Wide analysis of "María Teresa López de la Vieja, La pendiente resbaladiza. La práctica de la argumentación moral . Madrid y México, D.F.: Plaza y Valdés, 2010, 288 páginas.".

San Agustín hace posible el uso de la retórica en la predicación cristiana, tanto en la teoría como en la práctica. Los mismos recursos, pero usados de otra manera. Esto puede analizarse mediante el uso y función de los "signa" en su propia predicación. Los "In Ioannis euangelium tractatus" proporcionan una base sólida para el estudio de los "signa", según los utiliza Agustín.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 121.3 (2000) 453-478 [Access article in PDF] Plutarch's Lysander and Sulla: Integrated Characters in Roman Historical Perspective José María Candau Morón The term ritratto paradossale has been used to describe a formula of character portrayal seen in Latin literature of the first centuries B.C. and A.D. whose basic process consists in combining in one character apparently contradictory traits (La Penna 1976). To be (...) precise, the formula produced a type of man who in his moments of action shows energy, diligence, and constancy but exhibits licentious feelings, allows himself to be taken in by indolence, and succumbs to pleasures when his negotia are finished. This model may already have been present in Greek historical literature of the fourth century B.C., as the portrait of Philip II that the historian Theopompus delineates seems to bear this stamp. The public image of Maecenas and the Petronius of Tacitus are two clear examples of ritratto paradossale. The figure of Sulla also falls under this influence; in fact, according to La Penna (1976, 284), Plutarch's biography of Sulla often exhibits these same characteristics.The terms "paradox" and "paradoxical" also occur frequently in works devoted to Plutarch's Life of Lysander. Its paradoxical features are the central point of Pelling's comments (1988a, 268-74) on that biography. Pelling explores aspects of "integration" in the Parallel Lives, a technique of portrayal which he defines as follows: "a man's qualities are brought into some sort of relation with one another, and every trait goes closely with the next." 1 An almost universal literary habit in the [End Page 453] ancient world, integration appears even in a figure as complex and full of contrasts as Plutarch's Lysander. Arrogance and cruelty, incorruptibility and a capacity for adulation, duplicity, ingenuity, ambition, treachery: all the contradictions that coexist in him are seen to be unified through philotimia, a central trait that dominates Lysander's other characteristics and gives his portrayal a unified appearance.But Plutarch's interests in his Life of Lysander do not impel him to explain or reconstruct the traits of its protagonist. It is the contrasts and the paradoxes in Lysander that have drawn the author's attention and lend the biography its particular flavor. Plutarch shows how these diverse character traits work against the individual and end up destroying him. In this way, the biography of Lysander is similar to tragic works in which a character's potentialities unleash forces that ultimately defeat him, and Plutarch explicitly plans on parallelisms with the tragic genre. From this standpoint, Pelling concludes, Lysander offers a moral that is similar to that of tragedy and different from that of other biographies: human nature can produce a figure such as Lysander, and such figures tend to bring about their own destruction through appropriate tragic processes.Stadter (1992) has recently analyzed from start to finish the paradoxical character that Plutarch assigns to Lysander and also to Sulla, the protagonist of the Roman Life presented as his parallel. In Stadter's view the contradictions in each character--that is, the combination of admirable and repulsive traits--form the basis of the portrayal of both subjects. The biographer also contrives to cross the two Lives so as to convey that they form an ensemble. Among other things, we see a type of progression whose upper limit is delineated by the harshest components of the portrayal of Sulla: his destructive nature, bloodthirsty and implacable, his tyrannical and frequently arbitrary conduct, his arrogance and lack of humanity. These traits are only sketched in the parallel Greek Life; yet their presence there evokes sinister dimensions which horrify when they appear, full-blown, in the Roman counterpart. From this interplay of traits and personalities our understanding of the human type treated in the biographies becomes increasingly deep. The final result in the present instance is that we are enabled to recognize the true traits of Lysander's character, and so escape the difficulty that Plutarch alludes to in his prologue through a cryptic... (shrink)

After describing Wittgenstein's notion of ‘certainty’, in this article I provide four arguments to demonstrate that no certainty can be acquired at will. Specifically, I argue that, in order to assimilate a certainty, it is irrelevant whether the individual concerned has found a ground that seemingly justifies that certainty; has a given mental state; is willing to accept the certainty on the proposal of a persuader; or tries to act according to the certainty involved. Lastly, I analyse how each of (...) these arguments is reflected in the way children acquire certainties. (shrink)

Wittgenstein’s remarks in On Certainty about the acquisition of child language have gone nearly unnoticed for the commentators of his work. In this paper, I analyze some of those remarks to shed light on the main questions posed in On the categorical distinction between knowledge and certainty; the nature of language-games; the refutation of skepticism and, above all, the challenges involved by learning to believe.

Según señaló Ludwig Wittgenstein en Sobre la certeza, podríamos imaginar acontecimientos tan extraños que ni siquiera tuvieran cabida en nuestros juegos de lenguaje. En este artículo analizaremos las distintas consecuencias de estos hechos, prestando especial atención a la posibilidad de decidir aferrarnos a nuestras propias certezas. Concretamente, detallaremos en qué circunstancias podemos tomar tal decisión.

Many authors have tried to offer a definition of Wittgenstein’s conception of philosophical problems. In this paper my aim is to show that essentialist tendency is just the opposite of Wittgenstein’s attitude, an attitude based on paying attention to the clarification of misunderstandings concerning the use of words: the term ‘problem’ invites us to think on the corresponding ‘solution’, but far from offering solutions or explanations, Wittgenstein wanted to show a philosophical modus operandi comparable to the task of untying knots.

Donald Davidson foi um dos filósofos mais influentes da tradição analítica da segunda metade do século. A unidade de sua obra é constituída pelo papel central que reflexão sobre como podemos interpretar os proferimentos de um outro falante desempenha para a compreensão da natureza do significado. Davidson adota o ponto de vista metodológico de um intérprete que não pode pressupor nada sobre o significado das palavras de um falante e que não possui nenhum conhecimento detalhado de suas atitudes proposicionais. Neste (...) artigo, eu apresento inicialmente a estrutura e os pressupostos da filosofia da linguagem de Davidson; passo depois a uma discussão sobre a importância do princípio de caridade para seu projeto interpretativo e, por fim, procuro apontar as diferenças do projeto de Davidson com a hermenêutica filosófica. PALAVRAS-CHAVE – Interpretação radical. Princípio de caridade. Hermenêutica. ABSTRACT Donald Davidson was one of the most influential philosophers in the analytic tradition in the last half of the twenthy century. The unity of his work lies in the central role that the reflection on how we are able to interpret the speech of another plays in undestanding the nature of meaning. Davidson adopts the standpoint of the interpreter of the speech of another whose evidence does not, at the outset, pressupose anything about what the speaker’s words mean or any datailed knowledge of his propositional attitudes. This is the position of the radical interpreter. In this paper, I begin with an account of the assumptions and structure of Davidson’s philosophy of language; after this I discuss the philosophical importance of the principle of charity for the theory of radical interpretation and, at the end, I compare Davidson’s interpretative project to the philosophical hermeneutic. KEY WORDS – Radical interpretation. Principle of charity. Hermeneutics. (shrink)

La pragmática de tradición griceana es una corriente teórica importante en la filosofía del lenguaje y la lingüística. Gracias a ella se entienden de forma cabal aspectos fundamentales de la comunicación intencional. Sin embargo, esta tradición no se interesa especialmente en el estudio de la transmisión y el reconocimiento de significados no intencionales, por ejemplo de ciertos significados que se evocan en "actos fallidos", juegos de palabras no buscados y errores del habla. Trataré de mostrar que el estudio de estos (...) significados no intencionales es pertinente para una teoría general de la producción y la comprensión de enunciados. En este sentido, la lingüística neurocognitiva toma en cuenta estos significados no intencionales y, a partir de ellos, no sólo explica cómo se organiza y funciona el sistema lingüístico de un hablante o un oyente, sino que además resulta ser un complemento interesante de la pragmática. Gricean pragmatics is one of the mainstreams in philosophy of language and linguistics. it has been instrumental in fully understanding fundamental aspects of intentional communication. However, this theoretical tradition has not been especially concerned with the transmission and recognition of unintentional meanings, for example meanings evoked by Freudian slips, unintended puns, and slips of the tongue. Here I aim at showing that the study of such unintentional meanings is relevant for a general theory of utterance production and utterance comprehension. Neurocognitive linguistics has approached those unintentional meanings and has explained how the linguistic system of speaker or a hearer is organized and how it works, and it also figures as an interesting complement of pragmatics. (shrink)

Wittgenstein scholars have tended to interpret the acquisition of certainties, and by extension, of a world-picture, as the achievement of a state in which these certainties are assimilated in a seemingly unconscious way as one masters language-games. However, it has not been stressed that the attainment of this state often involves facing a series of challenges or difficulties which must be overcome for the development of the world-picture and therefore the socialization process to be achieved. After showing, on the one (...) hand, how a world-picture is usually developed, and on the other hand, why a child who seemingly found itself trapped in a precocious skepticism might have serious problems in assimilating certainties, in this paper, I describe some of the challenges children often meet as they acquire a world-picture. Since the overcoming of these challenges is often needed for children to develop a world-picture, I aim at raising the awareness of the necessity of ‘learning to believe’, that is, of developing a series of skills that allow children to undertake the challenges described in this paper. (shrink)

Though Wittgenstein's On Certainty has been influential in analytic epistemology, its interpretation has been enormously controversial. It is true that exegesis has been mainly concerned with the proper characterization of Wittgenstein's very notion of ?certainty?; however, some important questions remain unanswered regarding this notion. On the one hand, I am above all referring to the study of the possibilities we have of retaining a certainty when it has seemingly been placed into question and, on the other hand, of regaining a (...) certainty once it has been lost. In this paper, I attempt to provide a detailed answer to both questions. In so doing, some important features of the picture of ourselves which emerges from Wittgenstein's On Certainty are also revealed. (shrink)

Dossier: Post-religional Paradigm Editorial - Vol. 13, no. 37, Jan./Mar. 2015.

En este artículo se tratará de justificar por qué la obra de Borges tiene un profundo valor filosófico. Para defender esta tesis se desarrollarán cuatro argumentos íntimamente conectados entre sí. En el primer inciso se ejemplificará cómo un poema y un cuento pueden interpretarse como textos argumentativos que despliegan tesis metafísicas y gnoseológicas. Luego, a partir de un contra-ejemplo de la cultura del fútbol, se tratará de mostrar que los enunciados de Borges se caracterizan por su “densidad conceptual”. En el (...) tercer inciso se recurre a la lingüística relacional (y en menor medida a la lingüística de corpus) para explicar cómo funciona una característica saliente del estilo de Borges: el adjetivo descolocado. Este análisis de base lingüística da pie a que también se explique con mayor hondura y precisión de qué se trata la densidad conceptual presentada en el apartado anterior. A continuación, en el cuarto apartado, se muestra cómo dos relatos policiales funcionan en un nivel que trasciende la complejidad narrativa, uno como una tesis cosmológica y el otro como una tesis política. Por último, se presentan conclusiones sobre los límites elusivos o difusos de la literatura y la filosofía. (shrink)

SÍNTESE - El decreto de Graciano sefiala el momento decisivo de la juridización de la Iglesia. AI tiempo, surgen algunas voces de teólogos em contra de dicha juridización. Son teólogos que entienden que la vinculación dei cristiano a unos comportamientos determinados no puede dimanar de una normativa humana, sea civil o eclesiástica, sino sólo de la voluntad de Dios manifestada en el derecho natural y en la Biblia, según viene interpretada por los Padres de la Iglesia y por las determinaciones (...) de los concillos y de los papas. En este sentido se expresan concretamente dos teólogos hispanos de los siglos XII y XIII, Martino de León y Antonio de Lisboa. Posteriormente, segunda mitad dei siglo XIII y principios dei XN, Raimundo Lulio contacta com esa tendencia, ai elaborar una teoria en la que e! derecho queda reducido a filosofia moral. Ya em pleno siglo X:V, un autor hispano anónimo da testimonio de que algunos teólogos siguen manteniendo la tesis de una Iglesia governada por la sola teología, sin necesidad del derecho. Los autores mencionados no representan uma tradición hispana. Martino y Antonio conectan en su formación teológíca con una corriente espiritualista que procede de Francia, y Raimundo es autónomo en su teoria. (shrink)