginary water. They must be analyzed and deconstructed in the light of the new paradigms, such as hermeneutics and the ecocriticism. Thus, mythography helps shape the profound meaning of the culture of the water at the new environmental, educational and cultural demands of the 21st century, in a context where the water is not only a strategic resource but a cultural property linked to local development and sustainability policies. Therefore, to know the ancestral traditions and imaginaries in connection to water, and to educate students with the plural values of these cultural manifestations, --which always aimed to respect and knowledge of the natural and cultural heritage-- we contribute decisively to the governance of the water and the sustainable and responsible management of water resources then no doubt the main problem of sustainability will be the education of citizens. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to outline a thesis which in some ways attemts to retrieve the value of meaning as a constituent element of theories. It will be argued that theories possess in common a more or less explicit relational structure, but, at the same time, they possess a meaningful function by means of which they are instruments of knowledge or, rather, by means of which theories have the value ofknowledge in science. In conclusion, it will be suggested (...) that this approach to theories allows those with weak relational structure (social, historical theories, etc.) to be treated with a degree of adequacy by the philosophy of science. Likewise, it will be suggested that the method of semantic analysis linked to the theory of “possible worlds” could be fruitful for this purpose. (shrink)

In this article there is a criticism of the thesis that defines the Spanish political transition as a successful attempt to put an end to the "law of the pendulum" that had been governing our constitutional history. On the one hand, this thesis underestimates the conditions of the Spanish situation of 1978, marked by the transit between two worlds, the modern one that inherited and the emerging postmodern, which would become an unquestionable reality from 1989. In addition, the Spanish Constitution (...) of 1978 was drafted at a time when the political-normative conceptual assumptions of the dominant constitutional paradigm in Europe after World War II were declining. Likewise, the thesis ignores the specific spanish differential feature: the civil war of 1936-1939 and the subsequent rupture and radical separation of Spanish modernity into two distinct historical sections: one initiated with the French Revolution and culminated in the most absolute destruction of the pre-existing political and social order; and another that starts in 1939, since the construction of zero of a radically new pattern of society and culture, with which the Spaniards encountered in December 1975 when they assumed their full political protagonism in a situation unprecedented and completely devoid of precedents in our national constitutional tradition. (shrink)

Este artículo analiza las aportaciones que Eloy Rada hizo a los estudios leibnicianos a través de sus ediciones de textos de Leibniz y al analizar la confrontación entre Leibniz y los newtonianos: polémica sobre el origen del Cálculo y el Análisis Matemático a finales del siglo XVII y contraposición entre las teorías del espacio y el tiempo de Newton y Leibniz. Rada mostró que el sistema newtoniano tenía una fundamentación teológico-religiosa, que fue puesta en cuestión por el (...) sistema leibniciano de la armonía preestablecida, haciendo irreconciliables las posturas de ambos. Las divergencias, incluida la discusión sobre la fuerza de la gravedad, son consecuencia de esa contraposición metafísica y teológica, que afectaba a las raíces de la religión anglicana, tal y como se había conformado a partir del latitudinarismo de los filósofos de Cambridge, de Boyle y del propio Newton y su sistema de la gravitación universal. (shrink)

Colección de ensayos en memoria del profesor Eloy Rada García.

La muerte resulta problemática para la contemporaneidad. El existencialismo es una corriente filosófica que presenta la facticidad de la mortalidad como propia de la vida. El pensador Albert Camus articula los pilares fundamentales de su filosofía en torno a la experiencia de la muerte, que lleva al absurdo, del que debe partir la acción rebelde. En esta investigación se analizan algunas dinámicas que, pretendiendo huir de la muerte, solo han conseguido hacernos débiles frente a ella. Presentaremos a Sísifo y Rieux, (...) dos de los personajes de sus escritos, como aquellos paradigmas de conducta que pueden contribuir a hacernos más conscientes del absurdo y poder, de este modo, vivir, amar y luchar. (shrink)

This is a short introduction by the three authors, Gabriela Basterra, Rada Iveković and Boyan Manchev, to the issue of the French journal "Rue Descartes" (N. 67), titled "Quel sujet du politique?" or approximately, "Who is the subject (or Who is the agency) of the political [dimension]?". The question is posed in the specific political and philosophical context of 2008, and is dealt with through History and Political philosophy.

The truth of a statement depends on the world in two ways: what the statement says is true if the world is as the statement says it is; on the other hand, what the expressions in the statement mean depends on what the world is like (for instance, on what conventions are in place). Each of these two kinds of dependence of truth on the world corresponds to one of the dimensions on the two-dimensional semantic framework, developed in the 1970’ (...) in the work of Evans, Kaplan, Kripke and Stalnaker. The introduction provides a systematic overview of the framework, the ideas of its earlier originators, recent developments and criticism. Finally, it gives a brief overview over the contributions to the volume. (shrink)

What place, if any, does love have in Kantian ethics? This chapter is divided into three parts. First, I discuss Kant’s own account of moral versus non-moral love as found throughout his various writings and show how this closely parallels his account of moral versus non-moral friendship. Second, I discuss contemporary Kantian accounts of both friendship and love, highlighting how they go beyond, and in some ways seem to significantly improve upon, Kant’s own views via their appeal to Kant’s Formula (...) of Humanity. Lastly, I discuss the overall merits of what I call ‘Kantian moral love’. I argue that while Kantian moral love might rightly identify, from the moral point of view, how we ought to act and think when loving other people, it fails to provide a complete account of love, crucially leaving out certain key elements from the wide range of loving relationships we find ourselves in, especially romantic love. That is, while Kantian moral love might successfully identify a morally ideal way to love other people, it falls short of capturing the full essence of love—mainly because love is not simply a moral affair but also a matter of the heart. (shrink)

The general concept of a trope – that of a non-shareable character-grounder – admits of a distinction between modifier tropes and module tropes. Roughly, a module trope is self-exemplifying whereas a modifier trope is not. This distinction has wide-ranging implications. Modifier tropes are uniquely eligible to be powers and fundamental determinables, whereas module tropes are uniquely eligible to play a direct role in perception and causation. Moreover, each type of trope theory faces unique challenges concerning character- grounding. Modifier trope theory (...) faces challenges concerning the inscrutability of predication and the incompatibility with bundle theory, whereas module trope theory faces challenges concerning character overdetermination and a collapse into austere nominalism. These differences indicate that the modifier/module distinction divides the advantages of general trope theory and thus presents the trope theorist with a pivotal choice. (shrink)

This review note surveys some important aspects of a recent publication by Amos Edelheit, A Philosopher at the Crossroads: Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s Encounter with Scholastic Philosophy. While focus over the last decades has been placed on Pico’s thought in relation to Jewish Kabbalah and mysticism, Edelheit hopes to emphasize the importance of the scholastic tradition (or, rather, the pluriform and various tradition of late medieval and Renaissance scholasticism) in Pico’s thought, and the ways in which this intellectual context places (...) this unique Renaissance thinker at a sort of ‘crossroads’. Beyond providing a brief overview of the three main parts of the text, this note examines more closely Edelheit’s study of Pico’s 900 Theses and the methodological approach which involves a reconstruction of the dialectical context for each thesis. The Latin scholastics are real conversational partners for Pico: he is versed in the 13th-century scholastic sources, is certainly familiar with contemporaneous scholastic thought, and is able to employ scholastic methods and terminology within his wider philosophical project. While scholastic philosophy was very much alive at the end of the fifteenth century, Pico’s new and inclusive approach to philosophy and the history of philosophy, never eschewing the Latin masters, departs from both scholastic and humanist trends. (shrink)