Los seis textos que se incluyen a continuación contienen una breve reflexión sobre cuestiones de metafísica. A pesar de la diversidad de las temáticas, hay en todas ellas una mirada que les confiere «un aire de familia», a saber, la «mirada metafísica»: «Espiritualidad y religiosidad en Simone Weil», de Natán Verdés; «Metafísica de la psicodelia», de Gerard Masmitjà; «La relación trinitaria en la realidad cosmoteándrica de Raimundo Pánikkar», de Francesc Xavier Marquès; «Introducción a la teología analítica seguida del (...) ejemplo del colapso modal en el teísmo clásico», de Constantí Cabestany; «Metafísica: la ciencia que no avanza», de Albert Piguillem; y «Memorias del subsuelo: un breve análisis filosófico», de Andreu Cacho. (shrink)

This article analyzes the distinctive forms that collective memories take in the age of globalization. It studies the transition from national to cosmopolitan memory cultures. Cosmopolitanism refers to a process of `internal globalization' through which global concerns become part of local experiences of an increasing number of people. Global media representations, among others, create new cosmopolitan memories, providing new epistemological vantage points and emerging moral-political interdependencies. The article traces the historical roots of this transformation and outlines the theoretical foundations for (...) the emergence of cosmopolitan memories through an examination of how the Holocaust has been remembered in Germany, Israel and the USA in the course of the last fifty years. It is precisely the abstract nature of `good and evil' that symbolizes the Holocaust, which contributes to the extra-territorial quality of cosmopolitan memory. As such, memories of the Holocaust contribute to the creation of a common European cultural memory. (shrink)

This interdisciplinary volume connects the philosophy of history to moral philosophy with a unique focus on time. Taking in a range of intellectual traditions, cultural, and geographical contexts, the volume provides a rich tapestry of approaches to time, morality, culture, and history. -/- By extending the philosophical discussion on the ethical importance of temporality, the editors disentangle some of the disciplinary tensions between analytical and hermeneutic philosophy of history, cultural theory, meta-ethical theory, and normative ethics. The ethical and existential character (...) of temporality reveals itself within a collection that resists the methodological underpinnings of any one philosophical school. The book's distinctive cross-cultural approach ensures a wide range of perspectives with contributions on life and death in Japanese philosophy, ethics and time in Maori philosophy, non-traditional temporalities and philosophical anthropology, as well as global approaches to ethics. -/- These new directions of study highlight the importance of the ethical in the temporal, inviting further points of departure in this burgeoning field. (shrink)

A simple noncommutative probability theory is presented, and two examples for the difference between that theory and the classical theory are shown. The first example is the well-known formulation of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle in terms of a variance inequality and the second example is an interpretatio of the Bell paradox in terms of noncommuntative probability.

This paper disucsses the Boolean algebraic axiomatic system of situations suggested by the Polish logician Roman Suszko (1919-1979). The paper will specifically examine the adequacy of the axioms, definitions and theorems of Suszko’s system as a model for Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tracatus Logico-Philosophicus. It will be shown how the formal properties of Suszko’s system - the atomicity and completeness of the Boolean algebraic system - can be employed in order to clarify key concepts of the situational part of the Tractarian ontology. (...) After considering the formal reconstruction of the Tractarian concepts of teh world and logical space, a controversial issue pertaining to necessary facts in the Tracatus will be addressed. This will be followed by a formal clarification of the Tractarian concepts of logical place and possible worlds, the latter being identified as combinations of states and affairs, which are, according to the Tractarian ontology, the simplest kinds of situations. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the relation between logic and ontology. In particular, it demonstrates how classical logical theory can clarify the ontological part of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. To this end, the work examines the adequacy of a formal system that was devised by the Polish logician, mathematician and philosopher Roman Suszko (1919–1979) as a model for the Tractatus. Following a brief explanation of the Tractarian ontology, the main ideas of Suszko’s system and its philosophical significance will be considered. The (...) latter will be illustrated in the context of central Tractarian concepts. Finally, two implications for a better understanding of the Tractarian ontology will be pointed out. (shrink)

This essay analyzes the theoretical foundations of collective interest in the sufferings of strangers. Concern with the suffering of others, accompanied by the urge to help, is compassion. This study develops the social and historical conditions under which public compassion emerges. Two broad interpretations of these developments are suggested. The democratization perspective suggests that with the lessening of profoundly categorical and corporate social distinctions, compassion becomes more extensive. A second perspective is linked to the emergence of market society. By defining (...) a universal field of others with whom contracts and exchanges can be made, market perspectives extend the sphere of moral concern as well: however unintentionally. Public compassion is part of the language of modernity. This gives compassion the possibility to be also part of a newly emerging ‘Second Modernity’. (shrink)

This article brings out ethical aspects arising in Plato’s classical critique of narrative and imitative art in The Republic, especially when it comes to reading stories about the past. Socrates’s and Glaucon’s most important suggestion, I argue, is to cultivate an ethical consciousness where one ought to see the distinctions between how the real and the imaginary in narratives are to be conceived, and what that insight ethically demands of the reader. Taken as an ethical insight for the reader when (...) engaging in narrative understanding, this should be to resist the temptation to think that past suffering and misery as told in a story can be read analogously to narratives having a tragic plot. The article clarifies the meaning of Plato’s critique through the ideas of Simone Weil, Emmanuel Lévinas and Iris Murdoch. These existential moral philosophers work towards having an ethical consciousness in one’s personal relationship with stories of our lifeworld. (shrink)

This essay concerns what it means to historicize evil in an ethically responsible way: that is, what it means to think and narrate perpetrators and victims of evil through what is testified to and told about them. I show that a responsible gaze can only be recognized by allowing ourselves to be addressed by the dead victims. The argument consists in an existential critique of a set of common ideas in the human sciences, which suggest that we must attempt to (...) empathize with the perpetrators in order to understand their deeds in human terms. This empathetic thought, I suggest, easily leads us either to aestheticize the victims or to think that the evils in our history should be addressed as a metaphysical susceptibility to evil internal to being human. By critically discussing these ideas, I show that empathy for the perpetrators in several respects does injustice to the dead victims, which marks that we as their afterlife continue to have an irresponsible relationship with the dead. (shrink)

This investigation concerns first what Jacques Derrida and Paul Ricœur consider to be «the question of writing» in Plato’s Phaedrus, and then whether their conception of a general philosophical problem of writing finds support in the dialogue. By contrast to their attempts to «determine» the «status» of writing as the general condition of knowledge, my investigation has two objections. (1) To show that Plato’s concern is not to define writing, but to reflect on what is involved in honest and dishonest (...) inquiry. (2) To argue that Derrida’s and Ricœur’s determination of the instrumental (epistemic and moral) «status» of writing, overlooks crucial difficulties of dishonest writing that Plato’s discussion of the pharmakon reveals. The argument proposed is that honest and dishonest inquiry is not tied to the moral status that writing, as an invention or instrument, unconditionally involves, but to the moral quality of what a human being does when inquiring. (shrink)

Many of our hermeneutic, literary critic, and poststructuralist ideas on mediation imply that the medium determines how a textual or narrative account must be taken. In contrast to these, Émmanuel Lévinas suggests that responsibility for the other person is not determined by the medium. Responsibility is already established in proximity to the other person; a relationship that we as moral subjects need to ethically understand. In relation to Primo Levi’s memoir of survival in Auschwitz, If this is a Man, this (...) article show in what ways Slavoj Žižek’s and Hayden White’s aesthetic ideas on mediation make us unprepared to take on the responsibility for the other person that Lévinas shows us. (shrink)

This article conceptualizes the lofty term of cosmopolitanism from people's historical experience. It attempts to find a bridge between theory and life. Many writers now maintain that cosmopolitanism is no longer a dream, but rather the substance of social reality - and that it is increasingly the nation-state and our particular identities that are figments of our imagination, clung to by our memories. The aim of this article is to concretize this argument and demonstrate how some of the Jewish intellectuals (...) who emerged from World War II and the Holocaust argued passionately about the status of their Jewishness and how this related to abstract and universal ideals of modernity and human rights. The article focuses on Hannah Arendt's responses to her critics instead of her vast theoretical work to illustrate this point. In responding to her critics, Arendt came closest to providing a formula for a concept of cosmopolitanism, which attempts to square the circle between the universal and the particular. (shrink)

This book deals with some Peripatetic philosophers of the Hellenistic age who were direct and indirect pupils of Aristotle. The main focus of the book is Aristotle's school in the Hellenistic period, a subject not particularly explored by the scholars. Three main issues are addressed in the chapters of the book: the problem of knowledge, the question of time, and the doctrine of the soul. More specifically the topics addressed are: the problem of sense-perception and the method of multiple explanations (...) in the field of meteorology in Aristotle, Theophrastus and Epicurus, the epistemology of Strato, the notion of time in Eudemus and Strato, the conception of sleep in Clearchus, the doctrine of divination in Cratippus. Finally, the Appendix examines the probable influence of the physics of Strato on the medicine of Asclepiades of Bithynia. These themes are investigated by comparing the positions of the Peripatetics with Aristotle's philosophy, but above all by contextualising the doctrines of the Peripatetics within the broader framework of Hellenistic philosophies. (shrink)

This study takes off from the ethical problem that racism grounded in population genetics raises. It is an analysis of four standard scientific responses to the problem of genetically motivated racism, seen in connection with the Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP): (1) Discriminatory uses of scientific facts and arguments are in principle ‘misuses’ of scientific data that the researcher cannot be further responsible for. (2) In a strict scientific sense, genomic facts ‘disclaim racism’, which means that an epistemically correct grasp (...) of genomics should be ethically justified. (3) Ethical difficulties are issues to be ‘resolved’ by an ethics institution or committee, which will guarantee the ethical quality of the research scrutinized. (4) Although population genetics occasionally may lead to racism, its overall ‘value’ for humankind justifies its cause as a desirable pursuit. I argue that these typical responses to genetically motivated racism supervene on a principle called the ‘ethic of knowledge’, which implies that an epistemically correct account has intrinsic ethical value. This principle, and its logically related ideas concerning the ethic of science, effectively avoids a deeper ethical question of responsibility in science from being raised. (shrink)

In this essay we consider the moral claims of one branch of non-realist theory known as linguistic narrativism theory. By highlighting the moral implications of linguistic narrativism theory, we argue that the “moral vision” expressed by this theory can entail, at worst, undesirable moral agnosticism if not related to a transcendental and supra-personal normativity in our moral life. With its appeal to volitionism and intuitionism, the ethical sensitivity of this theory enters into difficulties brought about by several internal tensions as (...) to what morality and moral judgements involve. We contend that the proponents of linguistic narrativism theory must strongly recognize and take responsibility for the “moral vison” their theory professes, in so far as they want to think of their theory as a morally responsible one. (shrink)

This dissertation examines existential and ethical dimensions of writing and reading, especially with regard to what it means to historicize, that is think, tell, read and write about the past. A central aim of the dissertation is to show that reading and writing as cultural phenomena involve a transgenerational ethical relationship with absent people, which exceeds the immediate horizon of life of an individual. Growing up in a culture of literacy means gradually coming to understand a life that spans over (...) several generations, relationships with people in a past world who, in their absence, are constantly referred to and invoked in the continued life of posterity. In light of this, historiography appears above all as a way of maintaining a life over generations. In turn, this raises an ethical-existential question of responsibility for the ways in which any posterity talks about and relates to those who are no longer alive. The articles in this dissertation are case studies the purpose of which is to clarify what this responsibility toward the past involves in our culture of literacy. The methodological starting points of the dissertation are mainly to be found in existential moral philosophy, philosophical hermeneutics, and deconstructive phenomenology. The arguments of the articles take shape in dialogue with central thinkers of these philosophical traditions. The thoughts that are critically examined, however, are understood by many scholars to be unproblematic or legitimate, so that it is even more important to point out their possibly difficult ethical implications. Central themes examined in the articles of the dissertation are: the view that written language has a generally ethically unreliable character (Derrida, Ricoeur, Plato); the relationship between writing, burial and the performative culture of remembering (Jonas, Derrida, Ruin, Fritsch); aesthetic temptations in relation to testimonial stories and realistic prose (Lévinas, Levi, White, Žižek); and the problems for responsibility that can arise when an empathetic method or social psychology is used in historical research (Browning, Brison, Wyschogrod). Through an examination of these themes, the dissertation shows several immoral and existentially simplified aspects arising from ways in which posterity’s responsibility has often been understood to be constituted. These simplifications permeate our historical consciousness and are particularly evident in the methodology and theory of historical science, as well as in the philosophy and aesthetics of historiography. The positive argument of the dissertation therefore consists in clarifying how an ethical-existential relationship of responsibility to other people precedes literary mediation, narrativity, and the search for evidence, as these people are the ones that posterity talks about, lives on with, and continues to care about even in their absence. (shrink)

This existential phenomenological exploration concerns how writing is not the mere tool for communication and commemoration, or the supplementary image of a memory, but is closely connected to the phenomenon of the grave. The exploration aims to show a transgenerational mode of human existence and moral life, by considering how the becoming of a historical, which is to say a transgenerational subject through the features that writing and the grave together lets us capture, is also importantly bound to the becoming (...) of a moral subject, or an “I,” in relation to the passed away other. (shrink)

Discussions on Marc Bloch usually focus on The Annales School, his comparative method, or his defence of a distinct historical science. In contrast, I emphasise his seldom-investigated ideas of what historical understanding should involve. I contend that Bloch distinguishes between three different ethical attitudes in studying people and ways of life from the past: scientific passivity; critical judgements; understanding. The task of the historian amounts to understanding other worlds in their own terms. This essay is an exploration of Bloch’s methodology (...) and what historical understanding is needed to do justice to cultures that belong to the past, both conceptually and practically. (shrink)

Psychological egoism is the doctrine that all of our actions are ultimately motivated by self-interest, even including seemingly altruistic actions. Although this view is commonly referred to as \vacuous" or \trivially true" because of its immunity to counterexamples, I argue that there are possible observations that can refute this thesis. I describe the experiments, identify the results that could in principle falsify the strongest possible version of psychological egoism and formulate a probabilistic argument against this view. Ultimately, I conclude that (...) a \trivially true" formulation of psychological egoism is an empirical theory that is in all likelihood false. (shrink)

One of the standard examples in contemporary moral psychology originates in the works of social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. He treats people's responses to the story of Julie and Mark, two siblings who decide to have casual, consensual, protected sex, as facts of human morality, providing evidence for his social intuitionist approach to moral judgements. We argue that Haidt's description of the facts of the story and the reactions of the respondents as ‘morally dumbfounded’ presupposes a view about moral reasoning that (...) is more substantial than he acknowledges. Drawing on the philosophical work by Iris Murdoch and Cora Diamond, we explore how different descriptions of human morality, sexuality, and family relations engage us in evaluations about distinctive features of human life and language that go deeper than Haidt envisages. Thus, we show the need to attend to the concepts used to describe the facts of human moral psychology and the pictures of morality these concepts reveal about the researcher's own understanding of moral experience. This points to the particular responsibility any researcher into human moral psychology has for ensuring that the descriptions they offer are attuned to the complexities of the lives of those they form theories about and that these do not appear conceptually confounding. (shrink)

In this paper we delineate the conditions and features of what we call an existential philosophy of history in relation to customary trends in the field of the philosophy of history. We do this by circumscribing what a transgenerational temporality and what our entanglement in ethical relations with temporal others ask of us as existential and responsive selves and by explicating what attitude we need to have when trying to responsibly respond to other vulnerable beings in our historical world of (...) life. (shrink)

Belief bias is the tendency for prior beliefs to influence people's deductive reasoning in two ways: through the application of a simple belief-heuristic and through the application of more effortful reasoning for unbelievable conclusions. Previous research indicates that cognitive ability is the primary determinant of the effect of beliefs on accuracy. In the current study, we show that the mere tendency to engage analytic reasoning is responsible for the effect of cognitive ability on motivated reasoning. The implications of this finding (...) for our understanding of the impact of individual differences on belief bias are discussed. (shrink)

The focus of this paper is the analysis of the epistemological and practical role played bypathe/affections in Epicurus’ philosophy. Epicurus firstly considered the affections not as emotional/passional conditions, but as firm criteria of truth and more specifically as the third criterion of the canonic (i.e. the epistemological part of his philosophical system). In this article the critical reactions (in particular by the Peripatetic side: Aristocles of Messene) against the Epicurean position about the function of the affections will be investigated too. (...) Finally, two parts of this paper are devoted to the Cyrenaic tripartition ofpathe(in all likelihood, a subject criticized by Epicurus) and to the probable doctrinal relationship between Epicurus’patheand Aristotle’sNicomachean EthicsBook 2. (shrink)

Jane Addams ha sido considerada una de las personas más importantes e influyentes en la historia de los Estados Unidos y esta categorización, en especial para una mujer nacida en el siglo XIX, nos incita a pensar en una personalidad apasionante. Ahondar en la vida y obra de esta mujer no defrauda, aunque dificulta ofrecer una imagen completa – si eso fuese posible – de su poliédrica figura. En este artículo esbozamos algunos rasgos biográficos de Jane Addams en el contexto (...) donde desarrolla principalmente su labor – el centro social Hull House en Chicago – para detenernos en su concepción sobre la acción social de su tiempo y los presupuestos epistemológicos, éticos y políticos que fundan su trabajo social. Pretendemos abordar la faceta de Addams en tanto que trabajadora social (sólo a efectos analíticos dada la interseccionalidad de su producción) a través de algunos tópicos como el debate sobre la responsabilidad individual o social de la pobreza; Hull House como instrumento de abordaje de la cuestión social; la cooperación interclasista, el igualitarismo, y la participación de la comunidad en la resolución de sus problemas; los fundamentos empíricos y pragmáticos de su pensamiento y acción; y el carácter antiopresivo y reformista del Trabajo social que Addams focaliza en los niveles de intervención grupal y comunitaria ya que son desde los que se podrá llevar a cabo la reforma social. (shrink)

This paper introduces self-rewilding, a philosophy prioritizing ecologically aware, ecocentric living. It examines human-environment interactions, advocating for an ecological consciousness and multispecies sensibility. Within this framework, unlike traditional views of nature, “wild” is preferred to signify the interconnectedness of all ecosystem agents. Self-rewilding is presented as a method to foster coexistence and multispecies justice, encouraging societal shifts towards ecocentric practices through ecological re-enchantment and discomfort acceptance. Aimed at enriching lives and catalyzing positive ecological change, this concept underscores the potential for (...) a thriving biosphere and equitable multispecies community, positioning self-rewilding as essential for contemporary ecological awareness and active ecosystem restoration. (shrink)