El presente trabajo aborda sumamente la cuestión de la demostrabilidad de la existencia de Dios en el pensamiento del beato Ramon Llull. El tema es un camino entre otros para poner de manifiesto la específica manera que tiene Llull de entender las relaciones entre la razón y la fe. La comparación con la misma problemática en la esfera del aristotelismo, sobre todo el tomista, sin constituirse en el núcleo central del trabajo, acaba de aclarar la singular coherencia de la constitución (...) interna del "intellectus fidei" luliano. (shrink)

Animal studies and biopolitics are two of the most dynamic areas of interdisciplinary scholarship, but until now, they have had little to say to each other. Bringing these two emergent areas of thought into direct conversation in _Before the Law_, Cary Wolfe fosters a new discussion about the status of nonhuman animals and the shared plight of humans and animals under biopolitics. Wolfe argues that the human­­­-animal distinction must be supplemented with the central distinction of biopolitics: the difference between those (...) animals that are members of a community and those that are deemed killable but not murderable. From this understanding, we can begin to make sense of the fact that this distinction prevails within both the human and animal domains and address such difficult issues as why we afford some animals unprecedented levels of care and recognition while subjecting others to unparalleled forms of brutality and exploitation. Engaging with many major figures in biopolitical thought—from Heidegger, Arendt, and Foucault to Agamben, Esposito, and Derrida—Wolfe explores how biopolitics can help us understand both the ethical and political dimensions of the current questions surrounding the rights of animals. (shrink)

Bringing these two emergent areas of thought into direct conversation in Before the Law, Cary Wolfe fosters a new discussion about the status of nonhuman animals and the shared plight of humans and animals under biopolitics.

In What Is Posthumanism? he carefully distinguishes posthumanism from transhumanism (the biotechnological enhancement of human beings) and narrow definitions of the posthuman as the hoped-for transcendence of materiality.

Las dificultades teóricas que obstaculizan la idea de una ética constitucional -- ¿constitucionalismo global o constitucionalismo cosmopolita? -- El constitucionalismo, entre el cosmopolitismo, el universalismo y el localismo del estado nación -- El estado constitucional de derecho (o Estado constitucional de derecho, social y ambiental) y los derechos sociales -- El impacto del consenso de Washington en el derecho social colombiano, y la respuesta social desde la movilización y desde los derechos -- Los derechos, un espacio de lucha y emancipación (...) -- La autocrítica a modo de conclusión. (shrink)

In Animal Rites, Cary Wolfe examines contemporary notions of humanism and ethics by reconstructing a little known but crucial underground tradition of theorizing the animal from Wittgenstein, Cavell, and Lyotard to Lévinas, Derrida, ...

Phillip Cary argues that Augustine invented or created the concept of self as an inner space--as space into which one can enter and in which one can find God. This concept of inwardness, says Cary, has worked its way deeply into the intellectual heritage of the West and many Western individuals have experienced themselves as inner selves. After surveying the idea of inwardness in Augustine's predecessors, Cary offers a re-examination of Augustine's own writings, making the controversial point that in his (...) early writings Augustine appears to hold that the human soul is quite literally divine. Cary goes on to contend that the crucial Book 7 of the Confessions is not a historical report of Augustine's "conversion" experience, but rather an explanation of his intellectual development over time. (shrink)

Phenomenology’s reversal of naturalism hinges on the central claim that the worldly objects that we experience acquire their ontological solidity throughout series of intentional acts that are accomplished over the course of our subjective and intersubjective lives. This posture has historically given rise to realist critiques stating that such a “correlational” ontology undermines our capacity to formulate a coherent discourse on generative natural events that predate humans, such as the Big Bang, the Earth’s accretion, the formation of the oceans, etc. (...) In this paper, I articulate a Merleau-Pontian response to this problem. I establish a continuity between the temporality that is at play in the genesis of empirical bodies and the pre-objective tension that precedes perceptual givenness. I therefore suggest treating the past of nature as a transcendental past, always at work within our present experience, instead of an objective moment that would have determined in advance a causal chain of events. (shrink)

In the last decades the concept of objectivity has been criticized by the "new epistemologies". These criticisms favour the consolidation of relativist and subjective positions, which condition the objectivity of scientific knowledge to such an extent that it seems to be a goal impossible to achieve.

Patients with apraxia perform poorly when demonstrating how an object is used, particularly when pantomiming the action. However, these patients are able to accurately identify, and to pick up and move objects, demonstrating intact ventral and dorsal stream visuomotor processing. Appropriate object manipulation for skilled use is thought to rely on integration of known and visible object properties associated with ‘ventro-dorsal’ stream neural processes. In apraxia, it has been suggested that stored object knowledge from the ventral stream may be less (...) readily available to incorporate into the action plan, leading to an over-reliance on the objects’ visual affordances in object-directed motor behaviour. The current study examined grasping performance in left hemisphere stroke patients with (N = 3) and without (N = 9) apraxia, and in age-matched healthy control participants (N = 14), where participants repeatedly grasped novel cylindrical objects of varying weight distribution. Across two conditions, object weight distribution was indicated by either a memory-associated cue (object colour) or visual-spatial cue (visible dot over the weighted end). Participants were required to incorporate object-weight associations to effectively grasp and balance each object. Control groups appropriately adjusted their grasp according to each object’s weight distribution across each condition, whereas throughout the task two of the three apraxic patients performed poorly on both the memory-associated and visual-spatial cue conditions. A third apraxic patient seemed to compensate for these difficulties but still performed differently to control groups. Patients with apraxia performed normally on the neutral control condition when grasping the evenly weighted version. The pattern of behaviour in apraxic patients suggests impaired integration of visible and known object properties attributed to the ventro-dorsal stream: in learning to grasp the weighted object accurately, apraxic patients applied neither pure knowledge-based information (the memory-associated condition) nor higher-level information given in the visual-spatial cue condition. Disruption to ventro-dorsal stream predicts that apraxic patients will have difficulty learning to manipulate new objects on the basis of information other than low-level visual cues such as shape and size. (shrink)

Mid-Republican censors were bound by few formal restrictions in their lectiones of the Senate. So holds the scholarly communis opinio, at any rate, based primarily on Carolus Sigonius' emendation of Livy 23.23.6. This article shows Sigonius' emendation to be fatally flawed, however, and popular election to be a legal requirement for senatorial enrollment – and not just a social desideratum. This prerequisite is shown to originate in the fourth-century lex Ovinia, with ramifications for models of aristocratic rule at Rome, mid-Republican (...) political developments, and the curia itself. (shrink)

The fascination of Velasquez's painting Las Meninas stems largely from the ambiguous relationship between the painting as a whole, viewed by a single perceiver, and the variety of different perceptual viewpoints it invites. This situation resonates strongly with a central puzzle in the study of consciousness: the apparent unity of perceptual experience despite multiple sense modalities. Understanding more of this latter might help to explain the way we respond to the painting.

The paper by Cary Wolfe is an abridged translation of the chapter »Animal Studies«, Disciplinarity, and the (Post)Humanities from the monograph (Minnesota 2009). Wolfe discusses the relation between (trans-)disciplinarity and posthumanism with reference to concepts by Derrida, Foucault and Luhmann, allowing to consider a form of social communication in which human subjects still may participate, but no longer are their sovereign initiators. German Der Text von Cary Wolfe ist eine gekürzte Übersetzung des Kapitels »Animal Studies«, Disciplinarity, and the (Post)Humanities aus (...) der Monographie What is Posthumanism? (Minnesota 2009). Wolfe diskutiert die Beziehung zwischen (Trans-)Disziplinarität und Posthumanismus im Rückgriff auf Konzepte von Derrida, Foucault und Luhmann, die eine Form von gesellschaftlicher Kommunikation zu denken erlauben, an der menschliche Subjekte zwar noch teilhaben, aber deren souveräne Urheber sie nicht mehr sind. (shrink)

This essay is about the United States Supreme Court's discursive creation of two kinds of persons, one corporate the other criminal, during its 1886 term. The aim is to contrast the Supreme Court's construction of corporate personhood in County of Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad with its view of the criminal's body in Ex parte Royall, a habeas corpus case. The Court's purpose in deciding these two cases was to design a way to disperse newly emergent and conflicting interests (...) in particular directions within the judicial apparatus. The result is that both criminal and corporate bodies come to be understood through discourse, not outside of it. So the body which is being introduced can be described as a discursive body, not as an anatomical given. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Waiting for CriticismCary Howie (bio)1Critical AttentionIf it is often the case that so much of what we do, as writers in a certain idiom and profession, is to wait for criticism—in the form of peer reviews, book reviews, tenure reviews, and so many other kinds of review that one would not be wrong to characterize the profession as constitutively myopic, incapable of seeing anything without looking at it again—there (...) may nonetheless be another sense in which to understand this work of waiting, this waiting for work, that comes to be called, more often than not, critical. In other words, what would it mean to think criticism as a mode of taking (and making) time? What if one of the most crucial things we do when we read and write—but also, and still more importantly, when we look at or participate in the world—is to wait? This essay aims to give space, and time, to the question of critical attention, even as it will become clear that aiming is really the last thing anyone can be expected to do while they wait.What, then, could it mean to be critically attentive? That is to say, how might it be possible to give an account of those processes and states of suspension and expectation that lie within the moment or the sequence of critical attention? This question may seem less obvious—although there’s nothing wrong with the obvious—if we recall the resonance that attention has, in French or Italian for example, with certain words for waiting, with attente or attesa; if we take seriously how attending to something or someone may also be to wait for them. Critical attention, in this way, would put on hold—for a while if not necessarily forever—the evaluative and policing functions that so frequently attend what comes to be called critical; and it would do so precisely because it would take seriously what it means, and what it feels like, to attend.For Martin Seel, this is a specifically aesthetic question: “It is,” he says, near the beginning of his Aesthetics of Appearing, “a basic characteristic of all aesthetic relations that in them we take time for the moment” [20]. To take time for the moment, as Seel puts it, is also, I’d argue, to give time; to inscribe a kind of waiting at the heart of that moment, to respond, capaciously, to the objects or persons who are convoked there. This encounter—or what I’m tempted to call this convocation—is bound up, for Seel, with the complex presence of the encountered object: “Aesthetic perception,” he writes, “wants to take something in this light, in this movement, in this tone, in this roughness and coldness, in this weather and taste” [34]. This sequence—and notice how Seel returns to that deictic pronominal adjective “this” again and again—shows at least two things: the extent to which aesthetic perception’s mode of “taking” is no mere appropriation, given the drawn out, the literally distracted, effect of the object on the perceiver; and how this deictic disarray, caught up in “this” and “this” and “this” and “this,” is fed and fueled by a kind of wanting. Aesthetic perception, in other words, wants to take; but it ends up being taken. And when it is a matter of wanting—indeed, when it is a matter of being literally for the taking—the question and the encounter become more than just aesthetic. “Attention,” Simone Weil says, “consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty, [End Page 43] and ready to be penetrated by the object.”1 To wait for the world, for Weil, is to prepare to be entered by that (or perhaps another) world. The attentive position or disposition is also an erotic one. This preparation—about which more will be said in the second part of this essay—takes place not as prophylaxis but as seduction.I’d like, accordingly, to ask how we, singularly and in common, may be taken or, in Weil’s words, penetrated by the objects and persons we attend to; and how they, more often than not... (shrink)

Este artículo aborda la cuestión del ser humano en Descartes, entendido como unión de cuerpo y alma. Tras recorrer La pensée passive de Descartes de Marion, se propone la necesidad de reformular el concepto de sustancia, adecuándolo a la nueva filosofía, y se concluye que lo principal para Descartes consiste en presentar una concepción del ser humano acorde con la nueva modernidad científica y filosófica, y que se sitúe, también, dentro de la ortodoxia religiosa.

The correct legends of figures 1, 2, 5, 12, 13 and 14 read.

This paper focuses on the first iteration of Thrasymachus’ claim as reported in Book I of Plato’s Republic that ‘justice is the interest of the stronger’, namely, a ‘political’ interpretation, according to which ‘justice is the interest of the stronger party in each polis as established in the law’. The author contends that this argument is logically and rhetorically distinct from Thrasymachus’ subsequent restatements of his position in Republic I. The ‘political’ version of the Thrasymachean position enjoyed currency after the (...) composition of the Republic — and in a way that was not entirely negative. The current paper examines two cases of this reception: the first, in Plato’s own late work, the Laws, where he reengages with the Thrasymachean doctrine; the second, in the De republica Anglorum of Sir Thomas Smith, an early modern theorist who self-consciously defended Thrasymachus’ theory of justice. The paper’s immediate purpose is to suggest that Thrasymachus’ conception of ‘political’ justice, in particular, has far more coherence and power than the supposed ‘refutation’ of it in the Republic might leads us to believe. (shrink)

Sontag is certainly attracted to the aesthetic she describes but not so wholeheartedly as many readers have assumed.1 One of the ironies of her career has been her reputation as an enthusiast for works toward which she actually expresses considerable ambivalence. Many of her essays include overt advocacy, but it is rarely uncomplicated or uncompromised.2 Despite her reputation for partisanship, she more typically begins her essays by recounting an experience of alienation, annoyance, uncertainty, or shock. For example, she describes the (...) "happening" as an event "designed to tease and abuse the audience"3 and speaks of the "profoundly discouraging," even "hopeless," emotions of her first days in North Vietnam. She is, therefore, often motivated by her sense of difference from the event or object she describes. But it is not her wish merely to find ways of assimilating and dominating unpleasant or alien experience; while that is certainly one of the main impulses in her work - to control apparently impossible subjects, to exhilarate in the Nietzschean will to power over the text - her will to power is always countered by a need to credit and honor the text's otherness. Sontag never finally assumes an easy familiarity with her subject but rather draws its difficult and negating otherness ever closer to herself. Her work may be understood, in a way, as a search for a text that is utterly unknowable, a text that will always elude and contradict what we may say about it, a text, in short, that cannot be contaminated by critical rhetoric. That is a quality she has recently attributed to Artaud's work: "Like Sade and Reich, Artaud is relevant and understandable, a cultural monument, as long as one mainly refers to his ideas without reading much of his work. For anyone who reads Artaud through, he remains fiercely out of reach, an unassimilable voice and presence."4 · 1. There is, to be sure, an atmosphere of iconoclasm and intellectual challenge about Sontag's criticism, but it is not especially self-congratulatory. She is only interested in difficult topics or in topics whose difficulties have been repressed, partly because that context energizes her mind and partly, as she has written of Diane Arbus, because she wants "to violate her own innocence, to undermine her sense of being privileged" · 2. The exception is some of the early reviews included in Against Interpretation, where the polemical requirements of the occasion distinguish those brief judgments from her more careful and extended pieces.· 3. Sontag, Against Interpretation , p. 267.· 4. Sontag, "Artaud," Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings , p. lix. Cary Nelson teaches critical theory at the University of Illinois. He is the author of The Incarnate Word: Literature as Verbal Space and Our Last First Poets: Vision and History in Contemporary American Poetry and Reading Criticism: The Literary Status of Critical Discourse. (shrink)

The paper by Cary Wolfe is an abridged translation of the chapter »Animal Studies«, Disciplinarity, and the (Post)Humanities from the monograph (Minnesota 2009). Wolfe discusses the relation between (trans-)disciplinarity and posthumanism with reference to concepts by Derrida, Foucault and Luhmann, allowing to consider a form of social communication in which human subjects still may participate, but no longer are their sovereign initiators.

Text recycling, often called “self-plagiarism”, is the practice of reusing textual material from one’s prior documents in a new work. The practice presents a complex set of ethical and practical challenges to the scientific community, many of which have not been addressed in prior discourse on the subject. This essay identifies and discusses these factors in a systematic fashion, concluding with a new definition of text recycling that takes these factors into account. Topics include terminology, what is not text recycling, (...) factors affecting judgements about the appropriateness of text recycling, and visual materials. (shrink)

This response article argues that the question of “extrahuman relations” obtains on not just one level but two. It is not just a question of our relations to nonhuman forms of life—such as, for example, the embodiment and finitude we share with other beings. It's also a question of a second form of finitude that obtains in our prosthetic subjection to any semiotic system whatsoever that makes possible “our” concepts, “our” recognition and articulation of our “nonhuman relations” in the first (...) place. By examining the bird poems of Wallace Stevens, I demonstrate that with the question of extrahuman relations we are always talking, in other words, not about a thematics but about a technics of address. (shrink)

Resumen¿Es relevante la propuesta moral cartesiana? La influencia de Montaigne sobre Descartes se sitúa no sólo al inicio (como lo que debe ser superado) sino también al final de la filosofía cartesiana, porque la moral cartesiana recoge aspectos clave de la actitud vital que aparece en los Ensayos de Montaigne. El análisis de los textos cartesianos de la década de los 40, y en especial de Principios de la Filosofía, permite precisar la peculiaridad de la moral cartesiana, que sin abandonar (...) Montaigne apunta a Kant.Palabras claveDescartes, Filosofía Moral, Montaigne, Principios de la FilosofíaAbstractIs the Cartesian moral proposal relevant? Montaigne’s influence on Descartes stands at the beginning and end of Cartesian philosophy; at the beginning because it is in the epistemological field, which must be surpassed; at the end, because the Cartesian moral collects key aspects of the attitude towards life that appear in Montaigne’s Essays. The analysis of Principles of Philosophy, among other texts, allows us to specify the peculiarity of the Cartesian moral, which without moving away from Montaigne approaches Kant.KeYwordsDescartes, Moral Philosophy, Montaigne, Principles of Philosophy. (shrink)

Ari Aster’s 2019 folk horror film Midsommar, which enjoyed both critical and popular success, features a bright colour palette and an eerily playful tone alongside a dark narrative exploring complexities of grief, depression, and bad relationships. The remote Swedish community to which protagonist Dani, her boyfriend, and his friends travel for a mid-summer festival is designed around beautiful objects, collective experiences, and rituals that foreground communal emotions, all of which contrast the technologically mediated communications foregrounded at the film’s outset. In (...) fact, this community offers meticulously constructed antidotes to the loneliness of the modern world, and to Western ideals of masculine emotional distance…but at a cost. This paper examines the intersection of emotion, community, and gender in Midsommar, using the concept of affective design – usually associated with technology design – as well as work on group-based emotions, to interrogate the film’s vision of a community that challenges gender norms and the boundaries of emotional experience. Through the depiction of ingroup boundary-policing, stark contrasts between visions of masculinity, and lush visions of aesthetic experience and emotional release, Midsommar offers a series of convincing compensatory mechanisms that invite viewers, along with the main character, to temporarily compromise morality for the sake of belonging. (shrink)