Diseases of complex origin have a component of quantitative genetics that contributes to their susceptibility and phenotypic variability. However, after several studies, a major part of the genetic component of complex phenotypes has still not been found, a situation known as “missing heritability.” Although there have been many hypotheses put forward to explain the reasons for the missing heritability, its definitive causes remain unknown. Complex diseases are caused by multiple intermediate phenotypes involved in their pathogenesis and, very often, each one (...) of these intermediate phenotypes also has a component of quantitative inheritance. Here we propose that at least part of the missing heritability can be explained by the genetic component of intermediate phenotypes that is not detectable at the level of the main complex trait. At the same time, the identification of the genetic component of intermediate phenotypes provides an opportunity to identify part of the missing heritability of complex diseases. (shrink)

RESUMEN Este trabajo pretende analizar el papel jugado por la ideología en lo que respecta al despliegue histórico de los derechos humanos, interrogándose sobre si dicho despliegue ha cumplido con una función eminentemente ideológica. La reflexión transcurrirá a través de la visión de dos pensadores que han mantenido una de las discusiones filosóficas contemporáneas más interesantes: Louis Althusser y Michel Foucault. En un primer momento, se esbozará la teoría althusseriana de la ideología, con el fin de sostener que los derechos (...) humanos han operado como un "aparato ideológico", interpelando al individuo desde un contexto inmanentemente capitalista. En un segundo momento, comprobaremos que Michel Foucault fue muy crítico con los planteamientos althusserianos. La noción de sujeto trascendental será crucial en dicha crítica, puesto que en la perspectiva foucaultiana nunca existen sujetos constituidos con anterioridad a las tramas de poder efectivas. En el análisis foucaultiano, la ideología dejará de ocupar un lugar esencial. Las aportaciones de Slavoj Žižek también resultarán, por cierto, determinantes en toda esta discusión. Finalmente, se trazarán algunas reflexiones criticas para pensar la posibilidad emancipadora de los derechos humanos en el mundo contemporáneo. ABSTRACT This paper intends to analyze the role played by ideology in regard to the historical implementation of human rights, questioning whether this implementation has fulfilled an eminently ideological function. The reflection will pass through the vision of two scholars who have held one of the most interesting contemporary philosophical discussions: Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault. At first, the Althusserian theory of ideology will be outlined, in order to defend that human rights have operated as an "ideological apparatus", questioning the individual from an immanently capitalist context. Then, we will verify that Michel Foucault was very critical of the Althusserian approaches. The notion of a transcendental subject will be crucial in such criticism, since in the Foucaultian perspective there are never subjects that are constituted prior to effective dynamics of power. In Foucaultian analysis, ideology will no longer occupy an essential place. The contributions of Slavoj Žižek will also be, by the way, decisive throughout this discussion. Finally, some critical reflections will be drawn to think about the emancipatory possibility of human rights in the contemporary world. (shrink)

El recientemente publicado libro de Adrián Almazán Gómez, Técnica y tecnología. Cómo conversar con un tecnolófilo, constituye un intento de aprender del pasado para auspiciar un futuro que supere la crisis de encaje entre tecnosfera y biosfera en que consiste nuestro presente. El planteamiento en el libro de figuras como el campesino y el artesano, así como de una marcada oposición entre naturaleza y ciencia, invita a un debate y a una profunda indagación que problematice la Modernidad.

Nowadays, the quality standards of higher education institutions pay special attention to the performance and evaluation of the students. Then, having a complete academic record of each student, such as number of attempts, average grade and so on, plays a key role. In this context, the existence of missing data, which can happen for different reasons, leads to affect adversely interesting future analysis. Therefore, the use of imputation techniques is presented as a helpful tool to estimate the value of missing (...) data. This work deals with the academic records of engineering students, in which imputation techniques are applied. More specifically, it is assessed and compared to the performance of the multivariate imputation by chained equations methodology, the adaptive assignation algorithm based on multivariate adaptive regression splines and a hybridization based on self-organisation maps with Mahalanobis distances and AAA algorithm. The results show that proposed methods obtain successfully results regardless the number of missing values, in general terms. (shrink)

Given the ubiquitous nature of love, numerous theories have been proposed to explain its existence. One such theory refers to love as a commitment device, suggesting that romantic love evolved to foster commitment between partners and enhance their reproductive success. In the present study, we investigated this hypothesis using a large-scale sample of 86,310 individual responses collected across 90 countries. If romantic love is universally perceived as a force that fosters commitment between long-term partners, we expected that individuals likely to (...) suffer greater losses from the termination of their relationships—including people of lower socioeconomic status, those with many children, and women—would place a higher value on romantic love compared to people with higher status, those with fewer children, and men. These predictions were supported. Additionally, we observed that individuals from countries with a higher (vs. lower) Human Development Index placed a greater level of importance on romantic love, suggesting that modernization might influence how romantic love is evaluated. On average, participants worldwide were unwilling to commit to a long-term romantic relationship without love, highlighting romantic love’s universal importance. (shrink)

In this article we examine the way in which the American Alt-Right movement has made Friedrich Nietzsche its most influential philosopher. The authors ascribed to the Alt-Right evidence a strong liking for the German philosopher's ideas, which resonate forcefully in many their principal policies: specifically, the characterisation of our contemporaneity as “decadent”, the comparison between “superior men” and the project to construct a “white ethnostate”, and the advocacy of Christianity, as opposed to Christianism, as an identity structure for defining white (...) civilisation. Having trawled the main Alt-Right forums of ideological expression and analysed the key writings of their theorists, references and spokespersons, we aim to present a systematic explanation of how this advocacy has been built on certain Nietzschean themes. We also argue that this is a partial, superficial and contradictory reading of Nietzsche, as well as a narrow and distorted interpretation. (shrink)

Se plantean los problemas y algunas temáticas características de la "independencia literaria" en Hispanoamérica, a la luz de la coyuntura de la emancipación política de España. Este tema desborda los marcos temporales o la periodización de las guerras de independencia; recorre todo el siglo XIX y pa..

Después de las novelas laicas y las novelas religiosas, las narraciones del fin del mundo de la “edad de plata” de la literatura española se rematan con las narraciones breves, que cuentan con representantes tan ilustres como Clarín o Azorín. El primero escribe un relato al que se ha llamado El Paraíso revisitado y el segundo una meditación, la del último hombre sobre la Tierra. El tercer cuento, de Blanco Belmonte, tiene menor entidad y se asemeja más a los (...) posteriores relatos que la ciencia ficción ha hecho populares. El cuarto es una brevedad de Edgar Neville, en la estética y el humor de Gómez de la Serna, y el quinto, de Ángeles Vicente, es igualmente breve, aunque más amargo. (shrink)

En esta nota crítica (i) se hace una breve descripción de cada uno de los artículos que componen Orayen: de la forma lógica al significado, (ii) se señalan algunas cuestiones que no están claras en ellos o en las réplicas de Orayen y, (iii) en la medida de lo posible, se indica si los autores desarrollan ulteriormente los problemas abordados en sus artículos. The aim of this critical note is threefold: (i) it briefly describes and comments on each of the (...) articles of Orayen: de la forma lógica al significado; (ii) identifies some issues that may not be clear enough or not fully developed whether in the articles or even in Orayen's replies; (iii) as far as possible, it refers to further studies made by the authors themselves on the same, or quite related, subjects addressed by them in their papers. (shrink)

John McDowell's conception of perceptual knowledge commits him to the claim that if I perceive that P then I am in a position to know that I perceive that P. In the first part of this essay, I present some reasons to be suspicious of this claim - reasons which derive from a general argument against 'luminosity' - and suggest that McDowell can reject this claim, while holding on to almost all of the rest of his conception of perceptual knowledge, (...) by supplementing his existing disjunctive conception of experience with a new disjunctive conception of perceiving. In the second part of the essay, I present some reasons for thinking that one's justification, in cases of perceptual knowledge, consists not in the fact that one perceives that P but in the fact that one perceives such-and-such. I end by suggesting that the disjunctive conception of perceiving should be understood as a disjunctive conception of perceiving such-and-such. (shrink)

Epícteto, el filósofo estoico del siglo II de la e.c., nos presenta su visión ética en este discurso Sobre el embellecimiento . Se apoya en los preceptos socráticos del “Conócete a ti mismo” y “Cuídate a ti mismo”, pero los complementa maravillosamente con el “Ordénate a ti mismo”. Es una visión en la que la ética y la estética son embellecidas por la cosmética.

This paper advances a version of physicalism which reconciles the “a priori entailment thesis” (APET) with the analytic independence of our phenomenal and physical vocabularies. The APET is the claim that, if physicalism is true, the complete truths of physics imply every other truth a priori. If so, “cosmic hermeneutics” is possible: a demon having only complete knowledge of physics could deduce every truth about the world. Analytic independence is a popular physicalist explanation for the apparent “epistemic gaps” between phenomenal (...) and physical truths. The two are generally seen as incompatible, since the demon’s deductions seem to presuppose analytic connections between physical and phenomenal terms. I begin by arguing, in support of the APET, that implications from the complete truths of physics to phenomenal truths cannot be a posteriori. Such implications are (according to the physicalist) necessarily true. But they cannot be Kripke-style a posteriori necessities, since (according to the physicalist) the complete truths of physics fix any relevant a posteriori facts about the reference of terms. I then show how the physicalist can turn the tables: the demon can exploit the physical fixing of reference to bridge the gap between the vocabularies, by deducing when phenomenal and physical terms co-refer. This opens the way for a “type-C” physicalism, which accepts in-principle deducibility while still appealing to analytic independence to explain why we (who are not demons) find it impossible to see phenomenal-physical connections a priori. (shrink)

El ingreso de España en la Organización Europea de Cooperación Económica y la puesta en marcha del Plan de estabilización fueron dos sucesos estrechamente asociados. La elaboración y aplicación de dicho plan jugó un papel esencial para franquear el acceso a aquella organización, a la vez que la intervención de la OECE resultó determinante en el cambio de la política económica española de finales de los años cincuenta. La España franquista, excluida en 1948 del Plan Marshall, iba a lograr incorporarse, (...) con once años de retraso, a los mecanismos multilaterales impulsados por su principal instrumento de coordinación económica: la OECE. El precio fue la renuncia a los esquemas autárquicos y la política de sustitución de importaciones que se habían promovido hasta entonces. El resultado fue la participación en uno de los períodos más dinámicos de crecimiento económico registrados en el continente europeo y una considerable aceleración del desarrollo económico del país. (shrink)

Commentary on: Olaf Blanke, Thomas Metzinger, Full-body illusions and minimal phenomenal selfhood, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Volume 13, Issue 1, January 2009, Pages 7-13, ISSN 1364-6613, DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2008.10.003.

This article contends that Dworkin's notion of ‘genuine’ theoretical disagreements, which is a fundamental pillar in his criticism of legal positivism and semantic disagreements, requires a realist reinterpretation. This view is defended according to two core arguments. First, a realist reinterpretation of ‘genuine’ theoretical disagreements enables Dworkin to avoid semantic criticisms such as the one advanced by Joseph Raz, who propounds a sophisticated model of criterial semantics to explain theoretical disagreements. Second, to make intelligible the distinction between theoretical and semantic (...) disagreements in law, we need to resort to realist elements. The conclusion is striking and in clear contradiction with Dworkin's ametaphysical and epistemic abstinence. The article shows that there is a problematic tension within Dworkin's constructivist project and that he should revise either its ametaphysical view and epistemic abstinence, or notions such as ‘genuine’ theoretical disagreements. (shrink)

As religiões podem ser consideradas como sistemas simbólicos mediante os quais os seres humanos ao longo da sua história sempre procuraram encontrar sabedoria em ordem a enfrentar o mal Um olhar pela história das religiões oferece-nos dados que podem ser compreendidos a partir de três tipos ideais de atitude básica em relação ao problema: Ascese, Gnose, Praxis. O Budismo originário, o Maniqueísmo e a religião bí-blico-cristã são exemplificações disso mesmo. Mais do que uma opção pela exclusão, os membros da nossa (...) cultura ocidental iluminada demonstram uma preferência pela atitude práxica. É a partir dela que nos cabe recuperar os valores das outras. Isso é também o que em muitos significa a presença de uma certa nostalgia pela "espiritualidade oriental". Ou ainda, como modesta gnose, a "teodiceia" (porquê tanto mal?): tão pouco prometedora enquanto resposta (teórica), como inevitável enquanto pergunta. /// Religions can be viewed as symbolic systems with which human beings have throughout history sought the wisdom which enables them to face evil. A survey through the history of religions exhibits features which may be brought to three ideal types of basic attitudes: the ascetic, the gnostic and the 'praxical'. Original Buddhism, Manichaeism and the biblical-Christian Religion exemplify them. Men and women of our occidental, enlightened culture need not to take an exclusive option thereabout. They show a preference for the praxical trend, even though at the same time they also retrieve some of the values of the other ones. Signs of this can be seen in the interest of many for 'oriental spirituality' as well as in that sort of modest gnosis which is "theodicee "(Why so much evil?): always unpromising as a theoretical answer and unavoidable as a question. /// Las religiones pueden ser consideradas como sistemas simbólicos con los que los seres humanos hemos buscado en nuestra historia una sabiduría para afrontar el mal. Un recorrido por la historia de las religiones ofrece datos que pueden comprenderse desde tres tipos ideales de actitud básica de afrontamiento: Ascesis, Gnosis, Praxis. El Budismo originário, el Maniqueísmo y la Religión bíblico-cristiana los ejemplifican. Más que una opción excluyente, los humanos de nuestra cultura occidental ilustrada tendrán una preferencia por la actitud práxica. Cabe desde ella recuperar valores de las otras. Eso hace en muchos la añoranza por la "espiritualidad oriental". Y, como modesta gnosis, la "teódicea" (¿por qué tanto mal?): tan poco prometedora como respuesta (teórica), cuanto insoslayable como pregunta. (shrink)

Este trabajo se enmarca dentro de las innumerables vindicaciones de la poesía. Comienza con el desarrollo de las cuatro características del “lenguaje poético” en tanto “lenguaje denso”. La figuratividad o metaforicidad, su alusividad, la identidad forma-contenido y el realismo poético. En el segundo apartado se analizan estas características a la luz de las categorías de “significatividad” y de “interpretante”. La ontología heideggeriana y la semiótica peirceana enriquecen el concepto de lenguaje denso y aclaran su poder epistémico. Finalmente, analizo algunos aspectos (...) que Nietzsche, en su período retórico, elabora sobre el lenguaje, y que prefiguran y amplían la noción de lenguaje denso. Me centro allí en la idea que todo lenguaje es, en su origen, retórica, y en el modo en que el proceso comunicativo atenta contra dicho origen. Me interesan, en particular, las nociones de “fijación”, “olvido” y “restauración”. (shrink)

La cuestión de la identidad personal ha sido muy discutida durante los últimos años. La atención puesta sobre este problema es una clara evidencia de la relevancia que tiene, entre otros, para el ámbito práctico en general. En este horizonte, Habermas y Tugendhat han sostenido una larga e interesante polémica sobre el concepto de identidad personal, polémica no siempre bien dimensionada. Esta querella ha servido para clarificar las diferentes variables que ingresan en esta problemática. En este trabajo analizaré críticamente cada (...) una de las posturas con la finalidad de advertir el corazón argumental, buscar elementos en común y subrayar las insalvables diferencias. (shrink)

Este artículo pretende caracterizar a la bioética como un saber que acontece en la frontera del tiempo. Se trata de un saber de frontera, ubicado del lado del acontecer, por su carácter tentativo y abierto. La frontera del tiempo sitúa la conciencia moral en momentos de gestación, cuando la reflexión abunda en perplejidades y tantea respuestas. Existen dos modos de dar contenido a los relatos bioéticos: la memoria que recuerda y la esperanza que anticipa.

I want to examine critically a certain strategy of moral justification which I shall call instrumentalism. By this I mean the view that a moral theory is rationally justified if the actions, life-plan, or set of social arrangements it prescribes can be shown to be the best means to the achievement of an agent's final ends, whatever these may be. Instrumentalism presupposes a commitment to what I shall call the Humean conception of the self. By this I mean a certain (...) way of conceiving the motivational and structural constituents of the self. Briefly, the self on this conception is motivated by its desires for states of affairs that are temporally or spatiotemporally external to the self. And it is structured by the normative requirements of instrumental rationality: The self is conceived as rationally coherent to the extent that theoretical reason calculates and schedules the satisfaction of as many of its desires as possible, with the minimum necessary costs. The motivational and structural elements of the Humean conception of the self combine to form a familiar explanatory model of human agency: We make sense of an agent's behavior by ascribing to her the desire to achieve the ends that she does in fact achieve, and the theoretically rational belief that, given the information and resources available to her, behaving as she did was the most efficient way to do so. I shall want to argue that to the extent that instrumentalism is successful in providing an objective justification of a moral theory - and I shall contend that it cannot be completely successful - it cannot provide a moral justification. But when we attempt to modify it so as to produce a specifically moral justification, we see that either it is impossible to do this, or else the Humean notion of instrumental rationality is doing no justificatory work. (shrink)

Historically, the view, prevalent in contemporary economics and decision theory as well as philosophy, that rational action consists simply in satisfying one’s desires, whatever they may be, as efficiently as possible, is to be found first in Book II of Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature. This view has counterintuitive and self-refuting implications, in that it recognizes as rational behavior that may reveal a clear degree of irresponsibility or psychological instability. Accordingly, many Hume scholars have tried to show recently that this (...) view was not Hume’s; and that, on the contrary, Hume did supply an account of rational final ends--in his discussion of the calm passions, the “steady and general view” that corrects the biases and contingencies of an individual’s desires and perceptions, and elsewhere. But a detailed reconstruction of Hume’s views on these matters that assembles all the relevant texts does not support this thesis. Instead, it undermines it. Hence the counterintuitive and self-refuting implications of Hume’s view of rational action must be allowed to stand. (shrink)

Raymond Geuss asserts that there are fragmented views on what human rights are and that there is no unifying principle underlying such notion. I think that this view has its merits. It conveys the particularity of our perspectives, attitudes, desires and selfunderstandings. It rejects abstractness and is committed to a thick, perspectivist, historical understanding of personhood. To understand who we are, is to understand how we arrive at being who we are. By contrast, the notion of human rights deploys abstractness, (...) unification of agency, necessity and a thin view of personhood. In this paper, I attempt to bring into focus these two aspects of the notion of human rights. I will first analyse the genealogical method advocated by Geuss and argue that it has the merit of elucidating our historical contingencies; however, it is argued that any view in favour of the genealogical method relies on the idea that evaluative or normative concepts cannot be defined in terms of a common denominator. We reconstruct the Aristotelian idea of ‘focal meaning’ as core-resemblance and show that there is a unifying concept of human rights. We conclude that the perspectivist spirit of genealogy is not far from the Aristotelian tradition. Aristotle’s inquiry into a concept that could grasp different perspectives and contingencies as opposed to a Platonic understanding of abstract and universal forms shows that genealogical worries are germane to the tradition. (shrink)

The present paper deals with the philosophical styles of the hermeneutic project and deconstruction and tries to answer the question whether there really is, as Derrida argues, a fundamental difference, even an opposition between them. In this sense, taking the questions Derrida addressed Gadamer in their famous Paris encounter in 1981 as a clue, the author retraces the fundamental articulations of deconstruction, descending from Derrida's own description of the idea to his actual deconstructive practice, and shows that the presupposition Derrida (...) takes as separating the hermeneutic project from deconstruction is actually one these two share in common. (shrink)

El artículo presenta, reconstruye y contextualiza la discusión filosófica a la cual Michel Henry somete el planteamiento de Martin Heidegger acerca de la disposición afectiva (Befindlichkeit). Henry toma como hilo conductor el concepto de cooriginariedad (Gleichursprünglichkeit) entre las estructuras existenciales. Sostendremos que la lectura de Henry no solo afecta a una herramienta metodológica central de Ser y tiempo; también nos aproxima, con una economía filosófica nada desdeñable, al núcleo argumentativo de la obra principal de Heidegger, núcleo que se entreteje a (...) partir de las estrechas relaciones que guardan ontología, fenomenología y analítica existencial. Sin embargo, el planteamiento de Henry ha sido encasillado dentro del «giro teológico» de la fenomenología. Con lo cual será necesario mostrar que la crítica a Heidegger puede sostenerse con independencia de la deriva teológica de la filosofía henriniana. (shrink)

The Kantian moral foundations of Nozickian libertarianism suggest that the claim that self‐ownership grounds only negative rights to property should be rejected. The moral foundations of Nozick's libertarianism better support basing property rights on moral desert. It is neither incoherent nor implausible to say that need can be a basis for desert. By implication, the libertarian contention that persons ought to be respected as persons living self‐shaping lives is inconsistent with the libertarian refusal to accept that claims of need can (...) sometimes outweigh claims to property. (shrink)

The present paper aims to bring to light the relevance of Wittgenstein‘s thought for philosophical hermeneutics. In this sense it offers a thorough discussion of the Austrian philosopher‘s understanding of the concept of translation through a detailed examination of its development from its first formulation in the context of the picture theory of meaning in the Tractatus to its reformulation as "language game" and "form of life" within the use theory put forth in Philosophical Investigations. The paper argues that the (...) skepticism towards the history of everyday language implied by Wittgenstein‘s understanding of translation could be taken as an important step forward in the development of a critical dimension of philosophical hermeneutics. (shrink)

Uno de los principales filosofos de nuestro tiempo, Robert Nozick, continua en este libro la tradicion socratica de investigacion. Este volumen ilustra la originalidad, fuerza y alcance de su obra, a la vez que demuestra su sello personal al combinar un extraordinario rigor analitico con un inteligente juego intelectual. A traves de ensayos y ficciones filosoficas, el libro abarca desde Socrates hasta Quine. Algunos ensayos ofrecen metodos clasicos para apoyar nuevas preguntas en torno a la eleccion. Otros, nuevas aproximaciones a (...) conocidos puzzles intelectuales. Estos escritos dan testimonio tanto de la oportunidad como de la inoportunidad del pensamiento del autor; pero sobre todo demuestran como la filosofia puede ser una forma de vida. (shrink)

I call illocutionary externalism (IE) the approach to the study of illocutionary force that I favor. IE is inspired by Austin's seminal ideas on performatives and speech acts. According to IE, in the analysis of a paradigmatic illocutionary force we must essentially mention some aspects of the social and natural environment that cannot be reduced to the (de dicto) speakers' mental states, no matter how these are individuated. A difficult problem for IE derives from the possibility of making explicit the (...) force of an utterance. This fact invites us to focus our attention on the utterer (the person who makes the force explicit) and his mental states (illocutionary intentions), and to support a mentalist approach in the study of forces. In this article I shall argue for the compatibility of IE with the phenomenon of the explicitability of illocutionary force. (shrink)

This article, as well as the publication of a previously unpublished personal letter written by Jacques Derrida in his youth, relate to my thinking and research regarding the existential questions raised by philosophy and the act of suicide. Both the personal letter and the correspondence between Derrida and his close friend Michel Monory invite us to reflect on death and the enigma that suicidal ideation can take when presenting itself to a subject, while at the same time they provide us (...) with valuable information about the origins of Derrida's oeuvre to come. Giving us a glimpse into the universe of a young tormented soul, who has already dreamed of “a book of extraordinary philosophy,” Jacques Derrida confides some of his philosophical, psychological, and—interesting in light of what we know will be his future—autobiographical reflections to his friend. I situate the context of this correspondence more precisely and give shape to the distant, buried form of what will have been friendship allowing us to gain a greater understanding of the act of autobiography, as well as the autobiographical pact—as Philippe Lejeune has theorized it—and how it relates to the work of mourning. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

Two methodological claims in Hart's TheConceptofLaw have produced perplexity: that it is a book on 1 and that it may also be regarded as an essay in 2 Are these two ideas reconcilable? We know that mere analysis of our legal concepts cannot tell us much about their properties, that is, about the empirical aspect of law. We have learned this from philosophical criticisms of conceptual analysis; yet Hart informs us that analytic jurisprudence can be reconciled with descriptive sociology. The (...) answer to this puzzle lies in the notion of nonambitious conceptual analysis. The theorist analyzes concepts but accepts the limitations of conceptual analysis and therefore uses empirical knowledge and substantive arguments to explain, refine, or perhaps refute initial insights provided by intuitions. This is the conclusion that this paper arrives at as an argumentative strategy to defend Hart's legal theory from the criticisms of Stavropoulos and Dworkin. The latter argues that Hart's legal theory cannot explain theoretical disagreements in law because he relies on a shared criterial semantics. Stavropoulos aims to show that Hart's semantics is committed to ambitious conceptual analysis and relies on the usage of our words as a standard of correctness. Both attacks aim to show that the semantic sting stings Hart's legal theory. This essay refines both challenges and concludes that not even in the light of the most charitable interpretation of these criticisms is Hart's legal theory stung by the semantic sting. This study defends the view that Hart's methodological claims were modest and that he was aware of the limits of conceptual analysis as a philosophical method. He was, this study claims, far ahead of his time. (shrink)