Para los fines de esta exposición vamos a asumir como un principio explicativo que la obra de Descartes es una respuesta, en primer lugar, a la crisis de la ciencia escolástica, y, en segundo lugar, al avance, por un lado, del escepticismo, y, por otro, del hermetismo de inspiración platónica, en el siglo XVII. Dentro de los diversos aspectos que alberga este contexto nos situaremos en el ámbito de la ciencia natural, es decir,de la física.

In Spinoza’s metaphysics, we encounter many puzzling doctrines that appear to entangle metaphysical notions with cognitive, logical, and epistemic ones. According to him, a substance is that which can be conceived through itself and a mode is that which is conceived through another. Thus, metaphysical notions, substance and mode, are defined through a notion that is either cognitive or logical, being conceived through. He defines an attribute as that which an intellect perceives as constituting the essence of a substance. Intellectual (...) perception, something cognitive, is used to define an attribute, something metaphysical. And he claims that if something exists there is a reason why it exists and if something doesn’t exist there is also a reason why it doesn’t. Thus, a reason, something cognitive or epistemic, is necessary for existence or nonexistence. What are we to make of the intimate connections that Spinoza sees between metaphysical, cognitive, logical, and epistemic notions? Between being and reason? In this book, I argue for what might be called a realist interpretation: although Spinoza is confident that the order of being mirrors the order of reason, he believes that they are two orders, not one. There is inherence over and above conceptual dependence; there is causation in addition to causal explanation; the world has a nature that we can grasp and that our way of grasping it does not interpose an impenetrable conceptual veil between it and us. (shrink)

In _Around the Day in Eighty Worlds_ Martin Savransky calls for a radical politics of the pluriverse amid the ongoing devastation of the present. Responding to an epoch marked by the history of colonialism and ecological devastation, Savransky draws on the pragmatic pluralism of William James to develop what Savransky calls a “pluralistic realism”—an understanding of the world as simultaneously one and many, ongoing and unfinished, underway and yet to be made. Savransky explores the radical multifariousness of reality by weaving (...) key aspects of James's thought together with divergent worlds and stories: of Magellan's circumnavigation, sorcery in Mozambique, God's felt presence among a group of evangelicals in California, visible spirits in Zambia, and ghosts in the wake of the 2011 tsunami in Japan. Throughout, he experiments with these storied worlds to dramatize new ways of approaching the politics of radical difference and the possibility of transforming reality. By exploring and constructing relations between James's pluralism and the ontological turn in anthropology, Savransky offers a new conceptualization of the pluriverse that fosters modes of thinking and living otherwise. (shrink)

Do free will beliefs influence moral judgments? Answers to this question from theoretical and empirical perspectives are controversial. This study attempted to replicate past research and offer theoretical insights by analyzing World Values Survey data from residents of 46 countries (n = 65,111 persons). Corroborating experimental findings, free will beliefs predicted intolerance of unethical behaviors and support for severe criminal punishment. Further, the link between free will beliefs and intolerance of unethical behavior was moderated by variations in countries’ institutional integrity, (...) defined as the degree to which countries had accountable, corruption-free public sectors. Free will beliefs predicted intolerance of unethical behaviors for residents of countries with high and moderate institutional integrity, but this correlation was not seen for countries with low institutional integrity. Free will beliefs predicted support for criminal punishment regardless of countries’ institutional integrity. Results were robust across different operationalizations of institutional integrity and with or without statistical control variables. (shrink)

Shakespeare's Coriolanus is one of the most brilliant political plays ever written. Despite its ancient Roman setting, it remains a perennially relevant study of the relationship between personality and politics. The Introduction to this new edition illuminates its relevance to Shakespeare'sown time and to later ages while also emphasizing the wide range of interpretations that are possible in performance.

Online supplement, "Mulsow: Additions to Notes drawn from the 2002 edition of Moderne aus dem Untergrund" full versions of nearly 300 notes that were truncated in the print edition. Hosted on H. C. Erik Midelfort's website. Martin Mulsow's seismic reinterpretation of the origins of the Enlightenment in Germany won awards and renown in its original German edition, and now H. C. Erik Midelfort's translation makes this sensational book available to English-speaking readers. In Enlightenment Underground, Mulsow shows that even in the (...) late seventeenth century some thinkers in Germany ventured to express extremely dangerous ideas, but did so as part of a secret underground. Scouring manuscript collections across northern Europe, Mulsow studied the writings of countless hitherto unknown radical jurists, theologians, historians, and dissident students who pushed for the secularization of legal, political, social, and religious knowledge. Often their works circulated in manuscript, anonymously, or as clandestinely published books. Working as a philosophical microhistorian, Mulsow has discovered the identities of several covert radicals and linked them to circles of young German scholars, many of whom were connected with the vibrant radical cultures of the Netherlands, England, and Denmark. The author reveals how radical ideas and contributions to intellectual doubt came from Socinians and Jews, church historians and biblical scholars, political theorists, and unemployed university students. He shows that misreadings of humorous or ironic works sometimes gave rise to unintended skeptical thoughts or corrosively political interpretations of Christianity. This landmark book overturns stereotypical views of the early Enlightenment in Germany as cautious, conservative, and moderate, and replaces them with a new portrait that reveals a movement far more radical, unintended, and puzzling than previously suspected. (shrink)

Kant will die beständige Möglichkeit des radikal Bösen mit dem zeitlich offenen Charakter des menschlichen Seins rechtfertigen. Jede zu machende Entscheidung setzt voraus, dass der die Selbstachtung ermöglichende gute Wille nicht automatisch die oberste Maxime meiner Handlung ist. So kann und muss der Mensch «bei lauter guten Handlungen dennoch böse» sein.

Gedankenexperimente haben im Laufe der Jahrtausende eine entscheidende Rolle als Mittel der Wahl sowohl in der Philosophie als auch in der Naturwissenschaft gespielt. Im Gegensatz zu echten Experimenten kann im "gedanklichen Labor" auch Fragen nachgegangen werden, die man sonst nicht empirisch untersuchen kann. Gedankenexperimente lösen damit zwar sicher nicht die akuten Probleme der Menschheit, aber sie zeigen auf, wie schon leichte Veränderungen der Perspektive oder alltäglicher Grundannahmen zu verblüffenden Lösungen oder zu ganz neuen, spannenden Fragen führen können. Dieses Buch nimmt (...) den Leser mit auf eine Reise durch alle Epochen philosophischen Denkens und stellt, in prägnanter Auflistung von A bis Z, 26 besonders interessante Gedankenexperimente berühmter Philosophen vor. Durchaus anspruchsvoll, aber doch sehr unterhaltsam geschrieben, lädt es nicht nur zum Lesen, sondern vor allem zum Miträtseln und philosophieren ein. Anschauliche, teils auch abwegige Beispiele aus den unterschiedlichsten Gebieten der Wissenschaft lassen keine Langweile aufkommen. Dazu gibt es Hinweise zur Durchführung eigener Gedankenexperimente und kurze Erläuterungen zu den wichtigsten der angeführten Denker von Aristoteles bis Wittgenstein. (shrink)

In [6] Messmer and Wood proved quantifier elimination for separably closed fields of finite Ershov invariant e equipped with a (certain) Hasse derivation. We propose a variant of their theory, using a sequence of e commuting Hasse derivations. In contrast to [6] our Hasse derivations are iterative.

--Prophet mit Marx- und Engelszungen, von M. Walser.--Philosophie zwischen Traum und Apokalypse, von I. Frenzel.--Messianismus und Marxismus, von J. Moltmann.--Ein marxistischer Schelling, von J. Habermas.--Ein Gespräch über ungelöste Aufgaben der sozialistischen Theorie, von E. Bloch und F. Vilmar.--Ein grosser Einzelgänger, von I. Fetscher.--Ernst Blochs Evolution des Marxismus, von W. Maihofer.--Ausgewählte Bibliographie der Schriften über Ernst Bloch, zusammengestellt von R. Kübler (p. 133-[149]).

The phenomenon of altruism extends from the biological realm to the human sociocultural realm. This article sketches a coherent outline of multiple types of altruism of progressively increasing scope that span these two realms and are grounded in an ever-expanding sense of “self.” Discussion of this framework notes difficulties associated with altruism at different levels. It links scientific ideas about the evolution of cooperation and about hierarchical order to perennial philosophical and religious concerns. It offers a conceptual background for inquiry (...) into societal challenges that call for altruistic behavior, especially the challenge of environmental and social sustainability. (shrink)