Das angebliche Bilderverbot, das im Zweiten Gebot des Dekalogs enthalten sein soll, ist eigentlich ein Idolatrieverbot. Das heißt, dass das jüdische Gesetz nicht Bilder an sich, sondern Idole verbietet. Gewiss: Manche Bilder werden als Idole verehrt. Es gibt aber auch Bilder, die keine idolatrische Bedeutung haben, und umgekehrt Idole, die keinen bildlichen Charakter aufweisen. Die Untersuchung dieser komplexen Zusammenhänge ist das Hauptziel des vorliegenden Sammelbandes. Von unterschiedlichen theoretischen Standpunkten ausgehend, eröffnen die hier versammelten Aufsätze neue Perspektiven auf das Verhältnis zwischen (...) Bild und Idol. Mit Beiträgen von Beniamino Fortis, Asher D. Biemann, Ellen Rinner, Mario C. Schmidt, Lars Tittmar, Johannes Bennke und Agata Bielik-Robson. (shrink)

The work of the lay Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain continues to provoke and inspire readers to engage in a Thomistic approach to many of the questions facing the world today. Maritain’s wide-ranging thought touched on many fields, including aesthetics, anthropology, educational theory, moral philosophy, and ethics, as well as Thomism and its relationship to other philosophical stances._ In _Being in the World: A Quotable Maritain Reader_, Mario O. D’Souza, C.S.B., has selected seven hundred and fifty of the most salient (...) quotations found in the English translations of fifty-four works by Jacques Maritain. Organized into forty thematic chapters, ordered alphabetically, the book serves as an overview of the areas that Maritain's writings addressed. By referring to entries in _Being in the World_, readers can quickly locate key passages in Maritain’s writing on a given topic and then turn elsewhere to the full texts for more in-depth study. Complete with a detailed index of key terms, the _Reader _will be an essential reference tool for the study of Maritain in English. "Fr. Mario O. D'Souza's careful selection from the works of Jacques Maritain provides the reader with an invaluable sampling of Maritain's extensive philosophical work. In it, we find examples of Maritain's almost lyrical gift of expression as well as of his trenchant wit. More than a scholarly contribution, the volume also ably serves as an introduction and entrance into Maritain's corpus." — William Sweet, St. Francis Xavier University, Canada_. (shrink)

In the second half of the 20th century, Latin American poetry has had to deal with representing the phenomenon of forced disappearance in its various poetic productions. Some of those have incubated in the Central American civil wars, the dictatorial regimes of the Southern Cone and even in countries with supposed democratic stability such as Mexico and Colombia. Memorial de Ayotzinapa, by the Mexican poet Mario Bojórquez, and Carta de las mujeres de este país, by the Colombian poet and (...) activist Fredy Yezzed, experiment with the discursive forms of the long poem and the letter poem, respectively, to construct collective memories around a phenomenon that continues to take lives to this day. Bojórquez's text is concerned with constructing a testimony, apparently in situ, of the disappearance of the forty-three Mexican teacher trainees; Yezzed's work, for its part, refrains from referring to a specific event or place in order to provide a more complete testimony of the Colombian armed conflict, nearly seventy years old. The article analyzes the forms of the text, the subjects and their spaces of enunciation, as well as the memory strategies that are seen in both works. Thus, the testimonial status of poetry is confirmed, sometimes overshadowed by genres such as the novel and the short story. (shrink)

This essay focuses on the relationship between biopolitics and race theory. Starting from Foucault, many authors have considered totalitarian anti-Semitism as a depravity of biologism. This essay would like to challenge this all-too-simple positivist, materialist, and evolutionist picture of biopolitics in the Third Reich. It examines another "tradition" of racial theories, central to National Socialism, much closer to the revered Western philosophical tradition than Darwinism ever was. This kind of racism presents itself as the authentic heir of that "Metaphysics of (...) Form," which traces its roots back to classical antiquity, in particular to Plato's work. Through the analysis of some Platonist and racist texts the essay tries to point out the ambivalences that connect some of the assumptions of our philosophical tradition to Nazi totalitarianism. (shrink)

Building on the original formulation of the autopoietic theory (AT), extended enactivism argues that living beings are autopoietic systems that extend beyond the spatial boundaries of the organism. In this article, we argue that extended enactivism, despite having some basis in AT’s original formulation, mistakes AT’s definition of living beings as autopoietic entities. We offer, as a reply to this interpretation, a more embodied reformulation of autopoiesis, which we think is necessary to counterbalance the (excessively) disembodied spirit of AT’s original (...) formulation. The article aims to clarify and correct what we take to be a misinterpretation of AT as a research program. AT, contrary to what some enactivists seem to believe, did not (and does not) intend to motivate an extended conception of living beings. AT’s primary purpose, we argue, was (and is) to provide a universal individuation criterion for living beings, these understood as discrete bodies that are embedded in, but not constituted by, the environment that surrounds them. However, by giving a more explicitly embodied definition of living beings, AT can rectify and accommodate, so we argue, the enactive extended interpretation of autopoiesis, showing that although living beings do not extend beyond their boundaries as autopoietic unities, they do form part, in normal conditions, of broader autopoietic systems that include the environment. (shrink)

Defines the concepts, problems, principles, and theories that are used in modern philosophy.

To go through the pages of the Autobiography of Mario Bunge is to accompany him through dozens of countries and examine the intellectual, political, philosophical and scientific spheres of the last hundred years. It is an experience that oscillates between two different worlds: the different and the similar, the professional and the personal. It is an established fact that one of his great loves was, and still is, science. He has always been dedicated to scientific work, teaching, research, and (...) training men and women in multiple disciplines. Life lessons fall like ripe fruit from this book, bringing us closer to a concept, a philosophical idea, a scientific digression, which had since been uncovered in numerous notes, articles or books. Bunge writes about the life experiences in this book with passion, naturalness and with a colloquial frankness, whether they be persecutions, banishment, imprisonment, successes, would-be losses, emotions, relationships, debates, impressions or opinions about people or things. In his pages we pass by the people with whom he shared a fruitful century of achievements and incredible depths of thought. Everything is remembered with sincerity and humor. This autobiography is, in truth, Bunge on Bunge, sharing everything that passes through the sieve of his memory, as he would say. Mario's many grandchildren are a testament to his proud standing as a family man, and at the age of 96 he gives us a book for everyone: for those who value the memories that hold the trauma of his life as well as for those who share his passion for science and culture. Also, perhaps, for some with whom he has had disagreements or controversy, for he still deserves recognition for being a staunch defender of his convictions. (shrink)

Standard economic theory usually analyzes the decisions made by individuals as a rational process in which each individual has sound and consistent preferences and makes decisions according to the principle of subjective expected utility maximization. Starting from the pioneering work of Herbert Simon and the research of cognitive psychologists Kahneman and Tversky, the contributions provided by cognitive-behavioral theory have repeatedly shown that real agents make choices in a way that differs systematically from standard theory, hence highlighting its limits. Rather than (...) considering standard normative theory as false or unable to explain the data obtained by behavioral economists, several economists decided to develop new formal models that could include the results of different experiments and empirical observations that captured all dimensions of the choice made by an individual. In this sense, they proposed new models that were not intended to challenge standard theory but rather designed to provide a kind of psychological expansion to it. This article has the aim of describing and analyzing the advantages and limitations of these new models, which unfortunately are not always suited to describe the individual behavior, the individuals’ actions, or the equilibria due to the combination of the actions of several players. To overcome the limits of these models, we decided to take into consideration the unfortunately unfinished work of Michael Bacharach, who strived to understand the individual and collective forms of rationality without applying only analytical devices or a theoretical vision of the world but bringing rationality back to the perception level of the agents. (shrink)

For a, b > 0, we consider a temporally homogeneous, one-dimensional diffusion process X(t) defined over I = (-b, a), with infinitesimal parameters depending on the sign of X(t). We suppose that, when X(t) reaches the position 0, it is reflected rightward to δ with probability p > 0 and leftward to -δ with probability 1 - p, where δ > 0. Closed analytical expressions are found for the mean exit time from the interval (-b, a), and for the probability (...) of exit through the right end a, in the limit δ → 0+, generalizing the results of Lefebvre, holding for asymmetric Wiener process. Moreover, in alternative to the heavy analytical calculations, a numerical method is presented to estimate approximately the quantities above. Furthermore, on the analogy of skew Brownian motion, the notion of skew diffusion process is introduced. Some examples and numerical results are also reported. (shrink)

Standard equilibrium economic models focus on interdependencies. This text develops a theory which is based on disequilibria. The model proposed is a heuristic tool that makes it possible to explore these disequilibria in relation to Western economies.

Poser ces questions, est-il soutenu dans ce recueil qui explore les référents culturels et les imaginaires paysagers issus de l'histoire, des pratiques d'aménagement et des politiques du paysage au Canada et en Europe, n'est-ce pas se ...

Questions about how closure is achieved in disputes involving new observational or experimental claims have highlighted the role of bodily knowledge possibly irreducible to written experimental protocols and instructions how to build and operate instruments. This essay asks similar questions about a scenario that is both related and significantly different: the replication of an invention, not of an observation or the instrument through which it produced. Furthermore, the machine considered here—Galileo’s compass or sector—was not a typical industrial invention (like a (...) spinning jenny), but a mathematical invention (a calculator), that is, a machine that produces numbers, not yarn. This case study describes some of the similarities and differences between replicating experiments, traditional machines producing material outputs, and mathematical inventions yielding calculations or information. This comparison indicates that, as in other kinds of replication, the replication of mathematical inventions involves texts (the calculator’s instructions) but that in this case bodily knowledge cannot be properly described as either tacit or explicit. It rather takes the shape of memory—muscle memory—that may be recalled from reading the instructions. (shrink)

The cognitive impairments shown by brain-damaged patients emphasize the role of task difficulty as a major determinant for performance. We discuss the proposal of Kurzban et al. in light of our findings on right-hemisphere–damaged patients, who show increasing awareness deficits for the contralesional hemispace when engaged with resource-consuming dual tasks. This phenomenon is readily explained by the assumption of unspecific depletable resources.

Few thinkers have left such an influence across such a diverse range of studies as Michel Foucault has. This book pays homage to that diversity by presenting a multidisciplinary series of analyses dedicated to the question of power today.

Les études récentes consacrées à la pensée épistémologique de Bachelard en France et en Italie mettent en évidence le caractère créatif et propulsif assigné aux mathématiques dans la construction du réel physique. Les travaux de Bachelard consacrés à la mécanique quantique dans les années '30, et en particulier à la physique théorique de Dirac, introduisent un concept particulier, celui de« rêverie anagogique » pour comprendre le caractère toujours plus abstrait et créateur de la mathématique dans la pensée des différents niveaux (...) de la réalité physique. Sur les traces de ce que Federigo Enriques qualifiait de « poésie mathématique », Bachelard propose une véritable « nouménologie mathématique » qui fournit les bases épistémiques pour comprendre I '« efficacité rationnelle » des mathématiques et leur application au réel. Pour toutes ces raisons, Bachelard utilisera dans ces années-là un terme nouveau pour désigner son engagement rationaliste: le « surrationalisme » qui condense ce qu' Enriques appelait « la philosophie implicite » dans les sciences, soit la « pensée des sciences » où, à travers la fonction jouée par la « rêverie anagogique », les mathématiques mettent en acte les « enjeux » continus du rationnel comme tel. (shrink)

Analyzing the Dialogue between a Philosopher and a Student of the Common Laws of England by Thomas Hobbes, the essay traces the historical tradition and the reasons for its secular underestimation. The Hobbesian text is placed within the history of English law and the controversies that accompanied and followed the revolution of 1640. It is then compared with the political works of Hobbes, showing how the silence of the law is gradually replacing the state of nature as image of the (...) death of the Commonwealth . The Dialogue proves to be a firm position in favor of an universal and equal capacity to understand what the law is. This latter is the product of the will of a sovereign, who however is the institutionalization of the authorization of the individuals who constitute it. (shrink)

Resumo: Nesta exposiçáo proponho efetuar uma apresentaçáo dos problemas interpretativos fundamentais e das diferentes leituras que se tem realizado em relaçáo à filosofia das formas simbólicas cassireriana. Palabvas chaves: Cassirer. Filosofia das formas simbólicas. Formas simbólicas.

This provocative volume, one of the most important interpretive works on the philosophical thought of the Renaissance, has long been regarded as a classic in its field. Ernst Cassirer here examines the changes brewing in the early stages of the Renaissance, tracing the interdependence of philosophy, language, art, and science; the newfound recognition of individual consciousness; and the great thinkers of the period—from da Vinci and Galileo to Pico della Mirandola and Giordano Bruno. _The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance (...) Philosophy_ discusses the importance of fifteenth-century philosopher Nicholas Cusanus, the concepts of freedom and necessity, and the subject-object problem in Renaissance thought. “This fluent translation of a scholarly and penetrating original leaves little impression of an attempt to show that a ‘spirit of the age’ or ‘spiritual essence of the time’ unifies and expresses itself in all aspects of society or culture.”—_Philosophy_. (shrink)