This article suggests that humanism is a decisionism in contemporary critical political theory. Despite obvious and multiple differences, leading critical theorists like Giorgio Agamben, Slavoj Žižek, Eric Santner, and Jürgen Habermas, among others, share an investment in stabilizing the human being as a ground of the political. This stabilization of the human should concern political theorists, as this article argues, because it uncritically reproduces conceptual affinities between the notion of the human being and sovereign authority. By investing in the stability (...) and centrality of the human being, these theorists perform what will be called, paraphrasing an often neglected argument by Carl Schmitt, a decision to be human. Contrary to conventional wisdom, I argue that Schmitt’s decisionism is not merely circumscribed to sovereignty’s juridico-political dimension, but that it also includes a peculiar commitment to God’s decision to become human in Christ. Against this decisionism as humanism, the article draws on Walter Benjamin, Roberto Esposito, and Jacques Derrida to propose an alternative politics that destabilizes humanity and sovereignty through the emergence of the animal, or what will be called melancholic lycanthropy. (shrink)

Popper conceived an experiment whose analysis led to a result that he deemed absurd. Popper wrote that his reasoning was based on the Copenhagen interpretation and therefore invalidated it. Many authors who have examined Popper's analysis have found in it various technical flaws which are briefly summarized here. However, the aim of the present article is not technical. My concern is to redress logical flaws in Popper's argument: the terminology he uses is ambiguous, his analysis involves counterfactual hypotheses, and it (...) violates Bohr's complementarity principle. Therefore, the absurdity of Popper's result only confirms Bohr's approach. (shrink)

Human dignity is making a comeback. The essay focuses on the story that this comeback of human dignity presupposes and recasts. In that story, the “human family” is portrayed in terms of aristocratic dignitas. The consequences are twofold: human dignity is co-implicated with the de-animalization of the human being; once de-animalization is introduced, the story of human dignity cultivates an aristocratic sense of elevation of the human over other species, or what I will call “species aristocratism.” The fact that a (...) new kind of aristocratism based on species emerges from the story of human dignity should concern us, I suggest, because it not only confronts us with unintended consequences of relying on human dignity as the foundation of human rights but also invites us to rethink our contemporary egalitarian, democratic ethos, understood as aristocracy for all. (shrink)

This article puts Arendt’s conception of non-human animal appearance into a productive dialogue with recent developments in critical animal studies and animal rights theory within which notions such as agency, zoopolis, and animal agora play an important role. By reinterpreting the animal condition in Arendt’s account of the human condition, it demonstrates her potential contribution to political theory in a world where non-human-animals and nature are seen as making claims of entry into the political community. By emphasizing Arendt’s later work, (...) in which she expresses an openness towards the possibility that non-human animals are drawn to appear, the article indicates how Arendt might help us, both to rethink the boundaries of the political community beyond the human species, and to recognize the political agency of non-human animals. (shrink)

El presente trabajo discute el concepto de comunidad en la obra del teórico italiano Roberto Esposito y su relación con literatura reciente en la teoría de los derechos de los animales. Se argumenta que la communitas teorizada por Esposito constituye un aporte a la configuración de una comunidad más allá de lo humano, de un modo que al mismo tiempo enriquece y problematiza la idea de comunidad presupuesta, pero no teorizada explícitamente, por Sue Donaldson y Will Kymlicka en la noción (...) de zoopolis. (shrink)

This paper publishes for the first time 132 conjectures by Nicolaus Heinsius on Ovid’s Metamorphoses 1‒4. The value and possible motivations of each proposal are briefly assessed.

Species are the basis of the taxonomic scheme. They are the lowest taxonomic category that are used as units for describing biodiversity and evolution. In this contribution we discuss the current species concept for prokaryotes. Such organisms are considered to represent the widest diversity among living organisms. Species is currently circumscribed as follows: A prokaryotic species is a category that circumscribes a (preferably) genomically coherent group of individual isolates/strains sharing a high degree of similarity in (many) independent features, comparatively tested (...) under highly standardized conditions. Although the number of described prokaryotic species is underrepresented in the living world, this phylo-phenetic or polythetic species concept currently in use is considered to be pragmatic, operational and universally applicable and successfully used for identification processes. (shrink)

Species are the basis of the taxonomic scheme. They are the lowest taxonomic category that are used as units for describing biodiversity and evolution. In this contribution we discuss the current species concept for prokaryotes. Such organisms are considered to represent the widest diversity among living organisms. Species is currently circumscribed as follows: A prokaryotic species is a category that circumscribes a (preferably) genomically coherent group of individual isolates/strains sharing a high degree of similarity in (many) independent features, comparatively tested (...) under highly standardized conditions. Although the number of described prokaryotic species is underrepresented in the living world, this phylo-phenetic or polythetic species concept currently in use is considered to be pragmatic, operational and universally applicable and successfully used for identification processes. (shrink)

RESUMEN ¿Es el animal es un tema de interés para Carl Schmitt? El sentido común académico presupone que la cuestión del animal es ajena tanto a los intereses intelectuales de Schmitt como a su concepción de lo político, de lo teológico y de la relación que ambos mantienen entre sí. En este trabajo sugerimos que esta impresión debe ser revisada a la luz de evidencia textual que revela el interés de Schmitt por la cuestión del animal y de intérpretes de (...) su obra que, aunque de manera tangencial, participan de la discusión. ABSTRACT Is the animal a subject of interest to Carl Schmitt? Academic common sense presupposes that the question of the animal is alien both to Schmitt's intellectual interests and to his conception of the political, the theological, and the relationship between the two. In this paper we suggest that this impression should be revised in the light of textual evidence that reveals Schmitt's interest in the animal question and of interpreters of his work who, albeit tangentially, discuss the animal question. (shrink)

Planear una "estética plural de la naturaleza" es darle a la obviedad del enunciado que se trata de explorar algo parecido a un impulso haciéndolo avanzar por el camino de la complejidad. Esto en primer lugar. Después, hay que pararse a pensar que la articulación de estos términos, arte y naturaleza, no sólo implica enlazar la actividad relativa al primero con una imagen o arsenal de imágenes en las que esta segunda se representaría; también es vincularla a un concepto que (...) la significa. ¿Cuál? Lógicamente, la imitación, la mímesis. Aunque dadas las variaciones que ha sufrido dicho concepto a lo largo de la historia, parece necesario valorar la necesidad de comprender su objeto, la naturaleza, en lo que llamaría su dinamismo temporal. En otras palabras, habría que intentar una "historia de la naturaleza", cuya oportunidad aconsejaría mantenerla en paralelo con la "historia del arte". Y si este paralelismo -desde luego estético- del arte y la naturaleza implica en sus respectivas trayectorias temporales aquella parte de la reflexión estética que explora cada momento histórico con una atención especial en el "arte como mímesis", entonces el objetivo de dicha reflexión será también la naturaleza, que toca ir a buscar allí donde se encuentra efectivamente: en el pensamiento de la época. Tendríamos así los términos Arte, Naturaleza, Mímesis. Y de este último, la Mímesis, ya sabemos que no es la representación fiel de entidades o configuraciones naturales. ¿Qué es entonces? La proyección en una obra de Arte de unos contenidos mentales que tienen por objeto la Naturaleza. Quedan vinculados así los tres términos barajados en este libro. (shrink)

Lately, nanotechnology has become one of the main topics in the debates regarding what has been called the _Next Industrial Revolution_ within what are known as _emergent technologies_. This paper contains a comparative analysis of the different philosophical groundings, arguments and principles invoked in the official ethical approaches proposed by each of two of the main Western communities. By _official ethical approaches_ or _official positions_ we mean the opinions officially expressed by the government institutions about how ethical considerations prompted by (...) nanotechnologies should be tackled. The analysis is based, then, on the official points of view, expressed through two documents, namely two official releases issued by governmental offices or institutions in both communities, Europe and the United States of America, and considered by the authors as representative of the official opinions of the governmental institutions in each society. (shrink)

Esports have transformed playing video games into a competitive activity that bears similarities to sports and the processes of sportization. Taking as a starting point the concept of sports as competitive games, the objective of this work is to analyse the sportization of esports, as well as the impact of esports on the concept of sports and their implications on sports in the immediate future. Sports and esports are two different realities that interact with each other. This is a conceptual (...) problem for sports, and it also defines a practical challenge in the immediate future of sports. The virtual environment offers new possibilities in sports, such as broadening the possibilities of confrontation and competition development, contributing to reducing the environmental impact of certain sports, improving safety and maintaining the physical integrity of athletes, and increasing social justice and equality of chances in sports competitions. The challenge, therefore, is to try to bring esports and sports closer together, even moving toward hybrid sports, as addressed throughout this article. (shrink)