La percepción del Otro desde una perspectiva hegemónica es recurrente en las literaturas heterogéneas, entendidas a grandes rasgos como un tipo de literatura fruto del encuentro entre culturas. Mi objetivo es presentar a la poesía negrista como un evidente caso de literatura heterogénea, aunque con una diferencia: en lugar de perpetuar el punto de vista hegemónico, la poesía negrista latinoamericana, en particular la de Nicolás Guillén, logra una visión de los negros desde la búsqueda de una identidad propia. (...) Teniendo como fundamento la dialéctica nietzscheana dionisíaco-apolíneo, sostengo que la literatura heterogénea en general evidencia una insuficiencia del lenguaje -elemento característicamente apolíneo- en su búsqueda de la representación del Otro, mientras que la poesía de Guillén muestra un mayor grado de cercanía con el Otro, a través de la adopción de un elemento distintivamente dionisíaco: la musicalidad. The perception of the Other from a hegemonic perspective is recurrent in heterogeneous literatures, broadly understood as a kind of literature resulted from the encounter between cultures. The aim of this work is to present "negrista" poetry as an evident case of heterogeneous literature, though different in a way: instead of perpetuating the hegemonic point of view, Latinamerican "negrista" poetry, particularly Nicolás Guillén's, achieves a vision of black people in search of their own identity. Based on Nietzschean Apollonian-Dyonisian dialectic, I maintain that heterogeneous literature in general shows an insufficiency of language -typically Apollonian- in its search for the representation of the Other, whereas Guillén's poetry shows a greater degree of closeness to the Other by adopting an element which is distinctively Dyonisian: musicality. (shrink)

El gran zoo (1984), del poeta cubano Nicolás Guillén, ofrece distintas representaciones sobre el Caribe. El artículo argumenta que el texto de Nicolás Guillén se inscribe dentro del movimiento literario hispanoamericano de la neovanguardia. Luego, se examinan algunas características formales del texto, tomando como ejemplo los poemas “El sueño” y “Guitarra”. Otro poema que se estudia con más detenimiento es “El tenor”, el cual parodia la división entre la alta cultura y la cultura popular. Por último, (...) se analizan varias alusiones del poemario al contexto histórico de la Guerra Fría y la Carrera Espacial. (shrink)

This paper is an attempt to introduce the thought of the Martinican philosopher, René Ménil to the English-speaking world. It suggests that his philosophy can best be characterized as an aesthetic Marxism, which moved through three crucial phases: (1) a surrealist/French communist phase; (2) a Black poeticist/French communist phase; and (3) a critical poeticist/Martinican communist phase. The passage through these three phases was marked by an increasing and more fixed centering of the aesthetic that created very real tensions with its (...) politico-economic base. The paper explores these tensions through a comparative analysis with other Caribbean aesthetic Marxists or aesthetic historicists such as CLR James, Nicolás Guillén, and Kamau Brathwaite. (shrink)

In 1968, Aimé Césaire travelled to Cuba to participate in the Havana Cultural Congress, a mass international meeting where delegates discussed the place of culture in the struggle against imperialism, neo-colonialism, and underdevelopment. Among the likes of C.L.R. James, Nicolás Guillén, René Depestre, Michel Leiris, and Daniel Guérin, it was in Havana that the Martinican politician undertook the until-now untranslated interview with Sonia Aratán for the Casa de las Américas revue and delivered his Cultural Congress conference paper – (...) previously believed by Césaire scholars to be lost. Both texts shed light on Césaire’s little-known views on Fidel Castro, the Cuban Revolution and Marxism in the context of late-1960s tricontinentalism. By reconstructing Césaire’s exchanges with Cuban writers before and during the Congress, we propose a consideration of the role of Cuba in Césaire’s political thought as a tragic possibility, combining the catastrophe of Caribbean history with the uncertain potential of new social forms. (shrink)

The empirical study of belief is emerging at a rapid clip, uniting work from all corners of cognitive science. Reliance on belief in understanding and predicting behavior is widespread. Examples can be found, inter alia, in the placebo, attribution theory, theory of mind, and comparative psychological literatures. Research on belief also provides evidence for robust generalizations, including about how we fix, store, and change our beliefs. Evidence supports the existence of a Spinozan system of belief fixation: one that is automatic (...) and independent of belief rejection. Independent research supports the existence of a system of fragmented belief storage: one that relies on large numbers of causally isolated, context-sensitive stores of belief in memory. Finally, empirical and observational data support at least two systems of belief change. One system adheres, mostly, to epistemological norms of updating; the other, the psychological immune system, functions to guard our most centrally held beliefs from potential inconsistency with newly formed beliefs. Refining our under- standing of these systems can shed light on pressing real-world issues, such as how fake news, propaganda, and brainwashing exploit our psychology of belief, and how best to construct our modern informational world. (shrink)

An innovative literary analysis of Freud's "Wolf Man.".

In this article, I show that the semantics one adopts for mass terms constrains the metaphysical claims one can make about mixtures. I first expose why mixtures challenge a singularist approach based on mereological sums. After discussing an alternative, non-singularist approach, I take chemistry into account and explain how it changes our perspective on these issues.

After 100+ years of studying syllogistic reasoning, what have we learned? Well, Riesterer and colleagues suggest that we have learned to throw away most of the data! If that seems like a bad idea to you then, be assured, that the authors agree with you. The sad fact is that the conclusion of “No Valid Conclusion” (NVC) is one of the most frequently selected responses in syllogistic reasoning but these “majority data” have been ignored by most researchers. Riesterer and colleagues (...) introduce heuristic rules for predicting NVC and provide directions to modelers on how to up their game. (shrink)

Cette édition numérique a été réalisée à partir d'un support physique, parfois ancien, conservé au sein du dépôt légal de la Bibliothèque nationale de France, conformément à la loi n° 2012-287 du 1er mars 2012 relative à l'exploitation des Livres indisponibles du XXe siècle. En montrant que la conscience pure est pure attente, cet essai décrit comment l'attente structure transcendantalement toute représentation que nous puissions avoir du temps. « Copyright Electre » Pages de début Première partie - La conscience du (...) temps 1 - Le sens du temps 2 - Phénoménologie de l'attente Deuxième partie - Ontologie du temps 3 - Réalité du temps 4 - Continuité et discontinuité 5 - Substantialité de la médiation : une ontologie de l'ambiguïté Bibliographie Index Pages de fin. (shrink)

In order to describe the logic of morality, "contractualist" philosophers have studied how individuals behave when they choose to follow their moral intuitions. These individuals, contractualists note, often act as if they have bargained and thus reached an agreement with others about how to distribute the benefits and burdens of mutual cooperation. Using this observation, such philosophers argue that the purpose of morality is to maximize the benefits of human interaction. The resulting "contract" analogy is both insightful and puzzling. On (...) one hand, it captures the pattern of moral intuitions, thus answering questions about human cooperation: why do humans cooperate? Why should the distribution of benefits be proportionate to each person's contribution? Why should the punishment be proportionate to the crime? Why should the rights be proportionate to the duties? On the other hand, the analogy provides a mere as-if explanation for human cooperation, saying that cooperation is "as if" people have passed a contract-but since they didn't, why should it be so? To evolutionary thinkers, the puzzle of the missing contract is immediately reminiscent of the puzzle of the missing "designer" of life-forms, a puzzle that Darwin's theory of natural selection essentially resolved. Evolutionary and contractualist theory originally intersected at the work of philosophers John Rawls and David Gauthier, who argued that moral judgments are based on a sense of fairness that has been naturally selected. In this book, Nicolas Baumard further explores the theory that morality was originally an adaptation to the biological market of cooperation, an arena in which individuals competed to be selected for cooperative interactions. In this environment, Baumard suggests, the best strategy was to treat others with impartiality and to share the costs and benefits of cooperation in a fair way, so that those who offered less than others were left out of cooperation while those who offered more were exploited by their partners. It is with this evolutionary approach that Baumard ultimately accounts for the specific structure of human morality. (shrink)

A dilemma put forward by Schein (1993) and Rayo (2002) suggests that, in order to characterize the semantics of plurals, we should not use predicate logic, but non-singular logic, a formal language whose terms may refer to several things at once. We show that a similar dilemma applies to mass nouns. If we use predicate logic and sets, we arrive at a Russellian paradox when characterizing the semantics of mass nouns. Likewise, a semantics of mass nouns based upon predicate logic (...) and mereological sums is too weak, since it cannot characterize the “intermediary” construals that sentences containing mass nouns may receive. We then develop an account where mass nouns are treated as non-singular terms, which may refer to several things at once. This semantics is faithful to the intuition that, if there are eight pieces of silverware on a table, the speaker refers to eight things at once when he says: “The silverware that is on the table comes from Italy”. We show that this account provides a satisfactory semantics for a wide range of sentences, including cases often seen as difficult, like “The gold on the table weighs seven ounces” (Bunt 1985) and “All phosphorus is either red or black” (Roeper 1983). (shrink)

Jocelyne Porcher sets out to “reinvent” our relationship to animals in order to better “live with” them. This article provides a critical examination of her thesis that farm animals can be seen as proper workers, in a sense that precludes the sort of unjust exploitation that she ascribes to factory farming. Contrary to Porcher, the article considers relationships between humans and domesticated species which do not entail killing or even work for food production purposes. The present critique focuses on the (...) distinction between the (industrial) “animal productions” and the (traditional) “husbandry” practices ; the notion of animal worker and its implications ; finally, the assumptions leading Porcher to overlook possible alternative relationships. (shrink)

The διακριτικὴ τέχνη (the art of separating or discriminating), from which the sixth definition of theSophiststarts (226b1–231b9), is puzzling.Prima faciethe art of separating does not fit the initial division of art between ποιητικὴ τέχνη (production) and κτητικὴ τέχνη (acquisition) at 219a8–c9. Therefore, scholars generally agree that, although mutually exclusive, ποιητική and κτητική are not exhaustive and leave room for a third species of art, διακριτικὴ τέχνη, on a par with ποιητική and κτητική. However, I argue that textual evidence suggests otherwise.

Blaise Pascal est le penseur radical des limites et des contradictions de l'homme, ni ange ni bête. Contrairement à ce qu'en prétend l'orgueil de toute une modernité, la raison ne peut pas tout ; mais contrairement au désespoir du fanatisme, la raison n'est pas sans force. Jusqu'où alors peut-elle s'exercer? Pour Pascal, la philosophie ne saurait faire l'économie de la question de Dieu, Elle doit donc croiser la théologie. Mais comment vont se nouer l'ordre de l'esprit et celui de la (...) charité? Pascal produit ainsi une analyse critique de la philosophie comme telle, de ses capacités et de ses limites, que le présent ouvrage se donne pour tâche de clarifier. Que peut la philosophie? Mais qui décide de ce qu'elle peut, et surtout de ce qu'elle ne peut pas? Comment s'établissent alors ses rapports avec la théologie? Ce que Pascal nous invite ainsi à penser, c'est toujours à la fois la misère et la grandeur de la philosophie. (shrink)

Many scholars view artworks as the products of cultural history and arbitrary institutional conventions. Others construe art as the result of psychological mechanisms internal to the organism. These historical and psychological approaches are often viewed as foes rather than friends. Is it possible to combine these two approaches in a unified analysis of the perception and consciousness of artworks? I defend a positive answer to this question and propose a psycho-historical theory, which argues that artworks are historical and material artefacts (...) designed to prompt mental activities and elicit the conscious experience of aesthetic worlds. My argument suggests that the material components of artworks--termed their `material substrata'--are crucial mediators between historical contexts and the mental activities elicited by the perception of artworks. (shrink)

How do humans manage to keep track of a gradually changing object or person as the same persisting individual despite the fact that the extraction of information about this individual must often rely on heterogeneous information sources and heterogeneous tracking methods? The article introduces the Empirical Tracking of Individuals theory to address this problem. This theory proposes an analysis of the concept of integrated tracking, which refers to the capacity to acquire, store, and update information about the identity and location (...) of individuals in our environment. It hypothesizes that certain functions of attention are a key to explaining how the cognitive flexibility of the human mind overcomes the heterogeneity of sources and methods in integrated tracking. At least two premises lend support to this hypothesis. First, heterogeneity of tracking sources is overcome by the combination of information from multiple perceptual modalities and a phenomenon of multisensory 'transparency'. Second, heterogeneity of tracking sources and methods may also be overcome by inferences that combine information across domains to acquire reasons to believe propositions about the target's location and identity. (shrink)

This study examines the role of human rights violations as a harbinger of civil wars to come, as well as the links between repression, state weakness, and conflict. Human rights violations are both part of the escalating process that may end in civil war and can contribute to an escalation of conflict to civil war, particularly in weak states. The role of government repression and state weakness in leading to civil war is tested empirically. The results show that both closely (...) correlate with civil war onset, especially if they are observed in combination. A two-stage model shows that, while low-level conflict leads to human rights violations, they increase the risk of an escalation to civil war in turn. Human rights violations are identified as an important aspect of understanding civil war onset as the result of an escalation over time and a clear early warning sign of wars to come. (shrink)

The hypothesizes this article suggest that the constitutive elements of Pentecostalism are sufficiently heterogeneous, malleable and dynamic to enable reappropriations and diverse modes of identification, from a critical and intrinsically political dimension, both at the individual and collective levels. For the present study, we will analyze the case of a Pentecostal community in the city of Buenos Aires, the Centro Cristiano Nueva Vida, with the purpose of investigating how institutional dynamics, the performances of Pentecostal subjectivity and the resignification of theological (...) discourses, serve to the promotion and construction of alternative political positions. To this end, we will focus on two central themes. First, how the CCNV understands its Pentecostal identity from a disruptive dynamic, both in its religious and socio-communitarian dimensions. And second, the reappropriation of discursive elements -especially within the Evangelical/Pentecostal theological matrix- that operate in the CCNV as instances that enable resignifications in terms of socio-political practices and meanings. (shrink)

Sex‐determining factors are usually assumed to be either genetic or environmental. The present paper aims at drawing attention to the potential contribution of developmental noise, an important but often‐neglected component of phenotypic variance. Mutual inhibitions between male and female pathways make sex a bistable equilibrium, such that random fluctuations in the expression of genes at the top of the cascade are sufficient to drive individual development toward one or the other stable state. Evolutionary modeling shows that stochastic sex determinants should (...) resist elimination by genetic or environmental sex determinants under ecologically meaningful settings. On the empirical side, many sex‐determination systems traditionally considered as environmental or polygenic actually provide evidence for large components of stochasticity. In reviewing the field, I argue that sex‐determination systems should be considered within a three‐ends continuum, rather than the classical two‐ends continuum. (shrink)

Se busca rastrear la imagen que Platón tiene de Heráclito y articularla con la estructura argumentativa del Cratilo, para comprender las necesidades textuales a las que responde la doctrina del flujo perpetuo, es decir, la discusión sobre la corrección (ὀρθότης) del nombre. Gracias a la inclusión del testimonio heraclíteo, resulta posible rastrear la presunta consolidación de la tesis sobre los nombres primarios y los secundarios como el eje de la separación entre dos planos de realidad (uno estable y uno móvil) (...) y de la teoría de las Ideas -es decir, como la base de la epistemología platónica presente en los diálogos de madurez-. The article seeks to trace the image Plato has of Heraclitus and connect it with the argumentative structure of the Cratylus in order to understand the textual needs that give rise to the doctrine of perpetual flux, that is, the discussion regarding the correctness (ὀρθότης) of names. The inclusion of Heraclitus's testimony makes it possible to trace the alleged consolidation of the thesis regarding primary and secondary names as the axis of separation between two levels of reality (one stable, the other, changing) and the theory of Ideas -that is, as the basis of Plato's epistemology as set forth in the late dialogues-. (shrink)