Bajo el título «Utopías, distopías y otras nostalgias», la cuarta edición del Congreso de Pensamiento Interdisciplinar, organizado por alumnos del grado de Filosofía, Política y Economía de la Alianza 4 Universidades, abordó el controvertido fenómeno woke, una supuesta mezcla de izquierda identitaria y progresismo políticamente correcto al que se acusa de promover la censura y la llamada «cultura de la cancelación». Sobre esta cuestión conversaron la escritora y filósofa Elizabeth Duval, la investigadora Ayme Román y el director académico y profesor (...) del Instituto Superior de Sociología, Economía y Política (ISSEP), Miguel Ángel Quintana Paz, en un debate moderado por dos de los alumnos organizadores del congreso, Guzmán Díez e Isabel Rodríguez. (shrink)

Outlaw emotions are emotions that stand in tension with one’s wider belief system, often allowing epistemic insight one may have otherwise lacked. Outlaw emotions are thought to play crucial epistemic roles under conditions of oppression. Although the crucial epistemic value of these emotions is widely acknowledged, specific accounts of their epistemic role(s) remain largely programmatic. There are two dominant accounts of the epistemic role of emotions: The Motivational View and the Justificatory View. Philosophers of emotion assume that these dominant ways (...) of accounting for the epistemic role(s) of emotions in general are equipped to account for the epistemic role(s) of outlaw emotions. I argue that this is not the case. I consider and dismiss two responses that could be made on behalf of the most promising account, the Justificatory View, in light of my argument, before sketching an alternative account that should be favoured. (shrink)

In this article I argue that characterizations of anger as a hostile emotion may be mistaken. My project is empirically informed and is partly descriptive, partly diagnostic. It is descriptive in that I am concerned with what anger is, and how it tends to manifest, rather than with what anger should be or how moral anger is manifested. The orthodox view on anger takes it to be, descriptively, an emotion that aims for retribution. This view fits well with anger being (...) a hostile emotion, as retribution is punitive. I will argue that a different view of anger deserves our attention. On this alternative view, anger aims for recognition of harms done, rather than for the punishment of those who have committed them. I argue that we have reason to favour a strong view that excludes retribution from anger’s main aims. In addition, I offer a diagnosis of the reasons that led the retributive view of anger to become, and remain, orthodoxy. This diagnosis provides indirect reason to give my descriptive proposal serious consideration, for it highlights that the orthodox view has dominated folk and philosophical conceptions of anger for reasons that do not speak in favour of the view’s veracity. The view that anger is a hostile emotion will therefore emerge as in need of serious scrutiny. (shrink)

Una importante amenaza para la comunicación intercultu-ral es el relativismo: la idea de que cada cultura es tan diferente a las demás que resulta imposible entender nada de una de ellas desde cualquier otra. Se trata, de hecho, de una noción que cobró cierto éxito en diversas áreas del saber durante el siglo XX. Para oponerse a ella, los filósofos a menudo han intentado encontrar qué es lo que sí tienen todas las culturas en común, con el propósito de que (...) sirva de punto de apoyo para la comprensión mutua. En este artículo, empero, intentamos mostrar cómo cabe refutar las ideas del relativismo sin tener a la vez que comprometerse con una u otra idea de lo que presunta-mente puedan tener todas las culturas en común. El pensamiento de Richard Rorty será el que nos sirva de guía para ello. Veremos por qué, según este autor, el relativismo puede considerarse en realidad una idea incomprensible y, por tanto, que puede ser abandonada; y por qué, aunque nos confesemos etnocéntricos (como él se confesaba), ello no nos cierra a la comunicación con otras culturas, sino que, bien al con-trario, nos invita a entenderlas y a ampliar con ello nuestra propia comprensión de nosotros mismos. El uso de argumentos filosóficos tomados tanto de la epistemología elaborada por Donald Davidson, como de la historia del liberalismo político, nos resultarán fecundos en ambos empeños. (shrink)

This article provides a conceptual map of the debate on ideal and non‐ideal theory. It argues that this debate encompasses a number of different questions, which have not been kept sufficiently separate in the literature. In particular, the article distinguishes between the following three interpretations of the ‘ideal vs. non‐ideal theory’ contrast: (i) full compliance vs. partial compliance theory; (ii) utopian vs. realistic theory; (iii) end‐state vs. transitional theory. The article advances critical reflections on each of these sub‐debates, and highlights (...) areas for future research in the field. (shrink)

While various definitions of moral distress have been proposed, some agreement exists that it results from illegitimate constraints in clinical practice affecting healthcare professionals’ moral agency. If we are to reduce moral distress, instruments measuring it should provide relevant information about such illegitimate constraints. Unfortunately, existing instruments fail to do so. We discuss here several shortcomings of major instruments in use: their inability to determine whether reports of moral distress involve an accurate assessment of the requisite clinical and logistical facts (...) in play, whether the distress in question is aptly characterized as moral, and whether the moral distress reported is an appropriate target of elimination. Such failures seriously limit the ability of empirical work on moral distress to foster appropriate change. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Theories of sets such as Zermelo Fraenkel set theory are usually presented as the combination of two distinct kinds of principles: logical and set-theoretic principles. The set-theoretic principles are imposed ‘on top’ of first-order logic. This is in agreement with a traditional view of logic as universally applicable and topic neutral. Such a view of logic has been rejected by the intuitionists, on the ground that quantification over infinite domains requires the use of intuitionistic rather than classical logic. In (...) the following, I consider constructive set theories, which use intuitionistic rather than classical logic, and argue that they manifest a distinctive interdependence or an entanglement between sets and logic. In fact, Martin-Löf type theory identifies fundamental logical and set-theoretic notions. Remarkably, one of the motivations for this identification is the thought that classical quantification over infinite domains is problematic, while intuitionistic quantification is not. The approach to quantification adopted in Martin-Löf’s type theory is subtly interconnected with its predicativity. I conclude by recalling key aspects of an approach to predicativity inspired by Poincaré, which focuses on the issue of correct quantification over infinite domains and relate it back to Martin-Löf type theory. (shrink)

Many philosophers hold that generics (i.e., unquantified generalizations) are pervasive in communication and that when they are about social groups, this may offend and polarize people because generics gloss over variations between individuals. Generics about social groups might be particularly common on Twitter (X). This remains unexplored, however. Using machine learning (ML) techniques, we therefore developed an automatic classifier for social generics, applied it to 1.1 million tweets about people, and analyzed the tweets. While it is often suggested that generics (...) are ubiquitous in everyday communication, we found that most tweets (78%) about people contained no generics. However, tweets with generics received more “likes” and retweets. Furthermore, while recent psychological research may lead to the prediction that tweets with generics about political groups are more common than tweets with generics about ethnic groups, we found the opposite. However, consistent with recent claims that political animosity is less constrained by social norms than animosity against gender and ethnic groups, negative tweets with generics about political groups were significantly more prevalent and retweeted than negative tweets about ethnic groups. Our study provides the first ML-based insights into the use and impact of social generics on Twitter. (shrink)

There are many different interpretations of what the family should be – its desired member composition, its primary purpose, and its cultural significance – and many different examples of what families actually look like across the globe. I examine the most paradigmatic conceptions of the family that are based upon the supposed primary purpose that the family serves for its members and for the state. I then suggest that we ought to reconceptualize how we understand and define the family in (...) an effort to move away from these paradigmatic conceptions. This approach requires that we examine the way(s) in which the family has been defined descriptively – that is, how families have been defined historically – in an effort to determine what a normative theory of the family might look like. The goal of this inquiry is to define a family in terms of what it ought to be – a goal that moves our understanding of the family to a new conceptual landscape. I then present my own account of familial relations that aims to capture a normative understanding of the unique primary purpose that the family serves for its members. (shrink)

In this article, I develop a new account of the liberal view that principles of justice are meant to justify state coercion, and consider its implications for the question of global socioeconomic justice. Although contemporary proponents of this view deny that principles of socioeconomic justice apply globally, on my newly developed account this conclusion is mistaken. I distinguish between two types of coercion, systemic and interactional, and argue that a plausible theory of global justice should contain principles justifying both. The (...) justification of interactional coercion requires principles regulating interstate interference; that of systemic coercion requires principles of global socioeconomic justice. I argue that the proposed view not only helps us make progress in the debate on global justice, but also offers an independently compelling and systematic account of the function and conditions of applicability of justice. -/-. (shrink)

In this paper, we introduce an enactive account of loving as participatory sense-making inspired by the “I love to you” of the feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray. Emancipating from the fusionist concept of romantic love, which understands love as unity, we conceptualise loving as an existential engagement in a dialectic of encounter, in continuous processes of becoming-in-relation. In these processes, desire acquires a certain prominence as the need to know (the other, the relation, oneself) more. We build on Irigaray’s account of (...) love to present a phenomenology of loving interactions and then our enactive account. Finally, we draw some implications for ethics. These concern language, difference, vulnerability, desire, and self-transformation. (shrink)

Moods have global and profound effects on our thoughts, motivations and behavior. To understand human behavior and cognition fully, we must understand moods. In this paper I critically examine and reject the methodology of conventional ?cognitive theories? of affect. I lay the foundations of a new theory of moods that identifies them with processes of our cognitive functional architecture. Moods differ fundamentally from some of our other affective states and hence require distinct explanatory tools. The computational theory of mood I (...) propose places them within the context of other mental phenomena and is consistent with the empirical data on moods. (shrink)

Although the view that sees proper names as referential singular terms is widely considered orthodoxy, there is a growing popularity to the view that proper names are predicates. This is partly because the orthodoxy faces two anomalies that Predicativism can solve: on the one hand, proper names can have multiple bearers. But multiple bearerhood is a problem to the idea that proper names have just one individual as referent. On the other hand, as Burge noted, proper names can have predicative (...) uses. But the view that proper names are singular terms arguably does not have the resources to deal with Burge’s cases. In this paper I argue that the Predicate View of proper names is mistaken. I first argue against the syntactic evidence used to support the view and against the predicativist’s methodology of inferring a semantic account for proper names based on incomplete syntactic data. I also show that Predicativism can neither explain the behaviour of proper names in full generality, nor claim the fundamentality of predicative names. In developing my own view, however, I accept the insight that proper names in some sense express generality. Hence I propose that proper names—albeit fundamentally singular referential terms—express generality in two senses. First, by being used as predicates, since then they are true of many individuals; and second, by being referentially related to many individuals. I respond to the problem of multiple bearerhood by proposing that proper names are polyreferential, and also explain the behaviour of proper names in light of the wider phenomenon I called category change, and show how Polyreferentialism can account for all uses of proper names. (shrink)

In this article I present a disagreement between classical and constructive approaches to predicativity regarding the predicative status of so-called generalised inductive definitions. I begin by offering some motivation for an enquiry in the predicative foundations of constructive mathematics, by looking at contemporary work at the intersection between mathematics and computer science. I then review the background notions and spell out the above-mentioned disagreement between classical and constructive approaches to predicativity. Finally, I look at possible ways of defending the constructive (...) predicativity of inductive definitions. (shrink)

In this paper I lay the foundations for the construction of an affective quality space. I begin by outlining what quality spaces are, and how they have been constructed for sensory qualities across different perceptual modalities. I then turn to tackle four obstacles that an affective quality space might face that would make an affective quality space unfeasible. After showing these obstacles to be surmountable, I propose a number of conditions and methodological constraints that should be satisfied in attempts to (...) construct an affective quality space. Before concluding, I detail the high explanatory pay-off such a project promises. (shrink)

The orthodox view of anger takes desires for revenge or retribution to be central to the emotion. In this paper, I develop an empirically informed challenge to the retributive view of anger. In so doing, I argue that a distinct desire is central to anger: a desire for recognition. Desires for recognition aim at the targets of anger acknowledging the wrong they have committed, as opposed to aiming for their suffering. In light of the centrality of this desire for recognition, (...) I argue that the retributive view of anger should be abandoned. I consider and dismiss two types of moves that can be made on the part of a proponent of the orthodox view in response to my argument. I propose that a pluralist view, which allows for both retribution and recognition in anger, is to be preferred. (shrink)

Within the current mainstream research in the foundations of physics, much attention has been turned to the program of Axiomatic Reconstruction of Quantum Theory in terms of Information-Theoretic principles (ARQIT). ARQIT aims at finding a few general information-theoretic principles from which, once translated into mathematical terms, one can formally derive the structure of quantum theory. This chapter explores the role of mechanistic explanations and mathematical explanations (in particular, structural explanations) within ARQIT. With such considerations as a point of departure, we (...) investigate how ARQIT contributes to the explanation of quantum phenomena, and the possible prospects for explanations provided by mechanical interpretations of quantum theory. (shrink)

A characteristic form of philosophical inquiry seeks to answer ‘what is x?’ questions. In this paper, we ask how philosophers do and should adjudicate debates about the correct answer to such questions. We argue that philosophers do and should rely on a distinctive type of pragmatic and meta-representational reasoning – a form of rationalizing self-interpretation – in answering ‘what is x?’ questions. We start by placing our methodological discussion within a broader theoretical framework. We posit a necessary connection between epistemic (...) methodology and metasemantics. In our view, the correct semantic assignment for a representation must be justifiable from the epistemic perspective of the subject herself, given suitable empirical information and cognitive powers. So the upshot of your own ideal, fully informed epistemic methods will determine the correct answers to ‘what is x?’ questions. The bulk of the paper is devoted to articulating and defending our rationalizing self-interpretation account of philosophical methodology. By working through a specific example, we seek to isolate the relevant inputs into deliberation and the methods for adjudicating between competing answers to a ‘what is x?’ question. We suggest that the self-interpretive methods we isolate generalize across the board as a way of identifying the real nature of familiar topics. We also explain how these methods undercut the case for a priori conceptual analysis. (shrink)

I argue that our expectations for particular evil events, conditional on theism, ought to be informed by our empirical knowledge of history—that is, the history of what God, if God exists, has already allowed to happen. This point is under-appreciated in the literature. And yet if I’m right, this entails that most particular evil events are not evidence against theism. This is a limited but interesting consequence in debates over the evidential impact of evil.

Anger is often an appropriate reaction to harms and injustices, but is it a politically beneficial one? Martha Nussbaum (Journal of the American Philosophical Association 1 (1), 41–56, 2015, Anger and Forgiveness. Oxford University Press, 2016) has argued that, although anger is useful in initially recruiting agents for action, anger is typically counterproductive to securing the political aims of those harmed. After the initial shockwave of outrage, Nussbaum argues that to be effective at enacting positive social change, groups and individuals (...) alike, must move quickly out of the state of anger. Feminist theorists (Frye, The Politics of Reality. Crossing Press, 1983; Lorde, 1997; Narayan, Hypatia 3 (2): 31–48, 1988) on the other hand have for long highlighted the efficacy of anger, as well as its moral and epistemic value, in fighting against the oppressive status quo. It might be thought therefore that for political action to be effective, a continued state of anger is preferable. Protestors must after all create and sustain a sense of moral obligation and justice. A main way of doing so is to promote successive moral shocks that trigger outrage (Jasper, Emotion Review 6 (3): 208–213, 2014). I present a novel, empirically informed defense of anger’s efficacy in political action. Nussbaum holds a traditional view on the nature of anger, inherited from Aristotle and the Stoics, which holds that anger constitutively involves a desire for retribution. The view that anger is counterproductive falls out of this and is dominant in academic work as well as in our personal and political lives. Based on work in social psychology, I argue that we need to reconsider this. In doing so, I highlight anger’s aim for recognition, rather than retribution, as key. Furthermore, I uncover conditions for anger’s political efficacy, as well as reasons for why the traditional view of anger has been so pervasive. (shrink)

Frank Jackson often writes as if his descriptivist account of public language meanings were just plain common sense. How else are we to explain how different speakers manage to communicate using a public language? And how else can we explain how individuals arrive at confident judgments about the reference of their words in hypothetical scenarios? Our aim in this paper is to show just how controversial the psychological assumptions behind in Jackson’s semantic theory really are. First, we explain how Jackson’s (...) theory goes well beyond the commonsense platitudes he cites in its defence. Second, we sketch an alternative explanation of those platitudes, the jazz model of meaning, which we argue is more psychologically realistic. We conclude that the psychological picture presupposed by Jackson’s semantic theory stands in need of a much more substantial defence than he has so far offered. (shrink)

Is democracy a requirement of justice or an instrument for realizing it? The correct answer to this question, I argue, depends on the background circumstances against which democracy is defended. In the presence of thin reasonable disagreement about justice, we should value democracy only instrumentally (if at all); in the presence of thick reasonable disagreement about justice, we should value it also intrinsically, as a necessary demand of justice. Since the latter type of disagreement is pervasive in real-world politics, I (...) conclude that theories of justice designed for our world should be centrally concerned with democracy. (shrink)

The definitions and conceptualizations of health, and the management of healthcare have been challenged by the current global scenarios (e.g., new diseases, new geographical distribution of diseases, effects of climate change on health, etc.) and by the ongoing scholarship in humanities and science. In this paper we question the mainstream definition of health adopted by the WHO—‘a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity’ (WHO in Preamble to the constitution of (...) the World Health Organization as adopted by the international health conference, The World Health Organization, 1948)—and its role in providing tools to understand what health is in the contemporary context. More specifically, we argue that this context requires to take into account the role of the environment both in medical theory and in the healthcare practice. To do so, we analyse WHO documents dated 1984 and 1986 which define health as ‘coping with the environment’. We develop the idea of ‘coping with the environment’, by focusing on two cardinal concepts: adaptation in public health and adaptivity in philosophy of biology. We argue that the notions of adaptation and adaptivity can be of major benefit for the characterization of health, and have practical implications. We explore some of these implications by discussing two recent case studies of adaptivity in public health, which can be valuable to further develop adaptive strategies in the current pandemic scenario: community-centred care and microbiologically healthier buildings. (shrink)

Various philosophers authors have argued—on the basis of powerful examples—that we can have compelling moral or practical reasons to believe, even when the evidence suggests otherwise. This paper explores an alternative story, which still aims to respect widely shared intuitions about the motivating examples. Specifically, the paper proposes that what is at stake in these cases is not belief, but rather acceptance—an attitude classically characterized as taking a proposition as a premise in practical deliberation and action. I suggest that acceptance’s (...) theoretical usefulness in the ethics of belief has been hidden by its psychological obscurity. I thus aim to develop an empirically adequate and mechanistically specific psychological profile of acceptance. I characterize acceptance as centrally involving a cognitive gating function, in which we prevent a target belief state from having its characteristic downstream effects on reasoning, cognition, and action, and restructure those downstream processes. I then argue that there is substantial empirical support for the existence of the cognitive mechanisms needed to instantiate this view, coming from the science of emotion regulation. I argue that acceptance involves deploying the same mechanisms used in emotional response modulation to belief states: acceptance is doxastic response modulation. I then propose that having a better understanding of the psychological profile of acceptance leaves us better positioned to appreciate its potential usefulness for making progress on various puzzles within the ethics of belief. (shrink)

When and why do socially constructed norms—including the laws of the land, norms of etiquette, and informal customs—generate moral obligations? I argue that the answer lies in the duty to respect others, specifically to give them what I call “agency respect.” This is the kind of respect that people are owed in light of how they exercise their agency. My central thesis is this: To the extent that (i) existing norms are underpinned by people’s commitments as agents and (ii) they (...) do not conflict with morality, they place moral demands on us on agency-respect grounds. This view of the moral force of socially constructed norms, I suggest, is superior to views that deny the moral force of such norms, and it elegantly explains certain instances of wrongdoing that would otherwise remain unaccounted for. (shrink)

It's widely accepted that social facts about an individual's linguistic community can affect both the reference of her words and the concepts those words express. Theorists sympathetic to the internalist tradition have sought to accommodate these social dependence phenomena without altering their core theoretical commitments by positing deferential reference-fixing criteria. In this paper, we sketch a different explanation of social dependence phenomena, according to which all concepts are individuated in part by causal-historical relations linking token elements of thought.

In this paper I will defend the idea of the success of post-truth as one of the main features of hypermodernity. In order to understand such a claim, I will start by defining “post-truth” and showing the key differences that separate it from simple manipulation or lies. I will explain how post-truth characterizes a whole new way of understanding the difference between truth and falsity: a new attitude of indifference to the sharp distinction that moderns and ancients had placed between (...) these two notions. I will contend that this new attitude had been announced by the work of at least three recent philosophers: Harry Frankfurt, Gianni Vattimo and Mario Perniola. They give different names to “post-truth”, though, and attribute it to different causes (from anti-intellectualism to the new media and to sheer carelessness). After that, I will explore how two key aspects of hypermodernity (according to Gilles Lipovetsky), i.e. hyperindividualism and hyperconsumption, cohere with this spread of post-truth. Finally, I will summarily refer to some political and geopolitical events that corroborate the relevance of post-truth in our hypermodern world. (shrink)

In his recent bookThe Idea of Justice, Amartya Sen suggests that political philosophy should move beyond the dominant, Rawls-inspired, methodological paradigm – what Sen calls ‘transcendental institutionalism’ – towards a more practically oriented approach to justice: ‘realization-focused comparison’. In this article, I argue that Sen's call for a paradigm shift in thinking about justice is unwarranted. I show that his criticisms of the Rawlsian approach are either based on misunderstandings, or correct but of little consequence, and conclude that the Rawlsian (...) approach already delivers much of what Sen himself wants from a theory of justice. (shrink)

El pensamiento de Gianni Vattimo como entrecruzamiento de política, filosofía y religión.

Descripción de cómo las élites del mundo actual han traicionado al resto de la población en un proyecto global que ya solo beneficia a ellas.

Trust is a core feature of the physician-patient relationship, and risk is central to trust. Patients take risks when they trust their providers to care for them effectively and appropriately. Not all patients take these risks: some medical relationships are marked by mistrust and suspicion. Empirical evidence suggests that some patients and families of color in the United States may be more likely to mistrust their providers and to be suspicious of specific medical practices and institutions. Given both historical and (...) ongoing oppression and injustice in American medical institutions, such mistrust can be apt. Yet it can also frustrate patient care, leading to family and provider distress. In this paper, I propose one way that providers might work to reestablish trust by taking risks in signaling their own trustworthiness. This interpersonal step is not meant to replace efforts to remedy systemic injustice, but is an immediate measure for addressing mistrust in occurrent cases. (shrink)

If we classify ethical theories into ‘immanentist’ (those that detect what is ethically acceptable in some type of world events, such as the utilitarian growth of general benefits) and ‘transcendentalist’ (those that locate in some space beyond this world the reason why we should behave ethically – for example, due to some kind of otherworldly reward –), then the moral philosophy of the so-called ‘first’ Wittgenstein would occupy a special place between both extremes of such a dichotomy. To a certain (...) extent, it could be said that the ethical proposal of Wittgenstein during his years composing the Tractatus Logico-philosophicus maintains a delicate balance that avoids both its exclusive submission to transcendental instances (fundamentals), and its total assimilation by immanent motivations (benefits) when justifying the fact of acting in a correct way. In this article we will look at such a Wittgensteinian pirouette between both members of the transcendent-immanent dualism, and we will suggest that the peculiar place where he leaves ethics, between the heavenly and the earthly, may not be completely alien to some thesis of the Christian religion. (shrink)

Predicativity is a notable example of fruitful interaction between philosophy and mathematical logic. It originated at the beginning of the 20th century from methodological and philosophical reflections on a changing concept of set. A clarification of this notion has prompted the development of fundamental new technical instruments, from Russell's type theory to an important chapter in proof theory, which saw the decisive involvement of Kreisel, Feferman and Schütte. The technical outcomes of predica-tivity have since taken a life of their own, (...) but have also produced a deeper understanding of the notion of predicativity, therefore witnessing the " light logic throws on problems in the foundations of mathematics. " (Feferman 1998, p. vii) Predicativity has been at the center of a considerable part of Feferman's work: over the years he has explored alternative ways of explicating and analyzing this notion and has shown that predicative mathematics extends much further than expected within ordinary mathematics. The aim of this note is to outline the principal features of predicativity, from its original motivations at the start of the past century to its logical analysis in the 1950-60's. The hope is to convey why predicativity is a fascinating subject, which has attracted Feferman's attention over the years. (shrink)

Today, the notion of identity is usually linked with ethical-political discussions like multiculturalism, gender or sexual diversity, recognition of plurality, etc. Nevertheless, the flourishing of this vision that interprets “identity” mainly in its plural form (as “identities”) contrasts sharply with the sense that “identity” has had during most of the history of philosophy (in which identity was understood in connection with “unity” or “selfsameness”, not with “diversity” or “otherness”). In order to explain the passage from one notion of identity to (...) the other (a passage mainly made in the last third of the 20th century), we will focus on the reflections made by Ludwig Wittgenstein towards the middle of that century. Our contention is that these reflections open the way to a more plural understanding of human identity, against the many interpreters of Wittgenstein that defend the opposite: that he offered a strong notion of common human identity in his writings, a notion based on the idea of “human nature”. In order to sustain our thesis, we will have to give an interpretation of some key terms of Wittgenstein’s philosophy (like “forms of life” or “natural history”) from a pluralistic point of view; this is the only way of understanding to what extent he is a predecessor of contemporary discussions about plural identities. (shrink)

A globalized world, some argue, needs a global democracy. But there is considerable disagreement about whether global democracy is an ideal worth pursuing. One of the main grounds for scepticism is captured by the slogan: “No global demos, no global democracy.” The fact that a key precondition of democracy—a demos—is absent at the global level, some argue, speaks against the pursuit of global democracy. The paper discusses four interpretations of the skeptical slogan—each based on a specific account of the notion (...) of “the demos”—and concludes that none of them establishes that the global democratic ideal must be abandoned. In so doing, the paper (i) systematizes different types of objections against global democracy, thus bringing some clarity to an otherwise intricate debate and (ii) offers a robust but qualified defense of the global democratic ideal. (shrink)

For centuries, various disciplines have tried to tackle the topic of how legitimate it is to use violence in order to solve social problems. One of the most recent interdisciplinary approaches, most successful in present-day Latin America, is the so-called "Ethics of Liberation," designed by Enrique Dussel. Based on the Theology of Liberation, this theory goes beyond the limits of theology as a discipline and pleads for three ethical criteria that every political revolution must fulfill to use violence in a (...) legitimate way. The first is a formal criterion, which basically takes after the ideal dialogue situation endorsed by Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas, and purports to be rooted in yet another discipline, linguistics. The second is a material criterion, defined as the upshot of an acceptable welfare for all citizens, thus intimately linked with the discipline of economics and political philosophy. The third is a criterion of feasibility, which makes a revolt legitimate if, and only if, it has a reasonable possibility of succeeding; hence strategic issues take a leading role. This essay contends that each of these criteria is conceptually incompatible with violence. Hence, Dussel's arguments involve multiple contradictions as he aims to justify the use of violence precisely with these interdisciplinary criteria. (shrink)

Which standards should we employ to evaluate the global order? Should they be standards of justice or standards of legitimacy? In this article, I argue that liberal political theorists need not face this dilemma, because liberal justice and legitimacy are not distinct values. Rather, they indicate what the same value, i.e. equal respect for persons, demands of institutions under different sets of circumstances. I suggest that under real-world circumstances – characterized by conflicts and disagreements – equal respect demands basic-rights protection (...) and democratic participation, which I here call ‘political justice’. I conclude the article by considering three possible configurations of the global order – the ‘democratic world-state’, ‘independent democratic states’, and ‘mixed’ models – and argue that a commitment to political justice speaks in favour of the latter. (shrink)