Introducción -- Capítulo I Antecedentes y contexto -- Capítulo II Concepto de democracia y república -- Capítulo III Concepto de providencia y progreso -- Capítulo IV Relación e interacción de los conceptos.

En el presente artículo intentaré desarrollar algunas glosas marginales a un comentario de Walter Benjamin sobre el poema de Bertold Brecht “Del niño que no quería bañarse”. El comentario de Benjamin parte del gusto por la mugre para recuperar el pensamiento de Charles Fourier y su perspectiva de un trabajo lúdico. Intentaré mostrar cómo, a partir de la recepción del pensamiento de Fourier, el comentario de Benjamin sobre el poema de Brecht establece profundos vínculos entre la liberación del trabajo (...) y la transformación radical del vínculo de los seres humanos con los no humanos. Este vínculo permitirá proponer interesantes diálogos entre el pensamiento benjaminiano, la tradición utópica socialista, los nuevos materialismos y el pensamiento ecológico. (shrink)

La propuesta de una democracia radical condice con una concepción en la que el poder aparece como un «lugar vacío». Esto significa, que el lugar de la universalidad, que ocupaba la clase obrera en la teoría de Marx, es sustituido por una práctica articulatoria política, la cual se convierte en la encargada de brindar una unidad momentánea y parcial a los elementos fragmentarios de una estructura social abierta y dislocada (plural).

Complexe significabilia are the significate of whole sentences, irreducible to what is signified by categorematic sub-sentential components. It has been propounded firstly by Adam Wodeham. Wodeham construes his argument for the postulation of complexe significabilia as a middle way between William of Ockham and Walter Chatton. According to Wodeham, Ockham’s view implies a reflexive theory of mental acts, which goes against the phenomenology of the act of assent. Moreover, it leads to an anti-realist epistemology. We need therefore things outside (...) the mind to be object of the act of assent, which is also the conclusion reached by Chatton. However, against Chatton, Wodeham argues that things signified by the categorematic component of sentences cannot be the object of assent. In effect, sentences with different syncategorematic structures, but with the same categorematic components, would correspond to the same propositional attitude in Chatton’s framework, which is an unwelcome consequence. The result is that we need to postulate that the objects of assent are outside the mind, contra Ockham, that are not signified by sentential categorematic components, contra Chatton, but are irreducibly signified by the whole sentences. (shrink)

Essays by Ernesto Buonaiuti, Friedrich Dessauer, C. G. Jung, Werner Kaegi, C. Kerényi, Paul Masson-Oursel, Fritz Meier, Adolf Portmann, Max Pulver, Hugo Rahner, Erwin Schrödinger, and Walter Wili.

Adamson argues that Marxism "teaches us how to interpret social and historical reality, and to relate that interpretation to our current political concerns.".

Helmut Fleischer has distinguished three different approaches to history in the development of Marx's thinking: the "anthropological" , the "pragmatological" , and the "nomological" . However, these represent a less continuous and coherent development than Fleischer claims. The 1857 Introduction to the Grundrisse can be instanced as a fourth view, more focused than the others on historiography, and at variance with what Marx says elsewhere. The sequence and overlapping of these four views call into question both the interpretation of Marx's (...) development as smoothly continuous and the interpretation of his development as "ruptured" into "early" and "late.". (shrink)

How can Africans escape the control of the complex power relationships established during Colonization and successfully achieve self-development? More importantly, and the primary concern of this book, can African female characters ever hope to arrive at such individuation given the dual challenges of the power structures defined and enforced by European colonizers and the patriarchal structures that contort issues related to gender? Tracing Personal Expansion reads late 20th Century works by African female novelists Buchi Emecheta, Tsitsi Dangarembga, and Calixthe Beyala (...) as modern Bildungsromane, novels of self-development, to reveal the dynamics, complexities, and challenges the characters and authors experience. By exploring the possibility of self-development in African female protagonists, this engrossing work augments existing feminist critiques that have analyzed the possibilities and potentials for the individuation of mostly Western, mostly European female characters. (shrink)

In this radical reinterpretation of Aristotle's Metaphysics, Walter E. Wehrle demonstrates that developmental theories of Aristotle are based on a faulty assumption: that the fifth chapter of Categories is an early theory of metaphysics that Aristotle later abandoned.

Presently, there are two views of human history vying for our allegiance. The one is grounded in the Enlightenment and insists that history is a closed process whose course is determined by the dictum that “might makes right.” The other view is that of supernaturalism, which regards every event in history as a direct act of God. Challenging both of these views is the prophetic construal of history. This construal dares to identify extraordinary human events—the promise of Isaac to Abraham (...) and Sarah, the exodus, the pronouncements of Israel's great prophets, and the ministry of Jesus—as acts of God. Such extraordinary events have the power to free us to speak of God as enacting “newness” also in our time. (shrink)

The author defends the anti-representationalist claim that the formation of the proper names (and as a consequence – scientific terms or notions) cannot happen through certain ostensive pointing at some objects given here and now (like in B. Russell’s theory) or through perceptions which are generalized inductively or by means of Kantian apperception or Anschauung. In order to answer the question about the concepts formation we have to take into account the historical and socio-cultural background of the genesis of proper (...) names which form the foundation and boundary of all classifications including the scientific ones. The author claims that there is an important difference between a personal belief or propositional knowledge and some implicit or background knowledge of the language community in its historical development. The first one could be evaluated on its truth / falseness. The second one however – being the foundation for the first one – cannot be evaluated in this manner. It simply is as it is. (shrink)

I present two logical systems to show the “analogy of proportionality„ common to several interpretations: modality (necessity and possibility), quantification, truth-functional relations, moral attitudes (deontic logic), states of knowledge (epistemic logic), and states of belief (doxastic logic). To display the two underlying analogical relations, I call upon the originally Scholastic convention, recently put to use again, of using squares, hexagons, and octagons “of opposition„. A combined epistemic–deontic logic happens to be found in the traditional “probabilist„ theory of the “good conscience„, (...) and I shall then briefly explain how this is so. (shrink)

On s’interroge, dans ce livre, sur la façon dont les peuples sont représentés : question indissolublement esthétique et politique. Les peuples aujourd’hui semblent exposés plus qu’ils ne l’ont jamais été. Ils sont, en réalité, sous-exposés dans l’ombre de leurs mises sous censure ou – pour un résultat d’invisibilité équivalent – sur-exposés dans la lumière artificielle de leurs mises en spectacle. Bref ils sont, comme trop souvent, exposés à disparaître. À partir des exigences formulées par Walter Benjamin (une histoire ne (...) vaut que si elle donne voix aux « sans noms ») ou par Hannah Arendt (une politique ne vaut que si elle fait surgir ne fût-ce qu’une « parcelle d’humanité »), on interroge ici les conditions d’une possible représentation des peuples. Cela passe moins par l’histoire du portrait de groupe hollandais et des « portraits de troupes » totalitaires que par l’attention spécifique accordée aux « petits peuples » par les poètes (Villon, Hugo, Baudelaire par exemple), les peintres (Rembrandt, Goya ou Gustave Courbet), les photographes (Walker Evans, August Sander ou, pour un exemple contemporain, Philippe Bazin). Le cinéma, quant à lui, nomme figurants ces « petits peuples » devant lesquels agissent et s’agitent les « acteurs principaux », les stars comme on dit. D’où que les figurants incarnent un enjeu crucial, historique et politique, du cinéma lui-même, depuis sa naissance – La Sortie des usines Lumière – jusqu’à ses élaborations modernes chez Eisenstein et Rossellini, et bien au-delà encore. Une longue analyse est ici consacrée au travail de Pier Paolo Pasolini, à sa façon de retrouver les « peuples perdus » dans leurs « gestes survivants », selon un processus que permettent d’éclairer les analyses d’Erich Auerbach (pour les formes poétiques), d’Aby Warburg (pour les formes visuelles) et d’Ernesto De Martino (pour les formes sociales). Sans oublier quelques exemples plus contemporains, tel que le film du Chinois Wang Bing intitulé, précisément, L’Homme sans nom. (shrink)

The economically successful model of industrial agriculture that is currently expanding throughout Argentina is leading to deep social, economic, environmental, and logistical changes that are seriously restricting the sustainability of the rural, urban and environmental systems. The transformation of activities, the arrival of new technologies, the arrival of organizations with large financial and technological capabilities, the displacement of hundreds of thousands of small-scale and medium-scale farmers and their reallocation to new productive functions are not only affecting the social sustainability of (...) the rural sector but are affecting the urban communal plots of villages and towns located on the Chacopampeana Plain. Now, the production of agrofuels as a response to international global demand will promote the ecological and social depletion that Argentina has been facing from the beginning of the 1990s. We argue in terms of ecological economics that externalities should be included in the costs of companies, not just economic costs. (shrink)