Resumen: Partiendo de la hipótesis, avanzada por Horkheimer y Adorno, de que Auschwitz era una posibilidad inscrita en la racionalidad instrumental de la civiliza- ción moderna, el artículo analiza algunos mecanismos de la estructura de empresa heredada del industrialismo que pudieron contribuir a ‘normalizar’ lo anormal en el Holocausto nazi. Esta argumentación se desarrolla mediante la articulación de la concepción weberiana de la burocracia moderna con la teoría de la moral de colaboración de Günther Anders.: Starting from the hypothesis, advanced (...) by Horkheimer and Adorno, that Auschwitz was a possibility inscribed in the instrumental rationality of modern civilization, the article analyzes some mechanisms of the company structure inherited from industrialism that could contribute to ‘normalize’ the abnormal in the Nazi Holo- caust. This argument is developed through the articulation of the Weberian concep- tion of modern bureaucracy with the Günther Anders’ theory of collaborative moral. Palabras clave: Holocausto, burocracia, medialidad, conformismo, moral de empresa, Weber, Anders, Bauman. Keywords: Holocaust, bureaucracy, mediality, conformism, company moral, Weber, Anders, Bauman. (shrink)

El artículo compara el modo como Aristóteles explica que un cuerpo llegue a vivir o que una mente llegue a entender, con el esquema explicativo que emplea Wittgenstein para dar cuenta de problemas como éstos: ¿qué hace posible que el signo adquiera significado, o que una acción sea el seguimiento de una regla? El interés se centra en la lógica de la explicación, y el propósito no es establecer relaciones de influencia, sino explorar analogías formales, con el objetivo de arrojar (...) luz sobre algunos conceptos centrales del pensamiento maduro de Wittgenstein. (shrink)

L’école Millet, fondée en 1900 à Tunis, fut le premier établissement, non missionnaire et moderne dans le sens pédagogique, pour les filles indigènes dans l’Afrique du Nord française. Dans cet article, nous proposons quatre hypothèses. La première est d’ordre méthodologique : un modeste établissement pour jeunes filles peut servir à explorer des problématiques plus vastes sur les femmes et le genre de l’Etat-nation et de l’empire. Ensuite, la question de l’instruction des filles tunisiennes est traitée comme un enjeu dans (...) des conflits au niveau de l’État, ou plutôt de plusieurs États concurrents. Ces conflits ont provoqué des débats non seulement sur le rôle des femmes dans des sociétés arabo-musulmanes soumises à la France, mais aussi sur les « devoirs » des Françaises venues de métropole. Aussi est proposée l’idée que certaines colonies françaises étaient utilisées comme laboratoires expérimentant des programmes de réforme sociale. (shrink)

Powers of Horror is an excellent introduction to an aspect of contemporary French literature which has been allowed to become somewhat neglected in the current emphasis on para-philosophical modes of discourse.".

Kristeva points to Montesquieu's esprit général--his notion of the social body as a guaranteed hierarchy of private rights--in this humanistic plea for tolerance and commonality.

Julia Annas explores how Plato's account of the relation of virtue to law developed, and how his ideas were taken up by Cicero and by Philo of Alexandria. She shows that, rather than rejecting the account given in his Republic, Plato develops in the Laws a more careful and sophisticated version of that account.

This paper argues that a crucial skill needed to empathize with others cannot be trained by reading fiction: the skill of reading the evidence for the other person’s state of mind and, thus, empath...

In this book, Julia Ching offers a survey of over 4,000 years of Chinese civilization through an examination of the relationship between kingship and mysticism. She investigates the sage-king myth and ideal, arguing that institutions of kingship were bound up with cultivation of trance states and communication with spirits. Over time, the sage-king myth became a model for the actual ruler. As a paradigm, it was also appropriated by private individuals who strove for wisdom without becoming kings. As the Confucian (...) tradition interacted with the Taoist and the Buddhist, the religious character of spiritual and mystical cultivation became more pronounced. But the sage-king idea continued, promoting expectations of benevolent despotism rather than democratization in Chinese civilization. (shrink)

Nanosynthesis forces a reevaluation of received views on scientific explanation. I discuss the synthesis of anisotropic metal nanoparticles, a typical nanosynthesis research program, in order to demonstrate the failure of standard philosophical accounts of explanation to capture the dynamics of information exchange in synthetic sciences. I argue that using the language of effective heuristics, coupled with attention to changes in the meanings of concepts across different length scales, is a more promising means of capturing how information is obtained from the (...) study of nanosynthesis systems. (shrink)

While the current philosophical debate surrounding Hegel’s aesthetics focuses heavily on the philosopher’s controversial ‘end of art’ thesis, its participants rarely give attention to Hegel’s ideas on the nature of beauty and its relation to art. This study seeks to remedy this oversight by placing Hegel’s views on beauty front and center. Peters asks us to rethink the common assumption that Hegelian beauty is exclusive to art and argues that for Hegel beauty, like art, is subject to historical development. Her (...) careful analysis of Hegel’s notion of beauty not only has crucial implications for our understanding of the ‘end of art’ and Hegel’s aesthetics in general, but also sheds light on other fields of Hegel’s philosophy, in particular his anthropology and aspects of his ethical thought. (shrink)

Ancient ethical theories all assume that we are seeking our happiness when we try to live a moral life. This produces considerable revision of the intuitive content of happiness, different theories making more or less revisionary transformations of its content.

Aristotle's pupil Theophrastus sharpened the claim that happiness requires external goods as well as virtue, a claim prominently denied by the Stoics. Their position that virtue is sufficient for happiness requires revision of the content of happiness and adjustment of our attitudes to premature death and many other matters. The strain put on our concept of happiness is, however, greatly alleviated by the Stoic theory of preferred indifferents, which allows things other than virtue to have value of a different kind, (...) as the material on which virtuous activity is exercised. (shrink)

Using the writings of the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School as a framework, this book uncovers the tensions and contradictions associated with the rise of capitalism as manifested in the writings of Rousseau and Diderot.

(2014). Explosive Population Growth in Tropical Africa: Crucial Omission in Development Forecasts—Emerging Risks and Way Out. World Futures: Vol. 70, No. 2, pp. 120-139.

This article seeks to examine the representation of Chinese Indonesians in New Media after the demise of Suharto’s New Order regimes. It takes root in the recent phenomenon in Indonesia as the “reappearance” of Chinese faces in popular Indonesian media by discussing the celebrities or public figures, and ordinary ‘man-on-the street’ of Chinese Indonesians, who are catapulted in the mainstream mass media and portrayed in popular television formats in particular such as reality-shows, talk-shows, news and variety shows. Based on participatory (...) observation and in-depth-interview to the producers of several popular TV shows casting Chinese figures, this article argues that the political changes from authoritarian Suharto’s regimes which marginalized Chinese ethnicity to democracy has re-identified the representation of Chineseness in public sphere which contributes to more reception of Chinese identity at large in the country. This representation intermingles to produce the debates on religiosity and nationalism. (shrink)

Slavery and Race: Philosophical Debates in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries explores philosophical ideas, theories, and arguments that are central to early modern discussions of slavery. Jorati explores a topic that is widely neglected by historians of philosophy: debates about the morality of slavery in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century America and Europe. Slavery and Race: Philosophical Debates in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries explores philosophical ideas, theories, and arguments that are central to early modern discussions of slavery. It is a companion (...) volume to Jorati's Slavery and Race: Philosophy Debates in the Eighteenth Century (OUP 2023). (shrink)

ArgumentThe border in turn-of-the-century Argentina was a place of heightened anxiety. State officials ignored the nation's vast land borders and focused on the port, located in the capital city of Buenos Aires, which attracted nearly six million European immigrants in the decades after 1870. Federal authorities were seeking to attract new immigrants and yet they were terrified that opening their gates would allow entry among the potential citizenry a new category of “toxins” dangerous to the national body. The authorities hired (...) physicians as gatekeepers to identify desirable and undesirable traits that went beyond the definition of communicable disease. Science and medicine appeared to provide a means of legitimating a variety of attempts by the state to control the makeup of the population; in reality, the state's power to inspect immigrants for disease, racial toxins, social upheaval, and political instability was minimized by realistic decisions to open borders and by a weak and limited ability to control the influx of people. Alongside calls for immigrant selection there coexisted a strong trend in political discourse that sought to build a unified, homogenous national culture by accepting and assimilating the foreign masses. Both approaches, however, had similar goals – the material progress of the nation, the advancement of Argentina's “civilization,” and the erasure of traces of “foreignness” among the new population. (shrink)

Egypt the earliest nation.--India and the primal unity.--Persia, and the religion of conflict.--Greece and the harmony of opposites.--Rome and the reign of law.--The age of death.--The human trinity.--The problem of evil.--The fall of man.--Male and female created he them.--Index.