En este artículo me propongo abordar el problema del tiempo en las sociedades contemporáneas desde un diálogo entre las construcciones teóricas de Moishe Postone y Hartmut Rosa y el trabajo de Michel Foucault. Los dos primeros se han centrado en explicar cómo la temporalidad se ha convertido en un tipo de dominación abstracta, impersonal y cuasiobjetiva a partir de conceptos como la densificación temporal, la aceleración o la hibridación. Foucault, en cambio, concibe el tiempo bajo el prisma de la racionalidad (...) política neoliberal, por la cual el tiempo pasa a ser un recurso que debe gestionarse por los sujetos en términos empresariales y que termina por configurar una ética neoliberal de la administración del tiempo. Este diálogo ejemplifica de manera privilegiada la tensión entre la coacción o la presión temporal y la administración estratégica del tiempo propia de las sociedades contemporáneas. (shrink)

"Knowing how we know" is the subject of this book. Its authors present a new view of cognition that has important social and ethical implications, for, they assert, the only world we humans can have is the one we create together through the actions of our coexistence. Written for a general audience as well as for students, scholars, and scientists and abundantly illustrated with examples from biology, linguistics, and new social and cultural phenomena, this revised edition includes a new afterword (...) by Dr. Varela, in which he discusses the effect the book has had in the years since its first publication. (shrink)

We propose that to understand the biological and neurophysiological processes that give rise to human mental phenomena it is necessary to consider them as behavioral relational phenomena. In particular, we propose that: a) these phenomena take place in the relational manner of living that human language constitutes, and b) that they arise as recursive operations in such behavioral domain. Accordingly, we maintain that these phenomena do not take place in the brain, nor are they the result of a unique operation (...) of a human brain, but arise with the participation of the brain as it generates the behavioral relational dynamics that constitutes language. (shrink)

I do not wish to deal with all the domains in which the word time enters as if it were referring to an obvious aspect of the world or worlds that we human live. Indeed, the very fact that time can be made an issue of reflection shows us that what the word time connotes changes with the circumstances in which it is used. This situation alone, however, would not constitute a problem inviting us to enter in deep reflections if (...) we just accepted that the context defined the meaning of the word in each case. But we do not do that, and we ask the question what is time? as if we thought that the word time referred to some independent entity or dimension of nature that could be properly disclosed or described if we tried hard enough, even if we could not the final essence of it. I consider, however, that the question what is time? is adequate because it implies from the start the view that time can be properly treated as some kind of independent entity or dimension of nature. And I consider that such a view is fully inadequate because I think that all that we human beings talk about are relations that arises in our operation in language as a closed domain of recursive consensual coordinations of behaviors. Let me explain what I say with a few words about living, language, and cognition, and then answer the question what distinctions do we make or connote when we talk of time? (shrink)

Diante das presentes dificuldades de fundamentação da ética, ocasionadas pelas cisões necessárias, mas logo extrapoladas, entre natureza e subjetividade, conhecimento e ação, muitos pensadores têm se voltado para a grande síntese tomasiana do pensamento ocidental. Com numerosas releituras nos campos da ética, do direito, da epistemologia e da metafísica, o pensamento tomasiano vive sem exageros uma pequena renascença, particularmente em língua inglesa, ensejando inúmeras abordagens revisionistas, históricas ou adaptações às pesquisas da filosofia e da teologia analíticas. Mais como informativo deste (...) processo do que como análise sistemática, elencamos aspectos centrais da ética tomasiana e seus fundamentos metafísicos de acordo com autores contemporâneos que participam desta renovação do tomismo, buscando evidenciar a importância da disposição natural do ser humano para moralidade neste quadro teórico. (shrink)

La lección de Weber sobre la democracia es doble. Por un lado, la precisión acerca de qut actores y qut procesos son claves en su estudio -lidera, burocracia, partidos, búsqueda del poder, responsabilidad, &c.- y, por otro, la convicción acerca de los limites de lo posible en una democracia. P..

Two thousand five hundred years ago, in 507–506 B.C.E., the institutions of Athen were rocked by the reforms of Cleisthenes. Although the word did not yet exist, here was the foundation of democracy. First published in French in 1964, Cleisthenes the Athenian has become the classic study of the philosophical, political, and aesthetic background and significance of these reforms. The book has influenced a generation of scholars in anthropology, sociology, urban planning, political science, philosophy, and classical studies. This English translation (...) contains the complete text of the original essay and is supplemented by a discussion among Vidal-Naquet, Leveque, and the philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis on the invention of democracy, as well as a new authors' introduction. (shrink)

Our purpose in this essay is to introduce new concepts in a wide and recursive view of the systemic consequences of the following biological facts that I and we have presented that can be resumed as: that as living systems we human beings are molecular autopoietic system; that living systems live only as long as they find themselves in a medium that provides them with all the conditions that make the realization of their living possible, that is, in the continuous (...) conservation of their relation of adaptation to the circumstances in which they find themselves; that as a living system exists only in a relation of adaptation with the medium that operates as its ecological niche, its reproduction necessarily occurs as a process of systemic duplication or multiplication of the ecological organism-niche unity that it integrates; that the worlds of doings that we generate as languaging beings in our conversations, explanations, reflections and theories are part of our ecological niche; and that we human beings as living beings that exist in languaging, are biological–cultural beings in which our cultural and our biological manners of existences can be distinguished but cannot be separated. Of the systemic consequences of these biological facts that we consider in this essay, we wish to mention two as the principal: that the diversification of manners of living produced in biological evolution is the result of differential survival in a changing medium through the conservation of adaptation, and not through competitive survival of the best; and that we in our living as languaging human beings are the epistemological fundament of all that we do and know as such. (shrink)

Vidal intertwines fond recollections of films savored in the movie palaces of his Washington, D.C., boyhood with strands of autobiography and trenchant observations about American politics. Never before has the renowned author revealed so much about his own life or written with such immediacy about the forces shaping America. 26 halftones.

AbstractIn this article, I examine the pedagogical practices of La Red de Semillas Libres de Colombia, a grassroots national organization that works towards the construction of seed sovereignty. Using participant observation and interviews, I show the epistemic, territorial, and gender dimensions of these practices. I draw from extant scholarship on seed struggles, decolonial feminism, and feminist political ecology to analyze two specific practices: experimentation and demonstration and, visual technology creation, including drawings. I demonstrate how these practices organize territories through collective (...) epistemic gendered labor around seeds. These territories are spaces for community-based power creation that have the potential to advance agrarian and environmental agendas from below. However, they also reflect and embody the enduring character of patriarchy and the challenges it presents to achieve systemic transformations in the Colombian countryside. (shrink)

To begin with -- Genealogy of the cerebral subject -- Disciplines of the neuro -- Cerebralizing distress -- Brains on screen and paper -- Up for grabs.

The first part of this paper proposes a precise definition of what a worldview is, and why there is a necessity to have one. The second part suggests how to construct integrated scientific worldviews. For this attempt, three general scientific approaches are proposed: the general systems theory as the endeavor for a universal language for science, a general problem-solving approach and the idea of evolution, broadly construed. We close with some remarks about limitations of scientific worldviews.

: Standard ethical frameworks struggle to deal with transhumanism, ecological issues and the rising technodiversity because they are focused on guiding and evaluating human behavior. Ethics needs its Copernican revolution to be able to deal with all moral agents, including not only humans, but also artificial intelligent agents, robots or organizations of all sizes. We argue that embracing the complexity worldview is the first step towards this revolution, and that standard ethical frameworks are still entrenched in the Newtonian worldview. We (...) first spell out the foundational assumptions of the Newtonian worldview, where all change is reduced to material particles following predetermined trajectories governed by the laws of nature. However, modern physical theories such as relativity, quantum mechanics, chaos theory and thermodynamics have drawn a much more confusing and uncertain picture, and inspired indecisive, subjectivist, relativist, nihilist or postmodern worldviews. Based on cybernetics, systems theory and the new sciences of complexity, we introduce the complexity worldview that sees the world as interactions and their emergent organizations. We use this complexity worldview to show the limitations of standard ethical frameworks such as deontology, theology, consequentialism, virtue ethics, evolutionary ethics and pragmatism. Keywords: Complexity, philosophy, ethics, cybernetics, transhumanism, universal ethics, systems ethics. (shrink)

Philosophy lacks criteria to evaluate its philosophical theories. To fill this gap, this essay introduces nine criteria to compare worldviews, classified in three broad categories: objective criteria (objective consistency, scientificity, scope), subjective criteria (subjective consistency, personal utility, emotionality), and intersubjective criteria (intersubjective consistency, collective utility, narrativity). The essay first defines what a worldview is and exposes the heuristic used in the quest for criteria. After describing each criterion individually, it shows what happens when each of them is violated. From the (...) criteria, it derives assessment tests to compare and improve different worldviews. These include the is-ought, ought-act, and is-act first-order tests; the critical and dialectical second-order tests; the mixed-questions and first-second-order third-order tests; and the we-I, we-it, and it-I tests. The essay then applies these criteria and tests to a concrete example, comparing the Flying Spaghetti Monster deity with Intelligent Design. For another application, it draws more general fruitful suggestions for the dialogue between science and religion. (shrink)

This essay is part of a special issue celebrating 50 years of Political Theory. The ambition of the editors was to mark this half century not with a retrospective but with a confabulation of futures. Contributors were asked: What will political theory look and sound like in the next century and beyond? What claims might political theorists or their descendants be making in ten, twenty-five, fifty, a hundred years’ time? How might they vindicate those claims in their future contexts? How (...) will the consistent concerns of political theorists evolve into the questions critical for people decades or centuries from now? What new problems will engage the political theorists (or their rough equivalents) of the future? What forms might those take? What follows is one of the many confabulations published in response to these queries. (shrink)

A abordagem deste artigo trata de uma busca pelo sentido ontológico da vida humana em relação ao seu modo de ser e estar no mundo e com o mundo. Partindo de uma breve contextualização sobre a vastidão do cosmos, mostramos, direta e indiretamente, o paradoxal legado da ciência moderna que, de um lado, hoje evidencia nossa insignificância diante da infinitude do universo e, de outro, promoveu antinomias sociais por sua incansável busca pela dominação da natureza. O resultado desse processo é (...) um antropocentrismo desastroso em relação às questões ambientais. O ensaio, eminentemente teórico, promove um diálogo, a múltiplas vozes, na tentativa de angariar fundamentos éticos e epistemológicos para a Educação Ambiental. Trata-se de um estudo de metodologia bibliográfica. Destarte, em nossa abordagem, a filosofia figura com seu papel de buscar permanentemente pelo sentido e significado da vida, dos fenômenos humanos e não humanos. Defenderemos a tese de que é necessário e emergente o reconhecimento da esfera noológica da humanidade, pois se continuarmos a negligenciá-la incorreremos no risco de mantermos sufocado o lado demens do ser humano. Amparados pelas contribuições do pensador francês Edgar Morin, buscamos fundamentos filosóficos para a Educação Ambiental por querermos afirmá-la como campo de saberes e conhecimentos que promovem a busca pelo sentido da vida e a compreensão sobre a condição humana nacontemporaneidade. A ciência moderna promoveu a matematização e o desencantamento do mundo, fazendo com que o epíteto sapiens de nossa nomenclatura taxonômica ganhasse a companhia do epíteto degradandis. Para que seja possível a revitalização dos sentidos sobre a existência humana, é necessário que o epíteto sapiens seja acompanhado, metaforicamente, da desinência demens. Palavras-chave: Educação Ambiental. Ética. Epistemologia. Filosofia. (shrink)

The paper presents and discusses an example, namely a version of heterogeneous frrst-order logic and uses the classical theorem of Herbrand-Schmidt-Wang about the reduction of heterogeneous first-order logic to homogeneous first-order logic, in order to obtain two transformations between heterogeneous and homogeneous frrst-order logic which are different from the institution morphisms defined by Goguen and Burstall. Moreover, by considering a type of 2-cell among institution morphisms it is obtained a 2-category and also a 2-functor from this to another 2-category.

O Brasil foi um dos maiores traficantes de africanos destinados à escravidão nas Américas; e a Bahia um dos seus principais destinos. Porém, juntamente com a escravidão, os africanos trouxeram também a rebelião. Uma das principais formas de negação da escravidão pela revolta trazida pelos negros africanos às Américas foi o quilombo. O artigo discute as mudanças ocorridas na literatura histórica sobre a escravidão e suas formas de negação após o centenário da abolição, em 1988. O quilombo de Palmares surgido (...) no interior de Alagoas em finais do século XIV, veio a se constituir, durante o século XVII, no maior e mais bem organizado quilombo das Américas. Visto de formas diferentes pela historiografia ao longo do tempo, Palmares acabou por se transformar, no imaginário dos explorados de todos os matizes e dos negros de forma especial, num dos maiores símbolos de liberdade e de resistência a qualquer forma de exploração, opressão e discriminação. Palavras-chave: Escravidão; negros; quilombo de Palmares; resistência. (shrink)

There is an argument by M. Dummett about the relative priority of language as a social phenomenon. The first step is to explain how the speaker and the hearer have to know the same language, ceteris paribus. The second step is to show how the speaker's idiosyncratic beliefs depend on his knowledge of common language; the last step is to appeal to Quine's principle of translation between languages in order to have a language at all.

Jackson has ellaborated an argument to show that our experiences or qualitative states gather information which cannot be obtained in any other way. Functionalists reject in many ways that experience may bring new information. The point of this paper is to argue that, if func-tionalism is right, if experiences or "qualia" are not informative, then functionalism cannot report about them. The functionalist criticism of Jackson's argument makes it impossible for any functionalist theory to know experience.

Natura 2000 is a network of natural sites whose aim is to preserve species and habitats of relevance in the European Union. The policy underlying Natura 2000 has faced widespread opposition from land users and received extensive support from environmentalists. This paper addresses the ethical framework for Natura 2000 and the probable moral assumptions of its main stakeholders. Arguments for and against Natura 2000 were analyzed and classified according to “strong” or “weak” versions of the three main theories of environmental (...) ethics – anthropocentrism, biocentrism, and ecocentrism. Weak (intergenerational) anthropocentrism was found to underlie the Natura 2000 network itself and the positions of environmentalists, while strong (traditional) anthropocentrism pervaded the positions of economic developers. Land users seemed to fall somewhere between weak and strong anthropocentrism. The paper discusses the relation between ethics and different attitudes towards Natura 2000, highlighting some of the implications for the network’s ongoing implementation. It is shown that Natura 2000 achieves a strong reversal of the burden of proof from conservation to economic development and land use change under anthropocentrism. It is argued that the alleged theoretical divide between anthropocentrism and non-anthropocentrism in relation to the burden of proof does not seem to hold in practice. Finally, it is predicted that the weak versions of anthropocentrism, biocentrism, and ecocentrism, are likely to converge extensively in respect to nature conservation policy measures. (shrink)

This paper deals mainly with Marx's conception of politics. My contention is that in Marx's works two basic and opposed conceptions of politics coexist. On the one hand we find a negative, instrumental and realist conception that sees politics as nothing but domination of one class over another and the State as the main instrument of that domination. On the other, we find a positive conception that understands politics as community self-rule. I trace the conceptual origins of these two conceptions (...) to three basic concepts: "alienation", "emancipation" and "species-being". These notions provide the foundations of Marx's conception of politics and enable us to understand its shortcomings. It is basically a contradictory and utopian conception which seriously disregards both the positive traits of actual politics and individual freedoms. /// El tema central de este trabajo es la concepción de la política de Marx. En el artículo sostengo que es posible encontrar dos concepciones básicas de la política en los escritos de Marx: por un lado, una concepción negativa, instrumental y realista que la concibe como la dominación de una clase sobre otra, y al Estado como el instrumento principal de tal dominatión; por el otro, una concepción positiva que entiende la política como el autogobierno de una comunidad. Estas concepciones están basadas en tres conceptos fundamentales de la obra de Marx: "enajenación", "emancipación" y "ser de la especie", los cuales nos permiten entender los errores de la concepción general de la política de Marx. Se trata de una concepción contradictoria y utópica, que no entiende ni las características positivas de la política efectiva, ni la importancia de las libertades individuales. (shrink)

La paradoja de Moore es el tipo de absurdo de, entre otras cosas, la aserción de una oración de la forma �p pero yo no creo que p�. Propongo una explicación de la paradoja en términos del uso del pronombre personal �yo�. Más aún, recurro a un modelo del uso competente al que me referiré como modelo de la autorreferencia autoconsciente. A continuación, muestro que la explicación introducida es independiente de otras explicaciones recientes basadas en la naturaleza consciente de la (...) aserción y de la creencia. Pero, además, concluyo que está justificado pensar que ni la aserción ni la creencia son de naturaleza consciente. (shrink)

Jean Starobinski on the Reason of Body In posthumous homage to Jean Starobinski (1920-2019) on the centennial of his birth, this article sketches his thought on the «reasons of the body», linking it to certain contemporary fields of research. Prolonging the «somatic turn» of the 1980s, more recent «emotional» and «interoceptive turns» claim to reintegrate the body into history, the humanities and the neurocognitive sciences. Starobinski’s perspective helps bring their limits to light. Conversely, approaching his critical enterprise from their vantage (...) point highlights its unique way of linking history and phenomenology, its sustained attention to the experience of the self and bodily self-awareness, and its demonstration of how the «reasons of the body» may be intimately bound to the literary expression that embodies them. (shrink)

Jean Piaget, connu comme créateur d'une théorie du développement de l'intelligence chez l'enfant, fut un naturaliste précoce. En 1912, à l'âge de seize ans, il prononça une conférence sur « La vanité de la nomenclature » dans le cadre des activités d'un club de jeunes naturalistes; le manuscrit de cette conférence a été retrouvé récemment. L'introduction à la présente édition du manuscrit essaie de montrer l'importance de ce dernier pour une biographie historique de Piaget. D'une part, « La vanité » (...) est à la fois l'expression la plus synthétique de l'intégration de son auteur au champ de l'histoire naturelle, et le premier signal de sa réorientation vers la biologie philosophique qui jouerait un rôle crucial dans son oeuvre ultérieure. D'autre part, le texte du jeune Piaget illustre la persistance du nominalisme dans la problématique post-darwinienne de l'espèce, et certaines relations entre cette problématique et la philosophie de Henri Bergson. Long before becoming the well-known creator of a theory of the development of intelligence in children, Jean Piaget was a naturalist. In 1912, at the age of sixteen, and as member of a young naturalists' club, he gave a talk called « The Vanity of Nomenclature », the manuscript of which was recently discovered. The introduction to the present edition of that manuscript aims at suggesting its significance for a historical biography of Piaget. On the one hand, Piaget's text is the best exponent of his integration into the field of natural history; however, it is also the first sign of his reorientation towards the philosophical biology that would play a fundamental role in his later work. On the other hand, « The Vanity » illustrates the persistence of nominalism in post-Darwinian thinking about the species, and reveals certain relations between Henry Bergson's philosophy and the history of biology. (shrink)

In this philosophical paper, we explore computational and biological analogies to address the fine-tuning problem in cosmology. We first clarify what it means for physical constants or initial conditions to be fine-tuned. We review important distinctions such as the dimensionless and dimensional physical constants, and the classification of constants proposed by Lévy-Leblond. Then we explore how two great analogies, computational and biological, can give new insights into our problem. This paper includes a preliminary study to examine the two analogies. Importantly, (...) analogies are both useful and fundamental cognitive tools, but can also be misused or misinterpreted. The idea that our universe might be modelled as a computational entity is analysed, and we discuss the distinction between physical laws and initial conditions using algorithmic information theory. Smolin introduced the theory of "cosmological natural selection" with a biological analogy in mind. We examine an extension of. (shrink)

Since the 19th century, and despite tremendous progress in science, the topic of 'brain and sex' remains a matter of misleading interpretations, far beyond the field of science. The media are not solely responsible for this situation. Some scientific circles still actively promote the ideology of biological determinism in their attempt to explain differences in behaviour and cognitive abilities between men and women. Experimental data from brain imaging studies, cognitive tests or the discovery of new genes are often distorted to (...) serve deterministic ideas. As biotechnologies and genetic engeneering represent today a new economic and lucrative challenge, the question of what is innate and what is acquired is becoming more and more significant, requiring vigilant scrutiny from us all. (shrink)