RESUMEN. Aunque pocos comentarios repararan en ella, la pregunta por la conciencia y su relación con el mundo moral está presente en Murdoch desde sus primeros escritos y reaparece con fuerza en Metaphysics as a guide to morals. La crítica moderna de la metafísica, y de la idea cartesiana de alma como sustancia, nos deja sin imágenes metafísicas para la concepción de sentido común del yo individual como un centro moral. ¿Cómo pensarla e imaginarla ahora? El existencialismo francés y el (...) conductismo lingüístico británico, Sartre y Hare, comparten una imagen del hombre y de la moral que resitúa ese centro en una voluntad que se ejerce discontinuamente, a saltos, dejando en la sombra tanto el campo de los pensamientos como el de los valores. Murdoch se enfrenta a tales posiciones con una trama de conceptos alternativa: el mundo que habitamos los agentes morales contiene ya siempre los valores que introduce en ellos el sujeto moral a través de una conversación interna continua que depende de la atención que prestamos a unas cosas u otras, al ego o a la realidad que lo trasciende. Proponemos finalmente una fusión de horizontes entre Heidegger, Weil y Murdoch que incluye también los conceptos de amor y bien. (shrink)

A propósito de la publicación en Suhrkamp de los Philosophische Aufsätze de Tugendhat (1992), se propone una interpretación de la obra del autor (hasta ese momento) que no se conforma a la visión tópica de la ruptura entre el Tugendhat fenomenológico y el analítico-lingüístico, sino que subraya (o demuestra, más bien) los elementos de continuidad entre ambas fases, destacando el papel que cumple en ambos casos la lectura de Aristóteles y su estructura "ti kata tinos" (algo de algo), que es (...) a la vez lógica y ontológica. Un ejemplo significativo: la lectura heideggeriana de la teoría de la identificación de particulares de P. F. Strawson a partir de la inter-remisión de lugares espacio-temporales del mundo. (shrink)

El trabajo explora críticamente la idea de una justificación débil o pen última de la moral enmarcándola en el conjunto de la filosofía de Tugendhat, reordenan do sus escritos éticos y discriminando los diversos aspectos que incluye dicha idea. Entre ellos, revisa el concepto formal de moral, ligado a los sentimientos, antes de centrarse en el punto crucial: la fundamentación de la ética moderna. Aquí se distingue, por un lado, la justificación comparativa de un contractualismo igualitario frente a otras alternativas (...) teóricas y, por otro, los motivos que pueden llevar a un individuo autónomo a entenderse en términos morales. (shrink)

Tri filosofskikh "opravdanii︠a︡" (teodit︠s︡ei︠a︡, antropodit︠s︡ei︠a︡, kosmodit︠s︡ei︠a︡ Serebri︠a︡nogo veka) -- Russkai︠a︡ sofiologii︠a︡ i kabbala -- S. Bulgakov : nauka sofiologii︠a︡ (ili konet︠s︡ religii) -- Tretiĭ Zavet o. Sergii︠a︡ Bulgakova -- Tretʹezavetnai︠a︡ misterii︠a︡ ("malai︠a︡" trilogii︠a︡ Bulgakova).

Tomando como marco de referencia algunos conceptos básicos de la teoría política de Gramsci, el objetivo principal de este artículo es criticar la función hegemónica e ideológica que la democracia representativa desempeña en el contexto social e histórico de la globalización neoliberal. Lejos de avanzar hacia el ideal emancipador que representa, en la época del neoliberalismo globalizado la democracia es un instrumento de dominación al servicio de una regulación social excluyente y desigual que origina nuevas formas de autoritarismo.

This book explores the epistemic side of racial and sexual oppression. It elucidates how social insensitivities and imposed silences prevent members of different groups from listening to each other.

On knowledge and practices: a manifesto -- The web of practices -- Agents and frameworks -- Complementarity in mathematics -- Ancient Greek mathematics: a role for diagrams -- Advanced math: the hypothetical conception -- Arithmetic certainty -- Mathematics developed: the case of the reals -- Objectivity in mathematical knowledge -- The problem of conceptual understanding.

The “language-communication-society” triangle defies traditional scientific approaches. Rather, it is a phenomenon that calls for an integration of complex, transdisciplinary perspectives, if we are to make any progress in understanding how it works. The highly diverse agents in play are not merely cognitive and/or cultural, but also emotional and behavioural in their specificity. Indeed, the effort may require building a theoretical and methodological body of knowledge that can effectively convey the characteristic properties of phenomena in human terms. New complexity approaches (...) allow us to rethink our limited and mechanistic images of human societies and create more appropriate emo-cognitive dynamic and holistic models. We have to enter into dialogue with the complexity views coming out of other more ‘material’ sciences, but we also need to take steps in the linguistic and psycho-sociological fields towards creating perspectives and concepts better fitted to human characteristics. Our understanding of complexity is different – but not opposed – to the one that is more commonly found in texts written by people working in physics or computer science, for example. The goal of this book is to extend the knowledge of these other more ‘human’ or socially oriented perspectives on complexity, taking account of the language and communication singularities of human agents in society. (shrink)

José L. Zalabardo defends a pragmatist account of what grounds the meaning of central semantic discourses--ascriptions of truth, of propositional attitudes, and of meanings. He argues that it is the procedures that regulate acceptance and rejection that give the sentences of these discourses their meanings, and explores the application of the pragmatist template to ethical discourse. The pragmatist approach is presented as an alternative to representationalist accounts of the meaning grounds of declarative sentences, according to which a sentence has the (...) meaning it has as a result of links with the bits of the world that it purports to represent. Zalabardo develops a version of the open-question argument to support the claim that the meaning grounds of the discourses he focuses on cannot receive representationalist accounts. It is generally assumed that a declarative sentence cannot perform the function of representing the world unless it has a representationalist meaning ground. Zalabardo rejects this assumption, arguing that sentences with pragmatist meaning grounds can represent the world in exactly the same sense that sentences with representationalist meaning grounds do. This requires that there are states of affairs that the target sentences represent as obtaining, and Zalabardo develops an account of the nature of the states of affairs that can play this role for sentences with pragmatist meaning grounds. Pragmatist Semantics concludes by developing the suggestion that the meaning grounds of all our representational discourses might be ultimately pragmatist. (shrink)

Legaz Lacamba, L. José Ignacio de Alcorta, filósofo de nuestro tiempo.--Semblanza del profesor Alcorta.--Rodríguez Resina, A. El realismo trascendental, introducción a la filosofía de J. I. de Alcorta.

While in agreement with Miranda Fricker’s context-sensitive approach to hermeneutical injustice, this paper argues that this contextualist approach has to be pluralized and rendered relational in more complex ways. In the first place, I argue that the normative assessment of social silences and the epistemic harms they generate cannot be properly carried out without a pluralistic analysis of the different interpretative communities and expressive practices that coexist in the social context in question. Social silences and hermeneutical gaps are misrepresented if (...) they are uniformly predicated of an entire social context, instead of being predicated of particular ways of inhabiting that context by particular people in relation to particular others. I contend that a more nuanced—polyphonic—contextualization offers a more adequate picture of what it means to break social silences and to repair the hermeneutical injustices associated with them. In the second place, I argue that the particular obligations with respect to hermeneutical justice that differently situated subjects and groups have are interactive and need to be determined relationally. That is, whether individuals and groups live up to their hermeneutical responsibilities has to be assessed by taking into account the forms of mutual positionality, relationality, and responsivity (or lack thereof) that these subjects and groups display with respect to one another. The central argument is developed through an examination of what in race theory and in contemporary epistemologies of ignorance has been termed “white ignorance”; that is, the kind of hermeneutical inability of privileged white subjects to recognize and make sense of their racial identities, experiences, and social positionality. (shrink)

This book offers insights on the study of natural language as a complex adaptive system. It discusses a new way to tackle the problem of language modeling, and provides clues on how the close relation between natural language and some biological structures can be very fruitful for science. The book examines the theoretical framework and then applies its main principles to various areas of linguistics. It discusses applications in language contact, language change, diachronic linguistics, and the potential enhancement of classical (...) approaches to historical linguistics by means of new methodologies used in physics, biology, and agent systems theory. It shows how studying language evolution and change using computational simulations enables to integrate social structures in the evolution of language, and how this can give rise to a new way to approach sociolinguistics. Finally, it explores applications for discourse analysis, semantics and cognition. (shrink)

Though Wittgenstein's On Certainty has been influential in analytic epistemology, its interpretation has been enormously controversial. It is true that exegesis has been mainly concerned with the proper characterization of Wittgenstein's very notion of ?certainty?; however, some important questions remain unanswered regarding this notion. On the one hand, I am above all referring to the study of the possibilities we have of retaining a certainty when it has seemingly been placed into question and, on the other hand, of regaining a (...) certainty once it has been lost. In this paper, I attempt to provide a detailed answer to both questions. In so doing, some important features of the picture of ourselves which emerges from Wittgenstein's On Certainty are also revealed. (shrink)

This book explores the epistemic side of oppression, focusing on racial and sexual oppression and their interconnections. It elucidates how social insensitivities and imposed silences prevent members of different groups from interacting epistemically in fruitful ways--from listening to each other, learning from each other, and mutually enriching each other's perspectives. Medina's epistemology of resistance offers a contextualist theory of our complicity with epistemic injustices and a social connection model of shared responsibility for improving epistemic conditions of participation in social practices. (...) Through the articulation of a new interactionism and polyphonic contextualism, the book develops a sustained argument about the role of the imagination in mediating social perceptions and interactions. It concludes that only through the cultivation of practices of resistance can we develop a social imagination that can help us become sensitive to the suffering of excluded and stigmatized subjects. Drawing on Feminist Standpoint Theory and Critical Race Theory, this book makes contributions to social epistemology and to recent discussions of testimonial and hermeneutical injustice, epistemic responsibility, counter-performativity, and solidarity in the fight against racism and sexism. (shrink)

This book explores the epistemic side of racial and sexual oppression. It elucidates how social insensitivities and imposed silences prevent members of different groups from listening to each other.

Background The Regional Committee for Africa of the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2001 expressed concern that some health-related studies undertaken in the Region were not subjected to any form of ethics review. In 2003, the study reported in this paper was conducted to determine which Member country did not have a national research ethics committee (REC) with a view to guiding the WHO Regional Office in developing practical strategies for supporting those countries. Methods This is a descriptive study. The (...) questionnaire was prepared and sent by diplomatic pouch to all the 46 Member States in the WHO African Region, through the WHO country representatives, for facilitation and follow up. The data were entered in Excel spreadsheet and subsequently exported to STATA for analysis. A Chi-Squared test (χ 2) for independence was undertaken to test the relationship between presence/absence of Research Ethics Committee (REC) and selected individual socioeconomic and health variables. Results The main findings were as follows: the response rate was 61% (28/46); 64% (18/28) confirmed the existence of RECs; 36% (10/28) of the respondent countries did not have a REC (although 80% of them reported that they had in place an ad hoc ethical review mechanism); 85% (22/26) of the countries that responded to this question indicated that ethical approval of research proposals was, in principle, required; and although 59% of the countries that had a REC expected it to meet every month, only 44% of them reported that the REC actually met on a monthly basis. In the Chi-Squared test, only the average population in the group of countries with a REC was statistically different (at 5% level of significance) from that of the group of countries without a REC. Conclusion In the current era of globalized biomedical research, good ethics stewardship demands that every country, irrespective of its level of economic development, should have in place a functional research ethics review system in order to protect the dignity, integrity and safety of its citizens who participate in research. (shrink)

Explores the stable core of Wittgenstein's philosophy as developed from the Tractatus to the Philosophical Investigations.

The subject matter of this paper is the view that it is correct, in an absolute sense, to believe a proposition just in case the proposition is true. I take issue with arguments in support of this view put forward by Nishi Shah and David Velleman.

We extend results of Bonet, Buss and Pitassi on Bondy’s Theorem and of Nozaki, Arai and Arai on Bollobás’ Theorem by proving that Frankl’s Theorem on the trace of sets has quasipolynomial size Frege proofs. For constant values of the parametert, we prove that Frankl’s Theorem has polynomial size AC0-Frege proofs from instances of the pigeonhole principle.

This paper defends a contextualist approach to epistemic injustice according to which instances of such injustice should be looked at as temporally extended phenomena (having developmental and historical trajectories) and socially extended phenomena (being rooted in patterns of social relations). Within this contextualist framework, credibility excesses appear as a form of undeserved epistemic privilege that is crucially relevant for matters of testimonial justice. While drawing on Miranda Fricker's proportional view of epistemic justice, I take issue with its lack of attention (...) to the role that credibility excesses play in testimonial injustices. I depart from Fricker's view of the relation between credibility excesses and credibility deficits, and I offer an alternative account of the contributions that undeserved epistemic privileges make to epistemic injustices. Then, through the detailed analysis of To kill a mockingbird, I elucidate the crucial role played by the social imaginary in creating and sustaining epistemic injustices, developing an analysis of the kind of social blindness produced by an oppressive social imaginary that establishes unjust patterns of credibility excesses and deficits. (shrink)

Based on published works and unpublished materials, this article analyses how cybernetics was received by two Spanish thinkers exiled in Mexico: José Gaos (1900–1969) and Eduardo Nicol (1907–1990). This reception is particularly intriguing especially when considering the substantial presence and social impact that Norbert Wiener had in Mexican society because of his friendship with Arturo Rosenblueth. Gaos and Nicol are the first philosophers to develop a complex and original diagnosis of cybernetics in Mexico. It will be shown how the exiled (...) thinkers take on the philosophical implications of this science in the light of their respective theoretical projects, and finally, it will be defended how the critical perspective they develop is particularly significant for Mexico’s political and academic context since it illuminates some negative aspects of cybernetics that Wiener did not foresee and that had not been reported there until then. (shrink)

The Letter to the Abbé Raynal was first published in 1782 in response to the appearance, a year earlier, of the English translation of the Abbé Raynal’s account of the Revolution in America. Although he begins acknowledging the style of the author of the highly influential Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes, then he reproaches him for his lack of practicality, and corrects what he considers to be errors and false assumptions (...) about the origins of the War of Independence and the role of France in the independence movement, Thomas Paine sets out in the Letter the universal dimension of his revolutionary principles. Eclipsed by other works and usually overlooked, the Letter, written in the context of diplomatic negotiations for peace, represents a turning point in the author’s thinking as he began to think in international terms. (shrink)

La Carta al Abate Raynal fue publica por primera vez en 1782 como respuesta a la aparición, un año antes, de la traducción al inglés del relato del Abate Raynal sobre la Revolución en América. Aunque empieza reconociéndole su estilo al autor de la muy influyente Historia filosófica y política de los establecimientos y del comercio de los europeos en las dos Indias, le reprocha su falta de sentido práctico, y corrigiendo lo que consideraba errores y falsas suposiciones sobre los (...) orígenes de la Guerra de la Independencia y el papel de Francia en el movimiento independentista, Thomas Paine expone en la Carta la dimensión universal de sus principios revolucionarios. Eclipsada por otras obras y pasada por alto, la Carta, escrita en el contexto de las negociaciones diplomáticas para la paz, representa un punto de inflexión en el pensamiento de su autor al empezar a pensar en términos internacionales. (shrink)

El texto presenta la crítica heideggeriana a los conceptos de teoría y praxis, tal como han sido acuñados por la tradición filosófica. El artículo muestra el giro transformador que hace el filósofo alemán en el tratamiento de estas dos nociones, con el fin de delinear una nueva concepción de filosofía, a propósito de la crítica y transformación de estas concepciones. La crítica se centra en señalar cómo en la tradición filosófica ha preponderado la teoría, comprendida desde una visión lógico – (...) racional, y la comprensión de la praxis como una instancia a-teórica, lo que deja de lado las consideraciones prácticas centrales y primarias implicadas en el pensar, y el ejercicio práctico como instancia comprensiva y de pensamiento. En este sentido, se muestra la reivindicación de la praxis, de la cotidianidad y de la situación fáctica como aspectos de central importancia en el ser del Dasein; y se plantea una nueva comprensión de lo que implica la teoría y las nuevas relaciones que se establecen en el nexo teoría – praxis como posibilidades del ser del Dasein, sin caer en el primado de la una sobre la otra, lo que implica la transformación de sus modos de comprensión. Finalmente, se muestra cómo un ejercicio filosófico desde estas intuiciones se encuentra más cercano a la comprensión e interpretación práctica que al desarrollo de teorías en el sentido clásico del término. (shrink)