The Epistemological Turn of the Twentieth Century’s Legal Positivism This article analyses the essential changes in the positivist law theory from its modern origins, usually remitted to Hobbes, Bentham and Austin, to the positivism of Kelsen and Hart. It is argued that a crucial epistemological break can be noticed, revealed in the most analytic-rationalistic character of Kelsen and Hart’s elaborations, compared to the more facts-descriptive style of their predecessors. Rationalism in Kelsen and Hart may explain the conventional character of the (...) basic norm and the rule of recognition, validity only formally, and the difficulty of accounting for the formal and substantive components. The change can be associated with Kelsen and Hart’s intellectual context, particularly Hume’s ‘guillotine’, the influences of logical positivism and neo-Kantian schools. This turn should not be overlooked since it casts doubts on the usual speaking of Kelsen and Hart’s legal positivism in the descriptive sense of nineteenth-century philosophers, with relevant consequences for thinking of law. (shrink)

Este trabajo da noticia de la existencia de la correspondencia encontrada en los materiales del archivo personal de la escritora María Luisa Mendoza. Se esboza, a su vez, el papel que ocupa la escritura privada en torno a la obra tanto de la destinataria como de cada uno de los remitentes entre los que se encuentra Carlos Fuentes, Carlos Monsiváis, José Carlos Becerra, Elena Poniatowska y Sergio Pitol; para señalar algunas coordenadas de lectura de esta cartografía epistolar.

"Crónica à clef" es fruto de la lectura a Estrella de dos puntas (Ariel, 2021), libro reconocido con el Premio Xavier Villaurrutia, que presenta una disertación basada en la investigación epistolar entre Carlos Fuentes y Octavio Paz. Gracias al seguimiento, Malva Flores propone algunas conclusiones que generarán un debate en la discusión sobre el campo cultural en México.

This article seeks to provide a reflection based on philosophy and sociology around the occupation, if any, of the humanities. According to the hermeneutics of founding texts on the question “What is man?” and on various perspectives on it, a reflection is configured that aims to sustain what, in the author's view, corresponds to be the basic and determining occupation of the humanities. For this, five sections will be developed in which an introduction to some basic ideas about the humanities, (...) foundations of a philosophical anthropology, what is man from the study of sociology, what is man from the study of biology and neurosciences, and the humanities as a whole are exposed. The article aims to contribute to the understanding that cultivating the humanities and developing them requires an intention to make them a conceptual and unfinished representation of the world, not a piece of ductile clay in the image and likeness of those who see in them the stage of praxis by excellence. It is mainly concluded that the relevance, the very nature of the humanities, lies in broadening the spectrum of questions about what is man, before attempting to provide complete answers, so that, at the very moment in which the crucial question “What is man?” is found a finished answer and it becomes law, not only is a resolved question left, but also a meaningless life. (shrink)