El autor analiza las principales características del liberalismo mexicano del siglo XIX. A través de la historia, el liberalismo ha adoptado diversos rostros, tanto en la doctrina como en la política. Sin embargo, esto no impide la existencia de configuraciones y procesos políticos similares en épocas y países distintos. A pesar de su carácter anóma-lo, el liberalismo mexicano del siglo XIX no corresponde a un orden social y político único. Debido al predominio, entre otros factores, de poderes locales, de intermediarios (...) políticos, de la falta de recursos y a un sentido pobre de cohesión social, el liberalismo mexicano tuvo que adoptar, paradójicamente, un carácter revolucionario. (shrink)

"Every culture needs to appropriate the universal truth of human suffering," says Fernando Escalante, ". . . to give its own meaning to this suffering, so that human existence is bearable." Originally published in Spanish as La mirada de Dios: Estudios sobre la cultura del sufrimiento, this book is a remarkable study of the evolution of the culture of suffering and the different elements that constitute it, beginning with a reading of Rousseau and ending with the appearance of (...) the Shoah in the Western consciousness--"The memory endures, and this constitutes a fundamental transition for the Western conscience: we have witnessed." Drawing on writings from the Greeks to Cervantes, Voltaire to Nietzsche, and Freud to William James, Escalante combines his considerable knowledge of politics and political theory with a vast array of literary examples to arrive at an intellectual understanding of the history and meaning of suffering. His investigation encompasses the rise of popular politics, the role of messianism in modern nationalism, and the contemporary implications of the Shoah. This book will appeal to a wide audience: students of political theory, humanism, and philosophy, as well as the general reader interested in a glimpse into the mind of a highly original Latin American thinker. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Beyond Revisionism:The Bicentennial of Independence, the Early Republican Experience, and Intellectual History in Latin AmericaElías José PaltiLatin America's Revolution of Independence was an event of world-historical importance. Citizens of different regions simultaneously created new nation states and established republican systems of government. This occurred at a time when the very meaning of the notions of "nation" and "republic" remained ill-defined. In such a context, a number of debates naturally (...) emerged regarding the tenets of modern politics, and the kind of dilemmas and problems contained therein.Yet the assessment of the historical relevance of these disputes has been precluded by the teleological assumptions which have informed traditional approaches in the history of ideas. These assumptions have led historians to interpret these disputes as mere expressions of local prejudices that prevented the correct understanding of the true meaning of the modern liberal concept of representative democracy. According to this traditional view, the concerns of Latin American commentators were seen as "deviations" from the rational path of conceptual development and understanding. It was necessary to undermine this traditional teleological prejudice before the debates around these notions produced in Latin America in the nineteenth century could reveal their historical significance and become matters for systematic analysis. The rise of a "new intellectual history," insofar as it has [End Page 593] questioned the assumed rationality and logical consistency of the putative models and disclosed the contingent nature of their foundations, has opened the door to an entirely new universe of problems and issues for scholarly research in the field of Latin American politico-intellectual history.The great wave of new studies on the crisis of the Spanish and Portuguese empires and the emergence of new national states, triggered by the approach of the Bicentennial of Independence, has been greatly influenced by this new set of questions.1 Historians from different countries in Latin America have revisited that fundamental event, and have sought to revise established perspectives in the field. This has made room for the development of a self-defined "revisionist" position. However, what is to be revised has not always been clear.The revisionists seek to dislocate an epic narrative of independence as the epiphany of long-lasting struggles of oppressed nations to recover their rights to self-determination.2 They argue that the teleological, nationalistic biases of traditional approaches led their authors to see as already present at the point of departure an entity (the nation) which actually could be perceived only at the point of arrival. If understood in this way, however, the revisionists' contributions are hardly innovative. In the decade of the 1960s, a series of studies, propelled by the spread in Latin America of Marxist thought and social history, as well as by the increasing presence of American and European historians in the field, had already destabilized Manichean emplotments of the Revolution of Independence as a struggle between liberty and oppression.3 These studies introduced a number of nuances that questioned the objective basis of the states that emerged from the rupture of colonial ties. Instead, they demonstrated that the new states were the result of the contingent process of formation rather than its premise. [End Page 594] Yet it is not here that the profound transformation of the discipline has occurred. Revisionists do concentrate their criticism on the contents of nationalistic narratives, but leave untouched the theoretical premises on which these narratives rest. They fail to penetrate and undermine the sets of antinomies on which those teleological perspectives are grounded: enlightenment / romanticism; rationalism / nationalism; "liberty of the Modern" / "liberty of Ancient;" modernity / tradition; individualism / organicism, etc. In the following pages I will trace the origins of revisionism in Latin American, its contributions to the field of politico-intellectual history, and the kind of problems that it raises in turn.The Tradition of History of "Ideas" in Latin AmericaMany scholars consider Charles Hale to be the key figure in the emergence of the revisionist critique. As Fernando Escalante Gonzalbo remarks, for the case of Mexico (which has served as the exemplary case for the entire region): "Up to the moment Charles Hale came to intervene, we could recount to ourselves a delicious... (shrink)

This paper offers an account of observation from a realist view. Observation is considered here as a process of information gathering from the environment; the performance of which will be more or less succesfull depending on the theories underlying this process.

This paper offers an account of observation from a realist view. Observation is considered here as a process of information gathering from the environment; the performance of which will be more or less succesfull depending on the theories underlying this process.

Some recent forms of reliabilism, and the epistemic virtues theory, postulate a compromise between reflectivity and informational reliability. In this paper we present a model of epistemic normativity that makes compatible the reflective instance with the physical process of information gathering.The hard core of this proposal is a concept of metarepresentation that allows to represent both the content and the process of belief formation. This new concept is provided by the Recanati´s Principle of Iconicity. We propose this principle as a (...) basis for a more robust knowledge relationship than the considered ones in the clasical forms of reliabilism. (shrink)

Truth is an epistemological concept that sometimes is claimed to have explanatory strength. It is argued, within a realistic view about causality and explanation, that concepts must represent naturalistic properties in order to have explanatory power. The eliminativistic theories about truth fail to account the use of predicate “truth” in explanatory contexts. Many antirealistic explanations of truth are reconstructed in order to sustain that thesis. Specially, we focus on the minimalist theory of truth. As we argue, we cannot eliminate the (...) predicate “truth” in some of the most relevant contexts of science and daily life. (shrink)

El presente artículo debe su aparición a las puntuales catástrofes que agitan nuestro planeta y a las oportunidades que prestan para la creación de nuevos lazos éticos. Bajo el supuesto de que toda ética posibilista debe de acomodarse a las condiciones sociales de su aparición, el presente trabajo intentará estudiar cuáles son las condiciones de emergencia de las catástrofes en nuestras sociedades modernas avanzadas. Posteriormente, a la luz de dicho estudio, se analizarán algunas de las propuestas ético-políticas aducidas para nuestro (...) tiempo , con el fin de comprobar si son o no verosímiles. Finalmente, ante la intuición de su escasa verosimilitud, intentaremos establecer las bases para la creación de nuevas solidaridades, con la ayuda de la perspectiva post-humanista en ciencias sociales. (shrink)

This paper presents a possibilistic conception of technological artifacts facing technological determinism. Technological artifacts are considered points in a space of pragmatic possibilities determined by the abilities of different sociocultural aspects. The determination process of one possibility is the design of an artifact that comes true as long as the abilities are effective. A design is a process of creation at several levels of reality: material, functional, usefulness. At the same time, the idea of design may also include the social (...) participation of the community, which hereby collectively expresses its desires. This proposed alternative responds to determinism as well as to social constructivism. (shrink)

This paper analyses Edith Stein's thought in order to find out, particularly in the investigation the philosopher did about Thomas Aquinas, the metaphysical assumptions hidden in the phenomeno-logy. It tries to clarify in which way the steinian "realism of essence", based on a certain logical atomism, gives up the idealistic postulates of Husserl's philosophy.

Se puede hablar de Dios? Dios sólo se puede mostrar, según el Tractatus. La lectura de otras obras de Wittgenstein arroja nueva luz sobre el significado de tal proposición. El juego del lenguaje religioso, derivado de la interpretación de las Investigaciones Filosóficas abre nuevas posibilidades a la comprensión de nuestro hablar de Dios. El autor analiza, asimismo, la posibilidad de la creencia en la existencia de Dios desde el punto de vista del pensador de Cambridge.

In his pioneering work in the field of inductive inference, Gold (Inf Control 10:447–474, 1967) proved that a set containing all finite languages and at least one infinite language over the same fixed alphabet is not identifiable in the limit (learnable in the exact sense) from complete texts. Gold’s work paved the way for computational learning theories of language and has implications for two linguistically relevant classes in the Chomsky hierarchy (cf. Chomsky in Inf Control 2:137–167, 1959, Chomsky in Knowledge (...) of language: its nature, origin, and use, Praeger, 1986; Shieber in Linguist Philos 8:333–343, 1985; Heinz in Linguist Inq 41:623–661, 2010). Within that same framework, Angluin (Inf Control 45:117–135, 1980) provided a complete characterization for the learnability of language families. Mathematically, the concept of identification in the limit from that classical setting can be seen as the use of a particular type of metric for learning in the limit (Wharton in Inf Control 26:236–255, 1974). In this research note, I use Niyogi’s extended version of a theorem by Blum and Blum (Inf Control 28:125–155, 1975) on the existence of locking data sets to prove a necessary condition for learnability in the limit of any family of languages with the Gold property in any given metric. This recovers the most general version of Gold’s Theorem as a particular case. Moreover, when the language family is further assumed to contain all finite languages, the same condition also becomes sufficient for learnability in the limit. Finally, we discuss questions that are left open and outline a research program regarding language learnability in the limit from other input types and cognitive feasibility. (shrink)

Edward Nelson published in 1986 a book defending an extreme formalist view of mathematics according to which there is an impassable barrier in the totality of exponentiation. On the positive side, Nelson embarks on a program of investigating how much mathematics can be interpreted in Raphael Robinson's theory of arithmetic Q. In the shadow of this program, some very nice logical investigations and results were produced by a number of people, not only regarding what can be interpreted in Q but (...) also what cannot be so interpreted. We explain some of these results and rely on them to discuss Nelson's position. (shrink)

Finite-state methods are applied to determine the consequences of events, represented as strings of sets of fluents. Developed to flesh out events used in natural language semantics, the approach supports reasoning about action in AI, including the frame problem and inertia. Representational and inferential aspects of the approach are explored, centering on conciseness of language, context update and constraint application with bias.

Plato’s Meno offers important elements of his educational theory. This article begins with a brief introduction to this work, and then presents an analysis of several ideas that appear throughout it, with a special emphasis on those dealing directly or indirectly with the central theme of education and human communication. The article concludes with a summary of the work’s main arguments.

The theme of education occupies a special place in Aristotle’s thought. This article contributes various ideas concerning the theme of education and of what we are able to communicate, through a critical reading of one of Aristotle’s principal works, the Nicomachean Ethics.

En este texto abordamos la problemática de las fuentes existentes y sus metodologías de análisis para el estudio de las grandes revueltas de esclavos de la República romana. Nuestro objetivo consiste en dilucidar cuáles son los diferentes tipos de fuentes que disponemos y sus estados de conservación; señalar las dificultades y posibilidades heurísticas que presentan; y analizarlas desde un punto de vista historiográfico. Si bien la mayoría de ellas, y las literarias en su totalidad, provienen de la élite ciudadana, y, (...) en consecuencia, expresan el punto de vista de los vencedores, hostil a la revuelta servil, e implican parcialidad, distorsión y ocultamiento en el registro histórico, argumentamos que no conviene exagerar su sesgo como un factor limitante del conocimiento de los hechos. Pues, por una parte, resulta posible extraer de las fuentes narrativas información valiosa sobre los esclavos rebeldes; por otra, también se conservan algunas fuentes materiales elaboradas por estos últimos. Todo lo cual nos permite al menos vislumbrar la visión de los vencidos. (shrink)

El primer propósito de este artículo es considerar el fenómeno del pensamiento en Hannah Arendt. El segundo propósito es establecer en qué sentido, según esta autora, la actividad del pensamiento puede ser una condición contra la maldad. Como en su determinación del pensar Hannah Arendt se vuelve polémicamente contra todo intento por ver el pensar ya como un ejercicio intelectual, ya como una actividad puramente mental, ya como la fundación o prosecución de tradiciones de pensamiento, ya como el monopolio de (...) unos pocos, ya como la elaboración de doctrinas o sistemas…, el texto muestra subrepticiamente esta confrontación constante de Arendt con la tradición filosófica. Tal confrontación con la tradición filosófica tiene lugar al hilo de una conversación permanente con Sócrates, en cuyos diálogos advirtió Hannah Arendt un ejemplo inequívoco de la actividad del pensamiento. (shrink)

This article sets forth and discusses the Ithaca Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. Section 1 presents the standard formalism of quantum mechanics and the measurement problem. Section 2 sketches Everett's interpretation as a preamble to IIQM. Section 3 sets out IIQM's central claim: it is possible to make sense of quantum mechanics by taking as the proper subject of physics the correlations among subsystems. Section 4 introduces a theorem of quantum mechanics, the SSC theorem, which supports this claim. Section 5 contends (...) that at least two problems exist with IIQM, and one serious objection against it. Section 6 discusses a strategy based on relational probabilities to go around the objection. /// Este artículo presenta y discute la Interpretación de la Mecánica Cuántica de Ithaca. La sección 1 expone el formalismo estándar de la mecánica cuántica y el problema de la medición. La sección 2 bosqueja la interpretación de Everett como preámbulo a la IIQM. La sección 3 plantea la tesis central de la IIQM: es posible dar sentido a la mecánica cuántica tomando como sujeto propio de la física las correlaciones entre subsistemas. La sección 4 expone el teorema SSC de la mecánica cuántica que sustenta esta tesis. En la sección 5 se sostiene que existen al menos dos problemas con la IIQM, y una seria objeción en su contra. Para sortear esta objeción, la sección 6 discute una estrategia basada en probabilidades relacionales. (shrink)

Este artículo reseña: Francisco Javier ANSUÁTEGUI ROIG, Norme, giudici, Stato costituzionale. Frammenti di un modelo giuridico, G. Giappichelli Editore, Torino, 2020, 221 pp.

Este artigo objetiva apresentar os Conselhos de Políticas Públicas como instrumentos de aproximação da sociedade civil com o Estado. Busca-se debater se referidos institutos estão cumprindo de fato com sua função de efetivar o Estado Democrático de Direito. Para tanto, utilizou-se o método analítico-dedutivo, com enfoque em pesquisas bibliográficas e legislativas. Os conselhos, por serem instâncias formais na esfera pública, proporcionam a manifestação democrática por meio da participação ativa da sociedade no exercício de sua cidadania, conquanto seja necessária uma reconfiguração (...) da própria cultura participativa. (shrink)