The correspondence between the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno and his politically active graduate student Elisabeth Lenk offers fresh insights into both Adorno's view of surrealism and its relation to the student uprisings of 1960s France and Germany. Written between 1962, when Lenk moved to Paris and persuaded an initially reluctant Adorno to supervise her sociology dissertation on the surrealists, and Adorno's death in 1969, these letters reveal a surprisingly tender side of the distinguished professor. The correspondence is accompanied by a (...) selection of documents that bring additional depth and context to the letters and their engagement with the art and politics of the period. Filling in the background of Adorno and Lenk's lively exchange, the volume includes new translations of classic essays by Walter Benjamin ("Surrealism: Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia") and Adorno ("Surrealism Reconsidered"), along with a collection of short prose readings by Adorno and the writer-scholar Carl Dreyfus and three original essays by Lenk: her afterword to Paris Peasant by Louis Aragon, her Introduction to the German edition of Charles Fourier's The Theory of the Four Movements and the General Destinies, and her incisive essay "Critical Theory and Surreal Practice." An Introduction by Lenk's student, the contemporary writer and critic Rita Bischof, points to the continuing challenge of surrealist politics. This remarkable body of correspondence appears here in English for the first time, as do Adorno and Dreyfus's surrealist readings and the essays by Lenk. Together, they provide a rich mine of critical material for reassessing the significance of the surrealist movement and its successors. (shrink)

In this paper we examine the study of minerals from the Renaissance to the early nineteenth century in the light of the work of Michel Foucault on the history of systems of thought. In spite of a certain number of theoretical problems, Foucault's enterprise opens up to the historian of science a vast terrain for exploration. But this is the place neither for a general exegesis nor for a general criticism of his position; our aim here is the more modest (...) one of taking certain points from Foucault's study,The order of things, and seeing how far they can be extended into an area not explicitly considered in that work. (shrink)

I want to take issue with these views both by attempting to answer the arguments which have been given against regarding explanations in terms of the agent's reasons as causal and by giving some positive reasons for supposing that such explanations are a kind of causal explanation.

En el presente artículo se presenta, desde la filosofía, primeramente la tesis de L. Zea, según el cual la universidad del hombre americano, se halla en la aceptación de la diversidad concreta de las pluriformes maneras de ser de los americanos. Europa recién ahora se pone filosóficamente el problema de la pluralidad cultural. Se analiza luego la forma de considerar el gobierno y las leyes tanto de los americanos sajones como de los americanos latinos, cuando construyen sus propias formas de (...) ser. Se considera el intento y el fracaso al querer éstos imitar a aquéllos. Trata, además, la hipótesis de L. Zea según el cual la identidad de los pueblos latinoamericanos está en no tener ninguna que lo marque como pueblo y hombre común a toda América Latina, salvo ciertos rasgos de conducta común, derivados del talante conquistador español. Ortega y Gasset prolonga este análisis y lo centra en las influencias de la inmigración en Argentina, de lo que -entre otras causas- surge una explicación para ciertas conductas que dan forma a la identidad de los argentinos. Algo no ha cambiado en el modo de ser argentino: éste no se dedica primeramente a vivir la vida, sino a hacer fortuna y defenderse. Se identifica por lo que posee o desea poseer.This article presents, from a philosophical stand, firstly Leopoldo Zea's thesis according to which the American man's universality resides in his acceptance of the concrete diversity of the various ways of being American. Only now Europe is starting to consider philosophically the problem of cultural pluralism. Secondly, we analyze the way the Saxon Americans and the Latin Americans consider government and laws during their respective processes of becoming their own selves. We examine the intent and subsequent failure of the latter at trying to imitate the former; also, Zea's thesis according to which the identity of Latin American peoples lies precisely in not having a unique identity that define them as a man and people common to all Latin America, except for some behavioral traits deriving from the Spanish conqueror temper. Ortega y Gasset extends this analysis focusing on Argentina's immigration and concluding that this partially accounts for the Argentinean behavior and identity, their priority being to make a fortune and to defend themselves. Their identity rises from what they have or what they want to have. (shrink)

A non-epistemological history of historical epistemology Content Type Journal Article DOI 10.1007/s11016-010-9501-5 Authors W. R. Albury, School of Humanities, University of New England, Armidale, NSW 2351, Australia Journal Metascience Online ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796.

Open peer commentary on the article “Info-computational Constructivism and Cognition” by Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic. Upshot: Info-computational constructivism calls attention to some of the open questions about the origins of information and computation in the living realm. It remains unclear whether both were developed and shaped by evolution by natural selection or if they appeared in living systems independently of it. If the former, it is possible to sketch a scenario with a certain degree of reasonableness and postulate some of the conditions (...) that triggered the emergence of these biological properties. (shrink)