Lejos de nuestros modelos, la palabra desorden suele designar la riada anónima del exterior. Querría señalar la fuerza ciega de una corriente humana y terrenal, impetuosamente aleatoria, de la que debemos protegernos. Pero éste no es un libro de ética al estilo usual. No opera con la contraposición del bien al mal, no busca un conjunto de prescripciones para una vida mejor ni una idea del deber que guíe la acción. No intenta que los hombres aprendan a conducirse en términos (...) supuestamente morales, sino que cada uno asuma su indescifrable signo natal y le dé una forma de vida. El vínculo entre ética y alegría, entre moral y fuerza, ha sido peligrosamente olvidado. La disciplina no es reclamada por las señas externas de la organización, sino por el desarrollo interior de la potencia. Este libro intenta actualizar la vieja certeza, oriental y occidental, de que las contingencias externas acaecen siempre con un orden oculto, remotamente inteligible. Según tal experiencia, el pensamiento no es en primer lugar un acto reflexivo que pueda o no realizarse, sino la turbulencia secreta de cualquier presencia material, por apacible que parezca. Lo mismo es ser y pensar, se afirma ya antes de Platón. Se trata de una experiencia vertiginosa y a la vez común, admitida en la más llana –aunque no siempre expresable– sabiduría popular. Si aquí se tiene la pretensión de defenderla, de modo suficientemente comprensible, es por la intención de mostrarla en la más cotidiana y banal actualidad. (shrink)

El presente estudio aborda el nacimiento como problema filosófico desde una perspectiva intersubjetiva y corporeizada derivada del análisis del Cuerpo y el Otro presente en la Fenomenología de la Percepción de Merleau-Ponty. A partir de lo anterior, se discuten las limitaciones que tendría la coexistencia (Mitdasein) de Heidegger y la Otredad de Lévinas enmarcada en la relación del rostro en su intento de aproximarse a una filosofía del nacimiento desde una perspectiva de mundo compartido (madre-padre-hijo). Además, se plantea la necesidad (...) de incorporar al problema filosófico sobre el nacimiento tres etapas: embarazo-nacimiento-puerperio, ya que estas son fundamentales para ilustrar de manera profunda la dimensión relacional y corporeizada de este proceso que exhibe temporalidad e historicidad. (shrink)

Fodor and LePore's attack on conceptual role semantics relies on Quine's attack on the traditional analytic/synthetic and a priori/a posteriori distinctions, which in turn consists of four arguments: an attack on truth by convention; an appeal to revisability; a claim of confirmation holism; and a charge of explanatory vacuity. Once the different merits of these arguments are sorted out, their proper target can be seen to be not the Traditional Distinctions, but an implicit assumption about their superficial availability that we (...) have abundant reason to reject. Once we reject it, we can see how issues of the absorbtion of conventions, the revisability of belief, and confirmation holism are compatible with the Traditional Distinctions, and that Quine's discussion only serves to camouflage the question of whether some confirmation relations are constitutive of meaning and knowable a priori. (shrink)

The main claim of this paper is the following: In a typical rational legal system, legal adjudication is necessarily discretional. Discretion is the result of what I call ‘systemic indeterminacy’. Systemic indeterminacy is the thesis that claims that typical rational legal systems that have an interpretative code with more than one interpretative directive and the non-redundancy clause are necessarily indeterminate. Since typical rational legal systems do not have redundant rules a plurality of interpretative directives will necessarily yield a plurality of (...) interpretative results. Due to the non-liquet rule judges are obligated to choose among the different interpretative results provided by the interpretative code. In other words, by building a thesis on legal indeterminacy as the consequence of having a plurality of interpretative directives that necessarily yield different results, I proceed to provide an account of discretion as a necessary feature of legal adjudication. (shrink)

According to many actualist theories of modality, possible worlds should be identified with maximal and consistent sets of actually existing propositions called "world-stories". A set of propositions is said to be maximal if and only if for every (actually existing) proposition P , either P or its negation belongs to the set. In my talk, I will claim that this conception of maximality is problematic in case what has to be represented by a world-story is the possible non existence of (...) an actual individual. A representation of the possible non existence of an actual individual is either a representation that "encodes" the explicit information that the individual does not exist or a representation that does not contain any information about the individual in question. The former case corresponds to a world-story A that contains a proposition according to which a certain actually existing object, say O, does not exist, the latter case to a world-story B that simply does not contain any proposition about O. I will claim, however, that the first way is not good for the actualist (had A been the true world-story, something directly about a possible individual would have been true) while the second conflicts with the standard notion of maximality given above. In order to fix this problem, I will first propose to characterize the notion of "actual object that would have existed, had a certain set of propositions been true". I will then recursively define an alternative conception of maximality ("local maximality") that can be applied to world-stories aiming to represent, in an actualist acceptable way, the possible non-existence of an actual object. (shrink)

Can we explain why some propositions are necessary? Blackburn (Fact, science, and value. Blackwell, Oxford, 1987) has presented a dilemma aimed at showing that the necessity of a proposition cannot be explained either in the case where the explanans is another necessary proposition (necessity horn) or in the case where the explanans is a contingent proposition (contingency horn). Blackburn’s dilemma is intended to show that necessary truth is an explanatorily irreducible kind of truth: there is nothing that explains why propositions (...) are necessary, nothing that makes necessary necessary truths. In this paper, I criticize the contingency horn of Blackburn’s dilemma. On the one hand, I show that the official reconstruction of the horn uses a principle that is incompatible with the notion of explanation plausibly needed to explain why propositions are necessary; on the other, I show that a simpler formulation of the horn, which does not make use of such a controversial principle, makes essential use of principles that are incompatible with the idea that possibilities can have explanatory roles. I then defend the view that possibilities can have explanatory roles, and that the explanatory role of possibilities is best represented, within possible worlds, as the existence of trans-world relations of explanation. (shrink)

At its proper and most radical, humanistic inquiry is about problems that do not have ready solutions. If this fundamental feature had been accepted, debates about the humanities in recent years might have taken a different kind of turn, whereby, instead of appending new and ever more purposeful modifiers to the word humanities--the digital, the environmental, the neuro, the medical, the public--the ways in which humanistic modes of intellectual labor operate could have assumed a more central focus. This would not (...) have to mean adopting a conservative or conservatively disciplinary stance toward the humanities. Rather, it would demonstrate the ways in which humanistic inquiry approaches intellectual problems conceptually, methodologically, and practically, without necessarily seeking to legitimize the relevance of its undertakings by way of social utility and consensus.This possibility of reimagining humanistic study is the basic assumption and orientation of this book. Many books make use of Foucault's theories, but few use his work to reflect on the conundrums, dead ends, and potentialities of humanistic inquiry in the current Western academy. By juxtaposing debates about literary study, visibilities and invisibilities, sound/voice/listening, race/racism, and self- governance/entrepreneurship in a unique constellation against what Chow polemicizes as the moral instrumentalization of knowledge, A Face Drawn in Sand is intended as an intervention in some of the most pressing issues facing humanistic study today: how to process and analyze texts; how to form and sustain arguments; how to reconceptualize familiar problems through lesser known as well as very well known sources. Above all, how not to have the answers before the questions. (shrink)

Excerpt from L'E nerge tique Et le Me canisme: Au Point de Vue des Conditions de la Connaissance 1. - Les physiciens contemporains s'accordent tous a reconnaitre la valeur objective complete des resultats purement experimentaux. Ceux-ci constituent veritablement la science de la physique, et, sauf dans des cas exceptionnels, momentanes, dans la science en train de se faire, il n'y a, a leur sujet, aucune divergence. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find (...) more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.". (shrink)

Resumen Este artículo analiza la construcción de la infancia en las novelas El mercurio (1968), El río de la luna (1981) y Esta pared de hielo (2005), de José María Guelbenzu, a la luz de los conceptos mítico-simbólicos de Bachelard y Durand para demostrar que funciona como un absoluto primigenio al que se busca volver constantemente, pues resguarda a los personajes hasta el inminente choque con la realidad adulta. Esto para concluir que desde la adultez los personajes observan la infancia (...) con el anhelo de volver allí, lo que tiene una función paliativa mediante la memoria y la palabra, por ello, la narrativa de Guelbenzu plantea regresar al ámbito infantil desde las imágenes literarias y así conservar ese mundo de fantasía. Abstract This article analyzes the construction of childhood in the novels El mercurio (1968), El río de la luna (1981) and Esta pared de hielo (2005), by José María Guelbenzu, in the light of the mythical-symbolic concepts of Bachelard and Durand to demonstrate that it functions as a primitive absolute to which it is sought to return constantly, since it protects the characters until the imminent clash with adult reality. This to conclude that in their adulthood the characters observe childhood with the desire to return there, this has a palliative function through memory and word, therefore, Guelbenzu’s narrative proposes the return to the child environment trough literary images to preserve that world of fantasy. (shrink)

Introducción -- La filosofía moderna: Francisco Bacon. Renato Descartes -- El liberalismo europeo: Juan Locke. Juan Jacobo Rousseau -- La estructura del estado moderno: Montesquieu. Manuel José Sieyés -- El ataque a la tradición: Voltaire. Diderot -- Progreso y Utopia: Adán Smith. Condorcet.

Abductive problems have been widely studied in propositional logic. First order abduction, however, has been viewed as intractable, for the undecidability of logical consequence. In this paper, we propose a notion of abductive problem, N-abductive problem, which is relative to the cardinality of the minimal model satisfying the given theory. We use a notion of restricted satisfaction, also relative to a domain cardinality. Finally, we propose an effective procedure for the searching of abductive solutions, by means of a modification of (...) Beth's tableaux. (shrink)

El propósito del estudio que generó el presente artículo fue analizar las percepciones de coordinadores y docentes tutores sobre el desarrollo de competencias generales en estudiantes de pregrado desde la acción tutorial. El estudio se realizó según el enfoque cualitativo y diseño fenomenológico, cuya población la constituyeron coordinadores y docentes tutores de estudiantes de pregrado de una Universidad de Lima desde sus experiencias en la acción tutorial. El tamaño de la muestra se determinó por el criterio de saturación. Los datos (...) se recogieron por medio de una guía de encuesta estructurada y el rigor científico se orientó según criterios de calidad: credibilidad, transferibilidad, dependencia y confirmabilidad. Se encontró como resultado principal que la acción tutorial contribuye al desarrollo de algunas competencias genéricas, tales como las comunicativas escritas y orales, y el trabajo en equipo, que son las más valoradas por la experiencia tutorial, ya que se requiere de comunicación fluida. (shrink)

According to Williamson, our knowledge of metaphysical necessities and possibilities is just a “special case” of our knowledge of counterfactual conditionals. This subsumption of modal under counterfactual thinking mainly serves a methodological role: to sign the end of “philosophical exceptionalism” in modal epistemology, namely the view that our knowledge of metaphysical modalities is obtained by means of a special, dedicated, possibly a priori, capacity. In this paper, I show that a counterfactual approach to modal epistemology is structurally similar to more (...) traditional “conceivability-based” approaches. On this basis, I then show that the counterfactual approach suffers some of the same problems and I conclude that it is still based on a quite exceptional capacity to determine the truth of modal metaphysical claims. Given that, for Williamson, the epistemology of thought experiments should also be subsumed under the counterfactual approach, the problem I raise in this paper has consequences for his approach to thought experiments. (shrink)

The notion of validity for modal languages could be defined in two slightly different ways. The first is the original definition given by S. Kripke, for which a formula φ of a modal language L is valid if and only if it is true in every actual world of every interpretation of L. The second is the definition that has become standard in most textbook presentations of modal logic, for which a formula φ of L is valid if and only (...) if it is true in every world in every interpretation of L. For simple modal languages, “Kripkean validity” and “Textbook validity” are extensionally equivalent. According to E. Zalta, however, Textbook validity is an “incorrect” definition of validity, because: (i) it is not in full compliance with Tarski’s notion of truth; (ii) in expressively richer languages, enriched by the actuality operator, some obviously true formulas count as valid only if the Kripkean notion is used. The purpose of this paper is to show that (i) and (ii) are not good reasons to favor Kripkean valid- ity over Textbook validity. On the one hand, I will claim that the difference between the two should rather be seen as the result of two different conceptions on how a modal logic should be built from a non-modal basis; on the other, I will show the advantages, for the question at issue, of seeing the actuality operator as belonging to the family of two-dimensional operators. (shrink)

La filosofía helenística es producto de un curso impartido en la Facultad de Filosofía y Letras de la UNAM por Alfonso Reyes, quien a su gran formación filosófica unía extraordinaria sapiencia del mundo griego. El libro se divide en tres partes que comprenden desde la filosofía alejandrina hasta el periodo ético y religioso de los griegos, con lo que se completa el cuadro de la filosofía helenística.

In this paper, I claim that two ways of defining validity for modal languages (“real-world” and “general” validity), corresponding to distinction between a correct and an incorrect way of defining modal valid- ity, correspond instead to two substantive ways of conceiving modal truth. At the same time, I claim that the major logical manifestation of the real- world/general validity distinction in modal propositional languages with the actuality operator should not be taken seriously, but simply as a by-product of the way (...) in which the semantics of such an operator is usually given. (shrink)

Timothy Williamson in his article "Necessary Existents" presents a proof of the claim that everything necessarily exists using just three seemingly uncontroversial principles relating the notions of proposition with those of truth and existence. The argument, however, may be easily blocked once the distinction, introduced by R. M. Adams, between the notions of a proposition being true in a world and of (or at) a world is introduced. In this paper I defend the plausibility of the notion of a proposition's (...) being true of a world by rejecting two criticisms of it raised by Williamson; in the final section, I present a conception of propositions, according to which they are equivalence classes of mental representations, for which at least one of the principles comes out as false. (shrink)

Le propos de ce recueil est de développer deux thématiques : raison et folie et déraisons de la raison. D'un côté, on interroge la décision spéculative et politique qui "lie et sépare à la fois raison et folie" dans les termes mêmes employés par Michel Foucault (1961). L'âge classique, le siècle de la raison, commence par constituer un autre de la raison : le fou, renvoyé "au jardin des espèces". Il faut donc revisiter cette archéologie des dualismes mutilants : raison (...) et folie, normal et pathologique, âme et corps, à la lumière des travaux les plus récents. La folie aujourd'hui s'aborde de manière préoccupante dans les politiques de santé mentale qui visent à criminaliser la folie : psychiatrie menacée d'un retour de l'enfermement et de la violence. Psychiatrie sinistrée mais qui est déjà sur la voie de la résistance, notamment dans la culture, comme l'atteste la présence de la mélancolie en son sein, mais aussi dans les développements contemporains de la psychothérapie institutionnelle et de ses équipements comme de ses concepts. Sans négliger d'autres initiatives. Enfin, la rationalité elle-même n'est pas une donnée immédiate de la science. Elle se construit sur fond d'irrationalité. Là aussi, les dualismes familiers et stérilisants sont dissipés. (shrink)

In this article, I show that (i) from what I call a “Kripkean” account of the relations between conceivability and metaphysical necessities, (ii) an apparently plausible principle relating conceivability and epistemic modality, and (iii) the duality of epistemic modalities, one can show the utterly anti-Kripkean result that every metaphysical necessity is an epistemic necessity. My aim is to present and diagnose the problem and evaluate the costs of some possible Kripkean reactions. In particular, I will evaluate the consequences and theoretical (...) costs of rejecting the main ingredients of the argument, namely that we cannot genuinely conceive the negations of metaphysical necessities, that there is no postulated relation between conceivability and epistemic possibility (actually, between unconceivability and epistemic impossibility), and that epistemic possibility and necessity are not dualities. (shrink)

Aaccording to D. K. lewis (1973), would-couterfactuals and might-counterfactuals are duals. from this, it follows that the negation of a would-counterfactual is equiv- alent to the corresponding “might-not”-counterfactual and that the negation of a might-counterfactual is equivalent to the corresponding “would-not”- counterfactual. there are cases, however, where we seem to be entitled to accept the would- counterfactual and we are also equally entitled to accept the corresponding might-not-counterfactual and cases where we seem to be entitled to accept the might-counterfactual without (...) being equally entitled to reject the corresponding would-not-counterfactual. In this paper, I will show that a distinction between two types of rejections for counterfactuals (p-rejection and s-rejection) and the recognition that might-not-counterfactuals may play the role of p-rejections (by an application to counterfactuals of the lewisian approach to conversational scores) could explain why the problematic cases should not be seen as cases where the duality of would- and might-counterfactuals fails. (shrink)