Si no me falla la memoria, fue el dibujante Álvaro Barrios quien afirmó que el trabajo del artista contemporáneo colombiano se desarrolla según una agenda de trabajo. Si miramos algunos fenómenos del arte último en Colombia, podemos señalar que su agenda está determinada por el intento de comprensión de los procesos de la violencia en el país, a partir de una amplia gama de aproximaciones al concepto de memoria que ha tenido resonancia en las disciplinas humanísticas, las investigaciones académicas, (...) el uso político del concepto por parte de la legislación estatal, y una gran diversidad de eventos artísticos. Desde el ámbito del arte, exposiciones como Destierro y reparación (2008), Tapices de Mampuján (2010), La guerra que no hemos visto (2009) o La piel de la memoria (2011), han discutido sobre la violencia en Colombia desde la aproximación a los procesos de comprensión de la memoria y nuestro pasado reciente. Así, la imbricación de violencia y memoria se manifiesta en la visión del pasado y en los efectos que este puede desplegar sobre el presente, en tanto se ha considerado, incluso, a la memoria como una instancia de reconciliación social. (shrink)

Este artículo explora algunas de las relaciones entre dialéctica y filosofía dentro del programa de una dialéctica modificada de Theodor W. Adorno ¿Cómo pensar la tensión entre las categorías dialécticas y la filosofía desde el prisma de una dialéctica negativa? ¿Qué significa desde el pensamiento de Adorno a liberar a la filosofía y a la dialéctica de su carácter afirmativo? Elaborar estas preguntas es el objetivo de este trabajo.

RESUMEN La modificación de la dialéctica que propone el planteamiento de Adorno despliega una crítica inmanente del principio identificatorio que emerge del conflicto entre componente somático y concepto, entre lo idéntico y lo no idéntico. Ello resulta fundamental para comprender la dominación como segunda naturaleza en las formaciones económico-sociales modernas/coloniales. En este trabajo proponemos, en primer lugar, examinar críticamente las relaciones de alteridad que estructuran la experiencia de lo político al interior de la modernidad/colonialidad, y la configuración de la subjetividad (...) en términos sociohistóricos. En segundo lugar, se explora, desde un abordaje decolonial del horizonte analítico de Adorno, la constelación de mecanismos ideológicos vinculados al principio identitario que se condensa en la alteridad colonial, y que, como exponemos en este análisis, convergen finalmente en una metafísica del exterminio, en donde lo particular resulta subsumido por lo universal, y, que se efectualiza como una matriz de dominación en la que se articulan la experiencia de lo abyecto y los procesos de estereotipia que vertebran la construcción simbólica y racial de América. ABSTRACT The modification of dialectics proposed by Adorno's approach displays an immanent critique of the identifying principle that emerges from the conflict between the somatic component and the concept, between identity and non-identity. This is essential to understand domination as second nature in modern/colonial social economic formations. In this paper, we propose, first of all, to critically examine the relationships of alterity that structure the experience of the political within modernity/ coloniality, and the sociohistorical configuration of subjectivity. Secondly, from a decolonial approach to Adorno's analytical horizon, we explore the constellation of ideological mechanisms linked to the identity principle that are condensed in colonial alterity, and, that, as we expose in this analysis, finally converge in a metaphysics of extermination, where the particular is subsumed by the universal, which is carried out as a matrix of domination in which the experience of the abject and the stereotyping processes that structure the symbolic and racial construction of America are articulated. (shrink)

This article addresses the relationships between dialectic and learning within the constellations of the conceptual universes of Adorno and Vygotsky. In that order, we proceed to analyze the set of links between the main dialectical categories that structure the dialectical approach that characterizes both representatives of the Marxist thought tradition (process, totality, mediation, fields of force, antagonism, praxis) and the communicating vessels that go from epistemology to aesthetics and that demonstrate the relevance of the tasks of thought in the face (...) of social transformation. Finally, the article addresses the question of an (im)possible analytical horizon that arises, from both thinkers, to emphatically think about social emancipation and its challenges today. (shrink)

La modificación de la dialéctica que propone el planteamiento de Adorno despliega una crítica inmanente del principio identificatorio que emerge del conflicto entre componente somático y concepto, entre lo idéntico y lo no idéntico. Ello resulta fundamental para comprender la dominación como segunda naturaleza en las formaciones económico-sociales modernas/coloniales. En este trabajo proponemos, en primer lugar, examinar críticamente las relaciones de alteridad que estructuran la experiencia de lo político al interior de la modernidad/colonialidad, y la configuración de la subjetividad en (...) términos sociohistóricos. En segundo lugar, se explora, desde un abordaje decolonial del horizonte analítico de Adorno, la constelación de mecanismos ideológicos vinculados al principio identitario que se condensa en la alteridad colonial, y que, como exponemos en este análisis, convergen finalmente en una metafísica del exterminio, en donde lo particular resulta subsumido por lo universal, y, que se efectualiza como una matriz de dominación en la que se articulan la experiencia de lo abyecto y los procesos de estereotipia que vertebran la construcción simbólica y racial de América. (shrink)

Este ensayo no es una interpretación metafísica del universo, sino de una interpretación científica, en donde la física contemporánea aparece como un sistema evolutivo y el universo como un sistema en expansión. Se pretende simplemente �averiguar si la imagen del universo físico que se forma la ciencia actual reclama o conduce a admitir la existencia de una realidad propia en y por sí misma, distinta realmente del universo y sin la cuál éste no podría existir ni ser lo que es�(A. (...) González). (shrink)

Se describe, desde una perspectiva histórica, el proceso institucional y legal de los estudios generales en Perú en el último siglo, tomado en cuenta sus contextos políticos e intelectuales. También se reflexiona sobre la dimensión humanista de los estudios generales y la razón de ser de la educación universitaria.

Dialogue between the Greeks and the contemporary way of thought.

When blame is understood to be emotion-based or affective, its emotional tone is standardly identified as one of anger. We argue that this conception of affective blame is overly restrictive. By attending to cases of blame that emerge against a background of a particular kind of hope invested in others, we identify a blaming response characterized not by anger but by sadness: reactive disappointment. We develop an account of reactive disappointment as affective blame, maintaining that while angry blame and disappointed (...) blame are both condemnatory responses, they have distinct evaluative foci and occupy different but complementary roles in our accountability practices. (shrink)

While epistemologists have long debated what it takes for beliefs to be justified, they've devoted much less collective attention to the question of what it takes for beliefs to be excused, and how excuses differ from justifications. This stands in contrast to the state of affairs in legal scholarship, where the contrast between justifications and excuses is a standard topic in introductory criminal law textbooks. My goal in this paper is to extract some lessons from legal theory for epistemologists seeking (...) to distinguish epistemic justifications from epistemic excuses. First, I'll provide a brief overview of appeals to the justification/excuse distinction in epistemology, focusing on the internalism/externalism debate. Then, I'll identify some choice points in legal theory for how to think about the function of the justification/excuse distinction, and will in turn correspond to analogous choice points in epistemology. Ultimately, I'll argue that depending on which way we go at some crucial junctures, we can motivate either a traditional, non‐factive, internalist conception of justification, or a purely factive one where truth is all that's required for a belief to be justified. But there's no clear path, via legal theory, to view that only beliefs that amount to knowledge are justified. (shrink)

While Strawsonians have focused on the way in which our “reactive attitudes”—the emotions through which we hold one another responsible for manifestations of morally significant quality of regard—express moral demands, serious doubt has been cast on the idea that non-blaming reactive attitudes direct moral demands to their targets. Building on Gary Watson’s proposal that the reactive attitudes are ‘forms of moral address’, this paper advances a communicative view of praise according to which the form of moral address distinctive of the (...) praise-manifesting reactive attitudes (approbation, gratitude) is moral invitation. Like moral demand, moral invitation is a species of directive address presupposing its target’s possession of distinctive agential capacities and, when valid, provides its addressee with reason to give the addressor’s directive discursive uptake. While blame’s demands issue imperatival reasons for compliance (e.g. to acknowledge wrongdoing, apologize, etc.), praise’s invitations provide discretionary reasons to accept credit in jointly valuing the significance of the act for the praiser. In addition to its phenomenological plausibility and contribution to the already fecund Watsonian-cum-Strawsonian program, the invitational view helps render intelligible the power of our praise practices to facilitate the formation and enrichment of our interpersonal relationships. (shrink)

I argue that semantics is the study of the proprietary database of a centrally inaccessible and informationally encapsulated input–output system. This system’s role is to encode and decode partial and defeasible evidence of what speakers are saying. Since information about nonlinguistic context is therefore outside the purview of semantic processing, a sentence’s semantic value is not its content but a partial and defeasible constraint on what it can be used to say. I show how to translate this thesis into a (...) detailed compositional-semantic theory based on the influential framework of Heim and Kratzer. This approach situates semantics within an independently motivated account of human cognitive architecture and reveals the semantics–pragmatics interface to be grounded in the underlying interface between modular and central systems. (shrink)

This paper argues that praise is governed by a norm of standing, namely the evaluative commitment condition. Even when the target of praise is praiseworthy and known to be so by the praiser, praise can be inappropriate owing to the praiser’s lacking the relevant evaluative commitment. I propose that uncommitted praisers lack the standing to praise in that, owing to their lack of commitment to the relevant value, they have not earned the right to host the co-valuing that is the (...) communicative aim of praise. (shrink)

One way of being responsible for an action is being praiseworthy for it. But what is the “praise” of which the praiseworthy agent is worthy? This paper provides a survey of answers to this question, i.e. a survey of possible accounts of praise’s nature. It then presents an overview of candidate norms governing our responses of praise. By attending to praise’s nature and appropriateness conditions, we stand to acquire a richer conception of what it is to be, and to regard (...) another as, a responsible agent. (shrink)

There’s a certain pleasure in fantasizing about possessing knowledge, especially possessing secret knowledge to which outsiders don’t have access. Such fantasies are typically a source of innocent entertainment. However, under the right conditions, fantasies of knowledge can become epistemically dangerous, because they can generate illusions of genuine knowledge. I argue that this phenomenon helps to explain why some people join and eventually adopt the beliefs of epistemic communities who endorse seemingly bizarre, outlandish claims, such as extreme cults and online conspiracy (...) theory groups. It can be difficult to grasp how members of such groups come to believe the theories they endorse. I argue that one route to such beliefs is via deep absorption in fantasies of knowledge, which can lead entire groups to become collectively detached from reality. (shrink)

It has long been recognized that we have a great deal of freedom to imagine what we choose. This paper explores a thesis—what we call “intentionalism (about the imagination)”—that provides a way of making this evident (if vague) truism precise. According to intentionalism, the contents of your imaginings are simply determined by whatever contents you intend to imagine. Thus, for example, when you visualize a building and intend it to be of King’s College rather than a replica of the college (...) you have imagined the former rather than the latter because you intended to imagine King’s College. This is so even if the visual image you conjure up equally resembles either. This paper proposes two kinds of counterexamples to intentionalism and discusses their significance. In particular, it sketches a positive account of how many sensory imaginings get to be about what they are about, which explains how the causal history of our mental imagery can prevent us from succeeding in imagining what we intended. (shrink)

The rapid development of artificial womb technologies means that we must consider if and when it is permissible to kill the human subject of ectogestation—recently termed a ‘gestateling’ by Elizabeth Chloe Romanis—prior to ‘birth’. We describe the act of deliberately killing the gestateling as gestaticide, and argue that there are good reasons to maintain that gestaticide is morally equivalent to infanticide, which we consider to be morally impermissible. First, we argue that gestaticide is harder to justify than abortion, primarily because (...) the gestateling is completely independent of its biological parents. Second, we argue that gestaticide is morally equivalent to infanticide. To demonstrate this, we explain that gestatelings are born in a straightforward sense, which entails that killing them is infanticide. However, to strengthen our overall claim, we also show that if gestatelings are not considered to have been born, killing them is still equivalent to killing neonates with congenital anomalies and disabilities, which again is infanticide. We conclude by considering how our discussion of gestaticide has implications for the permissibility of withdrawing life-sustaining treatment from gestatelings. (shrink)

What makes it the case that an utterance constitutes an illocutionary act of a given kind? This is the central question of speech-act theory. Answers to it—i.e., theories of speech acts—have proliferated. Our main goal in this chapter is to clarify the logical space into which these different theories fit. -/- We begin, in Section 1, by dividing theories of speech acts into five families, each distinguished from the others by its account of the key ingredients in illocutionary acts. Are (...) speech acts fundamentally a matter of convention or intention? Or should we instead think of them in terms of the psychological states they express, in terms of the effects that it is their function to produce, or in terms of the norms that govern them? In Section 2, we take up the highly influential idea that speech acts can be understood in terms of their effects on a conversation’s context or “score”. Part of why this idea has been so useful is that it allows speech-act theorists from the five families to engage at a level of abstraction that elides their foundational disagreements. In Section 3, we investigate some of the motivations for the traditional distinction between propositional content and illocutionary force, and some of the ways in which this distinction has been undermined by recent work. In Section 4, we survey some of the ways in which speech-act theory has been applied to issues outside semantics and pragmatics, narrowly construed. (shrink)

After presenting a simple expressivist account of reports of probabilistic judgements, I explore a classic problem for it, namely the Frege-Geach problem. I argue that it is a problem not just for expressivism but for any reasonable account of ascriptions of graded judgements. I suggest that the problem can be resolved by appropriately modelling imprecise credences.

A Theory of Shopping offers a highly original perspective on one of our most basic everyday activities - shopping. We commonly assume that shopping is primarily concerned with individuals and materialism. But Miller rejects this assumption and follows the surprising route of analysing shopping by means of an analogy with anthropological studies of sacrificial ritual. He argues that the act of purchasing goods is almost always linked to other social relations, and most especially those based on love and care. The (...) ethnographic sections of the book are based on a year's study of shopping on a street in North London. This provides the basis for a sensitive description of the issues the shopper confronts when making decisions as to what to buy. Miller develops a theory to account for these observations, arguing that shopping typically consists of three major stages which reflect the three key stages of many rites of sacrifice. In both shopping and sacrifice the ultimate intention is to constitute others as desiring subjects. Finally the book examines certain historical shifts in both subjects and objects of devotion, in particular, ideals of gender and love. This treatment of shopping from the perspective of comparative anthropology represents a highly innovative approach to one of the most familiar tasks of our daily lives. Written in a clear and accessible manner, this book will be of interest to students and academics in anthropology, sociology and cultural studies, as well as anybody who wants to consider more deeply the nature of their own everyday activities. (shrink)

Asumimos el problema de la singularidad como categoría filosófica aplicado en las principales variables metafísicas de Platón; primero en su expresión trascendentista, que supone la lectura de las Formas eternas como entidades singulares: luego, en su redimensión en el llamado período crítico, donde se presenta nuestro concepto de manera negativa, como un propiciador de aporías: y, finalmente, en una suerte de lugar intermedio, constituido sobre todo a partir de la ambigua posición de las obras finales del pensador, que sustentan tanto (...) la identidad absoluta de lo metafísica cuanto su traslado a las entidades determinadas. Nuestra idea básica es que la singularidad constituye uno de los aspectos más completos y ricos en posibilidades de la teoría platónica de las Formas, al punto de justificar una evolución de la doctrina, sea desde el punto de vista de su expresión, o desde lo más hondo de su pensamiento. (shrink)

Se hace una revisión del uso e implicaciones de la expresión Ka fKaoTov en buena parte de la obra aristotélica -interesan de manera especial en este estudio los tratados que conforman el Organon, pero sin dejar de lado textos ontológicos, cosmológicos, éticos, políticos y biológicos del filósofo-. Dicha fórmula designa al individuo en la lógica discursiva del Estagirita, pero los modos en que se va comprendiendo no son completamente congruentes; así, se pasa de un singularismo, que supone una identidad única (...) e insustituible, por ende incognoscible por parte de la ciencia. a un particularismo, esto es, una visión desde una perspectiva universalista que convierte a los individuos en partícipes de condiciones comunes, con lo cual los problemas cognitivos se solventan, aunque la potencia de la individuación, que podría estar en su pretendida singularidad, queda suspendida. Es pretensión fundamental de este trabajo mostrar cómo en el aristotelismo hay una fuerte tendencia universalista como fórmula para solventar las aporías que surgen de la individuación, y que por ende es el formalismo, surgido en el platonismo sin duda, el que habrá de definir los modos por excelencia de acceso a lo real tangible. (shrink)

Se parte de la idea de que el mundo platónico no es el de las ideas sino el que se capta desde la sensibilidad. En el plano histórico-filosófico se recurre a los pitagóricos, aunque el autor no acoje en su totalidad la idea de que sólo los números resuelven la cuestión del mundo. A cambio, apela a una escala musical, propendiendo hacia una estética de lo sublime que exalta la sensilbilidad, la cual irrumpe con una nueva racionalidad en conflicto con (...) la logicidad de las palabras. Por esta razón, los artistas son un paso imprescindible, y con ellos la determinación de la naturaleza del fenómeno artístico. Así se introduce la música para acompañar la comprensión de Platón, y se afirma que el arte del demiurgo no es otro que el de un músico matemático. (shrink)

La noción de tiempo y la idea de historia que surgieron después de la revolución científica y de la ilustración, fueron claramente secularizadas. Consideramos, de forma conjetural y exploratoria, que estas concepciones de tiempo y de historia, en su desarrollo y evolución final, ha tenido efectos sobre la formulación de una posible condición transhumana de nuestra especie.

Negli ultimi anni le ricerche sulla civiltà rupestre del Mezzogiorno medioevale, in seguito agli studi innovativi di Cosimo Damiano Fonseca, hanno condotto alla rivisitazione, attraverso approcci nuovi e con l'ausilio di strumenti sofisticati, di questo fenomeno nelle sue varie sfaccettature. Se, a partire soprattutto dalla fine dell'800, gli studiosi avevano rivolto i loro interessi in specie alle cappelle rupestri e alla loro decorazione pittorica, ovvero all'aspetto, in apparenza il più eclatante, dell'abitato rupestre, di recente l'attenzione si è focalizzata intorno allo (...) studio del paesaggio rupestre stesso e ai suoi valori, inteso come modello insediativo non certamente alternativo, né inferiore, a quello urbano, bensì come elemento specifico all'interno della complessa realtà dell'insediamento umano delle regioni meridionali e della Sicilia tra Tarda Antichità e Medioevo. (shrink)

Se ensaya un concepto de filosofía en el platonismo a la luz de los alcances del Banquete y el Fedro. Se pone especial énfasis en la problemática naturaleza de los objetos últimos del conocimiento, los cuales, vistos desde una perspectiva conceptual, deberían impedir un estricto acceso racional, bajo el supuesto de que se constituyen como entidades puras y singulares y, por ello, incomprensibles e imponderables, solo accesibles a quien entra en el juego de su religiosidad. Vista la necesidad, con todo, (...) de alcanzar tales metas con una perspectiva epistémica, el filósofo, que aquí se ve sobre todo como un pensador que se arriesga desde la estética, haría lo posible por transgredir los derroteros mistéricos que suponen aquellas, creyendo posible establecer mediaciones racionales para su aprehensión, es decir, abrir espacios hermenéuticos que nos permitan tener tales entidades a nuestra vera. (shrink)