In this paper, I argue that the certainty about the wrongness of killing must not be considered as a universal, but as a local one. Initially, I show that there exist communities in which the wrongness of killing innocents is not a moral certainty and that this kind of case cannot be justified by arguing that such people are psychopaths. Lastly, I argue that universal certainties do not admit of exceptions: thus, the fact that some exceptional cases affect the certainty (...) that killing innocents is wrong, leads me to conclude that it is a local certainty. (shrink)

This paper presents the concept of ‘religious certainty’ I have developed by drawing inspiration from Wittgenstein’s notion of ‘certainty’. After describing the particular traits of religious certainty, this paper addresses two difficulties derived from this concept. On the one hand, it explains why religious certainty functions as such even though all its consequences are far from being absolutely clear; on the other hand, it clarifies why, unlike the rest of certainties, the loss of religious certainty does not result in the (...) collapse of the world-picture made up of all certainties. Subsequently, it analyzes to what extent the teacher can teach religious certainty by acting as a facilitator for its acquisition–if desired—particularly bearing in mind that religious certainty cannot be attained at will. These basic teaching guidelines have several advantages. First, they make it possible to know the nature of religious certainty even better. Second, and most importantly, the fact of having adopted the perspective of a teacher who tries inculcating a religious certainty contributes to detecting and preventing forms of indoctrination that, arguably, might go unnoticed even when attempting to properly present religious certainty—or rather, this way of being religious—in current schools to foster understanding thereof. (shrink)

Philosophical Investigations, Volume 45, Issue 1, Page 91-97, January 2022.

Algunos autores han intentado considerar los delirios como certezas –entendidas en el sentido de Wittgenstein– debido a las similitudes que parecen existir entre sus respectivos estatus epistemológicos. Sin embargo, dicho intento ha sido criticado con agudeza, entre otras razones, porque el contenido de los delirios choca frontalmente con el contenido de las certezas, por lo que los delirios no pueden ser comprendidos debido a los cambios en las relaciones de significado. Pero es evidente que, aunque los delirios no se puedan (...) contemplar como certezas, muchos delirios afectan de un modo u otro al sistema de certezas del paciente. Partiendo de esta base, no es descabellado pensar que dicha influencia pudiera ser también recíproca: en otras palabras, parece sumamente recomendable analizar si algunos delirios se podrían contemplar como el resultado de variaciones en certezas. En este artículo llevo a cabo dicho análisis al intentar mostrar que el origen de algunos delirios pedestres y severos puede ser hallado en lo que llamaré “ceguera a posibilidades” e “incertidumbre”, términos que he desarrollado teniendo en cuenta la obra del filósofo Ludwig Wittgenstein. (shrink)

While in his late works Walter Benjamin seems to employ painting in an accessory way —either as an auratic counterfigure, or as a propitiatory victim of the technical image—, the allusions to the medium that guide his trajectory show its importance in the whole of his aesthetic reflection and even in the development of his theory of language. Especially relevant to understanding the general features of his idea of painting is the unpublished youth essay “On Painting, or Sign and Mark”, (...) as well as other writings of the same period that, although address the matter tangentially, shape it to a greater or lesser degree and determine its general scope. (shrink)

Aunque política y ciencia constituyen hoy en día ramas casi antagónicas del conocimiento humano -acaso combinables en ámbitos ficcionales como el cine y la literatura-, la relación entre filosofía política y astronomía es una constante histórica que alcanza especial fuerza en el pensamiento emancipatorio del siglo xix. El presente artículo sitúa en ese marco La eternidad por los astros y, asimismo, somete a contraste la peculiaridad retórica e ideológica de esta obra, en donde Louis-Auguste Blanqui propone una contigüidad entre orbe (...) celeste y sociedades humanas, basada en su análogo funcionamiento y su común atavismo. (shrink)

This article explains how Henri de Lubac contributed during the 20th century to the renewal of contemporary theology, and sustains the thesis that Lubac played a decisive role in the area of interreligious dialogue.

Though Wittgenstein's On Certainty has been influential in analytic epistemology, its interpretation has been enormously controversial. It is true that exegesis has been mainly concerned with the proper characterization of Wittgenstein's very notion of ?certainty?; however, some important questions remain unanswered regarding this notion. On the one hand, I am above all referring to the study of the possibilities we have of retaining a certainty when it has seemingly been placed into question and, on the other hand, of regaining a (...) certainty once it has been lost. In this paper, I attempt to provide a detailed answer to both questions. In so doing, some important features of the picture of ourselves which emerges from Wittgenstein's On Certainty are also revealed. (shrink)

Wide analysis of "María Teresa López de la Vieja, La pendiente resbaladiza. La práctica de la argumentación moral . Madrid y México, D.F.: Plaza y Valdés, 2010, 288 páginas.".

En la primera parte de este trabajo se busca explicar por qué tanto la figura personal de Jorge Luis Borges como su propia obra han generado alguna clase de recelo o “miedo”. Las prevenciones de orden político hacia su persona, por un lado, y las complejas relaciones entre la dificultad y disfrute que surgen en el tratamiento sus textos, por el otro, son dos dimensiones interconectadas que participan en la configuración de una representación cultural sobre Borges en su propio país, (...) Argentina. Como un método para vencer “el miedo a Borges”, en la segunda parte se muestra cómo muy diversas y heterogéneas producciones de la cultura popular pueden llegar a ser vías de acceso para empezar a tratar temas de su obra. En la tercera parte, que es el núcleo de este trabajo, se presenta el desarrollo una investigación que recurrió a un capítulo de la serie de dibujos animados “Los Simpson” como vía de acceso a un texto de Borges. Los resultados ofrecen evidencia empírica a favor de las dos hipótesis evaluadas. En primer lugar, una tarea preparatoria con una producción de la cultura popular parece favorecer la comprensión global. En segundo lugar, la lectura en voz alta y comentada parece favorecer no sólo la comprensión en general sino también el disfrute de los textos. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 121.3 (2000) 453-478 [Access article in PDF] Plutarch's Lysander and Sulla: Integrated Characters in Roman Historical Perspective José María Candau Morón The term ritratto paradossale has been used to describe a formula of character portrayal seen in Latin literature of the first centuries B.C. and A.D. whose basic process consists in combining in one character apparently contradictory traits (La Penna 1976). To be precise, the (...) formula produced a type of man who in his moments of action shows energy, diligence, and constancy but exhibits licentious feelings, allows himself to be taken in by indolence, and succumbs to pleasures when his negotia are finished. This model may already have been present in Greek historical literature of the fourth century B.C., as the portrait of Philip II that the historian Theopompus delineates seems to bear this stamp. The public image of Maecenas and the Petronius of Tacitus are two clear examples of ritratto paradossale. The figure of Sulla also falls under this influence; in fact, according to La Penna (1976, 284), Plutarch's biography of Sulla often exhibits these same characteristics.The terms "paradox" and "paradoxical" also occur frequently in works devoted to Plutarch's Life of Lysander. Its paradoxical features are the central point of Pelling's comments (1988a, 268-74) on that biography. Pelling explores aspects of "integration" in the Parallel Lives, a technique of portrayal which he defines as follows: "a man's qualities are brought into some sort of relation with one another, and every trait goes closely with the next." 1 An almost universal literary habit in the [End Page 453] ancient world, integration appears even in a figure as complex and full of contrasts as Plutarch's Lysander. Arrogance and cruelty, incorruptibility and a capacity for adulation, duplicity, ingenuity, ambition, treachery: all the contradictions that coexist in him are seen to be unified through philotimia, a central trait that dominates Lysander's other characteristics and gives his portrayal a unified appearance.But Plutarch's interests in his Life of Lysander do not impel him to explain or reconstruct the traits of its protagonist. It is the contrasts and the paradoxes in Lysander that have drawn the author's attention and lend the biography its particular flavor. Plutarch shows how these diverse character traits work against the individual and end up destroying him. In this way, the biography of Lysander is similar to tragic works in which a character's potentialities unleash forces that ultimately defeat him, and Plutarch explicitly plans on parallelisms with the tragic genre. From this standpoint, Pelling concludes, Lysander offers a moral that is similar to that of tragedy and different from that of other biographies: human nature can produce a figure such as Lysander, and such figures tend to bring about their own destruction through appropriate tragic processes.Stadter (1992) has recently analyzed from start to finish the paradoxical character that Plutarch assigns to Lysander and also to Sulla, the protagonist of the Roman Life presented as his parallel. In Stadter's view the contradictions in each character--that is, the combination of admirable and repulsive traits--form the basis of the portrayal of both subjects. The biographer also contrives to cross the two Lives so as to convey that they form an ensemble. Among other things, we see a type of progression whose upper limit is delineated by the harshest components of the portrayal of Sulla: his destructive nature, bloodthirsty and implacable, his tyrannical and frequently arbitrary conduct, his arrogance and lack of humanity. These traits are only sketched in the parallel Greek Life; yet their presence there evokes sinister dimensions which horrify when they appear, full-blown, in the Roman counterpart. From this interplay of traits and personalities our understanding of the human type treated in the biographies becomes increasingly deep. The final result in the present instance is that we are enabled to recognize the true traits of Lysander's character, and so escape the difficulty that Plutarch alludes to in his prologue through a cryptic... (shrink)

This paper argues that liberalism provides democracy with the experience of civic reformism. Without it, democracy loses any tie-argumentative or practical-to a coherent design of public policy endeavoring to provide the resources for the realization of democratic citizenship. The case for liberalism rests on an argumentative reconstruction of the function it performs before the rise of a world economic order and, more specifically, in the creation of the welfare state after the Second World War. Accordingly, liberalism defines a reformist political (...) program: it is an emancipatory political project by virtue of its struggle for an egalitarian and universalist extension of citizenship rights. This is but a formulation of the modern idea of citizenship, conceived of as a universalizable contract of rights. At the same time, liberalism embraces a socioeconomic emancipatory project that endeavors to provide the conditions, within the institutional framework of modern societies, for the accomplishment of citizenship rights. (shrink)

RESUMENEl trabajo presenta algunos de los rasgos básicos de la condición política moderna. Esboza así su génesis interna desde la sacralización del ámbito político hasta los inicios de la secularización en el siglo XIII. Para ilustrar ambos momentos de la filosofía política de Santo Tomás provee una argumentación básica que, aun siendo incompleta para reconstruir este tránsito, resulta significativamente clarificadora. PALABRAS CLAVEFILOSOFIA POLITICA MEDIEVAL-HISTORIA DEL PENSAMIENTO POLITICO- SANTO TOMAS DE AQUINOABSTRACTThe paper presents some of the basic features of the medieval (...) political condition. This, it outlines the genesis from the sacralization of the political realm to the beginnings of secularization in the XIIIth century. To illustrate both moments, Saint Thomas' political philosophy provdes a significant, though incomplete, argumentative basis. KEYWORDSMEDIEVAL POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY-HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT- AQUINAS. (shrink)

El demiurgo es el encargado de organizar un material espacial informe (chóra), para lo que contempla las formas inteligibles, y produce así las imágenes, las cosas sensibles. La causa de la diferencia entre las formas inteligibles (modelo) y las cosas sensibles (imagen) radica en el material caótico e indeterminado (receptáculo). Pretendemos analizar la chóra en el Timeo de Platón, donde convergen dos aspectos: el ¿constitutivo¿, ¿aquello de lo que¿ están constituidas las cosas sensibles, y el ¿espacial¿, ¿aquello en lo que¿ (...) aparecen. Este material espacial sufre una transmutación terminológica en la hyle de Aristóteles de Física, IV, 2. (shrink)

Los Elementos de ética de Hierocles, junto a los extractos que conservamos por Estobeo, constituyen una presentación ordenada de la ética estoica desde sus primeros fundamentos. En este trabajo nos proponemos desgranar el argumento estoico de la familiaridad (οἰκείωσις) y la tesis de que lo primero familiar, ya seamos seres humanos o animales, no es solo la percepción de sí mismo sino también el impulso a la conservación de sí mismo. Hierocles exhorta a ponerse los unos en el lugar de (...) los otros y a abrirse progresivamente en círculos concéntricos a la humanidad, pero sin demoler, desde el centro de la razón, la perspectiva de lo propio y familiar. (shrink)

Aunque Jusep Torres Campalans, la peculiar creación literaria de Max Aub, ha venido siendo objeto de numerosos comentarios, estudios y exposiciones, la peripecia editorial de la obra –un aspecto determinante para su adecuada valoración y recepción– apenas si ha captado el interés que merece hasta la fecha. Con el propósito de suplir esa carencia, el artículo se detiene en primera instancia en el marco intencional y coyuntural de su primera aparición y despliega después un ejercicio adaptado de bibliografía analítica donde (...) la edición príncipe es objeto de un somero análisis estructural y formal y se ve después sometida a contraste con todas y cada una de las ediciones en distintos idiomas que, desde 1958, se han venido sucediendo. Más allá de atender a las distintas versiones de una obra caracterizada en origen por una cuidada articulación de palabra, imagen y hechura material, el artículo aspira a promover la reflexión sobre el riesgo que entrañan ciertas rutinas editoriales para aquellas obras literarias que desbordan los márgenes de la convención. (shrink)

After making reference to the socio-cultural context of fin-desiècle Vienna —in which Otto Weininiger’s work appears— I describe in this paper the main characteristics of the influence that Weininger’s Über die letzten Dinge had on Ludwig Wittgenstein. I deal specifically with the way Wittgenstein’s work reflects Weininger’s remarks on criminality, animality, and madness.

Wittgenstein scholars have tended to interpret the acquisition of certainties, and by extension, of a world-picture, as the achievement of a state in which these certainties are assimilated in a seemingly unconscious way as one masters language-games. However, it has not been stressed that the attainment of this state often involves facing a series of challenges or difficulties which must be overcome for the development of the world-picture and therefore the socialization process to be achieved. After showing, on the one (...) hand, how a world-picture is usually developed, and on the other hand, why a child who seemingly found itself trapped in a precocious skepticism might have serious problems in assimilating certainties, in this paper, I describe some of the challenges children often meet as they acquire a world-picture. Since the overcoming of these challenges is often needed for children to develop a world-picture, I aim at raising the awareness of the necessity of ‘learning to believe’, that is, of developing a series of skills that allow children to undertake the challenges described in this paper. (shrink)

Literature on indoctrination has focused on imparting and revising beliefs, but it has hardly considered the way of teaching and acquiring certainties—in Wittgenstein’s sense. Therefore, the role played by rationality in the acquisition of our linguistic practices has been overestimated. Furthermore, analyses of the relationship between certainty and indoctrination contain major errors. In this paper, the clarification of the aforementioned issues leads me to suggest the avoidance of the term ‘indoctrination’ so as to avoid focusing on the suitability of the (...) case to the concept rather than on the analysis of the case itself. This should facilitate that the process of helping children to acquire a world-picture—by teaching them to ignore alternatives to certainties—is definitely accepted as normal and natural, for many beliefs are expected to end up becoming ungrounded certainties not only in the medium or long term, but also, and above all, in the short term. (shrink)

Traducción, selección y estudio preliminar José María Felipe Mendoza * Edición bilingüe. Se recomienda descargar el PDF para visualizar mejor la traducción y el original en paralelo.

After describing Wittgenstein's notion of ‘certainty’, in this article I provide four arguments to demonstrate that no certainty can be acquired at will. Specifically, I argue that, in order to assimilate a certainty, it is irrelevant whether the individual concerned has found a ground that seemingly justifies that certainty; has a given mental state; is willing to accept the certainty on the proposal of a persuader; or tries to act according to the certainty involved. Lastly, I analyse how each of (...) these arguments is reflected in the way children acquire certainties. (shrink)

Este libro nos presenta un «Ortega desde dentro», es decir, no como él había observado a Goethe, con catalejo, sino reconstruido a base de sus testimonios personales esparcidos en artículos, libros, cartas, clases y conferencias, a los que habría que sumar los que sobre él dejaron familiares, colaboradores, discípulos, amigos y enemigos. Estamos pues ante una biografía con ropaje autobiográfico, no sólo de su persona, sino también de su obra, íntimamente unidas a la España de la primera mitad del siglo (...) xx, a la que quiso guiar bajo los más diversos regímenes antes de ser arrastrado por su tragedia como nación. En cierto modo, es la historia de un amor imposible, porque la España que soñó no existía y puede que ni siquiera llegue a existir. Sin embargo y paradójicamente, también es la historia de cómo Ortega, al iluminar sus carencias, logró dejar su impronta en ella. (shrink)