Pese a la ausencia de una filosofía formalmente política en Zubiri, descubrimos en su pensamiento el esbozo de una protopolítica a partir de una protofilosofía del poder. Los dinamismos mas propios de la historia no son potencias ni poderes naturalmente emergentes, sino poderes opcionalmente posibilitantes. Este poder de las posibilidades es un concepto arraigado en la metafísica zubiriana que, en sus diversas vertientes, permite comprender también el dinamismo político como potestativo.

From the Middle Ages to the 20th century, the French language spread throughout Europe and all over the world, especially in Africa and in America, due to the different waves of colonisation. But this growth is compromised and even challenged within the French territory. We will thus aim at analysing the reasons of both the traditional expansion and the recent regression of the French, but we will also consider ways of curbing this movement. In order to do so, one has (...) to defend French, in a world divided among different languages supported by economic power and cultural influence forged over the years, and therefore illustrate it and make it shine in order to better strengthen it. (shrink)

En el presente ensayo se abordan algunos problemas lingüísticos a los que tuvo que enfrentarse Zubiri durante la redacción de Inteligencia sentiente. Con este fin, se reconstruye la compleja historia de las tres palabras que componen la trilogía zubiriana: inteligencia, logos y razón. La inteligencia humana es sentiente. El logos y la razón son modalidades de la inteligencia. El entendimiento es el modo supremo de la intelección racional. Estos temas básicos son estudiados desde una perspectiva histórica, que permite conocer mejor (...) el significado de las palabras utilizadas por Zubiri en su última gran obra noológica. (shrink)

En primer lugar, se aborda el problema de una supuesta “filosofía americana”. Dicho proyecto fue defendido por las cuatro generaciones del siglo XX, aunque cada una a su manera: 1ª. Reflexión sobre nuestro propio ser americano; 2ª. Normalización del quehacer filosófico en Iberoamérica; 3ª. Reinterpretación de nuestra historia desde el punto de vista de los pueblos conquistados y periféricos; 4ª. Liberación de la pobreza generalizada e institucionalizada. En segundo lugar, trato de definir las características del llamado Grupo de Bogotá, algunos (...) de cuyos miembros entendieron la liberación, desde la filosofía de Xavier Zubiri, como un proceso de posibilitación y, en últimas, como capacitación. (shrink)

Why is man religious? To this fundamental question Paul Tillich and Xavier Zubiri respond similarly. However, they did not know each other personally and apparently neitherread the works of the other. The coincidence in their positions is without a doubt owing tothe influence that Martin Heidegger exercised on their thought. First, both defend themethod of correlation, according to which it is not possible to give answers to questionsthat nobody asks. Second, every question is born of a previous human experience thatmakes (...) it possible and that gives it meaning. Granting this, in the case of the questionabout God, what is that previous experience? For Tillich it is nothing other than that “thedimension of depth” in which we are confronted with “that which concerns us unconditionally,” whether we call it “God” or not. For Zubiri, this fundamental experience stems fromthe fact of “religation to a power of the real which is ultimate, possibilitating, and impelling.” From this fundamental experience is born the concern for the ultimate ground of ourexistence and the possible answers, which are none other that the diverse religions thatthere have been throughout history, including other apparently irreligious forms of life suchas atheism, agnosticism and the present-day indifference to religion.¿Por qué es religioso el hombre? A esta pregunta fundamental responden de maneraparecida Paul Tillich y Xavier Zubiri. Sin embargo, no se conocieron personalmente y alparecer ninguno leyó las obras del otro. La coincidencia en sus planteamientos se debensin duda a la influencia que M. Heidegger ejerció sobre el pensamiento de ambos. En primer lugar, los dos defienden el método de la correlación, según el cual no se pueden ofrecerrespuestas a preguntas que nadie se hace. Y, en segundo lugar, toda pregunta nace deuna previa experiencia humana que la hace posible y le da sentido. Esto supuesto, en elcaso de la pregunta por Dios, ¿cuál es esa previa experiencia? Para Paul Tillich no es otraque “la dimensión profunda” en la que nos encontramos enfrentados a “aquello que nosconcierne incondicionalmente,” lo llamémoslo o no Dios. Para Zubiri dicha experiencia fundamental tiene lugar en el hecho de la “religación al poder último, posibilitante e impelentede lo real”. De esta experiencia fundamental nace la preocupación por el fundamento último de nuestra existencia y las posibles respuestas, que no son otras que la diversas religiones que en la historia han sido e incuso otras formas de vida al parecer irreligiosas comoel ateísmo, el agnosticismo y la indiferencia actual. (shrink)

En este artículo pretendo argumentar de qué manera el lenguaje es conformador de la experiencia estética y, en especial, cómo el argot involucrado en las vivencias estéticas es indisociable de estas, al operar como uno de sus factores constituyentes. A través del análisis de ejemplos de jerga estética popular, procedentes en su mayor parte del lenguaje juvenil, señalo algunos de los modos en que el argot conforma experiencias estéticas que no existirían sin su intervención. En este análisis recurro (...) a algunas ideas sobre la relación entre el lenguaje y la experiencia de autores como Wittgenstein, Vigotsky o Searle. (shrink)

According a to a certain position formulated within the philosophical school of post-structuralism, attempts to reconstruct forms of consciousness are themselves textual fabrications, and should be relinquished in favour of other, more 'textual' forms of analysis. This paper argues that phenomenologists should not reject this critique outright, for it compels them to think more carefully about the appropriateness of particular terminologies for the representation and comprehension of particular life-worlds. To this end, the vocabulary of Maurice Merleau-Ponty is delineated and considered (...) as to its appropriateness for the study of sportive lifeworlds in particular, and that of soccer play more particularly. A Merleau-Pontian analysis of the latter is offered, and it is contended that whilst certain problems are attendant upon its use, it nonetheless stands as a vital resource for understanding such a form of activity. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology , Volume 2, Edition 2 September 2002. (shrink)

El presente texto examina la relación entre las valoraciones de la normalización filosófica en Colombia y el intento particular del filósofo Germán Marquínez Argote de realizar una historia de la filosofía colonial en clave latinoamericanista. Ello, para dar algunas luces sobre la continuidad de la filosofía latinoamericana en Colombia respecto del proceso local de normalización filosófica, siguiendo así algunas de las conclusiones de la historia de las prácticas de escritura. Esta continuidad no debe entenderse como una suerte de secuencialidad histórica, (...) de modo que la filosofía latinoamericana fuera la sucesora de la filosofía "normalizada". Por el contrario, se ha de entender como una reincidencia en los modos de valorar, que aparentemente estarían en contraposición según la comprensión de la primera como filosofía regionalista y de la segunda como universalista. En este sentido, el artículo comporta tres momentos. De manera introductoria se contextualiza el escenario filosófico local y latinoamericano, mostrando la presunta oposición entre latinoamericanistas y normalizadores. Luego, se expone cómo Marquínez Argote articula el proyecto latinoamericanista en Colombia y cómo pretendería estar valorativamente contrapuesto a la normalización. Finalmente, se evidencia, mediante un análisis narrativo de los textos que Marquínez Argote realiza sobre la filosofía en la Colonia, cómo reitera los valores de los normalizadores. Esto permite concluir la tesis central del artículo: la continuidad valorativa entre latinoamericanistas y normalizadores, en contraste con su frecuentemente asumida contradicción. (shrink)

Wegner, Giuliano, and Hertel (1985) defined the notion of a transactive memory system (TMS) as a group level memory system that “involves the operation of the memory systems of the individuals and the processes of communication that occur within the group (p. 191). Those processes are the collaborative procedures (“transactions”) by which groups encode, store, and retrieve information that is distributed among their members. Over the past 25+ years, the conception of a TMS has progressively garnered an increased interest among (...) social and organizational psychologists, communication scholars, and management theorists (Ren & Argote 2011). But there remains considerable disagreement about how exactly Wegner’s appeal to group memory should be understood. My goal in this paper is contribute to this debate, by articulating more clearly the value of conceptualizing groups as TMSs. This value, I argue, consists in providing us with a blueprint for how to explain group memory in terms of collective information-processing mechanisms. Collective information-processing mechanisms are dependent on, and interact with, the brain-bound information-processing of individuals, but cannot be reduced to the latter. In my analysis, I lean on extant accounts of mechanistic explanation in the philosophy of science (Bechtel & Richardson 1993; Machamer, Darden, & Craver 2000; Wimsatt 2007) that have been used to analyze the explanatory practices of psychology and cognitive neuroscience (Bechtel 2008, 2009). Based on my reconstruction of Wegner’s conceptualization of a TMS, I argue that the reality of emergent group cognition is compatible with its mechanistic explanation. More generally, my analysis shows that group cognition cannot be reduced to individual cognition, while avoiding the false dilemma between “wholism” and “nothing but-ism” which has hampered traditional construals of the “group mind” thesis (Allport 1968). (shrink)

Slurs are both derogatory and offensive, and they are said to exhibit “derogatory force” and “offensiveness.” Almost all theories of slurs, except the truth-conditional content theory and the invocational content theory, conflate these two features and use “derogatory force” and “offensiveness” interchangeably. This paper defends and explains the distinction between slurs’ derogatory force and offensiveness by fulfilling three goals. First, it distinguishes between slurs’ being derogatory and their being offensive with four arguments. For instance, ‘Monday’, a slur in the Bostonian (...) argot, is used to secretly derogate African Americans without causing offense. Second, this paper points out that many theories of slurs run into problems because they conflate derogatory force with offensiveness. For example, the prohibition theory’s account of offensiveness in terms of prohibitions struggles to explain why ‘Monday’ is derogatory when it is not a prohibited word in English. Third, this paper offers a new explanation of this distinction from the perspective of a speech act theory of slurs; derogatory force is different from offensiveness because they arise from two different kinds of speech acts that slurs are used to perform, i.e., the illocutionary act of derogation and the perlocutionary act of offending. This new explanation avoids the problems faced by other theories. (shrink)

Mathematics plays an inordinate role in the work of many of famous Western philosophers, from the time of Plato, through Husserl and Wittgenstein, and even to the present. Why? This paper points to the experience of learning or making mathematics, with an emphasis on proof. It distinguishes two sources of the perennial impact of mathematics on philosophy. They are classified as Ancient and Enlightenment. Plato is emblematic of the former, and Kant of the latter. The Ancient fascination arises from the (...) sense that mathematics explores something ‘out there’. This is illustrated by recent discussions by distinguished contemporary mathematicians. The Enlightenment strand often uses Kant's argot: ‘absolute necessity’, ‘apodictic certainty’ and ‘a priori’ judgement or knowledge. The experience of being compelled by proof, the sense that something must be true, that a result is certain, generates the philosophy. It also creates the illusion that mathematics is certain. Kant's leading question, ‘How is pure mathematics possible?’, is easily misunderstood because the modern distinction between pure and applied is an artefact of the 19th century. As Russell put it, the issue is to explain ‘the apparent power of anticipating facts about things of which we have no experience’. More generally the question is, how is it that pure mathematics is so rich in applications? Some six types of application are distinguished, each of which engenders its own philosophical problems which are descendants of the Enlightenment, and which differ from those descended from the Ancient strand. (shrink)

This discussion surrounds the dialectical methodology, underpinning the unity of knowledge, and discusses a differing perspective to knowledge and knowledge value from knowledge transfer practitioners, in a business context. It asks why, if knowledge is vital for business success and competitive advantage, the transfer of knowledge is rarely a simple unproblematic event (Argote et al. 2000). Further, that the creation of knowledge before transfer is recognised within literature as a significant factor in determining a starting point for analogous scrutiny. Under (...) a premise of doxastic attitude, this discussion looks to synthesise from current literature and research the epistemic principal of ‘knowledge’, which underpins understanding congruent knowledge transfer theories and perspectives principals. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:"Not These Sounds":Beethoven at MauthausenJames SchmidtIOn May 7, 2000, the British conductor Simon Rattle led the Vienna Philharmonic in a memorial performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony at the site of the former Nazi concentration camp at Mauthausen.1 The concert marked the fifty-fifth anniversary of the liberation of the Austrian camp, which had been established shortly after the Anschluss to receive prisoners who—in the argot of the Third Reich—were (...) classified as "unreformable" and "scarcely trainable."2 Those initially imprisoned included Austrian and German criminals, political prisoners, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, and Roma. They were later joined by Poles, Spanish civil war refugees who had been interned in France and were turned over to German authorities by the Vichy government, Soviet and other prisoners of war, and Jews, many of whom were transferred from camps abandoned in the face of advancing Soviet troops during the last year of the war.3The function of Mauthausen was to work inmates to death. It proved to be ruthlessly efficient in carrying out its mission. Estimates of the total number killed range upward from 119,000 and the mortality rate was surpassed only by the extermination camps established in occupied Poland in 1941 and 1942 (Horowitz, p. 10). The camp was built around a working quarry, and prisoners were compelled to carry loads of stones [End Page 146] up the 186 steps that led from the base of the quarry to the surface. Inmates were regularly killed in falls or struck by falling rocks. But not all of the deaths at Mauthausen were the result of these horrific working conditions. Guards regularly forced prisoners outside the boundaries of the camp and then shot them on the pretense that they were attempting to escape. Between October 1941 and January 1942 prisoners were driven en masse into bathing areas where they were subjected to extended showers in frigid water: the weaker inmates collapsed and were drowned, their bodies clogging the drains, while guards forced others beneath the rising waters. Still other prisoners seized the only means of escape they could find and jumped to their death from the top of the quarry, prompting civilian laborers employed at the camp to complain to authorities about having to work amidst gore and pieces of brain (Horowitz, pp. 52–53).Authorities responded to epidemics of typhus and dysentery—the result of overcrowding in the camp—by shooting the sick. With the arrival of POWs from the Russian front, mass executions by firing squads began, and in 1941 the first gassing chamber was built at the nearby Castle Hartheim. As the slaughter increased, the municipal crematorium south of the camp was supplemented by three new crematoria constructed within the boundaries of the camp itself. When they were operational, tufts of human hair flew out of their chimneys onto the streets of Mauthausen itself, a peaceful town of about 1,800 residents who—while annoyed by the stench of burning flesh and not insensitive to the coarsening of life that the presence of so many soldiers brought to the region—generally kept to themselves and tried not to raise too many questions about what was going on at the camp (Horowitz, pp. 60–62). It was to this spot, then, that the Vienna Philharmonic came, in the late spring of 2000, to perform a symphony that ends with a choral setting of Friedrich Schiller's "Ode to Joy." Given the history of the place, it would be difficult to think of a more peculiar choice.IIThe concert at Mauthausen was intended as a contribution to a process of commemoration and reconciliation. In the eyes of those involved in its planning, it was a way to remember those who perished and to confront a part of Austrian history that was largely ignored by a nation that tended to see itself more as an unwilling victim of the [End Page 147] horrors of the National Socialist period than as an active participant in their commission. Yet, almost from the outset, the concert was plagued with controversy.Elections held in the previous autumn resulted in the formation of a government that included Jörg Haider... (shrink)

Theorists interested in learning more about any given interpretive approach are often required to navigate a dizzying array of sources, with no clear sense of where to begin. The prose of many primary sources is often steeped in dense and technical argot that novices find intimidating or even impenetrable. Interpretation in Political Theory provide students of political theory a single introductory reference guide to major approaches to interpretation available in the field today. Comprehensive and clearly written, the book includes: (...) A historical and theoretical overview that situates the practice of interpretation within the development of political theory in the twentieth century. Chapters on Straussian esotericism, historical approaches within the Cambridge School of interpretation, materialist approaches associated with Marxism, the critical approaches associated with varieties of feminism, Greimassian semiotics, Foucaultian genealogy, the negative dialectics of Theodor Adorno, deconstruction as exemplified by Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man, and Lacanian psychoanalysis. An exposition of the theoretical and disciplinary background of each approach, the tools and techniques of interpretation it uses, its assumptions about what counts as a relevant text in political theory, and what it considers to be the purpose or objective of reading in political theory. A reading of Thomas Hobbes s Leviathan to illustrate how each approach can be applied in practice. A list of suggestions for further reading that will guide those interested in pursuing more advanced study. An invaluable textbook for advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and even seasoned scholars of political theory interested in learning more about different interpretive approaches. ". (shrink)