Through a close examination of philosopher Leopoldo Zea's historicist phenomenology, Mario Saenz offers fresh insights into the role of Mexican intellectuals in the creation of a Latin American "philosophy of liberation". While this philosophy of liberation has been widely recognized as the most intellectual political ideology to emerge from Latin America this century, few scholars have specifically explored the Mexican roots of this intellectual movement. Saenz redresses this imbalance by placing Zea and his contemporary intellectuals firmly within the context (...) of post-revolutionary Mexico, a political and social landscape that fostered criticisms of colonial and neo-colonial structures of dependence. Saenz demonstrates how Zea's philosophy was informed by a sense of Mexico's distinctive social and cultural identity. (shrink)

The concept of living labor in Marx’s Grundrisse represents the key notion that conceptually ties his early theory of alienation with the drafts of Capital of the 1860s. Through a critique of the formalism that opened space for Marx’s economic writings, I explore living labor, not only as alienated within the capital–laborrelation, but as an absolute, metahistorical exteriority. Furthermore, the interpretive writings of Enrique Dussel on the Grundrisse are contrasted with the reading ofMichael Hardt and Antonio Negri to show how (...) living labor can be understood as ethical excess within the framework of biopolitical production. (shrink)

In his early works, Habermas wants to preserve both, the German idealist notion which gives primacy to self-reflection in the history of the human species, and the Marxist materialist conception that self-reflection is based on the material conditions of existence. ;Such dual preservation cannot be maintained; for the primacy given to self-reflection by German idealism is based on a prior spiritualization of the conditions of reflection. It is precisely with those alienated conditions that Habermas's "neo-Marxism" seeks to limit "materialistically" critical (...) self-reflection. This is a bad overcoming of Hegel, since it preserves the Spirit as alienated otherness. ;However, Habermas's more recent linguistic turn evinces an attempt to ground critical self-reflection by means of a de-historicized anticipation of an ideal speech situation through the formal rules of cogency of speech. ;An atheistic reading of Hegel's conception of life, which regards universal life as "congealed space" or pure positivity, allows for a transition to Marx's practical communism. ;The existential attitudes towards death have as their ontological correlate, the motion of life; that is, historical acts may be regarded as attempts to appropriate objectivity which, as pure positivity, cannot be appropriated in principle, especially after the notion of an all-encompassing transcendental subjectivity, which posits the object as alienated subject, has been rejected. ;In the early Marx, historical and social investigations were limited by the primacy of the subject, the object being subordinated to it. To this extent, he naively remained at the level of ideology, i.e., "lived relations." In this manner, the unconditioned supersensible, in the form of a transcendental subjectivity, clouds the examination of the objective conditions of existence. ;The mature Marx's turn to the object expresses the elimination of the unconditioned, and the concomitant consideration of social reality as the basis of positive and negative ideologies, to the extent that the consciousness of freedom arose from the forced emancipation of consciousness from and by material conditions. (shrink)

Leopoldo Zea contribuyó a un profundo replantamiento del significado de la identidad y su sentido filosófico, trabajando sobre temas que hacen al sentido del filosofar mismo, tales como: si hacer filosofía supone que quien filosofa debe abstraerse de su contexto social y cultural; si así fuera, entonces ¿cuál sería el sentido de la verdad?, específicamente de las pretensiones de verdad que tienen que ver con la cultura, la política, la crítica social e historia. ¿Qué quiere decir "identidad" en la cultura, (...) la sociedad y la política, así como en formaciones sociales en flujo y movimiento histórico? ¿Cuál es la relación del pensamiento y la filosofía latinoamericanos con el filosofar y el pensamiento crítico de otras regiones? No obstante, desde sus primeros ensayos, donde se asocia el significado de cultura con la reflexión de los intelectuales sobre la cultura, hasta los últimos, su pensamiento se muestra como elitista y occidentalista. La América indígena no parece tener más que una posición puramente circunstancial y no definitoria de lo latinoamericano. Se plantea, pues, una paradoja sobre la que el presente ensayo intenta echar luz.Leopoldo Zea contributed to a deep revision of the concept of identity and its philosophical meaning, working on topics that are on the base of the philosophical thinking itself: is it assumed that he who philosophizes should detach himself from his social and cultural context?; and if that is so, what would be the meaning of truth, especially in relation to culture, politics, social criticism, and history? What is the meaning of "identity" as regards culture, society, and politics, as well as social groups flow and historical movement? What is the relation between Latin American philosophy and critical thinking, and philosophy and critical thinking of other regions? Nonetheless, right from his early essays, where he relates culture with the reflection about culture made by intellectuals, to the last ones, Zea's thinking appears as elitist and Occidental. The indigenous America seems to be merely circumstantial and non definitive regarding Latin America. This fact poses a paradox over which this essay intends to shed some light. (shrink)

The concept of living labor in Marx’s Grundrisse represents the key notion that conceptually ties his early theory of alienation with the drafts of Capital of the 1860s. Through a critique of the formalism that opened space for Marx’s economic writings, I explore living labor, not only as alienated within the capital–laborrelation, but as an absolute, metahistorical exteriority. Furthermore, the interpretive writings of Enrique Dussel on the Grundrisse are contrasted with the reading ofMichael Hardt and Antonio Negri to show how (...) living labor can be understood as ethical excess within the framework of biopolitical production. (shrink)

El objetivo fue examinar el valor del ocio lúdico y cultural compartido entre abuelos y nietos para el bienestar de ambas generaciones. Se utilizaron técnicas cuantitativas -cuestionario ad hoc administrado a 1080 estudiantes de primaria- y cualitativas-2 grupos de discusión-. Las actividades lúdicas y culturales fueron preferentesen el ocio compartido, practicándose más con las abuelas. Como aportacionesdestacaron el incremento de la comunicación, la diversión, el aprendizaje mutuo y elbienestar afectivo. La práctica de ocio cultural y lúdico intergeneracional se asociópositivamente con (...) la valoración de una mejor relación entre nietos y abuelos. (shrink)

Enrique Dussel's writings span the theology of liberation, critiques of discourse ethics, evaluations of Marx, Levinas, Habermas, and others, but most importantly, the development of a philosophy written from the underside of Eurocentric modernist teleologies, an ethics of the impoverished, and the articulation of a unique Latin American theoretical perspective. This anthology of original articles by U.S. philosophers elucidating Dussel's thought, offers critical analyses from a variety of perspectives, including feminist ones. Also included is an essay by Dussel that responds (...) to these essays. (shrink)

From the most prominent thinkers in Latin American philosophy, literature, politics, and social science comes a challenge to conventional theories of globalization. The contributors to this volume imagine a discourse in which revolution requires no temporalized march of progress or takeovers of state power but instead aims at local control and the material conditions for human dignity.

Contributors are Susan Bordo, Stanley Clarke, Erica Harth, Leslie Heywood, Luce Irigaray, Genevieve Lloyd, Mario Moussa, Eileen O'Neill, Adrianna Paliyenko, Ruth Perry, Mario Sáenz, Karl Stern, Thomas Wartenberg, and James Winders.

"The essays in this book make it elegantly clear that there is a vigorous and rigorous Latin American philosophy... and that others dismiss it at their peril." —Mario Sáenz The ten essays in this lively anthology move beyond a purely historical consideration of Latin American philosophy to cover recent developments in political and social philosophy as well as innovations in the reception of key philosophical figures from the European Continental tradition. Topics such as indigenous philosophy, multiculturalism, the philosophy of (...) race, democracy, postmodernity, the role of women, and the position of Latin America and Latin Americans in a global age are explored by notable philosophers from the region. An introduction by Eduardo Mendieta examines recent trends and points to the social, political, economic, and cultural conditions that have inspired the discipline. Latin American Philosophy brings English-speaking readers up to date with recent scholarship and points to promising new directions. (shrink)

A powerful critique of nudge theory and the paternalist policies of behavioral economics, and an argument for a more inclusive form of rationality.

Let M be an o-minimal expansion of a real closed field. Let G be a definably compact definably connected abelian n-dimensional group definable in M. We show the following: the o-minimal fundamental group of G is isomorphic to ℤn; for each k>0, the k-torsion subgroup of G is isomorphic to n, and the o-minimal cohomology algebra over ℚ of G is isomorphic to the exterior algebra over ℚ with n generators of degree one.

Let R be an o-minimal expansion of an ordered group R has no poles, R cannot define a real closed field with domain R and order R is eventually linear and every R -definable set is a finite union of cones. As a corollary we get that Th has quantifier elimination and universal axiomatization in the language with symbols for the ordered group operations, bounded R -definable sets and a symbol for each definable endomorphism of the group.

Suppose G is a definably connected, definable group in an o-minimal expansion of an ordered group. We show that the o-minimal universal covering homomorphism equation image: equation image→ G is a locally definable covering homomorphism and π1 is isomorphic to the o-minimal fundamental group π of G defined using locally definable covering homomorphisms.

The many constraints of outer space experience challenge the human ability to coexist. Paradoxically, astronauts assert that on the international space station there are no conflicts or, at least, that they are able to manage their differences, behavioral as well as cognitive, in full respect of human rights and the imperatives of cooperative living. The question is: Why? Why in those difficult, a-terrestrial, and therefore almost unnatural conditions do human beings seem to be able to peacefully and collaboratively live together? (...) What is there beyond terrestrial boundary conditions that allows for such a result? And what can we learn from the astronauts’ experience about the effectiveness of human rights on Earth? My proposal is that the a-terrestrial dimension deeply alters the mind/body indexical framework and, in this way, disentangles the human inclination to semiosis from the cognitive and behavioral habits of categorization and territorialization inherent in the experience on Earth. If analyzed through the spectrum of an interdisciplinary approach involving anthropology, semiology, law, and human geography, I think that outer space enterprises can offer many insights into the cognitive and ethical/political hindrances to the effectiveness of human rights and their intercultural uses. Meanwhile the compulsive greed for a possessive territorialization of outer space and celestial bodies is growing by leaps and bounds. It haunts and imbues both astropolitics and space law. The astronauts’ semio-anthropological experience of human rights and cooperative coexistence seems to have been left in orbit. The future requires awareness and action by anthropologists, semioticians, cognitive scientists, geographers and lawyers, working all together in an interdisciplinary effort to move beyond approaching the experiential with a territorial mindset. The hope is that the “dark dream” of human exploitation/colonization of outer space will not turn from a political and legal speculation into a future reality. (shrink)

De manera inmediata y tradicional pensamos que hablar sobre política exige forzosamente ligarla a la idea de conflicto. Si bien es cierto que el carácter político marca ciertos modos de habitar el mundo, también es relevante aclarar que, a partir del concepto que tengamos de política, podremos darnos cuenta de si la idea de conflicto es inherente a esta o si la política puede ser pensada desde otro horizonte. Hans-Georg Gadamer nos ofrece una serie de reflexiones hermenéuticas en torno al (...) lenguaje y al diálogo; a partir de allí, intentamos atisbar un concepto de política no solo inherente al conflicto, sino también a su parte medular como lo es el diálogo prudente. Pensar en una política dentro del marco de un horizonte dialógico nos permite arrojar luz a problemas particulares que nos aquejan hoy, los cuales nos interpelan a pensar y repensarlos para comprender por qué hemos llegado a ser lo que somos. (shrink)

We show that if G is a definably compact, definably connected definable group defined in an arbitrary o-minimal structure, then G is divisible. Furthermore, if G is defined in an o-minimal expansion of a field, k ∈ ℕ and pk : G → G is the definable map given by pk = xk for all x ∈ G , then we have |–1| ≥ kr for all x ∈ G , where r > 0 is the maximal dimension of abelian (...) definable subgroups of G. (shrink)

In the De mineralibus, Albert the Great clearly states that minerals do not possess life, since – following the Aristotelian path – life is always connected with the operations of the soul. Nevertheless, dealing with the virtues of stones, Albert speaks about a curious difference between “living” and “dead” stones: living stones are substances that possess virtues caused by their forms, while non-living stones are called stones only equivocally because their virtues have expired. Moreover, throughout his work, Albert often seeks (...) help from the biological world to explain the nature and the processes of mineral substances: the coming-into-being of stones and metals is often compared to the generation of plants and animals; places where minerals are formed act as the mother’s womb for the embryo; sulphur and quicksilver are said to be the father and the mother of all metals; etc. The tendency to biologise inorganic nature is a key strategy that Albert uses to explain the processes and functions of the mineral world. (shrink)

El objetivo de este texto es ofrecer una visión de la academia que vaya más allá de las dinámicas del capital, dando cuenta de la pertinencia de la filosofía dentro de las universidades. Para hacerlo, en primer lugar, situaremos nuestro contexto posterior a la muerte de Dios anunciada por Nietzsche. Con esto en mente, rescataremos los planteamientos de Heidegger en La autoafirmación de la Universidad alemana. Posteriormente, a la propuesta heideggeriana de la filosofía como eje de las disciplinas universitarias se (...) le dará un giro nietzscheano, integrando la jovialidad en su quehacer. A lo largo de todo el texto, con ayuda de algunos pensadores contemporáneos como Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Derrida, Stephen Melville e Iain Thomas, haremos entonces un llamado a la configuración de un tipo de filosofía en la actualidad que asuma el riesgo que comporta hacerse cargo de la existencia en su vaivén permanente, entre tragedia y comedia, entre razón y sinrazón. Finalmente, daremos cuenta de la forma en que el capital se apropia del sinsentido de la existencia, llenándolo con razones y medidas. Por lo tanto, concluiremos que sólo desde la multiplicidad de las voces en torno a estas cuestiones existenciales es que podremos hacer frente al actual sistema de mercado y su tendencia a co-optar todos nuestros saberes. (shrink)

We prove that in a semi-bounded o-minimal expansion of an ordered group every non-empty open definable set is a finite union of open cells.

In this note we show: Let R = 〈R, <, +, 0, …〉 be a semi-bounded o-minimal expansion of an ordered group, and G a group definable in R of linear dimension m . Then G is a definable extension of a bounded definable group B by 〈Rm, +〉.

The relation between the moral account of the capital vices and the philosophical analysis of the passions of the human soul undergoes an important turning point from the 11th century onwards during the recovery of medical knowledge in the medieval West. In this wave of fervour towards a physiological approach in the investigation of the nature of man, the vice of acedia - as described by the Christian moral tradition - and the melancholic temperament - the result of a millenary (...) reworking and technicalisation of medical knowledge - found a point of contact in the passion of sadness. If authors such as Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas, following the Christian heritage, characterised acedia as an escalation of the passion of sadness, the medical tradition from Hippocrates and Galen to Avicenna and Constantine recognised sadness as one of the most distinctive manifestations of the melancholic temperament. The aim of this study is to demonstrate, by retracing some aspects of this interweaving of traditions after the year 1000, how Dante’s description of the sinners of acedia in Canto VII of the Inferno takes up the legacy of this hybridisation between the Christian description of acedia and the physiological description of melancholy. (shrink)

Philosophy has not yet recovered from the "divine language" of theology, although in its historical search it gradually digressed from the search of God as a possible object of questioning. Eventually it accepted the "atheism in principle" of the scientific constitution of the world. The crucial turning points of this path are Plato, Aristotle, Mediaeval Scholastics with Aquinas at its front, Nietzsche and his ontic assertion of overman. The coexistence of philosophical and theological thought thereby mirrors itself in the creation (...) of the mutual conceptual constructions. When thought as transcendence and omnipotence, the metaphysical God is solely a God outside the world. Both philosophy and theology belong to a time of rejecting the world and nourishing a terrible thought of the absence of God. The hermeneutic reflection on the openness of the world keeps us safe from the temptation to comprehend God's absence as something terrifying. The absence is a sign of divine mystery, which no forceful investigation is in power of violating. (shrink)

The article presents the results of a more extensive work on soviet historiography of philosophy. the first thing to note is that there is a well-developed soviet historiography of philosophy. it has developed remarkably since 1947--including expansion of the history of the philosophy of the peoples of the soviet union. the article also discusses the principles that underlie soviet historiography of philosophy: partisanship, and the unity of historicism and internationalism. an examination of the discussions about the object of history of (...) philosophy as a science shows that the basic statement is that philosophy develops according to laws. (shrink)

The book introduces to the analytic philosophy of language by presenting the main classical authors and texts of the XX Century, as well as the key problems and concepts of this discipline in their historical context. Ch. I: general introduction to the philosophy of language. Ch. II: Frege. Ch. III: Russell. Ch. IV: Wittgenstein's Tractatus. Ch: V: Neopositivism and verificationism. Ch. VI: Carnap's intensional semantics. Ch. VII: Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. Ch. VIII: Quine. Ch. IX: theories of direct reference. Everything is (...) explained in plain but precise language, with many examples. Thus, the reader realizes how each author addresses the problems set by earlier investigations, in turn opening new problems for discussion and advancing the state of the art. The critical comparison among different positions raises possible objections and answers, introducing to the rational debate in the style of analytic philosophy. Whenever required the book also introduces basic notions of logics, metaphysics, philosophy of science, foundations of mathematics, epistemology and philosophy of mind. Each argument is dealt with on three distinct levels: introductory, intermediate, advanced. Therefore, the book can be helpful to beginners, to graduate students, and to researchers. (shrink)

The contributions to this book touch the different aspects of Popper's philosophy of science.

The contrast between the past-future symmetry of mechanical theories and the time-arrow observed in the behaviour of real complex systems doesn’t have nowadays a fully satisfactory explanation. If one confides in the Laplace-dream that everything be exactly and completely describable by the known mechanical differential equations, the whole experimental evidence of the irreversibility of real complex processes can only be interpreted as an illusion due to the limits of human brain and shortness of human history. In this work it is (...) surmised that in the description of real events it would be more reasonable to renounce exactness and completeness of mechanical differential equations, assuming that also further effects exist in nature, governed by different kinds of rules, in spite of being so weak to be directly unobservable in single motions. This surmise can explain not only the time-arrow, but also why, in particular cases, it can happen that approximate and/or statistical models represent an improvement of mechanical theories instead of an approximation: this happened for Boltzmann gas-model and also for the famous work of Max Planck on blackbody-radiation. And it also appears as a more promising “working hypothesis”, stimulating and guiding us to learn more about limits and origin of the basic equations, and also about the nature of chance and the meaning of probability, which is nowadays not clear in spite of the fundamental role it plays in physics. Particularly that kind of probability which gives the connection between quantum–mechanical differential equations and observable events. (shrink)

This paper proposes that we read a late work of Georg Lukács, The Ontology of Social Being, as an indispensable contribution to ontological investigation in general and particularly to the understanding of social reality. As the ontology of Lukács tends not to be familiar even to those who have foregrounded ontological issues in recent decades, it seems to be extremely fruitful to bring it into discussion. Comparing the analysis of Lukács with the ontology of critical realism, we argue that it (...) is not only possible to identify obvious convergences but also to shed light on many questions that still demand a proper treatment from an ontological perspective. (shrink)

We show that in an arbitrary o-minimal structure the following are equivalent: conjugates of a definable subgroup of a definably connected, definably compact definable group cover the group if the o-minimal Euler characteristic of the quotient is non zero; every infinite, definably connected, definably compact definable group has a non trivial torsion point.