Tras descartar el acercamiento metodológico a la historia de Doñana como un paso hacia la “conservación de la Naturaleza” con mayúscula, este artículo sitúa la historia del Parque en los contextos políticos, personales y científicos que lo hicieron posible. Estos contextos nos colocan en la escala internacional del desmantelamiento del imperio británico y de la transformación de la ornitología y la ecología como disciplinas. Las rutas migratorias de las aves de Doñana contribuyeron a la dimensión internacional en la que se (...) fraguó el acuerdo entre el World Wildlife Fund (WWF) y el Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC) que llevó a la inauguración de la Reserva Biológica de Doñana en 1965. La posterior creación del Parque abrió la puerta a nuevos desencuentros entre diversos modos de entender el conservacionismo y entre diferentes categorizaciones científicas del territorio de Doñana. La resolución de estos conflictos dependió de fuerzas y alianzas, lo que permite concluir afinando el argumento metodológico de partida. (shrink)

Despite the central presence of materialism in the history of philosophy, there is no universal consensus on the meaning of the word “matter” nor of the doctrine of philosophical materialism. Dictionaries of philosophy often identify this philosophy with its most reductionist and even eliminative versions, in line with Robert Boyle’s seventeenth century coinage of the term. But when we take the concept back in time to Greek philosophers and forward onto our own times, we recognize more inclusive forms of materialism (...) as well as complex interplays with non-materialist thought about the place of matter in reality, including Christian philosophy and German idealism. We define philosophical materialism in its most general way both positively (the identification of reality with matter understood as changeability and plurality) and negatively (the negation of disembodied living beings and hypostatized ideas). This inclusive approach to philosophical materialism offers a new light to illuminate a critical history of the concept of matter and materialism from Ancient Greece to the present that is also attentive to scientific developments. By following the most important connections and discontinuities among theoretical frameworks on the idea of matter, we present a general thread that offers a rich and plural, but highly cohesive, field of investigation. Finally, we propose building on rich non-reductionist materialist philosophies, such as Mario Bunge’s systemic materialism and Gustavo Bueno’s discontinuous materialism, to elaborate powerful theoretical alternatives to both physicalism and spiritualism. (shrink)

This book provides an up-to-date revision of materialism’s central tenets, its main varieties, and the place of materialistic philosophy vis a vis scientific knowledge. Materialism has been the subject of extensive and rich controversies since Robert Boyle introduced the term for the first time in the 17th century. But what is materialism and what can it offer today? The term is usually defined as the worldview according to which everything real is material. Nevertheless, there is no philosophical consensus about whether (...) the meaning of matter can be enlarged beyond the physical. As a consequence, materialism is often defined in stark exclusive and reductionist terms: whatever exists is either physical or ontologically reducible to it. This conception, if consistent, mutilates reality, excluding the ontological significance of political, economic, sociocultural, anthropological and psychological realities. Starting from a new history of materialism, the present book focuses on the central ontological and epistemological debates aroused by today’s leading materialist approaches, including some little known to an anglophone readership. The key concepts of matter, system, emergence, space and time, life, mind, and software are checked over and updated. Controversial issues such as the nature of mathematics and the place of reductionism are also discussed from different materialist approaches. As a result, materialism emerges as a powerful, indispensable scientifically-supported worldview with a surprising wealth of nuances and possibilities. (shrink)

Materialism has been the subject of extensive and rich controversies since Robert Boyle introduced the term for the first time in the 17th century. But what is materialism and what can it offer today? The term is usually defined as the worldview according to which everything real is material. Nevertheless, there is no philosophical consensus about whether the meaning of matter can be enlarged beyond the physical. As a consequence, materialism is often defined in stark exclusive and reductionist terms: whatever (...) exists is either physical or ontologically reducible to it. This conception, if consistent, mutilates reality, excluding the ontological significance of political, economic, sociocultural, anthropological and psychological realities. Starting from a new history of materialism, the present book focuses on the central ontological and epistemological debates aroused by today’s leading materialist approaches, including some little known to an anglophone readership. The key concepts of matter, system, emergence, space and time, life, mind, and software are checked over and updated. Controversial issues such as the nature of mathematics and the place of reductionism are also discussed from different materialist approaches. As a result, materialism emerges as a powerful, indispensable scientifically-supported worldview with a surprising wealth of nuances and possibilities. (shrink)

This book weaves together apparently disconnected elements of Bertrand Russell’s philosophy and social activism into a coherent narrative about the acclaimed twentieth-century intellectual’s evolving stances concerning science and technology and their role in bringing either a future Golden Age or a secular Doomsday.

This is an English translation of a very short and quite dense Spanish original in which Gustavo Bueno summarizes and updates his philosophy of science as presented in 5 volumes in the 1990s. From then onwards, Bueno and a number of authors have developed this philosophy through specific applications to fields as diverse as classic chemistry, quantum mechanics, chaos theory, cybernetics, Darwinism, ethology, geology, plate tectonics, anthropology, sociology, economics and psychology. This has resulted in a number of doctoral dissertations, books (...) and articles. Unfortunately, that wealth of literature is for the most part only available in Spanish, although some of it has been produced in English and French or has been later translated into German and Chinese. Therefore, this translation is a welcome step towards an overdue effort.Gustavo Bueno is known as the main developer of philosophical materialism, one of the few last efforts to construe a comprehensive and coherent philosophical s .. (shrink)