For the Dalai Lama it is kindness that makes the world go round. Kindness at the heart of human nature, and it is kindness that is the essential component to developing healthy bodies, minds, and spirits. It is the glue that holds society together. Its absence results in isolation, dislocation, and suffering."--back cover.

Simple and accessible wisdom from His Holiness the Dalai Lama on how we stay in the moment in the midst of the demands and stresses of everyday life. Be Here includes discussions of the Buddhist concepts of attachment, emptiness, compassion, love, and resentment and how our sense of the past and the future affect our ability to be in the present. Many Buddhist practices and meditations focus on "being in the present moment." But what does that really mean? What does (...) it mean to be here now? Attachment. Emptiness. Compassion. You will hear the Dalai Lama present these three words again and again in this book of wisdom designed to move us toward the goal of "being here." He speaks of attachment - to things, to people, to memory, to feelings of anger and resentment, to future goals. Being attached means we are not here now; we are living through wherever our attachment takes us. Does emptiness mean we let go of everything? Even the present thoughts in our minds? How does understanding emptiness help us to be here now? The Dalai Lama is clear: if we are not educated about past history and if we have no sense of the future, then how can be possibly have a "present"? When we are here, we can practice compassion in the present moment and focus on social justice now. When we are here, we are no longer attached to our past, no longer stressed about the future, no longer tethered to suffering. Being here means we find happiness, peace, and the fullness of life. (shrink)

Articles on Islamic philosophy and science.

Healing Emotions is the record of an extraordinary series of encounters between the Dalai Lama and prominent Western psychologists, physicians, and meditation teachers that sheds new light on the mind-body connection. Edited by Pulitzer Prize nominee and best-selling author Daniel Goleman.

Organized by the Mind and Life Institute, this discussion addresses some of the most troublesome questions that have driven a wedge between Western science and religion. Where Buddhism Meets Neuroscience resulted from meetings of the Dalai Lama and a group of eminent neuroscientists and psychiatrists. Is the mind an ephemeral side effect of the brain's physical processes? Are there forms of consciousness so subtle that science has not yet identified them? How does consciousness happen? The Dalai Lama's incisive, open-minded approach (...) both challenges and offers inspiration to Western scientists. The book consists primarily of dialogue and intense, frank conversations between the Dalai Lama and participants. Questions of perception, dualism, categories of consciousness, memory, dreams, the nature of mental illness, and the mind during and after death are all explored. (shrink)

The aim of the present paper is to provide a logical reconstruction of the Marxian Theory of Value. This reconstruction is based upon the concept of abstract as opposed to that of homogeneous labor. Abstract labour is a social relation that holds in a market economy, (at least) whenever the profit rate is uniform; it consists in a comparison of the different labors through the exchange relationship. The author proved in a different place (see García de la Sienra, 1987) that (...) there exists a mathematical representation of abstract labor which is unique up to similarity transformations. The existence of this function — which is none other than the value function — is the basis of the present axiomatization, which includes detailed reconstructions of two of the most important models of the theory. (shrink)

The aim of the present paper is to attack some of the conceptual problems that arise when the framework of mathematical learning theory is applied to the description of the behavior of the firm, in setting prices and production quotas, in a competitive market. The goal is to depict the process by which the firm fixes prices and production quotas as a stochastic learning process. A solution to such problems is proposed which is based on statistical-decision concepts. The conceptualization of (...) the behavior of the firm by means of concepts pertaining to mathematical learning theory gives rise to certain mathematical problems, which are formulated here in rather precise terms. (shrink)

In moral and political philosophy, collective obligations are promising “gap-stoppers” when we find that we need to assert some obligation, but can not plausibly ascribe this obligation to individual agents. Most notably, Bill Wringe and Jesse Tomalty discuss whether the obligations that correspond to socio-economic human rights are held by states or even by humankind at large. The present paper aims to provide a missing piece for these discussions, namely an account of the conditions under which obligations can apply to (...) loose collections of agents that do not qualify as collective agents in their own right. I first explain the notion of joint obligations of loose collections of agents as opposed to collective obligations of collections of agents that are collective agents in their own right, and argue that the conditions under which agents can jointly have obligations are the conditions under which they are jointly able to do what is required. I then build on Virginia Held’s seminal work on the moral responsibility of “random collections” to develop such conditions for joint ability. My discussion shows that collections of individuals can more easily be subject to moral obligations than previously assumed. It also shows that putative joint obligations need to be carefully time-indexed, and that it is largely an empirical question whether a given collection can be subject to a moral obligation to perform a given joint action at a particular time. (shrink)

Esta obra ofrece un sumario de las partes capitales en la ciencia del Derecho, haciendo destacar los principios que informan el Derecho todo y son el fundamento de su unidad ideal.

When several agents together produce suboptimal outcomes, yet no individual could have made a difference for the better, Act Consequentialism counterintuitively judges that all involved agents act rightly. I address this problem by supplementing Act Consequentialism with a requirement of modal robustness: Agents not only ought to produce best consequences in the actual world, but they also ought to be such that they would act optimally in certain counterfactual scenarios. I interpret this Modally Robust Act Consequentialism as Act Consequentialism plus (...) a requirement of moral virtue, namely, to reliably act rightly and to act rightly for the right reasons. (shrink)

Este artículo pretende mostrar la convivencia de dos estructuras de pensamiento en la escolástica española y, especialmente, en Suárez. Vitoria presenta una visión comunitaria del orden internacional y sus enseñanzas serán transmitidas a Suárez, quien, al contrario, presenta una visión societaria del orden internacional. Esta diferencia no es una casualidad, sino un auténtico cambio de paradigma en el sabio granadino, que hace de él un autor más próximo a la modernidad que a la tradición escolástica. Gracias a un estudio comparado (...) mostraremos el punto de inflexión que supone Suárez en el tránsito hacia la modernidad y su idea de un orden mundial fundado en una sociedad de Estados. (shrink)

The life of Saint Teresa of Jesus, the most famous mystic of sixteenth-century Spain, was characterized by recurrent visions and states of ecstasy. In this paper, we examine social components related to Teresa’s personal crises and the historical conditions of her times, factors that must be taken into account to understand these unusual forms of experience and behavior. Many of these factors (e.g., increasing individualism and reflexivity) are precursors of the condition of modern times. Indeed, certain parallels can be observed (...) between Saint Teresa and certain present-day psychopathological disorders. The analogy should not, however, be carried too far. Religion played a particularly crucial role in Teresa’s cultural context; as a result, it would be misleading to view her mystical experiences as resulting from a mental disorder. (shrink)

In the Platonic dialogue that bears his name Protagoras,1 in a myth and in a logos positively affirms the absolute character of universal moral values, such as force themselves upon all men; this makes one think that the famous man-measure dictum was subservient to the ends that the sophist had in view as a teacher of areté. Indeed, his condemnation in that dialogue of the sophists who, like Hippias, included in their teaching mathematical and naturalistic studies , must be connected (...) with the criticism of mathematics reported by an Aristotelian text.2 These studies, that is to say purely theoretic disciplines, were considered by Protagoras not only useless for the spiritual formation of men and citizens, but also void of any certitude and objectivity whatever.3 We feel therefore allowed to suggest that also the man-measure principle had to perform an office of the same kind: to show that natural philosophy could not yield an objective knowledge of φ?σις which formed its object, because such knowledge is denied to man. Mistrust of the general conceptions of the cosmology of physiologists was widely spread at that time, and the authors of some medical treatises of the Hippocratean corpus used it to justify the construction of a discipline founded on the study of empirical materials interpreted rationally and not with the general hypotheses void of certainty. (shrink)

Hasta ahora, las discusiones sobre el multiculturalismo se han presentado como una revisión progresista de los límites del liberalismo en cuanto a políticas de inclusión y reconocimiento. Este artículo plantea que la recepción del multiculturalismo en Latinoamérica, si no quiere ser puramente procedimental, puede plantearse como una deconstrucción de los conceptos de Sujeto y Estado. Para ello hemos adoptado el punto de vista de comunidades étnicamente diferenciadas (que Deleuze y Guattari han categorizado como máquinas territoriales), de modo que sus relaciones (...) de poder y sus procesos de subjetivación puedan ser vistos como expresión de lo intraestatal y lo preindividual, respectivamente. Aunque esta diferencia de perspectiva se plantea, básicamente, como un diferendo entre teorías, al final se sugieren criterios para un debate más amplio sobre las relaciones entre Estado y capitalismo alrededor de las condiciones de existencia de las sociedades premodernas. (shrink)

This article explores the sources of the concept of difference advanced by Deleuze and, in particular, the idea of a non-phenomenological difference, understood as internal difference. In the first part, Deleuze’s appropriation of the concepts of memory and duration proposed by Bergson is explored, as if it corresponded with a response to Heidegger’s systematization of Nietzsche, thus opening the concept of forces to others such as heterogeneity, relativity, and multiplicity. The second part contains a dicussion of the hypothesis according to (...) which the immersion in the Bergsonian synthesis of time results in the justification for the reformulation of the eternal return as repetition, the distinctively deleuzian problem of internal difference, and the concept of virtual as the definitive sign of a new plane of immanence for thought. The article concludes by presenting the internal difference from the outside that overflows it and makes it mutate in the whole of Deleuzian philosophy. (shrink)

Este ensayo se plantea las relaciones entre dos regímenes de visibilidad: pintura y televisión, que parecen constitutivos de la tradición cultural en Occidente. El propósito es analizar esa relación siguiendo tres estrategias: la primera, traza la genealogía que va del cuadro como modo privilegiado de representación visual a la pantalla como medio privilegiado de simulación; la segunda, rastrea los diferendos y las hibridaciones entre arte y televisión, contrastando el “déficit de realidad” que caracteriza al arte en relación con el exceso (...) de copias, reproducciones y simulaciones de “lo real” que caracteriza la televisión; por último, se sugieren formas de resistencia a las políticas de producción masiva de imágenes televisivas en el mundo actual. (shrink)

The present article aims at postulating cannibalism as a fundamental axis for the analysis of the processes of subjectivation of Spanish America since the 15th century. The hypothesis is that this process has gone through three stages, which allow for the delimitation of the differences of what I shall refer to, for now, as regimes of cannibalism understood as subjectivation processes:(i) Anthropophagic or of ritual war.(ii) Mimetic or of colonial incorporation(iii) Iconic or of mediatic absorption, at a global level.In order (...) to construct the regimes of cannibalism as a concept I have chosen to use two perspectives: the one which speaks of the ritual experimentation of anthropophagy from the inside and the one which moves through the variants of that double desire for the other’s desire that makes every process of colonization possible; in the known forms of territorial annexation, incorporation (productive, spiritual, institutional) and absorption by the global system of mediatization. (shrink)

El artículo aborda la relación filosofía/literatura teniendo plan en el contexto de la moderna novela latinoamericana. En la primera parte se retoman las discusiones sobre el indigenismo para examinar hasta donde la crítica y el olvido del que fue objeto son justificados. La pregunta, en este caso, es si se trata de un problema filosófico relativo a la representación y, si es el caso, cómo escapa la novela a la filosofía de la representación “indigenista” para hacerse plenamente moderna. La segunda (...) parte describe la influencia del surrealismo en la novela americana, para mostrar cómo la pregunta por lo moderno es una pregunta por el presente que O. Paz logró formular desde muy pronto en sus ensayos teórico-poéticos. La tercera parte plantea la pregunta por los mundos literarios y su relación indisociable con el yo, el punto de vista y el ensamblaje desbordante del concepto de máquina literaria a la imagen del sujeto-escritor. (shrink)

No Brasil, diversos grupos de pesquisa apresentam interesse em aprofundar a Educação em outros países latinoamericanos. A presente pesquisa forma parte do grupo “Filosofia e Educação” (Educogitans), Universidade Regional de Blumenau (FURB), Blumenau, Santa Catarina, Brasil, que tem interesse em aprofundar a problemática epistemológica educacional latino americana. Colômbia é um dos países com uma expressiva produção sobre a referida problemática. Assim, o objetivo da presente pesquisa é identificar e analisar algumas concepções de cientificidade no pensamento epistemológico da educação na Colômbia. (...) Visa aprofundar as concepções de Ciências da Educação por parte de autores colombianos. Também se aprofundará em como consideram o objeto da epistemologia e sua importância para a América Latina. Os dados foram coletados mediante os levantamentos bibliográficos e documentais e interpretados no contexto das perspectivas da epistemologia da Educação na América Latina. (shrink)

El presente artículo se propone identificar los fundamentos de la teoría de la comunicabilidad de la Obra de Arte que se puede extraer de los escritos de Edith Stein. Tras presentar el problema de la empatía y la base antropológica que afecta a los sujetos y objetos del mundo del arte, además de los posibles problemas en la transmisión de dicho mensaje artístico, se ahonda en las implicaciones de la consideración del arte como objeto y sujeto de empatía y el (...) sistema comunicativo que se puede establecer en el mundo del arte. (shrink)