This paper analyzes the implications that the linguistic formulation of the marriage provision of the Spanish Constitution of 1978 had for securing the passage in 2005 of Law 13/2005, which legalized same-sex marriage. By claiming that a semantic omission in the original legal text was a marker of distributiveness, SSM supporters aimed to avoid a constitutional amendment, and succeeded in doing so. This linguistic argument, based on implicitness, was instrumental as a subsidiary argument of political moral argumentation. Linguistic meaning therefore (...) contributed decisively to both the legal meaning of the marriage provision and the content of the law. I argue, against some assumptions in the literature stating otherwise, that linguistic meaning should not be dismissed in constitutional interpretation and adjudication. (shrink)

This book explores the significance of archery as ritual practice and literary metaphor in classical Confucian texts. Archery passages in the Analects, Mencius, and Xunzi are discussed in the light of Zhou culture and the troubled historical circumstances of early followers of the ruist master Confucius.

En el siglo XIX, médicos europeos desarrollaron estudios científicos sobre técnica vocal y su aplicación artística. Profesionales y aficionados al canto deseaban conocer estos nuevos recursos y descubrimientos sobre la fonación, la respiración y las últimas tendencias interpretativas. El objetivo de esta investigación es documentar a través de una metodología descriptiva las principales innovaciones en la técnica vocal que se presentaron en cinco tratodos españoles de canto publicados en la segunda mitad del siglo XIX. La incorporación de estos avances influyeron (...) de forma directa en la enseñanza del canto. (shrink)

Gothic literature—a genre brimming with madness, supernaturalism, and psychological terror—offers innumerable case studies potentially representing how psychiatric patients perceive their treatment from healthcare professionals. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s famous 1892 short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” offers a poignant example of this through its fictional narrator, a diarist many interpret to be suffering from postpartum depression. The fiction here does not stray far from reality: Gilman orchestrated her diarist’s experience to mirror her own, as both real author and fictional character suffocated from (...) a melancholy only made worse by their physicians’ insistence on following the “Rest Cure.” While this instruction to cease all work and activity was a prevalent depression treatment at the time, Gilman, through “The Yellow Wallpaper,” reveals how the intervention ultimately harmed more than helped because it overlooked her—and, by extension, her fictional diarist’s— unique needs and identities. Today, while the ineffective Rest Cure no longer exists, applying observations from “The Yellow Wallpaper” to clinical research calls attention to underrepresentation in treatment development, a costly problem that could be mitigated by mindful incorporation of intersectionality theory into study designs. (shrink)

Is freedom a Western concept? As a multifaceted human experience it seems fairly transcultural. Freedom is hardly a focus of philosophical discourses in China as it is in the West, and I suppose this partly accounts for the difficulty in tracking freedom and closely related notions of agency, choice, and autonomy in Chinese philosophy.Over four decades ago Herbert Fingarette raised the controversial idea about the absence of freedom in Confucian ethics. Although not intending to denigrate, Fingarette raised a polemic that (...) has lingered to the present.1 A. C. Graham noted the sour upshot of the issue when writing that "the claim that the concept of moral choice is foreign to Confucius has offended... (shrink)

According to a prominent view of organism persistence, organisms cease to exist at death. According to a rival view, organisms can continue to exist as dead organisms. Most of the arguments in favor of the latter view rely on linguistic and common sense intuitions. I propose a new argument for somaticism by appealing to two other sources that have thus far not figured in the debate: the concept of naturalness, and biological descriptions of organisms, in particular in ethology and ecology. (...) I show that if we hone in on the relevant notion of naturalness, we can show that organisms can continue to instantiate the natural property being an organism after death. (shrink)

According to the thinking parts problem, any part sufficient for thought—e.g. a head—is a good candidate for being a thinker, and therefore being us. So we can’t assume that we—thinkers—are human beings rather than their proper parts. Many solutions to this problem have been proposed. However, I will show that the views currently on the market all face serious problems. I will then offer a new solution that avoids these problems. The thinking parts problem arises from considerations that seem to (...) be empirically substantiated. One virtue of my solution is that in addition to its theoretical apparatus it appeals to empirically substantiated considerations. (shrink)

Metaphor study is a promising trend in present-day academia. Scholars of antiquity are already profiting from it in their study of early texts. We have yet, however, to harness the potentials of metaphor in East-West comparison. The article discusses what literary metaphors are, in particular how they generate images and perspectives that call into play a broad range of extra-textual information about the speaker and his milieu. Shared metaphors are doubly advantageous: they serve as hermeneutic tools for reading early texts (...) and are fulcrums for comparing views of different traditions. Archery is an example of a shared metaphor in the Confucian Analects and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. It seems that while both texts employ images that are close together, their meanings are far apart. (shrink)

While critically examining the techno-scientific thrust that props the discourse of sustainability, this paper argues for the inclusion of the humanities and the imaginative counterworlds and complex ontological perspectives that literature offers. As Donna Haraway proposes, “we need stories (and theories) that are just big enough to gather up the complexities and keep the edges open and greedy for surprising new and old connections” (2015: 160). The Indian graphic novel Bhimayana and the artisanal aesthetic of the tribal artists is read (...) for the ways in which it mediates current debates on the posthuman, offering the possibility of intimate affirmative relationalities that could create sustainable futures. (shrink)

El presente trabajo pretende repensar la centralidad ontológica de la clase obrera a la luz de los cambios acaecidos en el paradigma post-fordista. Una profunda transformación del capitalismo que ha consolidado una matriz de acumulación en la que la forma-empleo ha cristalizado como precariado. Éste no es concebido como el sujeto histórico portador de un proyecto de transformación radical. Pensar las posibles potencias de subversión que encarna el precariado será el objetivo.

Gothic literature—a genre brimming with madness, supernaturalism, and psychological terror—offers innumerable case studies potentially representing how psychiatric patients perceive their treatment from healthcare professionals. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s famous 1892 short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” offers a poignant example of this through its fictional narrator, a diarist many interpret to be suffering from postpartum depression. The fiction here does not stray far from reality: Gilman orchestrated her diarist’s experience to mirror her own, as both real author and fictional character suffocated from (...) a melancholy only made worse by their physicians’ insistence on following the “Rest Cure.” While this instruction to cease all work and activity was a prevalent depression treatment at the time, Gilman, through “The Yellow Wallpaper,” reveals how the intervention ultimately harmed more than helped because it overlooked her—and, by extension, her fictional diarist’s— unique needs and identities. Today, while the ineffective Rest Cure no longer exists, applying observations from “The Yellow Wallpaper” to clinical research calls attention to underrepresentation in treatment development, a costly problem that could be mitigated by mindful incorporation of intersectionality theory into study designs. (shrink)

This paper argues that Samuel Beckett’s interest in functions of the brain is not only evidenced in his notebooks, taken from a number of psychology and psycho-physiognomy texts in the early 1930s, but is also explored and expanded in his fiction and drama. This paper investigates Beckett’s fascination with the limits of “cerebral consciousness” and the brain’s failure to consciously perceive certain bodily modifications especially when processing emotion. Like Antonio Damasio’s definition of emotion as essentially the bodily modifications that include (...) chemical changes, Beckett often exploits the idea of emotion as sorely a bodily phenomenon by creating characters who are unable to consciously perceive and process their emotion. For example, when talking about his own weeping, the narrator of The Unnamable attributes the tears to the malfunctioning of the brain, “liquefied brain”, denying, displacing or making physical the feeling of sadness. By examining the ways in which Beckett emphasizes a somatic dimension of emotion and its relation to the brain function and perception in his writing, this paper reveals how he explores the idea of the self and extends the idea to what he calls the “impenetrable self” that cannot be consciously recognized. I argue that if, for Joseph LeDoux, the “notion of synapses as points of communication between cells is […] essential to our efforts to understand who we are in terms of brain mechanisms”, for Beckett to expose such unconscious biological mechanisms and “gaps” becomes his own artistic challenge. (shrink)

el artículo que presenta Antonio Gómez Villar se basa en un trabajo previo, más amplio y con una estructura y contenido diferentes, preparado para la asignatura de “Ética civil”. Su publicación es, por tanto, independiente del cometido y de la programación de la asignatura. Este nuevo trabajo plantea de un modo razonable algunas de las cuestiones centrales para analizar el papel público de la religión en una democracia.

According to constitution views of persons, we are constituted by spatially coinciding human animals. Constitution views face an ‘overpopulation’ puzzle: if the animal has my brain, there is another thinker where I am. An influential solution to this problem distinguishes between derivative and non‐derivative property possession: persons non‐derivatively have their personal properties, while inheriting others from their constituters. I will show that this solution raises a new problem, by constructing a puzzle with the absurd result that we instantiate certain properties (...) incompatibly. In setting up the puzzle, I demonstrate the relevance of the bodily awareness and self‐awareness literatures to overpopulation puzzles. (shrink)

In 2014, Brett Bailey’s Exhibit B site-specific installation created a media storm and protests throughout Europe. One such protest was in London, leading to the cancellation of his show at the Barbican. Consternation caused by art work is not a new phenomenon, and indeed one of the enduring purposes of art is to push the boundaries of acceptability and to show sights that are normally kept hidden from the public gaze. From some of the Impressionists’ exhibits to twentieth century art (...) works such as Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ in 1987 and Chris Ofili’s The Holy Virgin Mary 1996, art has caused offence in a variety of ways. This article examines Exhibit B to identify the reasons for its reception. In broad outline, as a white artist his presentation of black oppression was regarded at best as naïve and at worse as culturally inappropriate. (shrink)

This article presents an archaeological analysis of some of the discourses and practices that played a decisive role in the effectuation of the Conquest of America and the establishment of a political order based on a racial prejudice and domination. A political order that was, in consequence, extremely exclusionary and violent. This research is based on the concepts of biopolitics and anthropological machine created by Giorgio Agamben, as well as on the relationship that exists between them and the communities founded (...) on identitarian principles; the researches of post-colonial philosophers; and Carl Schmit’s writings on International Law. The analysis of the Aristotelian-Thomistic conception of the human being, the geographical division of the World created from Europe, and the political treaties concluded between the emerging European States during fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, allows me to propose the Conquest of America as a paradigmatic case of this form of power that has characterized Western politics: biopolitics. (shrink)

La libertad en Descartes tiene dos momentos diferentes: antes de que se descubra la posibilidad de la verdad y después de su descubrimiento. La experiencia de la libertad previa al establecimiento de las condiciones de la verdad tiene lugar en la decisión de reconstruir el edificio del conocimiento. El descubrimiento de su fundamento teológico tiene como consecuencia la moralización del saber.

Metaphors have long been valued as powerful literary devices. Lately however the discovery of the cognitive content of metaphors is drawing the attention of contemporary scholars. For those of us engaged in comparative philosophy, metaphors seem to promise to be a much-needed hermeneutic tool for understanding independent traditions and working out balanced comparisons. In this paper, I shall examine two metaphors for virtue that are used in both the Confucian Analects and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. These common metaphors are archery and (...) the middle, or mean. If Confucius and Aristotle use similar images to speak of moral virtue, do they make the same claims about virtue? In other words, do these images convey the same meaning? My paper attempts to unpack the referential meanings of these metaphors by first contextualizing them and then by tracing the associated ideas and structures behind the images. (shrink)

ABSTRACTZhi is an important Chinese notion that conveys among other things human capacity to set aims, to determine a course of action, or to persist in a resolve. The term naturally turns up in Chinese contributions to Western Free Will debate. In this paper, I explain zhi by working out a comparison that goes from East to West. I do a three-fold textual analysis of zhi focusing on the Mencius. I outline different usages found in the text, examine a nuanced, (...) dominant meaning suggested in 2A.2, and discuss notional features based on language patterns. My analysis yields a more homegrown understanding of zhi which I shall compare with Western expressions of moral agency. (shrink)

RESUMEN Las principales ideas del pensamiento de Han se construyen frente a conceptos de la filosofía de Foucault: la psicopolítica como superación de la biopolítica, la transparencia como un panóptico no perspectivista y el cuidado de sí como la técnica de dominación más eficaz, propia de individuos que se someten voluntariamente creyendo que son libres. En este trabajo evalúo dicha lectura subrayando las imprecisiones sobre las que se asienta su lectura de Foucault: no comprende el carácter incitador de la biopolítica (...) y olvida la importancia de la perspectiva en el panóptico y la imposibilidad de escapar de las relaciones de poder. ABSTRACT The main ideas of Han's thought are built against concepts of Foucault's philosophy: psychopolitics as overcoming biopolitics, transparency as a non-perspectivist panopticon and self-care as the most effective technique for dominating individuals who submit voluntarily while believing that they are free. In this paper I evaluate this reading, underlining the imprecisions on which his reading of Foucault is based: he does not understand the inciting character of biopolitics and forgets the importance of perspective in the panopticon and the impossibility of escaping from power relations. (shrink)

A pesar de que en los trabajos de Foucault no encontramos una problematización de los Ensayos de Montaigne, a partir de las escasas menciones que hace a su pensamiento es posible reconstruir su lectura. Si Descartes es el autor que mediante un gesto violento expulsa la locura de lo razonable y clausura la tradición del ejercicio de sí reactivada en el Renacimiento, en Montaigne el ensayo surge como una técnica de continua transformación de sí ejercida por un sujeto que, ante (...) la impotencia de la evidencia para acceder a la verdad, solo puede someterse a prueba. La relación que se establece entre ambos autores en el marco de la filosofía foucaultiana nos permite entrever cómo se relaciona el eje de la subjetividad con los del poder y el saber, así como subrayar la importancia de un estudio filosófico de los Ensayos para comprender la genealogía de la ontología del presente. (shrink)

As states grapple with the forces of liberalization and globalization, they are increasingly pulling back on earlier levels of welfare provision and rhetoric. This article examines how the eclipsing role of the state in labor protection has affected state–labor relations. In particular, it analyzes collective action strategies among India’s growing mass of informally employed workers, who do not receive secure wages or benefits from either the state or their employer. In response to the recent changes in state policies, I find (...) that informal workers have had to alter their organizing strategies in ways that are reshaping the social contract between state and labor. Rather than demanding employers for workers’ benefits, they are making direct demands on the state for welfare benefits. To attain state attention, informal workers are using the rhetoric of citizenship rights to offer their unregulated labor and political support in return for state recognition of their work. Such recognition bestows informal workers with a degree of social legitimacy, thereby dignifying their discontent and bolstering their status as claim makers in their society. These findings offer a reformulated model of state–labor relations that focuses attention on the qualitative, rather than quantitative, nature of the nexus; encompasses a dynamic and inter-dependent conceptualization of state and labor; and accommodates the creative and diverse strategies of industrial relations being forged in the contemporary era. (shrink)

En la genealogía del cuidado de sí, Foucault afirma que la filosofía cartesiana propina a esta tradición el golpe definitivo que la condena al olvido. A partir de entonces, el sujeto ya no debe practicar sobre su ser de sujeto ninguna transformación para acceder a la verdad, basta con el empleo correcto de sus facultades cognoscitivas. En este artículo se defiende que en Descartes la cuestión del cuidado no es olvidada, sino que precisamente la empresa de la reconstrucción del edificio (...) del conocimiento para la búsqueda de la verdad es abordada como fruto de una decisión moral sobre la forma de vida. (shrink)

Este artículo tiene por objetivo poner en valor la importancia del postestructuralismo francés en el tránsito del operaismo al operaismo. El encuentro entre la corriente francesa e italiana no es tanto un proyecto para reunir ambos pensamientos, como un proceso de revelamiento de resonancias previas. Lo que abre la verdadera posibilidad de encuentro entre ambas corrientes son los lazos teóricos profundos que preexistían a la contingencia del encuentro. El resultado de ese encuentro no puede ser reducido a una unidad. Penetraremos (...) en él desde las grietas y fisuras de sus formas desbordantes y disruptivas. (shrink)

Partiendo de los análisis (post)operaistas, proponemos explicar la transición de los dispositivos disciplinarios a los dispositivos de la sociedad de control, como el in- tento de capturar el exceso de subjetividad y la multiplicación de formas de vida que constituyen el modo inmanente de la producción de riqueza en la economía post- fordista. El capitalismo postfordista no es tanto una estructura de explotación que se pueda comprender, exclusivamente, con relación al concepto de plusvalía, sino un dispositivo de captura y apropiación (...) de esa producción. (shrink)

Este artículo se propone rastrear genealógicamente el materialismo de la inmanencia que signa el pensamiento de Antonio Negri. Los inicios de tal operación filosófica, aunque entroncan con la evolución de los cinco Libros de la Autonomía obrera, se pueden situar a finales de los años ‘70, cuando Negri escribe La anomalía salvaje, dando lugar a una “vuelta a Spinoza”. Su objetivo fue el de volver a hallar un asidero ontológico, materialista; una operación filosófica que marcará su obra posterior. Si su (...) temprana formación jurídica había estado acompañada de una subjetividad trascendental y de una dialéctica –hegeliana y marxiana–, a partir de finales de los ‘70 su pensamiento se orienta hacia un materialismo constituyente de las multitudes signado por la presencia de Maquiavelo, Spinoza y Marx. (shrink)

Este trabajo pretende mostrar que la suspensión es la temporalidad inmanente a la noción de éxodo en Paolo Virno, a través de la potencia negativa tal como es entendida en el pensamiento de G. Agamben. La argumentación se articulará en tres momentos: en primer lugar, atenderemos a la lectura de “El Fragmento de las máquinas” de los Grundrisse de Marx que realiza Paolo Virno, en la que sostiene que la propia naturaleza del General Intellect implica que una parte importante de (...) los conocimientos no sea susceptible de ser depositada en las máquinas, sino que contiene como condición necesaria su manifestación directa del trabajo vivo y, por tanto, en fuerza de trabajo; en segundo lugar, analizaremos cómo el cuerpo biológico del individuo, en tanto que potencia puesta a producir, es el fundamento de la biopolítica; y, finalmente, nos adentraremos en el pensamiento de G. Agamben para sostener la tesis planteada. (shrink)