Partindo do princípio judaico-cristão de que Deus, ser único, mediante um ato livre de amor, criou todas as coisas a partir do nada (criação ex nihilo), Santo Agostinho defende que no universo físico, criado e governado por Deus, não há espaço para a desordem ou imperfeição (o mal), mas que a natureza é perfeitamente ordenada e harmoniosa, não havendo senão o bem, de forma que em Agostinho, existir, ser e bem são sinônimos. Já o suposto mal físico, ou a (...) imperfeição no universo, não passa de uma ausência ou privação do bem, que acontece não como ser, mas como não ser. (shrink)

Con motivo del bicentenario del nacimiento de Darwin, esta obra realiza un recorrido por la Teoría de la Evolución a partir del patrimonio bibliográfico y científico de la Universidad de Sevilla. Sus autores muestran la vigencia actual de esta teoría y el papel de Antonio Machado y Núñez, destacado darwinista de la Sevilla de finales del XIX.

Name der Zeitschrift: Klio Jahrgang: 99 Heft: 1 Seiten: 130-148.

Human rights have become an important ideal in current times, yet our age has witnessed more violations of human rights than any previous less enlightened one. This book explores the historical and theoretical dimensions of this paradox. Divided into two parts, the first section offers an alternative history of natural law, in which natural rights are represented as the eternal human struggle to resist opression and to fight for a society in which people are no longer degraded or despised. At (...) the time of their birth in the 18th Century and again in the popular uprisings of the last decade, human rights became the dominant critique of law and society. The radical rhetoric of rights and its apparently endless expansive potential has led to its adoption by governments and individuals alike seeking to justify their actions on moral grounds and has undermined its radical edge. Part Two examines the philosophical logic of rights. The classical critiques of Kant, Burke, Hegel and Marx illuminate traditional aproaches to the concept of human rights. The work of Heidegger, Sartre and psychoanalysis is used to deconstruct the metaphisical essentialism of bothe universalists and cultural relativists. Finally, through a consideration of the ethics of otherness, and with reference to recent human rights violations, it is argued that the end of human rights is to judge law and politics from a moral stand point which both transcends the present and is historically relevant. (shrink)

Corporate, Social, Ethical and Environmental Reporting should ideally discharge the accountability of an organisation to its stakeholders. Voluntary reporting has been characterised by a dearth of neutral and objective information such that the advocates of SEER recommend that it be made compulsory. Their underlying rationale is that legally specified disclosure requirements and enforcement mechanisms will enhance the quality of such reporting. This paper sets out to explore how realistic this scenario actually is, in view of the conflicting interpretations in the (...) literature on this subject. To that end, a survey of the reporting patterns of 78 of the largest Spanish companies between 2001 and 2003 examines the extent of their compliance with the ICAC-2002 standard, which obliged them to make environmental disclosures in their financial statements. The results suggest that progressive and improved regulation could increase the volume and quality of SEER disclosures. They also suggest, however, that persistent non-compliance means that the problems associated with voluntary disclosure still exist. Finally, through an impression management perspective, the study reveals, the diverse strategies, ranging from dismissal to concealment, that are employed by companies to avoid transparency. As regulation improves and enforcement expectations rise, it becomes more difficult to dismiss compulsory reporting norms. As a result, some firms engage in more complex concealment strategies to attain corporate legitimacy, depriving stakeholders of regulatory information. The latter point serves to reconcile apparently contradictory explanations in the literature as to whether legitimacy theory might explain partial compliance with SEER regulation. (shrink)

Erudite and timely, this book is a key contribution to the renewal of radical theory and politics.

The purpose of the present paper is to consider the traditional interpretive problems of quantum mechanics from the viewpoint of a modal ontology of properties. In particular, we will try to delineate a quantum ontology that (i) is modal, because describes the structure of the realm of possibility, and (ii) lacks the ontological category of individual. The final goal is to supply an adequate account of quantum non-individuality on the basis of this ontology.

Nietzsche wanted to affirm life in its totality without dispensing with either the joy of affirmation or the tragic energy of the most terrible that it implies. His thought and his life bore witness to this. However, a task of such magnitude requires the affinity of other spirits who are capable of traveling other paths than those of ascent. Bataille's immanent mysticism knows that in the sovereignty of excess the limitlessness of expenditure allows us to descend into the sacred spaces (...) of the curse. The present work wants to delve into such a physiological inner experience to see whether the Nietzschean affirmation can be consummated in this way. Como sabemos Nietzsche quiso afirmar la vida en su totalidad sin prescindir ni de la alegría misma de la afirmación, ni de la energía trágica de lo más terrible que ello implica. Sin embargo, una tarea de esa magnitud requiere la afinidad de otros espíritus que sean capaces de recorrer otras vías distintas a las del ascenso. El misticismo inmanente de Bataille sabe bien que en la soberanía del exceso la ilimitación del gasto nos permite descender a los espacios sagrados de la maldición. La afirmación nietzscheana parece querer consumarse de este modo. (shrink)

Jurisprudence is the prudence of jus, law's consciousness and conscience. Throughout history, when thinkers wanted to contemplate the organisation of society or the relationship between authority and the subject, they turned to law. All great philosophers, from Plato to Hobbes, Kant, Hegel, Marx and Weber had either studied the law or had a deep understanding of legal operations. But jurisprudence is also the conscience of law, the exploration of law's justice and of an ideal law or equity at the bar (...) of which state law is always judged. Jurisprudence brings together 'is' and 'ought', the positive and the normative, law and justice. But after a long process of decay, legal theory is today characterised by cognitive and moral poverty. Jurisprudence has become restricted and academically peripheral, a guidebook to technocratic legalism and a legitimation of the existent. Critical jurisprudence returns to the classical tradition of a general philosophy of law and adopts a much wider concept of legality. It is concerned both with posited law and with the law of the law. All legal aspects of the economic, political, emotional and physical modes of production and reproduction of society are part of critical jurisprudence. This widening of scope allows a radical rethinking of the nature of rights, justice, sovereignty and judgement. A political philosophy of justice today must examine the political economy of law; transitions from Empire to nation; ideological and imaginary constructions through which we understand ourselves and relate to others; ways in which gender, race or sexuality create forms of identity that both discipline bodies and offer sites of resistance. Law's complicity with political oppression, violence and racism has to be faced before it is possible to speak of a new beginning for legal thought, which in turn is the necessary precondition for a theory of justice. Critical Jurisprudence offers an ethics of law against the nihilism of power and an aesthetics of existence for the melancholic lawyer. (shrink)

In the wake of corporate ethical scandals that have harmed millions of employees and investors, there has been an increase in the number of works written in the last decade, which aim to answer one apparently simple question: what causes unethical behavior, and what can we do, if anything, to prevent similar transgressions in the future? The extensive research around this question is the best proof of its real complexity as the challenge of disentangling the background of ethical behavior has (...) obvious academic and practical interest. This study aims to take a further step toward that goal. Much research has noted the impact of multiple aspects of organizational contexts on individuals’ ethical behavior. However, studies that analyze the impact of organizational learning capability (OLC) on employees’ ethical behavior are few and far between. This was the first aim of this study. The second centered on gaining a deeper understanding of the relationship between OLC and ethical behavior by analyzing the mediating role of employability and organizational commitment. We tested our hypotheses through a structural equation methodology applied to a sample of 641 workers from 166 Spanish consultancy firms and found a positive, direct relationship between OLC and employability, OLC and organizational commitment, employability and organizational commitment, and organizational commitment and ethical behavior. (shrink)

Pueden identificarse cuatro estrategias principales de tratar la cuestión ambiental de acuerdo al marco rawlsiano. Extender la posición original o el principio de igualdad de oportunidades afecta a la concepción de la justicia. Reconocer límites naturales o ambientales a nivel de esencia constitucional o abrir la fase legislativa a la justicia ambiental afectan al liberalismo político. En cualquiera de ellas, el esquema sólo permitiría ir más lejos cuestionando la visión nacional-estatal de sociedad cooperativa.

Resumen: Este artículo consiste en un comentario del ensayo Ser justo con Freud: La historia de la locura en la era del psicoanálisis de Derrida con el objeto de rastrear lo que no puede ser reapropiado por la presuposición del marco del debate entre Derrida y Foucault. Al analizar la pregunta “¿quién anuncia el no-recurso?”, exploraré la forma en que la escritura de Derrida es afectada por la necesidad e imposibilidad de no reprimir la sinrazón. Argumentaré que Derrida compulsivamente escribe (...) los efectos de dicha resistencia a no reprimir la sinrazón a través de la repetición de la búsqueda Foucaultiana de un más allá de la razón. Esta “compulsión de repetición’ no solamente reabre una y otra vez el debate, sino que desencadena el retorno de la sinrazón en la forma de un desarreglo de los principios de identidad y tiempo lineal, desestabilizando todo forma de autoría sobre la historia de la locura en general y cada una de sus críticas. Este artículo se aproxima a los intercambios entre Derrida y Foucault deconstruyendo la premisa de la posibilidad de un debate sobre la historia de la locura. (shrink)

The concept of fitness, central to population genetics and to the synthetic theory of evolution, is discussed. After a historical introduction on the origin of this concept, the current meaning of it in population genetics is examined: a cause of the selective process and its quantification. Several difficulties arise for its exact definition. Three adequacy criteria for such a definition are formulated. It is shown that it is impossible to formulate an adequate definition of fitness respecting these criteria. The propensity (...) definition of fitness is presented and rejected. Finally it is argued that fitness is a conceptual device, a useful tool, only for descriptive purposes of selective processes, changing from case to case, and thus devoid of any substantial physical counterpart. Any attempt to its reification is an apport to the metaphysical load evolutionary theory has inherited from Natural Theology. (shrink)

The current crisis is one outcome of the financialisation of contemporary capitalism. It arose in the USA because of the enormous expansion of mortgage-lending, including to the poorest layers of the working class. It became general because of the trading of debt by financial institutions. These phenomena are integral to financialisation. During the last three decades, large enterprises have turned to open markets to obtain finance, forcing banks to seek alternative sources of profit. One avenue has been provision of financial (...) services to individual workers. This trend has been facilitated by the retreat of public provision from housing, pensions, education, and so on. A further avenue has been to adopt investment-banking practices in open financial markets. The extraction of financial profits directly out of personal income constitutes financial expropriation. Combined with investment-banking, it has catalysed the current gigantic crisis. More broadly, financialisation has sustained the emergence of new layers of rentiers, defined primarily through their relation to the financial system rather than ownership of loanable capital. Finally, financialisation has posed important questions regarding finance-capital and imperialism. (shrink)

The analysis of the confession in Foucault's work based on the comparison between Les anormaux, Mal faire, dire vrai and Les aveux de la chair shows one of the most relevant displacements in Foucault's work, which constitutes a good part of the essence of what has been called the last Foucault: the relation of the subject and the truth. An attempt will be made to account for this turn, analyzing the look at primitive Christianity of the last Foucault and the (...) relationship of such reflection in the analysis of the hermeneutics of the self. The last reflections on the confession in Les aveux de la chair will show the meaning of the ethical inquiry of the last Foucault that reproduces the double critical and ontological character of anarcheology. (shrink)

The knowledge extraction from data with noise or outliers is a complex problem in the data mining area. Normally, it is not easy to eliminate those problematic instances. To obtain information from this type of data, robust classifiers are the best option to use. One of them is the application of bagging scheme on weak single classifiers. The Credal C4.5 model is a new classification tree procedure based on the classical C4.5 algorithm and imprecise probabilities. It represents a type of (...) the so-calledcredal trees. It has been proven that CC4.5 is more robust to noise than C4.5 method and even than other previous credal tree models. In this paper, the performance of the CC4.5 model in bagging schemes on noisy domains is shown. An experimental study on data sets with added noise is carried out in order to compare results where bagging schemes are applied on credal trees and C4.5 procedure. As a benchmark point, the known Random Forest classification method is also used. It will be shown that the bagging ensemble using pruned credal trees outperforms the successful bagging C4.5 and RF when data sets with medium-to-high noise level are classified. (shrink)