Aura & Transvestment is a transmedia project consisting of a series of generative images, an experimental form of cryptomedia and a video essay. By describing its own powers and contradictions, the work explores notions of value, ownership, authenticity, artificial scarcity and abundance in the digital realm. The project is a critical analysis of non-fungible tokens used as proof of ownership for digital art, taking Walter Benjamin’s concept of aura as a starting point. It argues that, for tokenized art, cryptography serves (...) as an artificial source of auratic power that reverts the political potential of reproducibility falling back to a magical and ritual notion of aura. This time around the ritual performed is that of property, authenticity, ownership, markets and commodification. Finally, the article outlines alternative uses of cryptography and distributed ledger technologies to support artistic labour and proposes transvestment as a temporary counter-action for the reallocation of value from capitalist forms of production and into commons-based models of social coordination. Submitted to this journal is an adaptation of the script for the video essay, alongside other elements of the project. Please visit: https://aura-transvestment.art/. (shrink)

The main goal of this article is to explain the transdisciplinary training model developed at the National University of Education in Ecuador, based on the ancestral worldviews of Buen Vivir. Good Living is a philosophical and political concept of the Kichwa indigenous peoples in the Andean Region, where human beings are interconnected with planet Earth and the whole cosmos. In 2008, Ecuador became the first country in the world to recognize the Rights of Nature in its Constitution, in order to (...) face climate change and to restore the ecological footprint. This article first unifies scientific knowledge with ancestral wisdom, creating an inter-epistemological dialogue using a transdisciplinary approach. Second, the article explores the epistemological notions of transdisciplinary education: self-training, hetero-training, eco-training, and onto-training. Third, the article argues that as a result, Educational Sciences of Good Living emerged to design regenerative cultures that face socio-ecological challenges of the Anthropocene age. In sum, the article argues that training transdisciplinary educators implies an intercultural, decolonial, and biocentric approach that promotes their inner spiritual self-awareness, among other perceptive, affective, emotional, rhetorical, poetic, epistemic, creative, artistic, cognitive, and philosophical dimensions. (shrink)

As James Caesar highlights in Reconstructing America, the word “globalization” seems sometimes to be synonymous with “Americanization” or “Americanism,” evoking negative images. Globalization may bring indigenous cultures to their death and cause national individualism to disappear into a shapeless muddle. On Americanism, Heidegger declared that it was “the future monstrosity of modern times.” This would be homogenization, the rubbing out of cultural specificity, life in one universe, one dimension. Extremists like Alexandre Kohève take it further still. It would be the (...) end of history. Third world nations, particularly the Caribbean countries, would be predesignated victims of such an order, without power in political or economic realms, only making the front page of newspapers during cataclysm and natural catastrophes like Hugo, George, and Mitch. The tiny island of Montserrat, never before known to the West, rose to international fame when its volcano La Soufrière began to erupt. Rwanda would be known for genocide, and the Congo for a civil war and the assassination of its leader. (shrink)

The notion of conceptual space, proposed by Gärdenfors as a framework for the representation of concepts and knowledge, has been highly influential over the last decade or so. One of the main theses involved in this approach is that the conceptual regions associated with properties, concepts, verbs, etc. are convex. The aim of this paper is to show that such a constraint—that of the convexity of the geometry of conceptual regions—is problematic; both from a theoretical perspective and with regard to (...) the inner workings of the theory itself. On the one hand, all the arguments provided in favor of the convexity of conceptual regions rest on controversial assumptions. Additionally, his argument in support of a Euclidean metric, based on the integral character of conceptual dimensions, is weak, and under non-Euclidean metrics the structure of regions may be non-convex. Furthermore, even if the metric were Euclidean, the convexity constraint could be not satisfied if concepts were differentially weighted. On the other hand, Gärdenfors’ convexity constraint is brought into question by the own inner workings of conceptual spaces because: some of the allegedly convex properties of concepts are not convex; the conceptual regions resulting from the combination of convex properties can be non-convex; convex regions may co-vary in non-convex ways; and his definition of verbs is incompatible with a definition of properties in terms of convex regions. Therefore, the mandatory character of the convexity requirement for regions in a conceptual space theory should be reconsidered. (shrink)

Barbara Vetter, Potentiality. From Dispositions to Modality, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2015, 321pp., ISBN: 978–0–19–871431–6.

In his book Modal Logic as Metaphysics, Timothy Williamson defends first-order necessitism using simplicity as a powerful argument. However, simplicity is decomposed into two different, even antagonistic, sides: elegance and parsimony. On the one hand, elegance is the property of theories possessing few and simple principles that allow them to deploy all their theoretical power; on the other hand, parsimony is the property of theories having the fair and necessary number of ontological entities that allow such theories give an account (...) of themselves. Since necessitism endorses Barcan Formulae for the sake of elegance, it is committed to a vast number of contingently non-concrete objects, so one may think that it is not qualitatively parsimonious. I argue that necessitism could be viewed as an additive case in the sense that Alan Baker characterizes the adjective so quantitative parsimony should be considered when it comes to necessitism instead of qualitative parsimony. (shrink)

El objeto de investigación del presente artículo es identificar y definir las diferentes perspectivas epistemológicas y metodológicas que han emergido desde la mitad del siglo XX: la multidisciplinariedad, la pluridisciplinariedad, la interdisciplinariedad y la transdisciplinariedad. También aborda la irrupción de la globalización y los procesos transfronterizos haciendo un acercamiento genealógico a la epistemología del sur latinoamericana, africana, islámica y asiática. Por último, reivindica la necesidad de crear puentes transculturales entre los pueblos de todo el mundo para superar la encrucijada paradigmática (...) en la que nos encontramos como sistema-mundo, con la finalidad de alcanzar los Objetivos de Desarrollo Sostenible establecidos por los Naciones Unidas para el año 2030. (shrink)

Damos por hecho que los seres humanos somos egoístas y tendemos al mal. Por eso, resignados, afirmamos que el mal es inevitable. Todo lo que leemos sobre él no hace sino reforzar nuestro punto de partida. Y nos damos por vencidos: no tenemos remedio, el mal de hoy se repetirá mañana. Llegamos incluso a insensibilizarnos ante el horror. Pero ¿y si el mal pudiera pensarse de otro modo? Al recurrir al egoísmo, ¿estamos siendo ciegos a otras posibilidades para entenderlo? ¿Hacemos (...) el mal más por falta de cuestionamiento de lo que realmente lo posibilita que por su carácter consustancial? ¿Tiene sentido reducir el mal a una cuestión de voluntad individual en lugar de abordarlo desde la conformación de la comunidad? Hemos convertido el mal en un sesudo objeto distanciado de reflexión filosófica sin querer detenernos en la cercanía de un mal imperceptible y ordinario que no es tal por ser vulgar, sino porque es una práctica común y corriente y, por tanto, algo compartido por los integrantes de una comunidad. (shrink)

Si la gran mayoría de las reflexiones actuales (y no tan actuales) abordan cómo el sujeto se “subjetiviza” y adquiere identidad y peso en el seno de una comunidad, Presencias irReales, en diálogo con Hegel, Schelling, Heidegger, Deleuze, Derrida, Žižek o Sloterdijk constituye una reflexión a contracorriente porque su propósito es analizar los mecanismos más peligrosos y más desatendidos: aquellos que destruyen al sujeto, que le vacían de identidad e incluso corrompen su memoria. Este libro comienza para ello con un (...) parricidio, el de Parménides, cuyo fantasma aparecerá a lo largo de las páginas a través de uno de los conceptos más relevantes para la filosofía: el de aquello que no siendo es de alguna manera y tiene efectos, a veces terribles, en nuestra realidad. Se trata de un libro de terror, pero no tanto por contener toda una galería espectral, con asedios de las fantasías, de fantasmas que vagan por nuestra realidad o de fantasmas que lo son y no lo saben, sino porque ningún yo está a salvo de la espectralización. (shrink)

Los textos acerca del tiempo de Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) se organizan en torno a tres núcleos temáticos. En una primero época, en las Lecciones de fenomenología de la conciencia interna del tiempo (1904-1905), el hilo conductor es la pregunta acerca de cómo la percepción de un objeto que dura (tiempo objetivo) es constituida por una conciencia que vive en el tiempo inmanete y cómo esta es el resultado de un plano anterior -conciencia interna-. En un segundo momento, en los manuscritos (...) de Bernau (1917-1918) y en los textos sobre el carácter pasivo de los procesos de la conciencia (1921), Husserl profundiza en la relación entre conciencia, reflexión y temporalidad, y destaca la pasividad con la que se llevan a cabo las operaciones de constitución de la conciencia. Por último, en los manuscritos C (1929-1934) introducirá la noción de presente viviente como centro desde el que pensar toda la temporalidad. A la par que una investigación sobre el carácter eternamente enigmático del tiempo, los análisis de Jusserl revelan el ser fundamentalmente temporal de nuestra conciencia, en un ejercicio riguroso de pensamiento que lleva a la fenomenología hasta los límites de su potencial descriptivo. (shrink)

Este artículo retoma la cuestión de los orígenes genealógicos del jurista mālikí y teólogo aš‘arí Ibn Rušd al-Ŷadd (m. 520/1126) —al que no hay que confundir con su famoso nieto, Ibn Rušd al-Ḥafīd o Averroes (m. 595/1198). Se aportan nuevas evidencias en apoyo de los argumentos presentados en mi “Explicit Cruelty, Implicit Compassion: Judaism, Forced Conversion and the Genealogy of the Banū Rushd” aparecido en Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies (2010), trabajo en el que examinaba la genealogía de la familia (...) a la luz del trato dado a los dimmíes por parte de los almohades, de la caída en desgracia con ellos de Averroes y su posterior confinamiento en Lucena. (shrink)

Inleiding in de muziekfilosofie die aanzet tot denken, maar ook tot luisteren dankzij de bijbehorende website.

Postdisciplinary Knowledge is the first book to articulate postdisciplinarity in philosophical, theoretical and methodological terms, helping to establish it as an important intellectual movement of the 21st century. It formulates what postdisciplinarity is, and how it can be implemented in research practice. The diverse chapters present a rich collection of highly creative thought-provoking essays and methodological insights. Written by a number of pioneering intellectuals with a range of backgrounds and research foci, these chapters cover a broad spectrum of areas demonstrating (...) alternative ways of producing knowledge. Essays are interspersed with dialogue, encouraging a comprehensive and engaging discussion on this emerging movement. Not limited to a specific field or discipline, this will be of great interest to upper level students and researchers in a wide range of subject areas, including: tourism, sociology, education, psychology, physiotherapy, fine arts, architecture and design, as well as those with a general interest in epistemology and methodology. (shrink)

Recently, Casasanto and Lupyan (2015) have asserted that there are no context-independent concepts: all concepts are constructed ad hoc when they are instantiated. My aim is to show that the ad hoc cognition framework can be characterized by a similarity-based theory of concepts, and that two different notions of concept should be distinguished —which may be identified with two distinct stages of their life cycle (storage and instantiation). This approach brings together virtues from opposing views: (a) invariantist: stored concepts are (...) stable enough to collect new information; (b) contextualist: instantiated concepts are context-dependent, what explains our adaptive ability to changing environments. (shrink)

Explores and articulates Jean-Luc Nancy's profound impact on our understanding of artistic and literary modernism.

El objetivo fundamental de este artículo está dirigido a valorar las funciones de la intertextualidad en la construcción del espacio insular caribeño en WideSargasso Sea, de la escritora dominiquesa Jean Rhys. Por tal motivo se analizaron las relaciones intertextuales entre Jean Eyre, de Charlotte Brontë, y Wide Sargasso Sea, de Jea Rhys, con énfasis en la isla en tanto espacio literario presentado de manera explícita. Como resultado se pudo constatar que la principal función de la intertextualidad en dicho texto responde (...) a la intención calibanesca y desmitificadora de desmonte de los arquetipos en los que la imagen del otro ha sido construida en el discurso del poder. De igual manera, el presente análisis permite develar la riqueza de las connotaciones otorgadas en el texto al espacio isla y a sus significados añadidos. La red de significaciones encontradas refuerza su identidad cultural caribeña. (shrink)

In Heraclitus’ time, thymos and psyche carried highly similar or even identical meanings, because both could refer to life, courage, personality, emotions, and reason. Heraclitus probably worked with all of these meanings. He may have been partly inspired by Homer and post-Homeric literature, where the two terms were likewise placed side by side and often used interchangeably. In Heraclitus, thymos and psyche are not opposites in terms of signification. Oftentimes, they can be “swapped,” and their meaning and “costs” exchanged. The (...) source and cause of this special exchange is desiring or wanting (thelein), which connects all these senses but is also the source of conflict and fighting. Desire—regardless of what it is and what is desired—is simultaneously the acquisition of the desired object or person and a way of paying for it. This struggle for the desired object is difficult not only because of its consequences (the price), but also because it is not possible to permanently stop desiring, which is why this struggle cannot be brought to an end. (shrink)

According to informal logic, the possibilities of deductive logic as a tool for analysing and evaluating ordinary arguments are very limited. While I agree with this claim in general, I question it in the case of the argument from cause to effect. In this paper I first show, on the basis of carefully chosen examples, that we usually react differently to falsification of the conclusion of the argument from cause to effect than we do to the falsification of the conclusion (...) of other defeasible arguments. I then identify general conditions and assumptions under which the causal argument from cause to effect can be reconstructed as deductive. Finally, I compare the causal argument with the expert argument, which is a typical example of a defeasible argument in the narrower sense. (shrink)