Scepticism has been one of the standard problems of epistemology in modern times. It takes various forms – the most general one being the thesis that knowledge is impossible; but equally prominent are such versions as the notorious doubt about the existence of an external world, inaugurated by Descartes'Meditations, or doubts about the existence of objective values. Philosophers who undertake to refute scepticism – still a very popular exercise – try to show that knowledge is possible after all, or to (...) prove the existence of an external world, and so on. Sceptics, generally speaking, are seen as radical doubters – philosophers who call into question assumptions that are usually taken for granted by ordinary people as well as by other philosophers. Those doubts have to be refuted by showing that they are in some way unjustified. (shrink)

Karl Popper’s Objective Knowledge stands at the threshold of his last major philosophical phase, the period from his retirement from the London School of Economics in 1969 until his death in 1994. The two great books that he wrote before he came to London, Logik der Forschung and The Open Society and Its Enemies, contain much more than the innovations in the theory of scientific method and the theory of democracy for which they are famous. Logik der Forschung, translated into (...) English as The Logic of Scientific Discovery, is by no means just a tract, even a revolutionary one, on the methods of science, since about one third of the text is devoted to searchingly original treatments of the frequency theory of probability and of the interpretation of quantum mechanics, whilst the unpublished manuscript on which the book was based, Die beiden Grundprobleme der Erkenntnistheorie, at whose content it often hints, presents a wealth of significant material on the psychology of human learning and its biological context. Popper had, after all, been a student of Karl B¨uhler, and had absorbed the theories of problem solving developed within the W¨urzburg School. The Open Society and Its Enemies, for its part, is not so much a book defending democratic liberalism as a defence of democratic liberalism nestling within a book that discusses every other topic under the sun. It offers profound and provocative studies of the thought of Plato and Marx, an abundance of scholarly, if often controversial, historical interpretations of the work of Heraclitus, Aristotle, Hegel, J. S. Mill, Wittgenstein, Mannheim, and others, the elements of a new theory of rationality, and many elucidations of the workings of science that go beyond what is explicit in Logik der Forschung. One insight worth mentioning, since it is little known, is the clear recognition in section II of Chapter 11 that most important advances in science are revolutionary, not cumulative; a commonplace today perhaps, but one that many philosophers attribute to Kuhn. Another insight, also often forgotten, is the emphasis in Chapter 23 on the social character of science, which acts as the main custodian of its claim to objectivity. (shrink)

Auf der Arbeitstagung der Deutschen Gesellschaft fur Soziologie im Oktober 1961 hielten Karl R. Popper und Theodor W. Adorno Referate zur -Logik der Sozialwissenschaften-. Dies leitete den -Positivismusstreit- in der deutschen Soziologie ein, an dem sich prominent vor allem Jurgen Habermas auf Seiten der Kritischen Theorie der Frankfurter Schule und Hans Albert auf Seiten des Kritischen Rationalismus beteiligten. Der daraus entstandene Sammelband, der 1969 kurz vor dem Tod Adornos erschien, wurde im deutschen Sprachraum viel gelesen und diskutiert. Das -Adorno-Jahr- 2003 (...) und das -Popper-Jahr- 2004 gaben Anlass, sich mit den Fragen erneut auseinander zu setzen, die der Positivismusstreit aufgeworfen hat, und sie aus heutiger Sicht neu zu beleuchten. Dies wurde in den Referaten eines Symposiums der Karl Popper Foundation Klagenfurt unternommen. Dieser Sammelband beinhaltet die uberarbeiteten Referate dieses Symposiums. In ihnen werden die methodologische, die politische und die soziologische Dimension der damaligen Auseinandersetzungen mit heute dominierenden Themen und Positionen konfrontiert, was bisher in der einschlagigen wissenschaftlichen Diskussion nicht erfolgt ist.". (shrink)

Dieses Buch beleuchtet die Aktualitat der Philosophie Karl Poppers, des Kritischen Rationalismus, aus dem Gesichtspunkt verschiedener Disziplinen. Den Schwerpunkt bilden Weiterentwicklungen von Fragestellungen der Wissenschafts- und Erkenntnistheorie und der politischen und Sozialphilosophie, denen sich Popper vorwiegend widmete. Daruber hinaus nimmt auch die Ethik einen wichtigen Platz ein, weil Poppers Denken normativ gepragt und von starken moralischen Impulsen geleitet war. Anwendungen beinhalten unter anderem Uberlegungen zur Entscheidungstheorie, zur Religionskritik und zu den Grundlagen einer offenen Gesellschaft als politisches Gegenkonzept zu Totalitarismus und (...) Fundamentalismus.". (shrink)

Historically, as well as more recently, women's emancipation has been seen in two ways: sometimes as the `right to be equal' and sometimes as the `right to be different'. These views have often overlapped and interacted: in a variety of guises they have played an important role in both the development of ideas about women and feminism, and the works of political thinkers by no means primarily concerned with women's liberation. The chapters of this book deal primarily with the meaning (...) and use of these two concepts in the context of gender relations, but also draw attention to their place in the understanding and analysis of other human relationships. (shrink)

Por metodologías activas entendemos aquellas propuestas didácticas que orbitan en torno al papel del alumnado como generador de conocimiento y que construye su aprendizaje en base a la interacción con el grupo. Este planteamiento constituye la razón de ser de este trabajo donde Acción e Interacción se convierten en un grito enaltecido que llama al cambio desde la propia aula.

The story of Medea has exerted a powerful influence on creative artists since the time of Euripides. It is a tale that has been told in many ways and in several genres. This article offers a discussion of Christa Wolf's 1996 novel, Medea.Stimmen (Medea. Voices), a modern retelling through the voices, and conflicting perspectives, of the major characters involved with Medea, including Jason, Agameda, Akamas, Leukon, Glauce and Medea herself.Medea's role within feminist literary reception and women's literature cannot be overlooked (...) because of the crucial archetype she represents. One task of Feminist criticism has been to expose, deconstruct and rectify prevalent male (mis) interpretations of female archetypes, such as Medea, Medusa and others, and the patriarchal distortions they introduced through 3 000 years of male literature. In the patriarchal realm, Medea represents the Witch, the black Sorceress, and the archetype of the Negative Mother. These negative interpretations or archetypes may be attributed to misogynist perceptions of Medea as the vilest of women, because she committed the most despicable of all crimes — killing her children, the patriarchy's heirs — to take revenge on Jason, the husband who abandons her in Corinth (her place of exile) to marry Glauce, King Creon of Corinth's daughter, for reasons of political expedience.As a writer with her roots in the former East-German regime, Wolf perceives the Medea story as an account of a woman with both extraordinary powers and human shortcomings, who is misunderstood by the Colchians and the Corinthians alike. Wolf explores the distorted patriarchal motives for their loathing of Medea and Medea's ultimate powerlessness to do anything more than accept her tragic destiny. In doing so, Wolf does not attempt to manipulate the Medea story to suit the one-sidedness of some more radical feminist ideologies. (shrink)

This work constitutes our first advance in the study of the work of the writer, art historian, critic, and German anarchist Carl Einstein. He proposes an analysis of the methodological, theoretical matrix on which he establishes his unique historiographical conception of 20th-century art, focusing on the period between the rise of the German expressionist movement and the avant-garde consolidation of Cubism. The proposed hypothesis maintains that Einstein finds in Cubism (especially in the works of Picasso, Braque, and Gris) a "method" (...) for his model of critical historicization of twentieth-century art rather than an "object" of investigation. (shrink)

This article explores the rich tradition of Lutheran spirituality by examining the hymns of the seventeenth-century Lutheran hymn writer Paul Gerhardt. At times Lutheran theology is accused of emphasizing grace as pardon with little or no reflection on grace as empowerment. Paul Gerhardt is a wonderful representative of Lutheran spiritual theologians who hold the two together. In one of the darkest moments of Christian history, the Thirty Year War and its aftermath, Gerhardt was able to hunt for signs of God's (...) grace where others only saw death, darkness, and despair. His beautiful and theologically rich hymns became sacred literary spaces where pilgrim singers were able to find refuge in God and begin a journey of healing and transformation. Pastors today should once again take seriously and recover the importance of hymns and the arts more generally speaking for spiritual formation. (shrink)

The paper investigates Aristotle's simulation of the embryo (zygote) by a gear wheel mechanism. By this technical simulation of a natural thing Aristotle pursues an epistemic end, viz. to gain information on the efficient cause of embryonal development. Aristotle verifies the conjectured, yet unknown efficient cause of this natural process by means of a distinctive mapping of the artifact onto the embryo. The paper aims to show that Aristotle, to achieve this verification, tackles a calculus of relations with a semantics (...) of causal content, providing logicocausal deductions, an ancient causal analogue of the truth-preserving calculus of relations. The elements of this Aristotelian causal calculus are those relations among the components of composite things that Aristotle holds to be causal. To these causal relations he applies various operations, set extension and set restriction, substitution, generalization and particularization, in such a way that the causal content of the relations transformed is preserved, thus affording deductions of relations from relations that are valid in respect to their causal content. The paper finally aims to show that causal calculus, working well when applied to the gear wheel mechanism and the embryo, is not sound in every application. (shrink)

In this paper I would like to examine a conception of happiness that seems to have become popular after the time of Plato and Aristotle: tranquillity or, as one might also say, peace of mind. This conception is interesting for two reasons: first, because it seems to come from outside the tradition that began with Plato or Socrates, second, because it is the only conception of eudaimonia in Greek ethics that identifies happiness with a state of mind and makes it (...) depend entirely on a person’s attitude or beliefs. In this way it may be closer to more recent ideas about happiness, notably those of utilitarians who treat “happiness” as a synonym of “pleasure,” than to the classical Greek conceptions of the good life. For Plato and Aristotle the happy life certainly had to be pleasant or enjoyable, but they did not think that happiness itself consisted in being pleased with one’s life. As the Stoic Seneca puts it, “it is not that virtue is chosen because it pleases, but that, if chosen, it also pleases.” I will argue that tranquillity was in fact not a serious contender for the position of ultimate good in ancient times. Greek theories of happiness from Plato to Epicurus were attempts to spell out what sort of a life one would have to lead in order to have good reasons for feeling tranquil or contented; they were not recipes for reaching a certain state of mind. Looking at the case of tranquillity will show, I think, that modern philosophers interested in questions about the good life might be well advised to follow the lead of their ancient predecessors. (shrink)

This essay argues that ancient Pyrrhonists did not decide to suspend judgment, but rather claimed to have found themselves unable to arrive at any judgment. By giving up the attempt, they also claimed to have unexpectedly reached tranquility, then followed the customs of ordinary life without ever claiming to have found the truth. This anti-rational attitude is not likely to be typical of ordinary people, nor would it seem desirable to modern defenders of ordinary practices like Fogelin.

The Prior Analytics marks the beginning of formal logic, and is one of the most influential works in the history of thought. It is here that Aristotle sets out his system of syllogistic reasoning. The first book, to which this volume is devoted, offers a coherent presentation of Aristotle's logic as a general theory of deductive argument.

El presente texto propone una lectura de A Feminist Theory of Refusal asumiendo como propia la doble clave teórica y política que el libro sostiene. En la primera parte se resumen los puntos centrales de Honig sobre el tipo de complejización e impurificación de la teoría vigente que el drama Las Bacantes de Eurípides habilitaría, y sobre la importancia de esta nueva conceptualización para la práctica política feminista. A continuación se formulan algunos interrogantes respecto del proceso histórico en el cual (...) este concepto deviene protagónico para la teoría política crítica y se señalan posibles limitaciones del mismo a la hora de describir el tipo de desafíos que enfrentan las luchas emancipatorias e igualitarias emprendidas por el movimiento feminista en Argentina. (shrink)

Public discourse on religious matters is a sensitive issue in Romania. It has raised heated debates for at least two reasons: on the one hand, the repressive policy of the Communist regime concerning religion created a strong boomerang-effect, a religious renaissance after 1989; on the other hand, there is a deep cleavage between the “two Romanias:” the urban and the rural, the modernized and the traditionalist, the liberal and the conservative. Religion still serves as a major cultural marker of national (...) identity, and the church is one of the most trusted institutions in Romania. We are exploring the hypothesis that the 2006-2007 religious icon scandal in Romania is a typical example of heated public debate in a transitional society. (shrink)

This highly acclaimed volume brings together some of the world's foremost historians of ideas to consider Machiavelli's political thought in the larger context of the European republican tradition, and the image of Machiavelli held by other republicans. An international team of scholars from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds (notably law, philosophy, history and the history of political thought) explore both the immediate Florentine context in which Machiavelli wrote, and the republican legacy to which he contributed.

The doctrines of the Hellenistic Schools - Epicureans, Stoics, and Sceptics - are known to have had a formative influence on later thought, but because the primary sources are lost, they have to be reconstructed from later reports. This important collection of essays by one of the foremost interpreters of Hellenistic philosophy focuses on key questions in epistemology and ethics debated by Greek and Roman philosophers of the Hellenistic period. There is currently a new awareness of the great interest and (...) influence of Hellenistic philosophy. In bringing together a major collection of scholarly and interpretative studies by a leading figure in the field, this volume is a boon to philosophers and classicists who work on the Hellenistic period, but also to students keen to enrich their understanding of the history of epistemology and ethics. (shrink)

El texto de Carl Einstein (1895-1940) que aquí se presenta en español vio la luz en francés en 1929 en el primer número de la revista Documents (1929). En el marco de un singular cruce disciplinario en el que la historia y la teoría del arte son abordadas desde perspectivas teóricas renovadoras como la antropología, la sociología y la etnología cultural, “Aphorismes méthodiques” testimonia el giro teórico que Einstein había dado hacia la etnología desde mediados de la década de 1910.

It was once thought that solely humans were capable of complex cognition but research has produced substantial evidence to the contrary. Art and music, however, are largely seen as unique to humans and the evidence seems to be overwhelming, or is it? Art indicates the creation of something novel, not naturallyoccurring in the environment. To prove its presence or absence in animals is difficult. Moreover, connections between music and language at a neuroscientific as well as a behavioural level are not (...) fully explored to date. Even more problematic is the notion of an aesthetic sense. Music, so it is said, can be mimetic, whereas birdsong is not commonly thought of as being mimetic but as either imitation or mimicry and, in the latter case, as a ‘mindless’ act (parrots parroting). This paper will present a number of examples in which animals show signs of responsiveness to music and even engage in musical activity and this will be discussed from an ethological perspective. A growing body of research now reports that auditory memory and auditory mechanisms in animals are not as simplistic as once thought and evidence suggests, in some cases, the presence of musical abilities in animals. (shrink)