Gustavo Bueno intentó definir la filosofía en dos obras que han marcado su sistema durante más de cuatro décadas: El papel de la filosofía en el conjunto del saber (1970) y ¿Qué es la filosofía? (1995). Planteamos una crítica global a esa definición, que consideramos incompleta, y proponemos completarla, redefiniéndola a una nueva escala. Mantenemos que su “filosofía de la filosofía” se centra en aspectos “sustanciales” (“Geometría de las Ideas”), olvidando los componentes “modales” (filosofía como actividad o modo de vida), (...) lo que le habría llevado a una visión de la filosofía como “especialidad”, en perjuicio de su cariz “imperativo”, imposible de asimilar por ningún “saber” o “taller” concreto, lo que además ayudaría a explicar la racionalidad de las definiciones clásicas de filosofía. (shrink)

Ignacio de Luzán escribió la poética española más influyente del siglo xviii, en un período en el que la ópera italiana ocupaba un lugar esencial en todas las cortes de Europa. Sin embargo, este género recibe un tratamiento marginal en su obra. Esto puede resultar sorprendente en un autor que no solo conoció las óperas realizadas en España durante los reinados de Felipe V y Fernando VI, sino que además fue un gran defensor de Metastasio como poeta, traduciendo algunos de (...) sus libretos por encargo de la corte. En este artículo analizamos el lugar del melodrama en su obra, mostrando la influencia recibida de las poéticas italianas, sobre todo de Crescimbeni, Gravina, Muratori y Maffei, que entendieron el género desde las ideas aristotélicas sobre la tragedia griega. Como veremos, la clave de su poética es la contraposición entre artes liberales y serviles, que le obliga a situar la música en un lugar inferior respecto a la poesía. (shrink)

In this article I try to understand the importance of the theatrum mundi metaphor for the configuration of the Modern Age. After a brief introduction on the idea of Modern Age, I study the distinction between ancient and modern from the perspective of the discovery of America, arguing that the idea of globe, embodied in cartography, determined the metaphor of the world as theater, affecting a wide range of disciplines, from astronomy to theology. Next, I show the geopolitical component of (...) the metaphor, linked to the idea of global empire, modern states and big cities. I dedicate a special section to show several melodramatic examples, mainly operatic, where the theatrum mundi metaphor reached a culminating point, linked to the European cities and their place in the world. Finally, I analyze the implications this metaphor had on the constitution of the philosophy of history, a discipline essentially linked to the Modern Age. (shrink)

The study examines the perception that students have of an establishment in the commune of Osorno, about the formation processes and the interpersonal relationships that exist in their school development. The sample is made up of 157 high school students. To achieve the purposes, a survey-type instrument is designed and validated, containing alternatives. The results show that the students consider that their learning process has been positive. They report that the tasks are excessive and the subjects difficult, but they indicate (...) that their teachers know how to explain the same content differently, they are patient, they motivate them to learn. They report that in school they learn and that teachers propose interesting topics in the classes. (shrink)

By speaking directly to the students in a personal tone, this text invites students to get excited about philosophy and to explore how philosophy affects them. Fourteen lively chapters take students deep into the world of philosophical thinking and challenge them to ponder life's big questions.

No século XXI, a produção e o consumo de informação acompanharam o ritmo da globalização e hoje, sem muito esforço, podemos saber do que aconteceu a poucos minutos em qualquer parte do planeta. Percebemos, no entanto, que a produção dessa informação, bem como sua circulação, não acontece de forma livre e democrática. Há várias forças em jogo que fazem da comunicação uma ferramenta de manipulação social.

L’Arabie marchande: État et commerce sous les sultans rasūlides du Yémen. By Éric Vallet. Bibliothèque historique des pays d’Islam, vol. 1. Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2010. Pp. 872. €90.

While there is a tradition of Islamic world maps and geographic depictions of direction to the Kaʿba in Mecca, relatively few detailed maps of individual Islamic realms have been studied. In an early 14th-century tax ledger compiled for the Rasūlid sultan al-Malik al-Muʾayyad Dāwūd (d. 721/1321), there is a map of the fortresses (ḥuṣūn), major towns, and ports of the areas controlled and taxed, as well as individual maps of Aden, Taʿizz, al-Janad, Dhamār, al-Shiḥr, and several wadis. Given the context (...) of the text, Irtifāʿ al-dawla al-Muʾayyadiyya, as a tax register, some of the maps probably serve a functional purpose. But how should such maps be read against the lists of important locations in other Rasūlid sources and earlier compilations, such as Yāqūt’s Muʿjam al-buldān compiled a century earlier or al-Hamdānī’s 10th-century Ṣifat jazīrat al-ʿArab? In this article I analyze the range of locations, how they are iconically represented, the accuracy of their relative locations, and their links to other Rasūlid lists. In what ways do these maps better illustrate how the Rasūlids viewed their own realm, which in the early 14th century was a rival of the Egyptian Mamluks and a major player in the Red Sea/indian Ocean trade network? Finally, how does this unique set of maps fit other Islamic maps in the tradition that stems back several centuries before? (shrink)

This volume explores the connections between John McDowell's philosophy and the hermeneutic tradition. The contributions not only explore the hermeneutical aspects of McDowell's thought, but also asks how this reading of McDowell can inform the hermeneutical tradition itself. John McDowell has made important contributions to debates in epistemology, metaethics and philosophy of language, and his readings of Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, and Wittgenstein have proved widely influential. While there are instances in which McDowell draws upon the work of hermeneutic thinkers, the (...) hermeneutic strand of McDowell's philosophy has not yet been systematically explored in-depth. The chapters in this volume open up a space in which to read McDowell himself as a hermeneutic thinker. They address several research questions including: How can McDowell's recourse to the hermeneutical tradition be understood in detail? Besides Gadamer, does McDowell's work implicitly convey and advance motives from other seminal figures of this tradition, such as Heidegger and Dilthey? Are there aspects of McDowell's position that can be enhanced through a juxtaposition with central hermeneutic concepts like World, Tradition and Understanding? Are there further, perhaps yet unexplored aspects of McDowell's influences that ought to be interpreted as expressing hermeneutic ideas? McDowell and the Hermeneutic Tradition will appeal to researchers and advanced students working in American philosophy, Continental philosophy, hermeneutics, history of philosophy, philosophy of language, and epistemology. (shrink)

The paper offers a reconstruction of the logics of jazz improvisation that is drawing on Žižek’s Work on Hegel. A basic concept of Žižek’s reading of Hegel consists in the concept of Retroactivity as the temporality that is characteristic of what Hegel understands as the development of history. The logic of retroactivity cannot be understood in terms of a classical teleological account but rather draws upon the idea of incommensurable events: Each historical situation is presupposing its own preconditions in a (...) way that the contingent is transformed into necessity. The paper discusses the structure of the temporality of jazz in such a way that it can be informed by Žižek’s thoughts on the temporal logic of history. (shrink)

Towards a Cultural History of the Mamluk Era. Edited by Mahmoud Haddad, Arnim Heinemann, John L. Meloy, and Souad Slim. Beiruter Texte und Studien, vol. 118. Beirut: Orient-Institut, 2010. [Distributed by Ergon Verlag Würzburg.] Pp. xii + 164 + 152, illus. €68.

Wathāʾiq madīnat al-Qaṣr bi-l-wāḥāt al-Dakhla: Maṣdarān li-taʾrīkh Miṣr fī l-ʿaṣr al-ʿuthmānī. Silsilat Dirāsāt Wathāʾiqiyya. By Rudolph Peters. Cairo: Maṭbaʿat al-ʿĀmma li-Dār al-Kutub wa-l-Wathāʾiq al-Qawmiyya, 2011. Pp. 610.

Mamluk Cairo, a Crossroads for Embassies: Studies on Diplomacy and Diplomatics. Edited by Frédéric Bauden and Malika Dekkiche. Islamic History and Civilization, vol. 161. Leiden: Brill, 2019. Pp. xxvii + 881. $179, €149 ; $162, €135.

This anthology gathers the most philosophically interesting contemporary writing on core issues about the self, identity, and the nature of mind.

Einstein’s razor, a corollary of Ockham’s razor, is often paraphrased as follows: make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler. This rule of thumb describes the challenge that designers of a legal system face—to craft simple laws that produce desired ends, but not to pursue simplicity so far as to undermine those ends. Complexity, simplicity’s inverse, taxes cognition and increases the likelihood of suboptimal decisions. In addition, unnecessary legal complexity can drive a misallocation of human capital toward comprehending and (...) complying with legal rules and away from other productive ends. While many scholars have offered descriptive accounts or theoretical models of legal complexity, most empirical research to date has been limited to simple measures of size, such as the number of pages in a bill. No extant research rigorously applies a meaningful model to real data. As a consequence, we have no reliable means to determine whether a new bill, regulation, order, or precedent substantially effects legal complexity. In this paper, we begin to address this need by developing a proposed empirical framework for measuring relative legal complexity. This framework is based on “knowledge acquisition”, an approach at the intersection of psychology and computer science, which can take into account the structure, language, and interdependence of law. We then demonstrate the descriptive value of this framework by applying it to the U.S. Code’s Titles, scoring and ranking them by their relative complexity. We measure various features of a title including its structural size, the net flow of its intra-title citations and its linguistic entropy. Our framework is flexible, intuitive, and transparent, and we offer this approach as a first step in developing a practical methodology for assessing legal complexity. (shrink)

Bedouin Ethnobotany: Plant Concepts and Uses in a Desert Pastoral World. By James P. Mandaville. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2011. Pp. xv + 397. $55.

A Maritime Lexicon: Arabic Nautical Terminology in the Indian Ocean. By Abdulrahman al Salimi and Eric Staples. Studies on Ibadism and Oman, vol. 11. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 2019. Pp. 641, illus. €88.

Pragmatism can be understood as a position that conceives of epistemic and moral claims in the terms of a realization within the framework of our collective forms of activity. In this respect, it on the one hand proves to be compatible with current discussions in anthropology, which take Aristotle and German Idealism as their starting point. At the same time however, the two seem to be in tension with regard to the concept of form presupposed in the neo-Aristotelian debates which (...) seems to block a practice-theoretical reading. This article argues for a reconciliation of the two concepts: The human form of life is realized in collective practices that further define the concept of this form of life. For such a reconcilement, both pragmatist as well as neo-Aristotelian accounts however must partially be re-engineered. (shrink)

Philosophy of Jazz discusses the philosophical relevance of jazz, showing that jazz and European art music have more in common than many assume.

The country of Yemen, on the southwestern corner of the Arabian Peninsula, is one of the most extensively terraced areas in the world. There is a well-documented tradition of both dryland and irrigated farming over the past three millennia and much of the indigenous agricultural knowledge survives. Development efforts over the past two decades in the north of Yemen have focused on expansion of tubewell irrigation at the expense of the major land use on dryland terraces and traditional subsistence crops. (...) Despite millions of dollars in aid, Yemen is far from agriculturally self-sufficient and its scarce water resource is rapidly being depleted. This articles explores the relevance of indigenous Yemeni knowledge of agriculture and the environment for the future of terrace farming in the country. It is argued that farmer knowledge can contribute to sustainable production and can be grafted on to modern methods and technology. Within Yemen the existing community support networks and pride in national heritage would assist in a reinvestment effort for the existing resource of the terraces. (shrink)

In german aesthetics, aethetic experience is the most prominent concept to emphasize sensual properties of objects and events. Thus, artistic objects can be understood as a special case of aesthetic experience. In this paper I argue that a theory of art should be separated from a general theory of aesthetics. In a first part, referring to Arthur C. Danto’s arguments, I claim that there are many artworks for which sensual properties are not constitutive. In a second step, I try to (...) show that even sensual artworks cannot be understood sufficiently with regard to the concept of aesthetic experience. They have a specific structure that seperates them categorically from mere aesthetic objects and events. (shrink)

This exceptional anthology immerses students in such powerful ideas that they will find themselves not just reading about, but actually participating in, the kind of philosophical thinking that can change the way they look at their lives and the world around them. Now in a new edition, The Experience of Philosophy features eighty-five readings that challenge students' thinking about God, freedom, reality, nothingness, death, and their own identities. Provocative and accessible, these selections have been carefully chosen for their ability to (...) draw students out of an ordinary frame of reference into exciting new territory. Although the editors include many classic sources from philosophers such as Plato, Descartes, Locke, and Kant, the emphasis is on contemporary writings. Articles by Derek Parfit, Bertrand Russell, and others help students see philosophy's links to literature, the natural sciences, and the physical and social sciences. The sixth edition features twelve new essays--by Augustine, Alvin Plantinga and Daniel Kolak, Georges Rey, Fred Dretske, David Reisman, Paul Teller, Clea F. Rees, Padmasiri de Silva, Daniel Kolak, Karl Marx, Anand Chandavarkar, and Vincent Hendricks--as well as more text boxes offering excerpts from other relevant works. The Experience of Philosophy, Sixth Edition, integrates helpful pedagogical aids including section introductions, a brief introduction to each selection, biographical information on each author, and questions before and after each reading to reinforce main ideas and promote thinking. Further readings after each selection direct students to additional material on related issues. Ideal for introductory philosophy courses, The Experience of Philosophy, Sixth Edition, encourages students to "do" philosophy, rather than just read about its history. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie Jahrgang: 62 Heft: 2 Seiten: 349-364.

Name der Zeitschrift: Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie Jahrgang: 65 Heft: 1 Seiten: 174-182.

Name der Zeitschrift: Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie Jahrgang: 67 Heft: 2 Seiten: 159-173.

The aim of the paper is an analysis of the specific quality of jazz as a kind of artistic music. Three dimensions are brought forward as central for jazz music: improvisation, interaction and intensity. Even though these dimensions are not understood in terms of a definition – as solely necessary and jointly sufficient conditions –, they are meant to be central qualities in our appreciation of jazz music. The logics of improvisation are explored in contrast to the practice of performing (...) a composed work in the European tradition of art music. Despite this difference the thought is articulated that the performance of a composed work is in some way governed by a similar logic. Interaction is specified in terms of jazz being fundamentally a kind of dialogical practice in the medium of music. Intensity finally is spelled out as a certain focus of jazz music toward every single moment of its performance that is mainly but not solely due to its specific rhythmic dimension. Jazz music proves to be a kind of artistic music that renders aspects of artistic practice in general explicit. (shrink)