Martin y Fritz Heidegger, Correspondencia. 1930-1949. Edición de Bruno Pieger. Traducción de Raúl Gabás. Barcelona: Herder, 2018, 172 pp.

Latour is a world famous and widely published French sociologist who has written with great eloquence and perception about the relationship between people, science, and technology. He is also closely associated with the school of thought known as Actor Network Theory. In this book he sets out for the first time in one place his own ideas about Actor Network Theory and its relevance to management and organization theory.

The emergence of modern sciences in the seventeenth century profoundly renewed our understanding of Nature. For the last three centuries new ideas of Nature have been continuously developed by theology, politics, economics, and science, especially the sciences of the material world. The situation is even more unstable today, now that we have entered an ecological mutation of unprecedented scale. Some call it the Anthropocene, but it is best described as a new climatic regime. And a new regime it certainly is, (...) since the many unexpected connections between human activity and the natural world oblige every one of us to reopen the earlier notions of Nature and redistribute what had been packed inside. So the question now arises: what will replace the old ways of looking at Nature? This book explores a potential candidate proposed by James Lovelock when he chose the name "Gaia" for the fragile, complex system through which living phenomena modify the Earth. The fact that he was immediately misunderstood proves simply that his readers have tried to fit this new notion into an older frame, transforming Gaia into a single organism, a kind of giant thermostat, some sort of New Age goddess, or even divine Providence. In this series of lectures on "natural religion", Bruno Latour argues that the complex and ambiguous figure of Gaia offers, on the contrary, an ideal way to disentangle the ethical, political, theological, and scientific aspects of the now obsolete notion of Nature. He lays the groundwork for a future collaboration among scientists, theologians, activists, and artists as they, and we, begin to adjust to the new climatic regime. (shrink)

1. Can “practice” and “practices” be used as epistemological tools to study history? Can these concepts be used to break up unilateral and teleological narratives one the one hand, and, on the other, to provide a basis for a new understanding and writing of history and histories? The twelve essays (by thirteen authors) collected by Francis Chateauraynaud and Yves Cohen under the title Histoires Pragmatiques (in the Ehess’s Raisons pratiques. Epistémologie, sociologie, théorie sociale series)...

The Italian «constitutional compromise» between the liberal, catholic, and socialist-communist traditions and the «fordist-keynesian compromise» between capital and labor are two frequent set expressions. They are often put together, and sometimes overlapped, insofar as they share an emphasis on the central role of labor, the former putting it at the very foundation of the Republic, the latter at the core of the virtuous circle of mass production and mass consumption. Starting from a discussion of these formulas, the essay will propose (...) some lines of research for the history of the Italian Republic, not without significance for contemporary political discourse. (shrink)

Abstract: The standard picture of rationality requires that the agent acts so as to realize her most preferred alternative in the light of her own desires and beliefs. However, there are circumstances where such an agent can predict that she will act against her preferences. The story of Ulysses and the Sirens is the paradigmatic example of such cases. In those circumstances the orthodoxy requires the agent to be ‘sophisticated’. That is to say, she should take into account her expected (...) future choices and prevent her future self to act in certain ways. She should ‘bind’ herself to a certain course of action. This is a form of causal commitment. It is generally recognized that this form of self-commitment is the only one that is available to a rational agent. Rational commitment, where the agent gives herself a reason to act in a certain way rather than making herself act in that way, is considered not feasible. In this paper, I question this verdict. I sketch the broad outlines of a model of rational commitment, which takes as its starting point Michael Bratman’s ‘planning theory’ of intention. There are two important objections against this theory (one by John Broome and one by the Dutch philosopher Govert den Hartogh.) Both criticisms claim that such a theory is a form of ‘bootstrapping’ reasons for action into existence. In the remainder of the paper, I will defend the theory against these objections. This way, I hope to establish that defending the feasibility of rational commitment is not an obvious mistake. (shrink)

Brain imaging studies suggest that truth telling constitutes the default of the human brain and that lying involves intentional suppression of the predominant truth response. By manipulating the truth proportion in the Sheffield lie test, we investigated whether the dominance of the truth response is malleable. Results showed that frequent truth telling made lying more difficult, and that frequent lying made lying easier. These results implicate that the accuracy of lie detection tests may be improved by increasing the dominance of (...) the truth response and that habitual lying makes the lie response more dominant. (shrink)

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

English summary: Aufhebung is one of the major terms in philosophy and through it, the author explores the possibility of the ultimate transformation of the mind. By questioning this conceptual node, which stands for destruction and surpassing, disaster and metamorphosis, he tries to find within it the cipher of an ultra-modernity that exists primarily through its destructive power. French text. French description: Aufhebung est l'un des noms majeurs de la philosophie et l'auteur y cherche les chances d'une ultime transformation de (...) l'esprit. Interrogeant ce noeud conceptuel qui, a la fois, signifie destruction et depassement, sursaut et releve, catastrophe et metamorphose, il y cherche le chiffre d'une ultra-modernite qui regne d'abord par son pouvoir de destruction. Elucider la part de sursaut qui demeure encore accessible quand tout se fait decombre, ce n'est pas seulement interroger le plus puissant systeme philosophique de l'Occident, celui de Hegel, c'est demander a des constellations en apparence secondaires ou depassees dans l'economie du savoir: l'instant, la langue, la substance, le secret ou l'analogie de temoigner pour une faculte d'interiorisation et de synthese qui echappe aux desespoirs de l'heure, quand bien meme elle ne s'exercerait dans l'histoire que sous des formes parcellaires, decevantes ou dramatiques. Mais pour ce faire, il faut accepter d'entrer a nouveau, par-dela les certitudes communes de l'espace et du temps, dans le romantisme d'une dialectique absolue qui n'epargne rien, mais eclaire toute chose en s'imposant comme la metaphysique meme de toute destruction. (shrink)

Menschen haben eine Fülle von moralischen Überzeugungen. Wodurch sind diese Überzeugungen aber gerechtfertigt? In diesem Buch wird dafür argumentiert, dass verschiedene Arten von Gründen zur Rechtfertigung von moralischen Überzeugungen beitragen können: Gründe, die ihrerseits Überzeugungen sind, aber auch Gründe, die selbst keine Überzeugungen sind wie etwa Intuitionen, Emotionen und Wünsche. Die These lautet: Wenn derartige Gründe als Inputs in eine verlässliche Überzeugungsbildungsfähigkeit eingehen, sind die daraus resultierenden moralischen Überzeugungen gerechtfertigt.

Autoren Johannes Brachtendorf, Professor für Philosophie am Institut für philosophische Grundfragen der Theologie an der Katholisch-Theologischen Fakultät ...