En el presente trabajo se indagará en la problemática de establecer los fines éticos de la institución educativa en el mundo contemporáneo. Para ello, se recogerán los aportes de dos autores contemporáneos, Judith Butler y Ernesto Laclau, en torno a las nociones de vulnerabilidad, cohabitación y medialidad y de hegemonía y significantes vacíos, respectivamente. Finalmente, en las conclusiones se pondrán en juego los conceptos señalados para pensar qué clase de vínculos éticos son posibles en las instituciones educativas.

I consider some of the objections that have been raised against a conceptualist solution to the “grounding problem”, I address in particular two objections that I call Conceptual Validity and Instantiation, and I attempt to answer them on behalf of the conceptualist. My response, in a nutshell, is that the first of these objections fails because it ascribes to the conceptualist some commitments that do not really follow from the view’s basic insight, while the second objection also fails because it (...) denies the conceptualist resources that the alternative positions are allowed to use. (shrink)

Passive frame theory attempts to illuminate what consciousness is, in mechanistic and functional terms; it does not address the “implementation” level of analysis (how neurons instantiate conscious states), an enigma for various disciplines. However, in response to the commentaries, we discuss how our framework provides clues regarding this enigma. In the framework, consciousness is passive albeit essential. Without consciousness, there would not be adaptive skeletomotor action.

Anjan Chakravartty sostiene que – tradicionalmente - el debate realismo-antirrealismo científico ha sido eminentemente epistémico, estando en juego si debemos comprometernos o no con la creencia de que nuestras mejores teorías científicas son verdaderas o aproximadamente verdaderas y sus términos centrales refieren exitosamente a los aspectos del mundo. Sin embargo, las versiones contemporáneas del realismo científico muestran una clara tendencia hacia la profundización de los aspectos metafísicos de la ciencia, a tal punto que una de las características más prominentes de (...) estas son tesis metafísicas sustanciales. Frente a esta situación, Chakravartty afirma que, más allá de ciertos compromisos metafísicos “básicos” - basados en la práctica científica -, el realista científico puede mantener una postura más pragmática - incluso escéptica - frente a los compromisos metafísicos más “profundos”, más propios de la metafísica de la ciencia que del debate que nos compete. El presente trabajo se propone demostrar que los argumentos esgrimidos por Chakravartty no logran justificar dicha postura pragmática y ofrece un ejemplo en el cual dicha postura resulta insostenible para el realista científico. (shrink)

Considero la propuesta reciente de Vicente, Fraser y Castroviejo según la cual hay (al menos) dos tipos distintos de lenguaje peyorativo en español, uno de los cuales (el que apela a términos neutros usados como insultos) no ha sido, según los autores, suficientemente apreciado y estudiado. Si bien concuerdo con la importancia de la distinción, sugiero una explicación alternativa a la que ellos dan del fenómeno de los términos neutros usados como insultos, que sugiere entenderlos como un caso particular de (...) uso metafórico, y del contenido peyorativo genérico transmitido, que apela a fenómenos generales de la interpretación de metáforas y de la acomodación de presuposiciones. (shrink)

This article seeks to contribute to the history of the idea of 'middle class', an idea that was fundamental to Aristotle's philosophy but disappeared from the repertoire of political thinking for centuries, re-emerging shortly before the French Revolution to be developed by Diderot and other French liberals. The modern notion of 'middle class' is compared with that of Aristotle, and the similarities between the two contexts of emergence -- the crisis of Ancient Greek democracy and that of the French Ancien (...) Régime -- are explored to cast new light on the meaning and political function of that idea, and on the metaphorical operations it performs. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Daniel Whiting has argued that there are no exclusionary reasons (i.e., second-order reasons not to act for a reason). The premise of the argument is what he calls the motivation constraint, according to which for the fact that p to be a reason for you to ϕ, it must be possible for you to ϕ for the reason that p. However, the argument goes, it is not possible to act (or not to act) for a reason (...) for a reason. Therefore, he concludes, there are no second-order reasons. In this paper, I shall argue that Whiting's argument ought to be rejected. Thus, I will argue that we should not accept the motivation constraint on which it is based. It is true that for the fact that p to be a reason for you to ϕ, it must be possible for you to ϕ guided in the right way by the consideration that p favours you ϕing. However, I shall argue that it is possible for exclusionary reasons to guide us in the right way, even if it not possible for us to not to ϕ for a reason for a reason. (shrink)

By promising, requesting and commanding we can give ourselves and each other reasons for acting as promised, requested, and commanded. Call this our capacity to give reasons robustly. According to the triggering account, we give reasons robustly simply by manipulating the factual circumstances in a way that triggers pre-existing reasons. Here I claim that we ought to reject the triggering account. By focusing on David Enoch’s sophisticated articulation of it, I argue that it is overinclusive; it cannot adequately distinguish between (...) threats and robust reason-giving; and it cannot adequately explain why epistemic reasons cannot be robustly given. I suggest that when we give reasons robustly, we do so directly, without explanatory intermediaries. (shrink)

Mark Greenberg argues that legal obligations are those moral obligations created by the actions of legal institutions in the legally proper way. Here I defend three main claims. First, I argue that, although very often misunderstood, Joseph Raz is also a defender of MITL. Secondly, I argue that while both Greenberg and Raz are committed to MITL, they disagree about the conditions under which a moral obligation can be said to be created in the legally proper way. Finally, I argue (...) that Raz’s variant of MITL is better than Greenberg’s. It rests on a more plausible account of authority and it avoids one of the crucial defects threatening Greenberg’s view, namely, its overinclusiveness. (shrink)

What is the primary function of consciousness in the nervous system? The answer to this question remains enigmatic, not so much because of a lack of relevant data, but because of the lack of a conceptual framework with which to interpret the data. To this end, we have developed Passive Frame Theory, an internally coherent framework that, from an action-based perspective, synthesizes empirically supported hypotheses from diverse fields of investigation. The theory proposes that the primary function of consciousness is well-circumscribed, (...) serving the 'somatic nervous system[. For this system, consciousness serves as a frame that constrains and directs skeletal muscle output, thereby yielding adaptive behavior. The mechanism by which consciousness achieves this is more counterintuitive, passive, and “low level” than the kinds of functions that theorists have previously attributed to consciousness. Passive frame theory begins to illuminate (a) what consciousness contributes to nervous function, (b) how consciousness achieves this function, and (c) the neuroanatomical substrates of conscious processes. Our untraditional, action-based perspective focuses on olfaction instead of on vision and is 'descriptive' (describing the products of nature as they evolved to be) rather than 'normative' (construing processes in terms of how they should function). Passive frame theory begins to isolate the neuroanatomical, cognitive-mechanistic, and representational (e.g., conscious contents) processes associated with consciousness. (shrink)

En la tesina hemos examinado el problema de la tolerancia religiosa, a partir de los escritos de Marsilio de Padua, Thomas Hobbes y John Locke. La elección de los pensadores modernos ha respondido a la relevancia de sus contribuciones para la discusión acerca del problema que supone la tolerancia religiosa en la Modernidad.1 La interpretación que hemos propuesto en relación con los aportes de Hobbes, ha permitido considerarlo como un autor que exhortó a la diversidad como una estrategia para la (...) regulación de la religión. En cuanto a Locke, hemos señalado su defensa de la tolerancia en nombre de la racionalidad, su reivindicación de la utilidad de una actitud tolerante como medio para preservar la coexistencia pacífica. Observamos que las contribuciones de ambos pensadores trascendieron ampliamente los horizontes de su tiempo para arribar a nuestros días con una vigencia sorprendente. De allí que estos autores se convierten en lecturas obligatorias sobre esta materia al intentar buscar posibles soluciones a uno de los problemas políticos más apremiantes. Sin embargo, es importante señalar que, en la historia del pensamiento político, el principio de tolerancia fue desarrollado, no solo por autores modernos, sino asimismo por autores medievales, entre ellos, Marsilio de Padua. Este pensador tuvo una influencia decisiva en el pensamiento filosófico-político de los teóricos modernos anteriormente mencionados a raíz de sus aportes a la discusión de la tolerancia, sus contribuciones en lo que se refiere a la circunscripción del poder pontificio, su crítica a la doctrina de la plenitudo potestatis papal y sus reflexiones en torno a la relación entre el poder temporal y espiritual. Por tal motivo, dedicamos un primer capítulo a presentar y analizar los argumentos filosóficos-políticos centrales de Marsilio de Padua, con el fin de señalar los alcances de este antecedente medieval en el desarrollo de la noción moderna del principio de tolerancia religiosa. En el segundo capítulo, examinamos los argumentos de Hobbes, e intentamos señalar que su preocupación central fue, no tanto la tolerancia religiosa, sino antes bien el problema de la regulación de la religión. En el tercer capítulo, pasamos revista de los aportes de Locke en lo que respecta a esta materia desde una perspectiva liberal. Por último, en el cuarto capítulo realizamos un estudio comparativo entre Marsilio y Hobbes, por un lado, y entre este último y Locke, por otro. (shrink)

pt. 1. Apuntes autobiográficos.--pt. 2. Páginas selectas.

This monograph discusses the importance of A. L. Hülsen's only book for the history of early German idealism. The Wissenschaftslehre is Fichte's "response" to the objections of Schulze-Aenesidemus to Reinhold's early Elementarphilosophie. Hülsen, a Fichtean thinker, restructured many aspects of Reinhold's system which Fichte left intact. In 1797, Fichte recognized Hülsen as a partner in the development of his system, thus acknowledging his contribution to the emergence of German idealism.

This paper discusses a set of arguments launched in Salomon Maimon’s 1800 Der moralische Skeptiker against Kant’s notion of the moral law. Apart from being an almost overlooked chapter in the history of post-Kantian ethics, this work is one in which Maimon takes issue with four related aspects of the ethical thesis and methodology presented in Kant’s second Kritik. At the core of the discussion is Maimon’s emphasis on a major incongruity in the correlation of Kant’s notions of theoretical and (...) practical reason: objectively valid statements in ethics should not qualitatively diverge from those in theoretical science. It is in this context that the paper discusses the late Maimonian thesis that Kant’s factual notion of the moral law cannot be reconciled with his notion of theoretical rigor. It also shows why, for Maimon, the highest principle of Kantian ethics should reveal itself to be theoretically untenable and dogmatic, and hence lead to skepticism. (shrink)

In our research, we examine the efforts made by Latin American business schools in the last decade to deliver a value-based education. We carry out a survey with a sample of faculty members and program directors from the whole region. We find that societal demands influenced the direction of managerial education toward values and social responsibility, changing contents and teaching methodologies in the process. Our research shows that the teaching of value-based contents—social responsibility, business ethics and environmental sustainability—has gained ground (...) in the region in the last decade, and that the emphasis on value-based contents goes hand-in-hand with a more intensive use of active learning methodologies—the case method in particular. From the perspective of respondents, the emphasis on active learning seems to correlate positively with observed changes in students’ civility. (shrink)

The literary genesis of Einbahnstraße by Walter Benjamin represents a very special case of the use of the procedures of surrealism in the philosophical-literary production of the author. The process of evolution of thinking that ended up in the writing of this piece is unveiled throughout the present analysis. This is a sign of both waiver and restart; the opening for a new productive dimension in the career of one of the most important —and misunderstood— philosophers of the 20th century. (...) More than enlightening a small master piece of philosophy from a literary perspective, or analyzing a small master piece of literature from the philosophy, what is being problematized here is the division, cultivated or figured throughout the years, between both disciplines. This work is intended to recover what is insoluble from the philosophical-literary labor of Walter Benjamin, besides tracing a possible reconfiguration for an interdisciplinary field of work to come up and contribute in the understanding of the problem called The Retreat of Metaphor by Jacques Derrida. (shrink)

¿Las sociedades latinoamericanas están mal gobernadas o son simplemente ingobernables? Tal es la incógnita que orienta este trabajo. En el primer caso, los déficits de gobernabilidad que se manifiestan en casi todo el continente serían adjudicables a una insuficiente provisión de gobierno; en el segundo, a una demanda sobredimensionada que superaría toda posibilidad de satisfacción. Este artículo analiza la provisión y demanda de gobierno en un país del Cono Sur, la República Argentina, a lo largo de los últimos 70 años.

Ante el padecimiento de un dolor social producido en un entorno signado por la exclusión, la juventud despliega distintas estrategias entre las que pueden ubicarse las autoagresiones corporales. Este art í culo analiza los hallazgos de un estudio socioeducativo que recupera narrativas del dolor en las experiencias estudiantiles. *Este artículo recoge los resultados de una investigación finalizada con sede en el Programa de Investigación “Transformaciones sociales, subjetividad y procesos educativos”, bajo la dirección de Carina V. Kaplan, del Instituto de Investigaciones (...) en Ciencias de la Educación, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad de Buenos Aires. Proyecto UBACyT N° 20020170100464BA – periodo 2018-2021: “Violencias, estigmatización y condición estudiantil. Una sociología de la educación sobre las emociones y los cuerpos”. (shrink)

Patagonia: Land of Giants captures the wonders of the Patagonian landscape in hundreds of stunning color photographs by famed Argentine nature photographer Daniel Rivademar.

The sensorimotor approach to perception addresses various aspects of perceptual experience, but not the subjectivity of intentional action. Conversely, the problem that current accounts of the sense of agency deal with is primarily one of subjectivity. But the proposed models, based on internal signal comparisons, arguably fail to make the transition from subpersonal computations to personal experience. In this paper we suggest an alternative direction towards explaining the sense of agency by braiding three theoretical strands: a world-involving, dynamical interpretation of (...) the sensorimotor approach, an enactive description of sensorimotor agency as contrasted with organic agency in general, and a dynamical theory of equilibration within and between sensorimotor schemes. On this new account, the sense of oneself as the author of one’s own actions corresponds to what we experience during the ongoing adventure of establishing, losing, and re-establishing meaningful interactions with the world. The meaningful relation between agent and world is given by the precarious constitution of sensorimotor agency as a self-asserting network of schemes and dispositions. Acts are owned as they adaptively assert the constitution of the agent. Thus, awareness for different aspects of agency experience, such as the initiation of action, the effort exerted in controlling it, or the achievement of the desired effect, can be accounted for by processes involved in maintaining the sensorimotor organization that enables these interactions with the world. We discuss these processes in detail from a non-representational, dynamical perspective and show how they cohere with the personal experience of agency. (shrink)

Embodied approaches in cognitive science hold that the body is crucial for cognition. What this claim amounts to, however, still remains unclear. This paper contributes to its clarification by confronting three ways of understanding embodiment—the sensorimotor approach, extended cognition and enactivism—with Locked-in syndrome. LIS is a case of severe global paralysis in which patients are unable to move and yet largely remain cognitively intact. We propose that LIS poses a challenge to embodied approaches to cognition requiring them to make explicit (...) the notion of embodiment they defend and its role for cognition. We argue that the sensorimotor and the extended functionalist approaches either fall short of accounting for cognition in LIS from an embodied perspective or do it too broadly by relegating the body only to a historical role. Enactivism conceives of the body as autonomous system and of cognition as sense-making. From this perspective embodiment is not equated with bodily movement but with forms of agency that do not disappear with body paralysis. Enactivism offers a clarifying perspective on embodiment and thus currently appears to be the framework in embodied cognition best suited to address the challenge posed by LIS. (shrink)

The thought of Pierre Klossowski, praised by Foucault, Blanchot, Deleuze, has been scarcely addressed by the philosophical community. We argue in this article that this is largely due to the frequent difficulty of understanding his work as a whole: both his artistic and literary production and his interpretations of Nietzsche or Sade form a coherent whole, whose significance has a deeply critical political scope. The notion of unproductive spending, which occupies a central place in Bataille's work, will be rearticulated in (...) Klossowski's reflections through the concepts of drive, phantasm, simulacrum, value and consumption. In The Living Currency, the political dimension of these terms appears clearly: relying on a rereading of Fourier and Sade, the author shows the extreme degree of deformation of what we assume as a reality in modern industrial society. In this sense, his thinking takes on special relevance today, as a revelation of the excess and unhingedness of a society in which production and consumption are reproduced without limit through the infinite reflections produced by the game between drives, ghosts and simulacra. (shrink)

There is a small but growing community of researchers spanning a spectrum of disciplines which are united in rejecting the still dominant computationalist paradigm in favor of the enactive approach. The framework of this approach is centered on a core set of ideas, such as autonomy, sense-making, emergence, embodiment, and experience. These concepts are finding novel applications in a diverse range of areas. One hot topic has been the establishment of an enactive approach to social interaction. The main purpose of (...) this paper is to serve as an advanced entry point into these recent developments. It accomplishes this task in a twofold manner: it provides a succinct synthesis of the most important core ideas and arguments in the theoretical framework of the enactive approach, and it uses this synthesis to refine the current enactive approach to social interaction. A new operational definition of social interaction is proposed which not only emphasizes the cognitive agency of the individuals and the irreducibility of the interaction process itself, but also the need for jointly co-regulated action. It is suggested that this revised conception of ‘socio-cognitive interaction’ may provide the necessary middle ground from which to understand the confluence of biological and cultural values in personal action. (shrink)

There is a small but growing community of researchers spanning a spectrum of disciplines which are united in rejecting the still dominant computationalist paradigm in favor of theenactive approach. The framework of this approach is centered on a core set of ideas, such as autonomy, sense-making, emergence, embodiment, and experience. These concepts are finding novel applications in a diverse range of areas. One hot topic has been the establishment of an enactive approach to social interaction. The main purpose of this (...) paper is to serve as an advanced entry point into these recent developments. It accomplishes this task in a twofold manner: it provides a succinct synthesis of the most important core ideas and arguments in the theoretical framework of the enactive approach, and it uses this synthesis to refine the current enactive approach to social interaction. A new operational definition of social interaction is proposed which not only emphasizes the cognitive agency of the individuals and the irreducibility of the interaction process itself, but also the need for jointly co-regulated action. It is suggested that this revised conception of ‘socio-cognitive interaction’ may provide the necessary middle ground from which to understand the confluence of biological and cultural values in personal action. (shrink)

This volume brings together this new knowledge in a single, concise source, covering most if not all of the basic questions regarding human action: What are the ...

The idea of public reason involves a standard of legitimacy that requires that laws and institutions be acceptable to all reasonable people, regardless of their conceptions of the good. Many philosophers have argued that public reason should be understood as an answer to the question of how to justify state coercion. However, some authors have criticized this traditional account because it overlooks noncoercive state actions that seem appropriate topics of public reason. More recently, some philosophers have defended the traditional account (...) against that objection. In this paper, I argue that these approaches cannot effectively deal with that objection and offer a different version of the traditional account that can do so. This version rests on the ideas of overlapping consensus and stability. According to this version, the point of public reason is preserving an overlapping consensus on a coercive system of laws and institutions and achieving a stable society. (shrink)

In this paper I first present Dan Korman’s (2015) recent defence of a conservative view as regards the existence and composition of material objects, and then go on to criticize some of his arguments. I will focus on two related issues: on the one hand, I argue that his defense of that kind of view by making use of what he calls “arguments from counterexamples” has some metaontological presuppositions that are indeed unacceptable for someone defending the revisionist views he opposes; (...) on the other hand, I also claim that his defence of the epistemic authority of the singular intuitions allegedly backing some key premisses in those arguments is also flawed, as it seems to be in tension with his realist commitments. (shrink)

There are reasons to believe that conventional obligations are impossible. Thus, it could be argued that for me to have an obligation to Φ in virtue of the fact that a convention so requires, it must be the case that I have a convention-independent obligation to do something else such that, given the existence of the convention, Φing is a way of doing just that. But, then, my obligation to Φ would not really be conventional at all. On closer inspection, (...) so-called conventional obligations turn out to be no more than a specification of what our nonconventional obligations require given the circumstances. In this paper, I shall argue that contra to what this argument suggests, there can be genuinely conventional obligations. To do so, I develop a second-personal account of conventional obligations, according to which obligations are grounded by conventions in virtue of an explanation that does not follow the indicated pattern. (shrink)