En este trabajo argumento que sólo mediante un enfoque y un tratamiento wittgensteinianos se pueden disolver las pseudo-dificultades filosóficas concernientes a los colores. Sostengo que, aunque los hechos que de los que se ocupa la ciencia son fundamentales para que pueda gestarse el lenguaje de los colores, lo que la ciencia tiene que decir es enteramente irrelevante para inquietudes concernientes al significado, utilidad, enseñanza y aprendizaje, etc., del lenguaje de los colores. Asumiendo una perspectiva wittgensteiniana, se puede hacer ver que (...) los problemas filosóficos concernientes a los colores son efectivamente artificiales, porque plantean interrogantes en los que los nombres de los colores no son usados. Lo que nos debe interesar es describir su aplicación, explicar para qué nos sirve el lenguaje de colores, qué utilidad de hecho presta dicho juego de lenguaje. Doy por sentado que las palabras para colores no se usan solas sino en oraciones, en conexión con verbos de percepción y recojo dos contrastes de verbos como ‘ver’. Por una parte, ‘ver’ apunta tanto a propiedades objetivas de las cosas como a experiencias visuales de los hablantes. Por otra parte, los verbos psicológicos como ‘ver’ están marcados por una asimetría fundamental entre la primera y la tercera personas. Ambas distinciones tienen consecuencias para el lenguaje de los colores, porque éste sirve para lidiar con el mundo a través de nuestras vivencias. Éstas, sin embargo, son relevantes en la medida en que quedaron lingüistizados, esto es, cuando los hablantes ya se volvieron usuarios de la terminología de los colores, es decir, ya adscriben y reconocen correctamente las propiedades cromáticas de los objetos. ¿Para qué nos sirve entonces el lenguaje de los colores? En primera persona indico que tengo ciertas vivencias que son gracias al lenguaje comprensibles para otros y le doy garantías a mi interlocutor de que puedo lidiar con objetos ; en tercera persona me permiten describir la conducta exitosa de alguien en procesos de reconocimiento y manipulación de objetos. La presuposición fundamental del enfoque wittgensteiniano es la existencia de una comunidad lingüística. Comprendemos entonces que los nombres para colores, como cualesquiera otras palabras, se aprenden a través de un proceso de enseñanza ostensiva, ensayo y error, interacción permanente entre hablantes y aprendiz, premios y castigos, etc. Aplico también la idea de que, contrariamente a como proceden los filósofos, las palabras para colores no se usan solas, sino en oraciones y en conexión con actividades, esto es, con formas de vida. Los conceptos de juegos de lenguaje y formas de vida son pues los instrumentos que se requieren para superar los enredos filosóficos en torno al color. (shrink)

En este ensayo me ocupo de algunos conceptos que son parte de una misma familia, a saber, los conceptos de mentir, engañar y desorientar. Uno de mis objetivos es ofrecer un análisis que sea afín a la perspectiva wittgensteiniana del lenguaje. Argumento que estos conceptos están jerarquizados y que “engañar” es el más básico de todos, dado que mentir es algo que sólo los usuarios de un lenguaje pueden hacer y el fenómeno del engaño lo encontramos en el reino animal. (...) El objetivo de mi análisis es establecer ciertas verdades gramaticales como la de que no se puede mentir sin tener la intención de engañar, que no es posible mentir usando proposiciones verdaderas, etc. Ofrezco una leve corrección de la definición tradicional de ‘mentir’, remplazando ‘creer’ por ‘saber’. Examino también la noción de mentira descarada y trato de hacer ver que en el fondo es una noción dispensable (por no decir espuria). Examino críticamente la idea de que mentir es siempre una acción condenable y ofrezco algunos contraejemplos. Por último, discuto la interesante cuestión de si es posible aunque no se le mienta desorientar a alguien con verdades y muestro que ello es perfectamente posible. (shrink)

En este artículo diagnostico y rechazo la tesis de que el lenguaje de la filosofía analítica es el inglés. Para ello, realzo el carácter cultural de los productos filosóficos y argumento que su utilidad está esencialmente vinculada a sus respectivos contextos de producción. Enfatizo la importancia de la fi losofía en conexión con las atividades científi cas, políticas, etc., locales. El principal blanco de mi trabajo es la idea, en gran medida propiciada por la globalización y el coloniaje cultural contemporáneos, (...) de que hay básicamente un único modo de hacer fi losofía analítica, que ésta debería practicarse em un idioma en particular, y que dicho modelo se debe importar e imponer en los países de América Latina en donde se pretenda hacer filosofía seriamente. Ilustro rapidamente el rotundo fracaso de esta posición filosófica mediante un ejemplo de filosofía política. (shrink)

En este trabajo intento combinar una labor de reconstrucción histórica con otra de análisis conceptual. Lo que ante todo me propongoes mostrar que, con base en toda una gama de argumentoscontundentes,Wittgenstein desmantela la problemática filosóficatejida en torno al célebre Principio de Identidad de los Indiscernibles.Presento primero el problema de manera escueta y posteriormenteexamino algunas posiciones destacadas, en particularlas de Bertrand Russell, Gottlob Frege y F. P. Ramsey. Posteriormentereconstruyo en detalle el ataque deWittgenstein al uso filosófico de la noción lógica de (...) identidad tal como él lo despliega enel Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus y en algunas de sus clases, asu regreso a Cambridge. Concluyo con algunas críticas mías demanera que la idea wittgensteiniana de que en filosofía no haygenuinos problemas sino meros enredos conceptuales efectivamentese ve, en este caso particular, claramente confirmada. (shrink)

En este ensayo reconstruyo y contrasto las dos concepciones de la filosofía desarrolladas por Ludwig Wittgenstein en sus dos grandes periodos filosóficos. Uno de mis objetivos es resaltar la importancia de Bertrand Russell en la gestación de ambas concepciones. Hago ver que el elemento común a ambas concepciones es la convicción de que la filosofía tradicional brota por incomprensiones concernientes, respectivamente, a la lógica o a la Gramática del lenguaje. Sostengo que Wittgenstein inventó una nueva actividad intelectual, internamente vinculada con (...) la filosofía aunque radicalmente diferente a ella, para la cual quizá el mejor epíteto sea ‘anti-filosofía’. (shrink)

En este ensayo se contrasta el modo tradicional de encarar y tratar los enredos filosóficos con el enfoque disolvente propio del pensar wittgensteiniano. Se considera un caso particular de problemas de filosofía de la mente, a saber, el caso de la comprensión. El objetivo es hacer ver que, mientras el primero representa una respuesta que se va complicando en forma exponencial, el segundo desemboca en posiciones simples, pero efectivamente aclaratorias. Se refuerza así la aseveración inicial de que hay un sentido (...) en el que Wittgenstein pertenece y no pertenece a la tradición filosófica occidental. (shrink)

El martes 26 de abril de 2016 en la Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana de Medellín, en el curso “De la analítica a los acto de habla” del Doctorado en Filosofía, tuvimos la oportunidad de compartir y hacer una conversatorio con el filósofo mexicano Dr. Alejandro Tomasini Bassols, investigador del Instituto de Investigaciones Filosóficas y profesor de filosofía en la Facultad de Filosofía y Letras de la UNAM. El profesor Tomasini es uno de los investigadores más reconocidos en la (...) obra del Filósofo austriaco Ludwig Wittgenstein, además de haber desarrollado una importante obra alrededor de la tradición analítica y de algunos problemas actuales como la discusión sobre la pena capital. También el profesor Tomasini en su visita a Colombia, inicialmente participó en Medellín con una conferencia titulada “Derecho y objetividad”, en la Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana y luego en la Feria del Libro de Bogotá –FILBO- realizó la presentación y conferencia del libro Hacer mundos: el nombrar y la significatividad. Previo a su viaje a Bogotá, interactuó con el curso doctoral en filosofía y de este encuentro académico presentamos el siguiente diálogo. (shrink)

Fanny Bré was a volunteer nurse in the International Brigades, who fought in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) on the side of the democratically elected Republican government. The objective of this study is to understand the relationship between Bré's antifascist ideas, her conception of care and the activities she carried out in the Spanish hospitals of Casa Roja (Murcia), Villa Paz (Selices, Cuenca) and Vic (Barcelona). We use narrative biography to describe Bré's personal, political and professional trajectory. To do so, (...) we conducted a content analysis of primary sources archived in Spain, Russia and France and secondary sources that emerged from a thorough literature review. We identified three thematic axes: (1) a concept of nursing in the service of the antifascist struggle, (2) nursing activity for high‐quality care and (3) political action for improving hospital organisation and care. The interest of Bré's texts transcends the war in Spain because, in them, Bré questions the neutrality of care by revealing that care can itself be a political act. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Psychiatric Treatment and the Problem of Equality:Whose Justice, Which Rationality?Floris Tomasini (bio)KeywordsInvoluntary treatment, democracy, equality, impartialityCraig Edwards in his article "Ethical Decisions in the Classification of Mental Conditions As Mental Illness" provides the reader with a socially normative, rather than a naturalistic understanding of mental illness, one that, in particular, promotes a normative understanding of mental illness as a form of evaluating dysfunctional personhood. In doing so, Edwards (...) is not interested in undermining psychiatric expertise, but exploring some of the practical consequences that flow from it, such as involuntary psychiatric treatment.My concern about psychiatric treatment in general and involuntary psychiatric treatment in particular, is three-fold, the third concern adding to the arguments already rehearsed by Edwards and others. The first concern is about the value neutrality of mental illness. Any dysfunctional conception of mental illness is not value neutral according to Fulford; dysfunction is, straightaway, a normative concept and is heavily influenced by a patient's desires and values. The second concern is about competing and conflicting values that arise in a person's psychiatric treatment. Again, there exists a legitimate variation in people's evaluative judgments about mental health conditions, for which a degree of democratic compromise might be required in negotiating conflicting values in a person's psychiatric treatment (Fulford and Colombo 2004). Without wishing to examine any of the philosophical foundations or counter-arguments to these claims in this short discussion paper, my third concern is about how to ethically negotiate between conflicting values in a person's psychiatric treatment. In other words, what might democratic compromise consist in? How might democratic compromise be implemented in terms of an ethically relevant principle?Any democratic enterprise, by definition, favors or is characterized by social equality and is egalitarian in nature (New Oxford English Dictionary 1999, 490). To be able to negotiate in the spirit of democratic compromise between competing and conflicting values in the process of psychiatric treatment, a principle of equal consideration of interests is vital.The essence of the principle of equal consideration of interests is that we give equal weight in our [End Page 101] moral deliberation to the like interests of all those affected by our actions (Singer 1979, 19). In other words, an interest is an interest whoever's interest that may be. So, for example, if the principle is about relieving pain, then the moral principle is about relieving the undesirability of pain as such, and not the undesirability of A's pain, which might be different from the undesirability of B's pain. Naturally, one may be able to distinguish that A's pain is greater than B's pain, in which case, under the equal consideration of interests principle, A's pain should be given greater weighting than B's pain in any conflict of interests. In short, in the evaluation of like interests, major interests outweigh minor interests.The significance of the principle of equal consideration of interests in decisions about mental health treatment in general, and about involuntary psychiatric detention and treatment more specifically, is that it should be possible (in theory at least) to able to democratically arbitrate on the basis of utility, whose interests take precedence when legitimate conflicts arise. The great practical advantage to the principle of equal consideration of interests is that it weighs' interests impartially—like well-balanced weighing scales; they favor where the interest is stronger or where several interests combine to outweigh a smaller number of similar interests. Most important, in the case of psychiatric treatment, it is a principle that takes no account of whose interests they are, avoiding any discriminatory stigma that may arise because of having made certain assumptions about being mentally ill. From the point of view of the equal consideration of interests, who the bearer is and how they are classified is, in itself, incidental to what the actual bearer's interests are and how they compete and conflict with others who have like interests. There are a number of practical consequences that flow from the principle of equal consideration when applied to psychiatric treatment (voluntary and involuntary) that need to be pinned down.Simple Negative DiscriminationClearly... (shrink)

This article critically examines how solidarity has been enacted in the first 2 months of the COVID-19 pandemic, mainly, but not exclusively, from a United Kingdom perspective.1 Solidaristic strategies are framed in two ways: aspirations to overcome COVID-19 ; and those that are illusory, incompatible, contradictory, and disrupting of solidaristic ideals. Solidarity can also be understood more widely from a biocentric perspective. In the context of COVID-19 a lack of biocentric solidarity points to a probable cause of the pandemic; where (...) COVID-19, harmless in bats, jumped species as a consequence of closer contact with humans. Solidarity, therefore, is not only expressed in a fight against a viral “enemy” but is also a reminder of human activity that has upset balances within ecosystems. (shrink)

Music can be interpreted by attributing syntactic relationships to sequential musical events, and, computationally, such musical interpretation represents an analogous combinatorial task to syntactic processing in language. While this perspective has been primarily addressed in the domain of harmony, we focus here on rhythm in the Western tonal idiom, and we propose for the first time a framework for modeling the moment‐by‐moment execution of processing operations involved in the interpretation of music. Our approach is based on (1) a music‐theoretically motivated (...) grammar formalizing the competence of rhythmic interpretation in terms of three basic types of dependency (preparation, syncopation, and split; Rohrmeier, 2020), and (2) psychologically plausible predictions about the complexity of structural integration and memory storage operations, necessary for parsing hierarchical dependencies, derived from the dependency locality theory (Gibson, 2000). With a behavioral experiment, we exemplify an empirical implementation of the proposed theoretical framework. One hundred listeners were asked to reproduce the location of a visual flash presented while listening to three rhythmic excerpts, each exemplifying a different interpretation under the formal grammar. The hypothesized execution of syntactic‐processing operations was found to be a significant predictor of the observed displacement between the reported and the objective location of the flashes. Overall, this study presents a theoretical approach and a first empirical proof‐of‐concept for modeling the cognitive process resulting in such interpretation as a form of syntactic parsing with algorithmic similarities to its linguistic counterpart. Results from the present small‐scale experiment should not be read as a final test of the theory, but they are consistent with the theoretical predictions after controlling for several possible confounding factors and may form the basis for further large‐scale and ecological testing. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is not to affirm or deny particular philosophical positions, but to explore the limits of intelligibility about what post-mortem harm means, especially in the light of improper post-mortem procedures at Bristol and Alder Hey hospitals in the late 1990s. The parental claims of post-mortem harm to dead children at Alder Hey Hospital are reviewed from five different philosophical perspectives, eventually settling on a crucial difference of perspective about how we understand harm to the dead. On (...) the one hand there is the broadly 'analytical' tradition1 of thinking that predicates the notion of harm on the basis of an existing subject. Since the dead are non-existent persons, it makes little sense to view the dead as being harmed. On the other hand, there is a phenomenological perspective, where the dead, in respect to the experience of grief, are existentially absent. This forms the basis that it is possible to harm grieving parent's experiences of how their dead are treated. The article ends with a short examination of what harming the dead implies for traditional bioethical concerns, namely, obtaining informed consent from significant others when planning medical research on the newly dead. (shrink)

This article critically evaluates bettering human life. Because this involves lives that do not exist yet, the article investigates human eugenics and enhancement through the social prism of ‘the imaginary’ (defined ‘as a set of assumptions and concepts for thinking and speaking about human enhancement and its future direction’) [1]. “Exploring basic assumptions underlying the idea of human enhancement” investigates underlying assumptions and claims for human enhancement. Firstly, human eugenics and enhancement entangles a factual as well as a normative claim (...) about what improvement/betterment maybe constitutive of. Secondly, claims about what a better life is, is often a future orientated claim about whether certain kinds of life that do not exist yet should ever exist. Moral images of thought are introduced and how they work to make normative judgments about lives that do not exist. This implicates the moral problem of difference, where an image of a ‘better’ life—classically expressed in eugenics as a ‘superior’ and/or ‘normal’ life—necessarily entails inferiority and/or deviance from a norm. “Moral imagination in contemporary fiction and the history of old eugenics”, introduces moral images in history of eugenics and demonstrates how examples fall foul of the problem. “The new (liberal) eugenics and the moral image of therapy” examines progress in contemporary debates, the move from authoritarian to non-authoritarian eugenics (human enhancement), and how, to some extent, this has solved the problem of difference, through liberal defence of personal choice. “The heart of the eugenic issue” suggests that personal choice in liberal non-authoritarian eugenics is not immune to basic drive behind all eugenic arguments; desire as lack which is expressed as the continual dissatisfaction of not having our future expectations met. (shrink)

Nous interrogeons le phénomène de la folie à la lumière de l’enseignement de Jacques Lacan. Elle a supposé une restitution de la dimension du sujet de la parole et du langage, ainsi que du sujet de la jouissance, dans un renversement éthique qui n’est repérable que dans l’expérience de la psychanalyse. Nous faisons un parcours des premiers textes de Lacan, lors de son passage de la psychiatrie à la psychanalyse, jusqu’aux conséquences repérables dans la dernière partie de son enseignement, où (...) les termes du « sinthome » et de « lalangue » permettent de replacer le sujet de la folie dans la structure. (shrink)

Mi meta en este ensayo es, primero, reconstruir los puntos de vista de Marcelo Dascal en relación con las controversias filosóficas y, en segundo lugar, someterla a un examen crítico. Dejo en claro que las tesis de Dascal tienen un amplio rango de aplicaciones. Mi crítica se centra alrededor del concepto de conocimiento y de la idea misma de reconstrucción pragmática. Considero también la sugerente conexión que Dascal establece entre las controversias y el progreso intelectual.

This first book of the series, contains the theory and technique on how to recognize your own presence and your connectedness to everything else, experiencing oneness, through the state of awareness. Making emphasis on how to clear the soul from any blockages, emotions or other filters that may affect that experience of recognizing the true self.

Simona Giordano (2010) claims that whether or not anorexics should be allowed to die should not primarily depend on their competence, but on the extent of whether the condition can be alleviated. This implies two outcomes. First, that if an anorexic has a reasonable chance of recovery, competent refusal of treatment can be overridden. Second, that if an anorexic has no realistic chance of recovery, patient refusal needs to be upheld—not, exclusively, on the basis of patient’s decision-making competence, but on (...) the basis of their prolonged and unnecessary suffering. Giordano is right, in my view, to suggest that there are good moral grounds to uphold patient wishes to refuse life-saving treatment, when .. (shrink)