Pedro de Ledesma became one of the most important professors in the theological faculty of the University of Salamanca at the beginning of the 17th century. He and Juan Vicente de Astorga were Dominican theologians in substantial agreement with Domingo Báñez about the main points of the disputes on grace. However, they manifest remarkable differences between them. Astorga believes that God could not maintain the infallibility of His predestination of creatures only through His foreknowledge of the acts of the (...) creature, as Luis de Molina defends. He thinks that God disposes by His providence each concrete act of creatures and, by His concurrence, effectively achieves their fulfillment. However, God does not influence created free will by means of a physical premotion, but by a moral one, i.e. by suggestions and inspirations. Ledesma criticizes Astorga’s thesis, although he uses Astorga’s arguments to defend the compatibility of physical premotion with the freedom of the creature. In this article, the thought of both theologians is presented in the light of their unpublished manuscript works. The opposition between these two friars manifests the variety of approaches adopted by Dominicans of the time, who cannot be considered as a uniform group. (shrink)

The Dominican Pedro de Ledesma was a member of the School of Salamanca, professor of Theology in the late 16th and early 17th century. Here we investigate for the first time his contribution to the «de auxiliis» controversy, in which mainly the Dominicans and the Jesuits contended about human free will and God’s influence on it. Among the various theological problems involved, this thesis examines the nature of the divine concurrence in free human action and, in particular, divine concurrence (...) in actual efficacious grace. Ledesma focuses his contribution to this debate on the real (and not only moral) difference between sufficient and efficacious grace. Another original feature of his conception of divine concurrence and efficacious grace are the target of his attacks, since he does not only dispute the theology of the Jesuit Luis de Molina, but also that of several Dominicans, such as Juan Vicente de Astorga; likewise, he opposes Pedro de Herrera and Diego Álvarez with a less sophisticated conception of «physical premotion» than theirs. This thesis updates Ledesma’s intellectual biography and contains the most complete list of his manuscript work to date. Ledesma’s ideas are studied on the basis of three documents: first, his unpublished lectures of 1590 on divine concurrence; second, the report on Molina’s Concordia sent to the Inquisition in 1594 (a manuscript hitherto neglected, and transcribed in the Appendix); third, the book on the dispute completed in 1601 and published in 1611. (shrink)

Divine grace is the hand of Christ that sustains the Christian in his acts: such is the mystery explored at the end of the 16th century in the profound studies carried out by various Catholic theologians in a debate in Spain known as the “Controversy on divine aids” (de auxiliis). Its problematic covers both the drama of the loving agreement between divine initiative and human response, as well as the subtle questions of causal determinism or freedom of the will. In (...) this book, the participation of one of the main Dominicans involved in this dispute, Pedro de Ledesma, one of the last members of the School of Salamanca, is studied for the first time. For this purpose, his manuscript work is reviewed, contrasting it with the teachings of other Dominicans of the time. This also makes it possible to show that among the theologians of the Order of Preachers, despite their profound coincidences, there were also different approaches to providence, predestination and divine grace. Thus, this book provides a specific introduction to Ledesma, whose understanding of physical premotion is quite original, but it also provides a broad overview of the early years of the controversy on grace in the Iberian Peninsula. (shrink)

Pedro de Ledesma is one of the Dominican theologians of the School of Salamanca involved in the De Auxiliis controversy, i.e., the disputes around a famous book by Luis de Molina on the relation between divine foreknowledge and providence and our free will. Studying an unpublished manuscript by Ledesma and his 1611 book on this subject, the article shows that he opposed Molina with a Thomistic position that we call deflationary. According to this interpretation, God, in moving (...) the created will to do good actions, does not bring about an entity distinct from volition itself. Contrary to other Thomists, he does not think that the immediate effect of the divine motion of the will is an intermediary entity used by God to produce, with the will, the created free act. Ledesma defends his thesis by using some elements of Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics, in particular, a minimalist interpretation of the relation between action and passion already present in Domingo de Soto and the specific causality of immanent acts. (shrink)

Throughout the history of Thomism, interpretations of the ontology of God’s physical premotion of human free will have been divided mainly into two main groups. Most authors have thought that physical premotion constitutes a certain “entity” infused by God in the creature, although not all of them accept the account of Cabrera, who affirmed that premotion was a “quality”. On the other hand, there are some authors who understand premotion as a direct intervention of God in the vital act of (...) the creature which does not originates any entity prior to the created deliberate action itself. Báñez himself never spoke of any such entity, although some of his disciples soon adopted this view. One of his disciples, Pedro de Ledesma, is the author who best developed this minimalist approach in his treatise published on the occasion of the Controversy De auxiliis. This paper studies the main reasons used by Ledesma in his book to defend such an interpretation. (shrink)

The tendency to idealise artificial intelligence as independent from human manipulators, combined with the growing ontological entanglement of humans and digital machines, has created an “anthrobotic” horizon, in which data analytics, statistics and probabilities throw our agential power into question. How can we avoid the consequences of a reified definition of intelligence as universal operation becoming imposed upon our destinies? It is here argued that the fantasised autonomy of automated intelligence presents a contradistinctive opportunity for philosophical consciousness to understand itself (...) anew as holistic and co-creative, beyond the recent “analytic” moment of the history of philosophy. Here we introduce the concept of “crealectic intelligence”, a meta-analytic and meta-dialectic aspect of consciousness. Intelligent behaviour may consist in distinguishing discrete familiar parts or reproducible functions in the midst of noise via an analytic process of segmentation; intelligence may also manifest itself in the constitution of larger wholes and dynamic unities through a dialectic process of association or assemblage. But, by contrast, crealectic intelligence co-creates realities in the image of an ideal or truth, taking into account the desiring agent imbued with a sense of possibility, in a relationship not only with the Real but also with the creative sublime or “Creal”. (shrink)

Can we fruitfully apply creative ecology practices in the world of industrial production? Enter the crealectic method for innovation and self-innovation, aiming at fostering creative long-term thinking and acting. The crealectic method proposes five steps: Step 1—Resetting (doing tabula rasa); Step 2—Crealing (reconnecting with the “Creal”); Step 3—Profusing (letting ideas pour out without censorship); Step 4—Compossibilizing (connecting compatible ideas); Step 5—Realizing (understanding and making real). I describe a pilot test of the method within the Research and Development unit of Vattenfall, (...) a Swedish power company dedicated to fossil-free energy production. (shrink)

This book is the result of a collective research effort performed during many years in both Sweden and Spain. It is the result of attempting to develop a new field of research that could we denominate «human act informatics.» The goal has been to use the technologies of information to the study of the human act in general, including embodied acts and disembodied acts. The book presents a theory of the quantification of the informational value of human acts as order, (...) opposing the living order against entropy. We present acting as a set of decisions and choices aimed to create order and to impose Modernity. Karl Popper’s frequency theory of probability is applied to characterize human acts regarding their degree of freedom and to set up a scale of order in human decisions. The traditional theory of economics and social science characterize the human act as rational, utilitarian and ethical. Our results emphasize that the unique significance of an act lies in its capacity to generate order. An adequate methodology is then presented to defend such hypothesis according to which, the rationality respective irrationality of acting, is in fact only a function of the act’s organizational capacity. From this perspective, it has been necessary to define «order» respective «disorder» as operative concepts that allowed the comparison of the organizational differences generated by each kind of act. According to the presented conclusions, the spontaneity of living, as unconscious thinking, dreaming, loving, etc. and the mainstream of the human acts, are utilitarian, but in an irrational way; they are rooted in unconscious drifts and therefore must be considered irrational-utility acts. (shrink)

The emerging crealectic frame posits that there are three complementary and effectual domains of intelligence, namely analytic, dialectic, and crealectic, being alternatively or complementarily used in human interactions with the world. The focus of crealectic intelligence is the relative possibilization and local realization of absolute possibility, the becoming real, biological, and social of creation. This multimodal externalization and asymptotic unification of a cosmological flux expresses itself via three realms of possibilization: physical, psychological, and philosophical. But the philosophical possible is not (...) merely abstract; it originates a generative process of exteriorizations, interiorizations, dissolutions, and unifications transforming the possible into realities. The term “crealectics,” coined by philosopher and author Luis de Miranda, is a compound of “Creal” and of two possible suffixes: “logos” or “ektos”. The ontological core of crealectics, the Creal, is the immanent process of creation understood as a ubiquitous stream of absolute possibility exteriorizing itself. For a crealectician, philosophy is not the mere logical analysis of truth conditions, but the self-questioning enterprise of thought regarding its own possibilizing and world-making power. (shrink)

In his dialogues with Claire Parnet, Deleuze asserts that: ‘Whether we are individuals or groups, we are made of lines’ (Deleuze and Parnet 2007: 124). In A Thousand Plateaus (with Guattari), Deleuze calls these kinds of ‘lifelines’ or ‘lines of flesh’: break line (or segmental line, or molar line), crack line (or molecular line) and rupture line (also called line of flight) (Deleuze and Guattari 2004a: 22). We will explain the difference between these three lines and how they are related (...) to the ‘soul’. We will also explain how a singular individual or group can arise from the play of the lines. Eventually, we will introduce the concept of ‘Creal’ to develop the Deleuzian figure of the ‘Anomal’, the so(u)rcerer. (shrink)

The logos question, one of the most important among the subjects that traverse the Plato's Sophist, has in fact some different aspects: the criticism of father Parmenides' logos, that is unable to speak about the not-being, but also about the being; the relations between logos and its cognates, phantasia, doxa and dianoia; the logos’ complex structure, that is a compound with onoma and rema; the difference between naming and saying, two distinct but inseparable actions; the logical and ontological conditions that (...) make possible to say the truth, or to lie or simply to joke; the necessity of a most flexible logos that allows us to speak about the not-being, and about the being, but at the same time is a logos dangerously similar to the sophist’ one; finally, the identity between the power to produce “spoken images” and the very power to speak. The aim of the present article is giving a systematical view of the matter that grasps all these faces. (shrink)

Vous éprouvez souvent l'embarras du choix? Que sera la liberté au XXIe siècle? Depuis l'invention des machines et des computeurs, notre quotidien semble avoir gagné du temps. Mais en contrepartie, il paraît de plus en plus codé, soumis aux automatismes. Depuis Leibniz jusqu'à la puce biométrique, l'auteur raconte une histoire alternative de l'ère informatique. Il démontre que le " numérisme ", le principe ordinateur, est une vertu humaine ancestrale et nécessaire. Mais insuffisante. Après le sauve-qui-peut du postmodernisme, un nouveau paradigme (...) est en train de naître, le " créalisme " : le monde est notre création commune incessante. L'horizon de notre liberté politique et existentielle, c'est la Terre comme oeuvre d'art. Construit comme une odyssée philosophique curieuse et empreinte d'humour, voici un traité de cocréativité pour une époque aux forces actives éclatées. Où l'on découvre que l'ordre et l'aventure ne sont pas incompatibles. (shrink)

The present article is a primary introduction to the semi-structured interviewing method SMILE_PH, an acronym for Sense-Making Interviews Looking at Elements of Philosophical Health. Beyond grounding this new methodology theoretically (a work that is started here but will in the future necessitate several developments), the main motivation here is pragmatic: to provide the recent philosophical health movement with a testable method and show that philosophically-oriented interviews are possible in a manner that can be reproduced, compared, tested and used systematically with (...) a population that has received no training in philosophy. The SMILE_PH approach was conceived by the author during an ethically approved pilot study focused on the philosophy of life of persons living with spinal cord injury (SCI), with the intention of rectifying the epistemic obstacles generated by rationalist, Socratic or unstructured ways of in-depth interviewing. The six-step structure of the method is also inspired by hundreds of individual dialogue sessions with philosophical counselees, led by the author between 2018 and 2022: the SMILE_PH method progressively gathers phenomenological data about 1 – our bodily sense, 2 – our sense of self, 3 – our sense of belonging, 4 – our sense of the possible, 5 – our sense of purpose and 6 – our philosophical sense. (shrink)

Background We investigated the personal philosophies of eight persons with a tetraplegic condition (four male, four female), all living in Sweden with a chronic spinal cord injury (SCI) and all reporting a good life. Our purpose was to discover if there is a philosophical mindset that may play a role in living a good life with a traumatic SCI. Methods Two rounds of in-depth qualitative interviews were performed by the same interviewer, a philosophical practitioner by training (de Miranda). The second (...) round systematically covered the following elements: bodily sense, sense of self, sense of belonging, sense of the possible, sense of purpose and philosophical sense. This six-step method developed by de Miranda is called SMILE_PH, an acronym for Sense-Making Interviews Looking at Elements of Philosophical Health. Results All the interviewees, as a consequence of their trauma, reported having gone through a reinvention of themselves which implied questioning the meaning and purpose of their life in particular and life in general. A philosophical rather than realistic sense of the possible was abstracted toward teleological growth. All interviewees developed a sense of purpose based on self-interested altruism and solidarity with disabled peers. Conclusions To reinvent a good life with SCI, in addition to physical training and willpower, one needs to consider philosophical questions about the self and life, what Kant called the cosmic interests of reason: What may I hope? What must I do? What can I know? Our results indicate that we should, in the future, explore what the philosophical health approach may bring to rehabilitation processes in the months or years that follow the trauma. (shrink)

Process philosophies tend to emphasise the value of continuous creation as the core of their discourse. For Bergson, Whitehead, Deleuze, and others the real is ultimately a creative becoming. Critics have argued that there is an irreducible element of (almost religious) belief in this re-evaluation of immanent creation. While I don’t think belief is necessarily a sign of philosophical and existential weakness, in this paper I will examine the possibility for the concept of universal creation to be a political and (...) ethical axiom, the result of a global social contract rather than of a new spirituality. I argue here that a coherent way to fight against potentially totalitarian absolutes is to replace them with a virtual absolute that cannot territorialise without deterritorialising at the same time: the Creal principle. (shrink)

« Ce petit livre est un bijou d’intelligence, de finesse, de culture, qui prend un objet technique sans rechigner et le tourne et le retourne comme Heidegger nous avait appris à le faire avec les chaussures de Van Gogh. Ce qui frappe, c’est l’ambition d’une méditation sur les cartes de la modernité contemporaine, sur le fameux Grand Paris, sur le sujet, sur le pluriel, sans les faux-fuyants du postmoderne, de la citation absurde. Luis de Miranda se promène, il vous (...) conte qu’il se promène, mais il vous mène avec une grande maîtrise et sait où il veut aller. Rien de gratuit dans cette rencontre de l’enseigne de kebabs sur la table de dissection de la Ville Néon. C’est plutôt une nouvelle méditation cartésienne après Descartes et Husserl : où le poêle et sa chaleur ont fait place au bruit vrillant du gaz dans un tube. Je suis, je crée, donc j’entends. » Yann Moulier-Boutang, ancien élève de l’ENS, professeur agrégé d’économie à l’université de technologie de Compiègne, directeur de la revue Multitudes. Né d’une rencontre inopinée avec un néon sur le quai du Louvre, ce livre a été composé à partir d’un séminaire donné par l’auteur à l’hiver 2012. Un voyage inspiré à travers la nuit, qui déchiffre les halos du passé et les reflets du présent pour donner à entendre une certaine magie du futur. Luis de Miranda, philosophe, romancier, révélateur du créalisme, est notamment l’auteur d’un essai remarqué, L’art d’être libres au temps des automates (Max Milo, 2010). (shrink)

Book review : The philosophy of person‐centred healthcareBy Derek Mitchell, Michael Loughlin, Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 2023.201 pp. £64.99. ISBN (10): 1‐5275‐9058‐5, ISBN (13): 978‐1‐5275‐9058‐8.

The multiple-choice video game Life is Strange was described by its French developers as a metaphor for the inner conflicts experienced by a teenager in trying to become an adult. In psychological work with adolescents, there is a stark similarity between what they experience and some concepts of existentialist philosophy. Sartre’s script for the movie Les Jeux Sont Faits (literally ‘‘games are made’’) uses the same narrative strategy as Life is Strange—the capacity for the main characters to travel back in (...) time to change their own existence—in order to stimulate philosophical, ethical, and political thinking and also to effectively simulate existential ‘‘limit situations.’’ This article is a dialogue between Sartre’s views and Life is Strange in order to examine to what extent questions such as what is freedom? what is choice? what is autonomy and responsibility? can be interpreted anew in hybrid digital–human—‘‘anthrobotic’’—environments. (shrink)

The article approximates some of the foundations of Cornelius Castoriadis's understanding of social-historical, guided by a theoretical-sociological perspective. I try to think in what senses Castoriadis's social ontology consideration can help us to rethink and eventually reconfigure the domain of social-theoretical reflection on the world. At the same time, an attempt is made to measure the extent of the reordering that the presuppositions of this ontology imply for the presuppositional level-ontological, epistemological, and methodological elements - and the theoretical level - (...) categories, concepts, and general statements-in sociology. The text closes, programmatically, with some problems and challenges that Castoriadis' thought bequeaths to the theoretical-social reflection on the world. (shrink)

« Voici un livre vif, intelligent, nullement béni-oui-oui. Avec Lacan, il démontre que le capitalisme est une machine à faire jouir massivement. Ce qui s'obtient n'est pas pour autant une jouissance toute, mais seulement des lichettes. La jouissance demeurera toujours tonneau des Danaïdes. » Hervé Castanet, professeur des universités, psychanalyste, membre de l'école de la Cause freudienne. -/- Partout la qualité de vie prend la forme d'une quantité d'envies. Le nouveau monde oscille entre deux versants d'une même pièce de théâtre (...) : côté cour, des passages à l'acte obscènes ; côté coulisses, un puritanisme coupable. Pouvons-nous nous comporter autrement que comme des machines à jouir détraquées, dont le courant alternatif oscillerait entre avidité et rétention, gaspillage et dette ? Beaucoup se demandent pourquoi, une fois réunies les conditions imaginaires ou symboliques de la jouissance, c'est un réel vide ou perverti qui s'installe. C'est que la mécanique même de l'économie libidinale capitaliste repose sur l'angoisse sans cesse repoussée d'un désir dévoyé. Dans un monde globalement structuré par la plus-value, la jouissance prend la forme internationale du « plus-de-jouir ». -/- Faut-il pour autant renoncer à la joie de vivre et se réfugier dans le moralisme et l'austérité ? Lacan, Heidegger et Marx, articulés ensemble, permettent de dire comment une forme d'existence créative est encore possible. Une telle liberté est l'horizon de ce livre. (shrink)

The radical evil. Notes on the revolt of masses. In his Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, Kant speaks about a radical evil present in the human being, a tendency to place before the desire with regard to the rational duty, which is impossible to tear up by the roots from the human nature. In The revolt of the masses, Ortega also speaks about an evil that is anyway present in the so called mass-man, in each one of us, (...) and that is not to eradicate. The aim of this paper is to read the book of Ortega y Gasset in dialogue with Kant. (shrink)

The temporality of human action is very peculiar: different from the cosmic time and even paradoxical, inasmuch as it is really a circular time. The aim of this essay is to study this circularity in the sphere of human activity through the relations between the notions of potency and habit in the Aristotelian Ethics, among others structural conditions of the action. These structural conditions are explored by Aristotle as those which make possible to judge the actions.

The letter and the neon -- Augustus Rex -- Sublimism -- The incalculable -- The halo -- The new grail -- The mint and the muses -- Neon in space.

O desempenho das empresas tem sido estudado sob diferentes perspectivas teóricas, que, em geral a utilizam indicadores econômico-financeiros. Essa abordagem sofre constantes críticas por não contemplar aspectos estratégicos, que podem fornecer informações acerca de vantagem competitiva obtida pela empresa. Fatores macroeconômicos também tendem a impactar de maneira indireta os diferentes setores. Além disso, os setores sofrem esses impactos macroeconômicos conforme o nível de exposição deste às oscilações macroeconômicas. Assim este trabalho buscou analisar como as dimensões de desempenho se relacionam com (...) retorno, para cada setor da bolsa de valores. Para a análise, utilizou-se a modelagem de equações estruturais a partir do software Smart-PLS. Foram utilizados dados do Economática para 82 empresas listadas em 6 setores da B3 no período entre 2011 e 2018. Os resultados indicam que diferentes indicadores compõe os construtos para cada setor analisado, indicando que o retorno tem associações diferentes em cada setor. O construto econômico-financeiro apresenta uma relação positiva na explicação dos retornos para os diferentes setores. Já o construto estratégico relacionou-se positivamente apenas no setor de Materiais Básicos. A dimensão macroeconômica apresentou resultados que evidenciam uma relação negativa com os retornos no período analisado. Assim pode-se apontar que o retorno de cada setor é explicado por diferentes informações, sugerindo que o investidor deve observar critérios específicos de cada setor. Os indicadores macroeconômicos foram similares para os setores analisados, contudo o impacto significativo não pode ser verificado para todos os setores, indicando que existem níveis de exposição diferentes para os setores. Ainda, foram evidenciados tanto efeitos diretos quanto indiretos dos indicadores macroeconômicos sobre o retorno. (shrink)

The necessity of a continuous creation by God, the need of a creation that is prolonged in the time, is an important issue in the Metaphysics of Descartes; for the being of the human conscience is not so persistent and so strong as the being of a really substance. The Cartesian cogito raises the problem of the weakness of this needy being: the distance between what is in each case thought, which is not temporal, and the thinking itself, which is (...) in the time. Descartes has very interesting observations about this theme. (shrink)

Comments on the paper: Pluralismo y absolutismo en la crítica. Dialéctica reflexiva y política democrática a partir de M. Horkheimer y Th. W. Adorno, by Emiliano Matías Gambarotta.

The 20th Century is the starting point for the most ambitious attempts to extrapolate human life into artificial systems. Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics, Claude Shannon’s Information Theory, John von Neumann’s Cellular Automata, Universal Constructor to the Turing Test, Artificial Intelligence to Maturana and Varela’s Autopoietic Organization, all shared the goal of understanding in what sense humans resemble a machine. This scientific and technological movement has embraced all disciplines without exceptions, not only mathematics and physics but also biology, sociology, psychology, economics etc. (...) New terms were developed, such as “information”, “organization”, “entropy”, “communication”, “encryption”, “computation” and “algorithmics” to mention a few, all which had an enormous impact on artificial systems. Our work follows this historical track but with a reversed order of priorities. Instead of deducing a reduced group of human acts into an artificial environment, we deduce the human aspects of machines by extrapolating algorithmic methodologies into everyday life acts. The present informational theories were insufficiently powered to achieve this objective without developing a new theoretical approach. Hence, our research is directed towards an expansion of the current informational theories. (shrink)

Luis de Lille es conocido por ser uno de los primeros vocalistas e intérpretes de un anime japonés de éxito mundial llamado Dragon Ball. En la entrevista que le realicé, le planteé unas preguntas que estaban relacionadas con el universo musical de esta serie animada. Sus respuestas consolidan un panorama sobre los requisitos indispensables para obtener un buen resultado en las adaptaciones y las interpretaciones que se hacen de las canciones que están en otros idiomas distintos del español. La (...) experiencia profesional que ha tenido en estudios de grabación y como músico perteneciente a bandas y grupos ha servido de base para explicar con pormenores esos componentes esenciales que deben estar incorporados en las canciones, tales como el respeto a la letra, la métrica, la melodía y la intensión. Para finiquitar, el cantante brinda una apreciación en torno a los fenómenos musicales que están surgiendo a partir del confinamiento, tales como la aparición curiosa de los fandubers y la realización de diferentes covers de la serie animada japonesa. (shrink)

On March 27, 1572 Fray Luis de Leon was imprisoned, among other reasons, because according to his informers, fray Luis, in addition to «be a friend of novelties» has argued that to understand the Sacred Scripture is not necessary the scholastic Theology. Fray Luis, who was always opposed to this view, will try to defend himself on the basis of the work De doctrina christiana of St.Augustine and putting forward that to correctly interpret Scripture is necessary the (...) scholastic Theology, but also other wisdoms such as history or language knowledge. (shrink)

This paper proposes to reconstruct Boaventura de Sousa Santos' conception of "epistemologies of the south" both (a) as a critical theory aiming at denouncing the impoverishment of the epistemic field entailed by the normative imposition of a certain model of knowledge (what we call "the monoculture of reason"), and (b) as a long-term political project of a harmonic coexistence of different epistemologies ("an ecology of knowledges").

Transdisciplinary research knits together knowledge from diverse epistemic communities in addressing social-environmental challenges, such as biodiversity loss, climate crises, food insecurity, and public health. This paper reflects on the roles of philosophy of science in transdisciplinary research while focusing on Indigenous and other subaltern forms of knowledge. We offer a critical assessment of demarcationist approaches in philosophy of science and outline a constructive alternative of transdisciplinary philosophy of science. While a demarcationist focus obscures the complex relations between epistemic communities, transdisciplinary (...) philosophy of science provides resources for meeting epistemic and political challenges of collaborative knowledge production. (shrink)

Foundational ontologies, central constructs in ontological investigations and engineering alike, are based on ontological categories. Firstly proposed by Aristotle as the very ur- elements from which the whole of reality can be derived, they are not easy to identify, let alone partition and/or hierarchize; in particular, the question of their number poses serious challenges. The late medieval philosopher Dietrich of Freiberg wrote around 1286 a tutorial that can help us today with this exceedingly difficult task. In this paper, I discuss (...) ontological categories and their importance for foundational ontologies from both the contemporary perspective and the original Aristotelian viewpoint, I provide the translation from the Latin into English of Dietrich's De origine II with an introductory elaboration, and I extract a foundational ontology–that is in fact a single-category one–from this text rooted in Dietrich's specification of types of subjecthood and his conception of intentionality as causal operation. (shrink)

Ontologies are some of the most central constructs in today's large plethora of knowledge technologies, namely in the context of the semantic web. As their coinage indicates, they are direct heirs to the ontological investigations in the long Western philosophical tradition, but it is not easy to make bridges between them. Contemporary ontological commitments often take causality as a central aspect for the ur-segregation of entities, especially in scientific upper ontologies; theories of causality and philosophical ontological investigations often go hand-in-hand, (...) and were essentially inseparable in medieval thought. This constitutes the foundation for a bridge, and this article analyzes the causality-based ontology of the late medieval philosopher Dietrich of Freiberg from the viewpoint of today's upper-ontology engineering. In this bridging attempt, it offers a translation into English of the first part of Dietrich's De origine (abbreviated title) that is a compromise between traditional scholarly translations of medieval Latin philosophical texts and contemporary ontology. (shrink)

La propuesta inmaterialista de Berkeley, elaborada definitivamente en sus Principles (1710), tiene como antecedente remoto los postulados del capadocio Gregorio de Nisa, quien en algunas de sus obras desarrolló argumentos, en relación con la materia, muy semejantes a los que planteó Berkeley casi catorce siglos después. El presente escrito tiene por objetivo mostrar que las concepciones de ambos pensadores tienen elementos en común, lo que permite sostener que el filósofo de Cesarea es un antecede lejano del inmaterialismo berkeleyano. // Berkeley's (...) immaterialism has as a remote antecedent in the postulates of the Cappadocian Gregory of Nyssa, who in some of his works developed arguments, concerning the matter, very similar to those that Berkeley presented almost fourteen centuries later. This paper aims to show that both philosophical conceptions have elements in common, which allows us to assert that the Cappadocian father is a distant precedent of Berkeley's immaterialism. (shrink)

Una investigación realizada en humanos ha desvelado la existencia de ciertas variantes genéticas en la conformación del gen AVPR1A que se traducirían en una mayor o menor disposición y aptitud hacia la vida en pareja. Eso significa que la actividad de ese gen influiría en la calidad de la vida conyugal y muy probablemente interferiría en la orientación de nuestro mundo afectivo.

In the following pages, the main proposal is to indicate how Max Weber has dialogued directly with some prerogatives from Kant’s Critic of practical Reason, following the reception of Wilhelm Windelband’s concept of “responsibility” (Verantwortlichkeit) and his theory of values. In sight of these influences, in this paper will be argued how Weber adherence to the neo-Kantian value concept has made possible a review on the categorical imperatives, which has turned his reading from Kantian philosophy to the proposal of an (...) antinomy between the ethic of conviction and the ethic of responsibility inside the Kantian moral maxims. -/- Nessa abordagem será proposto que a recepção de Max Weber do conceito de “responsabilidade” (Verantwortlichkeit) de Wilhelm Windelband, bem como sua revisão de certos elementos da filosofia dos valores neokantiana do sudoeste da Alemanha, permitiram que Weber estabelecesse um diálogo mais direto com os pressupostos de Kant em sua Crítica da razão prática. Em vista dessas influências, o presente artigo argumentará que a maneira como Weber revisa os imperativos categóricos direcionou sua compreensão da filosofia kantiana pelo conceito de “valores”, o permitindo ainda, propor a existência de uma antinomia entre a ética da convicção e da responsabilidade no interior das máximas morais kantianas. (shrink)

The tragic death in Tolstoy's writings has helped both Max Weber and György Lukács in characterizing the modern pathos as a tragic contemplation of the emptiness of life. Through Tolstoy's readings, Weber and Lukács found an interesting source of denying arts and modern sciences autonomy, considering, from the aesthetics sphere, the meaningless of this new immanent reality. Both has assumed Tolstoy main theme from the same perspective, contrasting ancient and modern worldviews. Max Weber presented this theme in his disenchantment of (...) world theory and Lukács, in a very similar way, following the paradox of religious needing as a mainline. -/- O tema da morte trágica, presente nos escritos de Liev Tolstói, auxiliou tanto a Max Weber como a György Lukács a caracterizarem o pathos moderno de pressentimento da morte como uma contemplação do vazio. Weber e Lukács encontraram, através das leituras de Tolstói, uma interessante maneira de questionar a autonomia da arte e da ciência moderna, considerando pela esfera estética, como se mostra sem sentido a recente realidade imanente. Ambos assumiram o tema central das obras de Tolstói segundo uma mesma imagem, derivada do contraste entre o mundo antigo e o moderno. Max Weber adequou esse tema a sua teoria do desencantamento do mundo e Lukács, de modo muito semelhante, seguindo seu conceito do paradoxo da necessidade religiosa. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to advance the idea according to which the Cartesian Cogito, the ground of modern philosophy and the source of the notion of thinking subject, is tributary of a certain method whose legitimation is grounded in western history. According to this hypothesis, there is a certain tool that plays a fundamental role in the production of this new philosophical notion: the dream. The argument will be developed in four parts. We will first proceed to (i) (...) an analysis of the role of the hypothesis of the dream in the formulation of the notion of res cogitans, what will bring us to (ii) an exploration of the conception of private world supposed by such a hypothesis so as to (iii) clarify the specificity of the Cartesian notion of knowledge, a knowledge that must be acquirable in a dream; in conclusion (iv) we will indicate in a schematic way the historic-cultural anchor of the Cartesian dream where the subject is originated. (shrink)

This paper explores the contrast between two meanings of thinking: (i) one implied by the Cartesian and Kantian philosophy, the two thinkers that have arguably the deepest influence on the constellation of Western philosophical problems and (ii) another implied by the philosophical-anthropological project of the Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. The thesis here defended is that, in the Cartesian and Kantian philosophy, thinking is related to ruling and legislating over the experience through concepts, while in Viveiros de Castros' theoretical (...) enterprise, thinking is rather to explore the limits of conceptual constructions when confronted with the experience of alterity. (shrink)

En The paradox of Addition and its dissolution (1969), Mario Bunge presenta algunos argumentos para mostrar que la Regla de Adición puede ocasionar paradojas o problemas semánticos. Posteriormente, Margáin (1972) y Robles (1976) mostraron que las afirmaciones de Bunge son insostenibles, al menos desde el punto de vista de la lógica clásica. Aunque estamos de acuerdo con las críticas de Margáin y Robles, no estamos de acuerdo en el diagnóstico del origen del problema y tampoco con la manera en la (...) que se proponen solucionarlo. En esta medida, en este texto mostraremos cómo la Regla de Adición sí trae problemas semánticos que pueden ser planteados desde diferentes perspectivas contemporáneas, como la extensionalidad del condicional, los principios proscriptivos y la validez conexiva. (shrink)

Discussion about one of my papers on Berkeley and reply to Téllez.

Voltaire has presented in his Letters on the English different themes, from religious ethics, literacy, politics, to dramas and science. The letters present us a comparison between England and France. In this parallel we shall present how Voltaire was concerned in evaluate a high standard of taste and refinements. This paper will review some of the last letters of those, which testify about this criterion of taste as a modern point of view. We shall present in Voltaire the eminence of (...) modernity in taste, refinements and on liberty of enjoying the ecstasies of a cosmopolitan life fulfilled with entertainments and luxury. We shall present how Voltaire fought against barbarism in benefit of civilization and some how against religiosity in benefit of an ethic hedonism. (shrink)

This article intend to elucidate how Wilhelm Windelband employed the Kantian critic method without devoid its typical features, going through this, what is fundamental for the approach from speculative reason to practical reason would be identified. We understand that practical reason, as a theoretical interest, is prefigured on the first critic, and that the Kantian system suffers mutations until his second critic formulation. Windelband’s critical view, can offer the tips of how to interpreter Kant’s passage from speculative to practical reason, (...) observing the elements witch are kept, as constant elements, the third antinomy for stance, and witch one changes among the course, as the ideas of liberty and nature in both theoretical and practical sense. Windelband can unfold to notice those variations and help to understand them in the development of Kantian theories as elements not contradictories with the canon of speculative reason. (shrink)