Introduction: Mexican Philosophy: What Is It and Why It Matters -- Relajo -- Nepantla -- Zozobra -- Corazonada -- Tik -- Figure of the World -- Mexistentialism.

This book introduces readers to central concepts and ideas in Mexican philosophy. Couched in stories and anecdotes from the author's life, the book offers these concepts and ideas as orientations, recommendations, or exhortation for navigating today's world. The structure and the style of the book aims at making these accessible to both specialists and non-specialist or anyone who may have had some experience with contemporary forms of marginalization, alienation, objectification, or any of the various forms of dread and accidentality familiar (...) to modern life. This, the author thinks, is most of us. Narrowing down the scope of the tradition, the author draws from the history of Mexican philosophy in the 20th century, as it is at this time that Mexican philosophy comes into its own. The book begins with two short introductions, one is an introduction philosophy in Mexico, the other to Mexican philosophy. Here, readers are introduced to Alfonso de la Veracruz, who offered the first philosophy course in the Americas in 1540 in the monastery of a small town in Michoacán, Mexico. From there, it presents four main themes from Mexican philosophy that recur in the philosophical literature. The remainder of the book serves as a "guide" for living a better, more fulfilling life. The main characters in what the author considers an uncontroversial retelling of Mexican philosophy are Antonio Caso, Samuel Ramos, Emilio Uranga, Leopoldo Zea, Jorge Portilla, Rosario Castellanos, Elsa Cecilia Frost, and, of course, persons in the author's own life. (shrink)

In his new book, Carlos Alberto Torres, an internationally renowned critical theorist of education, explores the early writings of Paulo Freire whose ideas have had a tremendous and long-lasting impact on the world of pedagogy and politics. Torres analyzes Freire's works, from the 1960s and 1970s, before Freire gained worldwide recognition for his Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Offering an in-depth look into the formative thinking of Freire, Torres identifies how his ideas produced frameworks for educating global citizens, building (...) community and mutual respect, creating social responsibility, instilling an appreciation for diversity, promoting multiple literacies, and social justice education. This volume is the result of more than 3 decades of research with access to Freire's personal library and the archives of the Paulo Freire Institute, as well as the author's extensive conversations with Paulo Freire over two decades--Dr. Torres was Freire's adviser during his tenure as Secretary of Education in the Municipality of São Paulo, Brazil, 1989-1991. (shrink)

Counselling y cuidados paliativos es el título del libro que conjuntamente decidieron escribir la doctora Esperanza Santos y el profesor José Carlos Bermejo. En esta obra de fácil lectura y con consejos muy prácticos y útiles, se presentan elementos fundamentales para brindar un acompañamiento de óptima calidad en el cuidado paliativo, así como la posibilidad de hacer un autoexamen de cómo los cuidadores de los pacientes vienen prestando sus servicios e incluso para no caer en burnout. Este libro es (...) de gran utilidad, tanto para los profesionales de la salud que trabajan en las unidades de cuidados paliativos, como para personas que dedican gran parte de su tiempo al cuidado de familiares con enfermedades terminales o que pasan por procesos prolongados de enfermedad. Con ejemplos de conversaciones de la vida real entre cuidadores y pacientes, la lectura del libro se hace, a la vez, agradable, divertida y profundamente reflexiva. Para citar esta reseña / To cite this review / Para citar esta resenha Rosas-Jiménez CA. Esperanza Santos y José Carlos Bermejo. Counselling y cuidados paliativos. Bilbao: Desclée de Brouwer-Centro de Humanización de la Salud, 2015, 164 pp. ISBN: 978-84-330-2786-3. Pers Bioet. 2019; 23: 137-139. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5294/pebi.2019.23.1.9. (shrink)

Freire is one of the most powerful voices challenging the hegemony of bureaucratic and banking educational systems. His voice was particularly influential impacting revolutionary processes and progressive social movements while at the same time learning from their practices. However, some silences in his oeuvres requires further examination. In this article, we focus on the silences of Freire regarding education and its relationship with work and labor, gender issues, and citizenship building.

Este trabajo defenderá la universalidad de la metáfora en arte (Arthur Danto), contra quienes piensan (Davidson, Carrol, Vilar) que en él la atribución de propiedades expresivas es literal y no metafórica. Se defiende la tesis de que la metáfora artística es como un símbolo tensivo que apunta a significados (epífora) y al mismo tiempo crea presencia (diáfora). Gracias a ambos elementos el arte crea presencia, crea realidad o transfigura lo usual y le otorga súbitas y asombrosas posibilidades de presencia, a (...) las cuales se corresponde no sólo con los sentidos, sino también con el afecto, el entendimiento y la imaginación. (shrink)

Independientemente de qué considere cada persona como saludable, lo más seguro es que cualquiera de nosotros quiera vivir una vida sin molestias ni dolores. De alguna manera todos queremos bienestar. Pues bien, el libro _Holistic Healing _editado por Peter A. Dunn nos presenta diferentes teorías, prácticas y el cambio social que estas traen consigo. Para algunos sectores y personas del ámbito de la salud, el término “holístico” puede causar desconfianza, recelo o simplemente indiferencia, ya que el término “holístico” ha sido (...) usado para referirse a prácticas de sanación que no hacen parte de la biomedicina o de la llamada medicina occidental. Lo interesante de este libro es que los autores de cada capítulo evidencian de distintas maneras que una aproximación más completa al ser humano permite abordar la salud desde una perspectiva que va más allá de curar las enfermedades físicas. Como veremos a continuación, una mirada holística considera las dimensión física, psicológica, emocional y espiritual del ser humano, cómo interactúan entre ellas y cómo se ven influenciadas por la realidad social, económica y ambiental. (shrink)

In this paper I consider the notion of “moral ecology” in relation to the social/cultural construction known as “narco-culture.” My claim is that the moral ecology of narco-culture is one that is both destructive and prohibitive of human flourishing. The general idea of a “moral ecology” is that the moral space of human conviviality is not unlike an ecological, or environmental, space—both are constituted by various interdependent relations which, when working harmoniously and in optimal capacity, maintain the overall well-being of (...) its inhabitants. Within non-human ecosystems, the quality or health of rivers, trees, earth, air, predator-prey relationships, etc., define what Allen Hertzke calls the system’s “carrying capacity.” The carrying capacity refers to what the system can handle while staying balanced and healthy and also indicates the point beyond which the system, if overburdened or degraded, begins to fall apart. In a social setting, the ecology is constituted by moral rules and behaviors, the degradation of which can cause the degradation of the entire system. (shrink)

One of the great challenges for students of any discipline is to be able to put into practice the knowledge learned in theory. Public health does not escape this challenge. Research Methods for Public Health is a book that seeks to help students understand in a simple way how to enter into the practice of public health research. This book stands out for its easy reading, but especially because it emphasizes the existence of quantitative and qualitative methods, as well as (...) the combination of both methods. On the other hand, the authors show between the lines, and sometimes more clearly, the importance of teamwork in research groups, a key element to avoid errors, validate procedures or instruments and increase the reliability of the results, as well as the importance of criteria of validity, reliability, precision, relevance, transparency and credibility, among others. -/- Uno de los grandes retos para los estudiantes de cualquier disciplina es poder poner en práctica los conocimientos aprendidos en la teoría. La salud pública no se escapa de este desafío. Research Methods for Public Health es un libro que busca ayudar a comprender de manera sencilla cómo introducirse en la práctica de la investigación en salud pública. Este libro se destaca por su fácil lectura, pero especialmente porque pone el énfasis en la existencia de los métodos cuantitativos y cualitativos, así como en la combinación de ambos métodos. Por otro lado, los autores dejan ver entrelíneas, y a veces más claramente, la importancia del trabajo en equipo en los grupos de investigación, elemento clave para evitar errores, validar procedimientos o instrumentos y aumentar la confiabilidad de los resultados, así como la importancia de criterios de validez, confiabilidad, precisión, relevancia, transparencia y credibilidad, entre otros. -/- Reseña del libro: Stuart McClean, Isabelle Bray, Nick de Viggiani, Emma Bird and Paul Pilkington. Research Methods for Public Health. London: SAGE, 2020. 273 p. (shrink)

First in-depth analysis of this important Mexican philosopher’s work.

Contemporary popular culture is riddled with references to Mexican drug cartels, narcos, and drug trafficking. In the United States, documentary filmmakers, journalists, academics, and politicians have taken note of the increasing threats to our security coming from a subculture that appears to feed on murder and brutality while being fed by a romanticism about power and capital. Carlos Alberto Sánchez uses Mexican narco-culture as a point of departure for thinking about the nature and limits of violence, culture, and (...) personhood. A Sense of Brutality argues that violent cultural modalities, of which narco-culture is but one, call into question our understanding of “violence” as a concept. The reality of narco-violence suggests that “violence” itself is insufficient to capture it, that we need to redeploy and reconceptualize “brutality” as a concept that better captures this reality. Brutality is more than violence, other to cruelty, and distinct from horror and terror—all concepts that are normally used interchangeably with brutality, but which, as the analysis suggests, ought not to be. In narco-culture, the normalization of brutality into everyday life is a condition upon which the absolute erasure or derealization of people is made possible. (shrink)

Reseña del libro: Giovanni Reale. Invitación al pensamiento antiguo. San Pablo, Océano Azul, 2017. 134 p.

El presente artículo busca presentar consideraciones bioéticas y antropológicas relacionadas con el documentado hecho de la alta pérdida de embriones que ocurre con la aplicación de las tecnologías de reproducción asistida en humanos. Se ilustran datos numéricos disponibles, provenientes del “2013 Assisted Reproductive Technology. National Summary Report” del CDC. Dada la alta pérdida de vidas humanas en estos procesos y los factores de insolidaridad y de ocultamiento del respeto por el derecho a la vida humana sin excepción, se plantea la (...) existencia de una similitud con la trágica situación de los náufragos de la Medusa, clásica obra de Géricault, en los inicios del siglo XIX. Se intenta, además, desde la disciplina de la bioética, llamar la atención sobre la necesidad de una formación de la conciencia crítica en este tema, pues no todo lo factible técnicamente tiene licitud ética a la luz de la razón. (shrink)

This paper explores and expands upon Jorge Gracia's reasons for the apparent lack of Hispanics in US philosophy. The point is to explain the underrepresentation of Hispanics in philosophy, with a focus on a specific subgroup of Hispanics, namely, "homegrown" US Hispanics. This group wasentirely missing from the "established" ranks in Gracia's census. I propose a phenomenological explanation for this lack, rooted in my experience as ahomegrown US Hispanic. This experience gives rise to a sense of identity described as "post-immigrant." (...) Those of us in the American philosophical establishment who share this identity, or who feel its pull, desire but hesitate to fully and authentically engage philosophy and the philosophical life, where thisrequires an uncompromising insertion of our cultural and historical identity into what we write and teach. The reason for the absence of homegrown Hispanicphilosophers who are willing to engage issues related to their circumstance as Hispanics is what I call, "the post-immigrant fear.". (shrink)

Thought and Social Engagement in the Mexican-American Philosophy of John H. Haddox : A Collection of Critical Appreciations.

This chapter draws parallels between Leopoldo Zea and Stanley Cavell's thought. It forms the basis of this argument in their thought on circumstantialism. Cavell and Zea both reflect on the American circumstance, a circumstance conditioned by the discovery, colonizations, and nationalization of Americas, together with the American people's heroic desire to connect, continuously and urgently, with themselves and their destiny as Americans.

El artículo explora vasos comunicantes entre el _Tractatus Logico Philosophicus_ de Ludwig Wittgenstein y el _Analysis situs_ de Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Se muestra que las caracterizaciones de objetos en el _Tractatus_ y de puntos en el _Analysis situs_ siguen patrones similares. También se exploran las similitudes y diferencias entre el pretender que «la proposición puede representar la realidad entera» (_TLP_, § 4.12) o «todas [las proposiciones] están unidas por una trama infinitamente fina al gran espejo» (_TLP_, § 5.511) y el (...) hecho de que «cada sustancia simple [tiene] relaciones que expresan a todas las demás, y [por consiguiente] es un espejo vivo y perpetuo del universo» (_Monadología_, § 56). (shrink)

El pluralismo en América Latina ha permitido en años recientes la aparición de manifestaciones religiosas complejas y multilaterales que se expresan más allá de la lógica del catolicismo tradicional. Estas opciones operan a través de mecanismos simbólicos provisionales, híbridos y flexibles, subjetivados mediante éticas polivalentes vinculadas a la participación de nuevos actores sociales, quienes mediante espacios hermenéuticos diversos construyen una discursividad política vinculada a la comprensión de Dios a mediante sistemas teológicos abiertos. Tal es el caso de la agrupación religiosa (...) conocida como CEGLA (Cristianos Evangélicos Gays y Lesbianas de Argentina), que constituye una manifestación de formas de socialización religiosa expresadas más allá de las instituciones católicas. (shrink)

O pensamento filosófico hispânico na segunda metade do séc. XX, potenciou um processo de emancipação cultural e filosófica mais profundas, que destacaram o sentido e o alcance de uma utêntica filosofia, no continente sul-americano. Com tomada de consciência da circunstância americana o que está em causa, é a procura e busca de uma autenticidade da razão latino-americana, a qual na análise que desenvolvo, só terá sentido se integrada numa dinâmica de integração cultural. Esta deverá sempre partir das circunstâncias próprias, e (...) desenvolvida a partir do respeito por um ethos vivencial comum. O presente estudo foi inspirado na obra de Carlos Beorlegui, intitulada Historia del pensamiento filosófico latinoamericano (2004), obra esta que nos apresenta uma visão geral da Filosofia latino-americana desde as cosmovisões pré-colombianas até às correntes filosóficas mais actuais, como é o caso da FL (Filosofia da Libertação), e a da pós-Modernidade ou pós-Colonialidade, comummente conhecida como interculturalismo. (shrink)

Una conversación con Heidegger.--Kierkegaard hablando sobre dios.--Don Miguel de Unamuno.

This paper considers the nature of Heidegger’s Eurocentrism in regard to philosophy. Focusing primarily on “A Dialogue on Language,” I argue, first, that Heidegger recognizes the limits of the Eurocentric idea of philosophy and proposes its overcoming. Secondly, I suggest that the proposal to overcome philosophy is made in an attempt to protect philosophy from the encroachment of an otherness that challenges its very identity. This leads me to the view, thirdly, that Heidegger’s Eurocentrism about philosophy is compromising insofar as (...) he is willing, to a certain degree, to let go of philosophy’s European origin. This “thinning” out of Heidegger’s Eurocentrism, finally, opens the door to a consideration of the possibility for a non-Western, namely, a Latin American, or Mexican “philosophy.”. (shrink)

El artículo examina tres propuestas de explicación del fenómeno de refracción de la luz formuladas por los pensadores medievales Roger Bacon, John Pecham y Erazmus Ciolek Witelo. Se muestra, en el caso de Bacon, que la explicación estaba soportada en una metafísica de la propagación de los poderes causales y anidaba un conflicto insalvable. En el caso de Pecham se muestra un mayor compromiso con la necesidad de una ley cuantitativa que, desafortunadamente, conduce a una explicación frustrada. Finalmente, se valora (...) el deseo de Witelo por introducir elementos cosmológicos en su explicación. (shrink)

Editorial - Dossier: Sanctuaries and Religious Tourism Horizonte, Belo Horizonte, Vol. 16, No. 49, Jan./Apr. 2018.

This paper traces the concept and phenomenon of generosity from Aristotle to Emannuel Levinas and beyond. The question motivating this investigation is: must the generous act be restricted by a rational calculation of correct, or prudent, giving? Answers to this question vary. Aristotle and Kant would answer in the affirmative, while Emerson and Levinas would not. The bulk of this paper is dedicated to Levinas's characterization of excessive generosity as a condition for the fundamental ethical relation, namely, the generous welcome (...) of the Other. I end by considering the phenomenon of generosity from the point of view of the mid‐20th century Mexican philosopher, Emilio Uranga. (shrink)

En el Aufbau Carnap mencionó la posibilidad de adelantar una construcción lógica de las emociones en forma completamente análoga a la construcción lógica de las cualidades sensoriales. Esta tarea, sin embargo, nunca se llevó a cabo. Me propongo mostrar que la construcción lógica sugerida por Carnap exige modificaciones importantes a los protocolos de construcción exhibidos en el Aufbau. En particular, modificaciones que permitan reconocer la duración genuina de las emociones. También sugiero protocolos de reconocimiento para la dirección y la manifestación (...) de emociones. (shrink)

At the beginning of the 18th century, Berkeley believed an anomaly pointed out by Isaac Barrow could be regarded as important evidence against the optical theories that had been established and standardized thanks to the works of Kepler and Newton. In this article, we want to show that Berkeley’s treatment of the Barrovian Case does not falsify these theories. We will contend that the strategy used by Berkeley to resolve the anomaly by alluding to a change of convention is a (...) strategy that the classical theorist could use as well. In other words, the classical theorist could also appeal to a change of convention to deal with the problem. (shrink)

Trata-se de uma investigação sobre a teoria dos primeiros princípios da razão prática na obra de Tomás de Aquino. No centro dessa teoria está o termo “sindérese”, cujo conteúdo foi elaborado nas discussões da filosofia e da teologia medievais, a partir de sua menção na Glosa de Jerônimo a Ezequiel. Tal termo designa um conceito que apresenta um caráter inovador dentro da teoria da ação moral em comparação com a ética aristotélica. Afinal, Tomás de Aquino o entende como o hábito (...) dos primeiros princípios da moral, equivalente ao hábito dos primeiros princípios teóricos de Aristóteles. Dessa forma, o interesse é compreender como o conceito de sindérese é recebido e desenvolvido na filosofia moral de Tomás de Aquino através da análise das três questões tradicionais: de sua natureza, de sua infalibilidade e de sua extinção. (shrink)