An undiscovered chapter in the history of architecture comes from the ex-Soviet Republic of Georgia. Poetics of Architecture is the name given to the studioworkshop at the Georgian Technical University set up by the Georgian architect Shota Bostanashvili (1948–2013). From 1990 until his death he delivered insightful, playful and rather provocative lectures on architecture at this university. He preferred to call his architectural philosophy, critical discourse on architecture. Themes ranged from poetics to metapoetics of architecture. His philosophy of architecture is (...) illustrated by some of his designs and executed projects which demonstrate a drift from existentialism to the philosophy of play. This study includes reference to his last building, a project whose demolition Bostanashvili witnessed before passing away. Based on the concept of the return of the sacred, this edifice was a sort of counter movement to technogenic architecture. (shrink)

In one of his last writings, Life: Experience and Science, Michel Foucault argued that twentieth-century French philosophy could be read as dividing itself into two divergent lines: on the one hand, we have a philosophical stream which takes individual experience as its point of departure, conceiving it as irreducible to science. On the other hand, we have an analysis of knowledge which takes into account the concrete productions of the mind, as are found in science and human practices. In order (...) to account for this division, Foucault opposed epistemologists such as Cavaillès and Canguilhem to phenomenologists such as Merleau-Ponty and Sartre but, also, and more particularly, he opposed Poincaré to Bergson. The latter was presented by Foucault as being the key-figure of the ?philosophy of experience? at the beginning of the twentieth century. Fifteen years later, in his Deleuze and in the Logics of Worlds, Alain Badiou again uses this dual structure in his interpretation of the past hundred years of French thought. He employs a series of oppositional couples: himself and Deleuze, Lautmann and Sartre, and, finally, Brunschvicg and Bergson. On the one hand a ?mathematical Platonism? and on the other a ?philosophy of vital interiority.? This Manichean reading of philosophy, and the strategic use of the figure of Bergson has, itself, a long tradition. It was also proposed by Althusser who, following Bachelard, opposed his standpoint to any form of ?empiricism.? Althusser developed his thought from a tradition of Marxist thinkers and ideologists, which included Politzer's and Nizan's critique of bourgeois philosophy and, even before that, neo-Kantians such as the philosophers of the Revue de métaphysique et de morale. The aim of this essay is to deconstruct and to put into its precise context of production this series of genealogies which entails the mobilization of Bergsonism and of the name ?Bergson.? By doing so, I hope to weight the importance of Bergsonism in twentieth-century French philosophy, in both its ?positive? and its ?negative? aspect. The essay will proceed regressively, taking into account figures such as Althusser, Badiou, Deleuze, Foucault, Canguilhem, Cavaillès, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, but also Polizer, Brunschvicg and Alain. The conclusion of the essay is an attempt at reading the ?Bergson renaissance? in the light of new discoveries in genetics and the cognitive sciences and to tie it to the renewal of studies in the history of French philosophy. (shrink)

Hier wird die folgende Frage gestellt: gibt es überhaupt irgendeine unengagierte Philosophie? Nämlich, jede Philosophie, die überhaupt als echte Philosophie bewertbar ist, und nicht etwa als Ideologie, Dophistik oder Schwindel, sollte als Denken, das der Wahrheit treu bleibt, beschrieben werden, d. h. als eine im Dienst der Wahrheit engagierte Philosophie. Dagegen, diejenige Philosophie, die im Dienst einer weltlicher oder jenseitiger Macht antritt, darf man keineswegs als eine Philosophie bewerten. Doch, es wird noch eine Frage gestellt: Wäre es erlaubt, eine Parallele (...) mit der sog. engagierte Kunst zu stellen? Die Antwort wird ermöglicht durch die Definition der Philosophie als die Tätigkeit des unnachsichtigen Dienstes zur Wahrheit. (shrink)

The 2015 film Lost and Beautiful, directed by Pietro Marcello, en­deavors in aesthetically compelling ways to decenter the human in the frame and engage viewers in what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari term becoming animals. Part documentary film, part fairytale, this film tells the story in the nonhuman first person, of the life and journey of a water buffalo calf in the south of Italy and his relationship with the shepherd who saved him from pre­mature death, and later, with Pulcinella, (...) a mythological figure from Neapol­itan folklore, who accompanies him in a journey north. Adopting ecocritical and posthuman perspective and providing elements of environmental cultural history, this article analyses the aesthetic and narrative strategies the film em­ploys to grant subjectivity to a nonhuman protagonist and, in turn, address the viewers. Advocating for the conservation of human artifacts while also posing the question of animal rights and agency, Lost and Beautiful powerfully gestures toward a non-anthropocentric cinema. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Antihumanism of the Young Deleuze:Sartre, Catholicism, and the Perspective of the Inhuman, 1945–48Giuseppe BiancoGilles Deleuze, along with Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and to a lesser extent Jean-François Lyotard, is considered an avatar of post-structuralism, and often associated with the critique of the concepts of identity and subjectivity. In this essay, I seek to identify the early sources of Deleuze's rejection of the notions of ego and person. In (...) the decade following 1944, one buzzword linked these two notions: humanism. Inspired by the evidential paradigm,1 and by using archival documents and little-known writings, I suggest why Deleuze's position, and the context in which it developed, can illuminate his mature work, especially his use of the concepts of immanence and univocity.Deleuze's engagement with anti-humanism—or, to be precise, with "inhumanism" and "impersonalism," the expressions Deleuze and his friends [End Page 795] used during the 1940s—is rooted in his radicalization of Jean-Paul Sartre's atheistic philosophy, which he read and discussed between 1943 and 1948. During this period, Deleuze was involved in gatherings organized by Catholic historians of medieval philosophy, including his mentor Maurice de Gandillac and Marie-Madeleine Davy. Gandillac, Davy, and their circles were interested in the existentialist and phenomenological movements, which they occasionally read within a theological framework. By radicalizing the positions detailed in works such as Being and Nothingness (1943) and "Transcendence of the Ego" (1936), Deleuze and his friend Michel Tournier confronted the mutation of Sartre's philosophy that began with his lecture "Existentialism Is a Humanism" (given in 1945 and published as a book the following year). They considered this turn to be incoherent with the core of his philosophy and to have conservative political consequences. This radical stance distinguished them from an older generation of scholars.Stefanos Geroulanos has shown that opposition to humanism, broadly conceived, emerged in French thought during the 1930s.2 To him, the idea that humanism had to be rejected and especially that anthropological questions had to be overcome began in the middle of that decade and reemerged in the later 1940s, with atheist and secular rejections of liberal humanism shadowing Catholic and, to a lesser degree, communist ones. However, I would argue that this ideological transformation in fact slowed somewhat in the decade following 1944. During this period, as Edward Baring has also claimed, most French intellectuals utilized "humanism" to oppose totalitarian and "anti-human" ideologies and to promote doctrines underlining the uniqueness of man as compared to other beings, the centrality of freedom, and the importance of defending human rights.3 Critiques of humanism took a final turn during the 1950s, after the publication of Martin Heidegger's "Letter on Humanism" (1947).4 From the late 1950s, and even [End Page 796] more so during the 1960s, the question of Being and the analysis of unconscious structures became common among scholars born during the interwar years as ways to overcome humanism and its limitations. During the 1960s, far more than during the 1930s, opposition to humanism and to the centrality of the notion of human subjectivity became radical and explicit; in this period, the term "anti-humanism" took hold, whereas, prior to the 1960s, it was rare and used as a pejorative. Deleuze used "inhumanism" far earlier than other authors of his cohort, already in 1945–48: by comparison, in the early 1950s, both Foucault and Derrida were still relying on different forms of humanism—in the case of the former, Marxist/existentialist; in the case of the latter, existential/spiritualist.5 Their turn toward anti-humanism during the mid-1950s was the result of the influence of Heidegger, Jean Hyppolite, Jules Vuillemin, and linguistic structuralism, through Lévi-Strauss.6 Not only did Deleuze reach antihumanist positions earlier, before even some of his professors, but he got there along a different way. Sartre's works were a defining theoretical influence at the beginning of Deleuze's intellectual trajectory, and they gave it a peculiar theoretical direction. During the 1940s, authors such as Bergson, Spinoza, and Nietzsche were not yet dear to Deleuze, and they did not occupy the important role that they... (shrink)

This paper provides a discussion of Jacques Rancière’s former teacher at École Normale Supérieure, then famous for fashioning Marxism with the philosophical gauge of structuralism, Louis Althusser. Perhaps a brief discussion on the relation between the two would render context to the origins of Rancière's philosophico-political praxis, specifically the humble beginnings of conceptualizing an egalitarian method out of his philosophical rupture with Althusserianism. Meanwhile, to reduce the philosophical enterprise of Althusser into its practical shortcomings and silence during the revolutionary events (...) of May 1968 in France would do an injustice to the magnitude of his contribution to contemporary French political theory and his major revisions in the theoretical direction of the Parti communiste français. Thus, the following discussions focus on sketching Althusser's theoretical foundations, which possibly clarifies the political decision he has made during May '68: a demand for organization over spontaneous revolutionary activity based on the authority of theoretical practice over the ideological activities—a decision that became the point of departure for Rancière's subversion of both mastery and the structural inequality Althusserianism entail. The whole piece is guided by the following two-fold question—a question, perhaps, akin to Badiou's inquiry: What were the philosophico-political interventions of Louis Althusser, and why did Rancière move away from his direction? (shrink)

Cuando se buscan los límites en la capacidad física de los humanos, toda mejora lleva implícita la optimización del funcionamiento del organismo. Para conseguirla se recurre a ayudas ergogénicas, aunque muchas de las utilizadas no se ha probado científicamente que consigan el efecto deseado. Además las hay permitidas y prohibidas (dopantes), saludables e insalubres. Con arreglo a sus efectos las podemos agrupar en nutricionales y no nutricionales. Entre las primeras, estarían todos los suplementos dietarios, tales como vitaminas, minerales, bebidas y (...) nutrientes energéticos. Entre las segundas, las ayudas mecánicas, psicológicas, fisiológicas y farmacológicas. Estas últimas incluyen el amplio grupo de sustancias prohibidas, que constituyen dopaje. Las ayudas ergogénicas hacen más efecto, en general, a los deportistas recreacionales que a la élite y en todo caso la respuesta es siempre individual. (shrink)

L’article essaie d’expliquer la nature éthique de l’action par l’analyse de la peine. C’est dans la justification de l’acte pénal que Hegel présenta le premier noyau de la dialectique qui « dépasse » et relativise le commandement du droit positif. C’est même dans la justification de l’action pénale que Hegel expose de façon systématique le principe capital selon lequel le droit n’est réellement juste que lorsqu’il se constitue comme un acte « reconnaissable » par le destinataire.

Industrial (“white”) biotechnology promises to contribute to a more sustainable future. Compared to current production processes, cases have been identified where industrial biotechnology can decrease the amount of energy and raw materials used to make products and also reduce the amount of emissions and waste produced during production. However, switching from products based on chemical production processes and fossil fuels towards “biobased” products is at present not necessarily economically viable. This is especially true for bulk products, for example ethanol production (...) from biomass. Therefore, scientists are also turning to genetic modification as a means to develop organisms that can produce at lower costs. These include not only micro-organisms, but also organisms used in agriculture for food and feed.The use of genetic modification for “deliberate release” purposes, in particular, has met great opposition in Europe. Many industrial biotechnology applications may, due to their scale, entail deliberate releases of GM organisms. Thus, the biobased economy brings back a familiar question; is it ethically justifiable, and acceptable to citizens, to expose the environment and society to the risks associated with GM, in order to protect that same environment and to sustain our affluent way of life? For a successful innovation towards a biobased economy, its proponents, especially producers, need to take into account (take responsibility for) such issues when developing new products and processes. These issues, and how scientists can interact with citizens about them in a timely way, are further explored in projects at Delft University and Leiden University, also in collaboration with Utrecht University. (shrink)

Constitutional law in the United States is, for most practical purposes, the product of ‘judicial review’, the power of judges to disallow policy choices made by other officials or institutions of government, ostensibly because those choices are prohibited by the Constitution. This extraordinary and unprecedented power, America's dubious contribution to the science of government, has made American judges the most powerful in the world, not only legislators but super-legislators, legislators with virtually the last word. Because lawmaking power divorced from popular (...) will is tyranny, most states have attempted to reconcile the lawmaking power of judges with representative self-government by subjecting all or some judges to some form of popular election. In all but four such states, judges, encouraged and supported by their fellow lawyers in the organized bar—would-be judges and beneficiaries of judicial power—have responded by adopting codes of judicial ethics that limit what candidates for election to judicial office are permitted to say. The effect is to undermine elections as a control on judicial power by limiting criticism of judicial activism, the misuse of judicial power. (shrink)

Research agendas and academic evaluation are inevitably linked. By means of economic incentives, promotion, research funding, and reputation academic evaluation is a powerful influence on the production of knowledge; moreover, it is often conceived as a universal instrument without consideration of the context in which it is applied. Evaluation systems are social constructions in dispute, being the current focus of international debates regarding criteria, indicators, and their associated methods. A universalist type of productivity indicators is gaining centrality in academic evaluation (...) with profound effects on the content of research that is conducted everywhere. Specifically, evaluation systems based on this type of indicators are sending negative signals to scientists willing to conduct research on contextualized agendas, particularly those negotiated with non scientists. On the basis of theoretical and empirical studies documented on the specialized literature and extensive personal engagement with university research policy in Uruguay, we argue that the consolidation of evaluation practices of alleged universal validity deteriorates and discourages a type of research which is undeniably important in developing contexts. (shrink)

The modern time regime was constituted by the common belief in an open future promising progress and growth. Modern law has been adapted to these temporalities and founded on similar paradigms. Positivist law is strictly separated from nature, subject to permanent change and legitimated solely by human will and ratio. Since the 1970s the modern time regime has been out of joint. Due to multiple crises societies now tend to expect a limited future, some even fear apocalyptic scenarios. This change (...) in future expectations has triggered cultural turns having an impact on the law. The Anthropocene demands law to be re-orientated to natural events. Digitalization raises legal debates about how to make future predictions and about the extent to which data about the past may be stored and when it should be forgotten. Since the future seems to hold no promise of improvement anymore, societies turn back to their past. The law is supposed to solve the arising conflicts over past injustice. This article aims to investigate these changes in legal paradigms and to elaborate on the role that the law could play in repairing the modern time regime. (shrink)

Desde hace décadas se viene hablando en América Latina y de manera muy particular en Venezuela sobre la necesidad de una transformación universitaria. Lo que, como es de esperar, genera gran debate entre quienes se aferran a las roídas estructuras de las instituciones de educación superior por los privilegios que consagran y los que apuestan por una nueva universidad. Este trabajo intenta contribuir al gran debate nacional que el proyecto de Ley de Educación Universitaria (2010) ha generado en Venezuela, para (...) ello hace énfasis en lo importante de la radicalización de la democracia universitaria y la introducción del pensamiento crítico en los planes de estudio. (shrink)

Ludovico Silva fue uno de los intelectuales marxistas más influyentes de la Venezuela del siglo XX. Él recogió de la obra de Marx aquellos elementos que le permiteron enjuiciar al capitalismo desde el contexto latinoamericano, sin olvidar los errores que los pueblos de la Europa del Este cometieron en su camino al socialismo. Las ideas que guían el presente estudio recogen su postura sobre conceptos como el de ideología, plusvalía, alienación, capitalismo, iglesia, utopía, cultura, entre otros, desde los cuales procura (...) vitalizar el marxismo fosilizado por los manuales elaborados por los intelectuales soviéticos. (shrink)

Albert Einstein je svojom specijalnom teorijom relativnosti definitivno opovrgao svaku mogućnost znanstvenog legitimiranja mehanicističkog pogleda na svijet, što implicira i opovrgnuće one metafizike materijalističkog predznaka koja se temelji na koncepciji razdvojenosti prostora i vremena. On je u specijalnoj teoriji relativnosti zasnovao pojam vremena i prostora kao jedinstvenog zbivanja, a taj je pojam oslobođen i od ravne metrike kakva obilježuje još i koncepciju Hermanna Minkowskog. Mnoštvenost jedinstvena vremena-prostora ukida i Galilejeve i Newtonove pojmove kao što su: apsolutni prostor, apsolutno vrijeme, apsolutno (...) mirovanje, te nepromjenjivost mase, a jednako tako i apsolutnost činjenice koja sadrži istodobnost dva prostorno udaljena zbivanja. Time su uspostavljene pretpostavke za razvoj tzv. postmoderne kozmologije. Autor postavlja pitanje otvara li postmodernizam ukozmologiji put za obnovu raznovrsnih onto-teokozmo-antropologija kojima je zajedničko htijenje da se ukine ideja povijesnosti, ili pak, naprotiv, Einsteinovo ukidanje pravocrtnosti otvara prostor afirmacije autentične povijesnosti. A upravo se u toj antitezi između metafizike i povijesnog mišljenja sastoji temeljni prijepor današnje filozofije,suočene i s lažnom alternativom iracionalizma i hiperracionalizma.Albert Einstein hat durch seine Spezielle Relativitätstheorie jegliche Möglichkeit der wissenschaftlichenLegitimierung einer mechanizistischen Weltanschauungdefinitiv widergelegt.Diesimpliziert ebenfalls die Widerlegungeiner Metaphysik materialistischer Art,die auf derKonzeptionder getrenntenExistenz von Zeit und Raum begründet ist. In der Speziellen Relativitätstheoriehat Einstein den Begriff der Einheitlichkeit von Zeit und Raum als einheitlichenGeschehensgeprägt. Dieser Begriff ist befreitvon platter Metrik, die noch die Konzeption vonHermannMinkowski charakterisiert. Durchdie Vielfältigkeitder Einheitlichkeit von Zeit undRaumentfallen die Begriffe von Galilei und Newton . Damitwerdendie Voraussetzungenfür die Entwicklung der sog. postmodernen Kosmologie aufgestellt.Der Autorfragt, ob der Postmodernismus in der Kosmologie einen Wegzur Erneuerungdifferenzierter Onto-Theo-Kosmo-Anthropologieneröffnet, dergleichartigdem Verlangenist, die Idee der Geschichlichkeit aufzuheben, oder ob EinsteinsAufhebungder Linearität einen Raum für die Affirmierungauthentischer Geschichlichkeit eröffnet. Gerade in dieserAntithesezwischen Metapysik und geschichtlichem Denken liegt eine wichtige StreitfragederzeitgenössischenPhilosophie, die auch durchdie falsche Alternativezwischen Irrationalismusund Hyperrationalismus gekennzeichnet wird. (shrink)