Name der Zeitschrift: Paragrana Jahrgang: 23 Heft: 2 Seiten: 75-84.

En este artículo se revisa el lugar que ocupa Eckhart en L’essence de la manifestation, a fin de establecer correspondencias y afini­dades entre el místico renano y la peculiar concepción que de la fenomenología sostiene Michel Henry. Se trata de analizar la es­trecha cercanía entre el alma humana y Dios postulada por Meister Eckhart y su vinculación con la conocida noción de Vida presente en el autor francés. Henry es proclive a fundar una filosofía primera asociada a la pura autoafección, (...) describiendo la Vida sea como pura inmanencia, sea como una ipseidad algo problemática. En general, el trabajo teórico de los representantes del “giro teológico de la fenomenología francesa” (Janicaud) cuestiona al sujeto clásico de la Modernidad, sin por eso traer a colación la causa de un Dios Revelado ni el que resulta de una teología natural. Este trabajo, en suma, no es el esfuerzo de pensar a un Dios confesional ni tiene un propósito evangélico. Lejos de ello, se trata de precisar el nexo entre Henry y Eckhart, puesto en escena por aquél, y si tal nexo es coherente con lo que Henry piensa acerca de un modo de manifestación que ya no implica distancia fenomenológica alguna: la manifestación del pathos de la Vida. (shrink)

God is said to be Spirit, but the language of spirit is ignored in contemporary philosophy of religion. As well as exploring the notion of spirit in Hegel, Romanticism and Kierkegaard, participants explore the view that God is a spirit without a body, and the relations between "spirit" and "truth.".

In this collection, distinguished theologians and philosophers of religion explore the relation of key Biblical concepts to our world. They examine a range of concepts, including authority, faith and history, the historical Jesus, the resurrection and miracles.

This is the first study to compare the philosophical systems of secular scientific philosopher Mario Bunge (1919-2020), and Moroccan Islamic philosopher Taha Abd al-Rahman (b.1945). In their efforts to establish the philosophical underpinnings of an ideal modernity these two great thinkers speak to the same elements of the human condition, despite their opposing secular and religious worldviews. While the differences between Bunge’s critical-realist epistemology and materialist ontology on the one hand, and Taha’s spiritualist ontology and revelational-mystical epistemology on the other, (...) are fundamental, there is remarkable common ground between their scientific and Islamic versions of humanism. Both call for an ethics of prosperity combined with social justice, and both criticize postmodernism and religious conservatism. The aspiration of this book is to serve as a model for future dialogue between holders of Western and Islamic worldviews, in mutual pursuit of modernity’s best-case scenario. (shrink)

In this article, I examine Luhmann’s, Bunge’s and others’ views on emergence, and argue that Luhmann’s epistemological construal of emergence in terms of Totalausschluss (total exclusion) is both ontologically flawed and detrimental to an appropriate understanding of the distinctive features of social emergence. By contrast, Bunge’s rational emergentism, his CESM model, and Wimsatt’s characterization of emergence as nonaggregativity provide a useful framework to investigate emergence. While researchers in the field of social theory and sociology tend to regard Luhmann as the (...) sole representative of systems theory, the latter has been characterized by its diversity, and the writings of such systems theorists as Mario Bunge deserve more (critical) attention from social researchers than they receive at present. Finally, this article suggests that the perennial debate over methodological individualism and holism in social science may make real progress if such ambiguous terms as reduction and reductionism are elucidated before they are employed. (shrink)

This article attempts to assess Mario Bunge’s important but widely neglected criticisms of dialectics. It begins by providing a contextualized interpretation of Friedrich Engels’s metaphysics of the dialectics of nature before embarking on a detailed discussion of Leon Trotsky’s and contemporary “dialectical” scientists’ views on materialist dialectics. It argues that while some of Bunge’s criticisms are eminently sensible, the principles underlying the works of dialectical scientists are compatible with Bunge’s emergentist and systemic approach and can shed light on such issues (...) as the levels of organization, the diachronic and synchronic aspects of emergence, and the individualism-holism-systemism trilemma. This article also submits that dialectics is best interpreted as a guideline for a philosophy of change instead of a magical wand that liberates the investigator from study of facts. Understood as something that serves heuristic purposes, dialectics can be sensibly utilized by scientists to shore up or refine their methodological principles and thereby to facilitate empirical research. (shrink)

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

The notion of a hypothesis being deployed essentially in the derivation of a novel prediction plays a key role in the deployment realist reply to Laudan’s and Lyon’s attacks to the No Miracle Argument. However Lyons criticized Psillos’ criterion of essentiality, urging deployment realists to abandon this requirement altogether and accept as true all the assumptions actually deployed in novel predictions. But since many false assumptions were actually deployed in novel predictions, he concludes that the “no miracle argument” and deployment (...) realism fail. I reply that the essentiality condition is required by Occam’s razor, and a “no miracle argument” deprived of that condition is a straw man. While Lyons’ criticisms of Psillos’ formalization of essentiality may be well taken, I suggest that there is a simpler formulation which escapes those criticisms and is enough to deal with the supposed counterexamples to the No Miracle Argument and deployment realism: a hypothesis is essential when it does not have a proper part (in Yablo’s sense) from which the prediction could also be derived. I then show how this condition rescues deployment realism from Lyons’ purported historical counterexamples. Essentiality in this sense cannot be detected prospectively, but this is just what we should expect, and far from causing problems for deployment realists, this frees them from unreasonable obligations. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to analyze time-asymmetric quantum mechanics with respect to the problems of irreversibility and of time's arrow. We begin with arguing that both problems are conceptually different. Then, we show that, contrary to a common opinion, the theory's ability to describe irreversible quantum processes is not a consequence of the semigroup evolution laws expressing the non-time-reversal invariance of the theory. Finally, we argue that time-asymmetric quantum mechanics, either in Prigogine's version or in Bohm's version, does (...) not solve the problem of the arrow of time because it does not supply a substantial and theoretically founded criterion for distinguishing between the two directions of time. (shrink)

Neuroeconomics is a science pledged to tracing the neurobiological correlates involved in decision-making, especially in the case of economic decisions. Despite representing a recent research field that is still identifying its research objects, tools and methods, its epistemological scope and scientific relevance have already been openly questioned by several authors. Among these critics, the most influential names in the debate have been those of Faruk Gul and Wolfgang Pesendorfer, who claim that the data on neural activity cannot find place in (...) economic models, which should on the contrary be solely based on the data produced by choices. This paper aims at countering the gloomy and unsubstantiated claims of these two authors and those who believe that neuroscience cannot provide new and useful insights to the established knowledge of standard economics. The main point stressed here is that this perception is the product of a general misunderstanding of the advances made by neuroscience, which are incidentally of crucial importance. (shrink)

The many constraints of outer space experience challenge the human ability to coexist. Paradoxically, astronauts assert that on the international space station there are no conflicts or, at least, that they are able to manage their differences, behavioral as well as cognitive, in full respect of human rights and the imperatives of cooperative living. The question is: Why? Why in those difficult, a-terrestrial, and therefore almost unnatural conditions do human beings seem to be able to peacefully and collaboratively live together? (...) What is there beyond terrestrial boundary conditions that allows for such a result? And what can we learn from the astronauts’ experience about the effectiveness of human rights on Earth? My proposal is that the a-terrestrial dimension deeply alters the mind/body indexical framework and, in this way, disentangles the human inclination to semiosis from the cognitive and behavioral habits of categorization and territorialization inherent in the experience on Earth. If analyzed through the spectrum of an interdisciplinary approach involving anthropology, semiology, law, and human geography, I think that outer space enterprises can offer many insights into the cognitive and ethical/political hindrances to the effectiveness of human rights and their intercultural uses. Meanwhile the compulsive greed for a possessive territorialization of outer space and celestial bodies is growing by leaps and bounds. It haunts and imbues both astropolitics and space law. The astronauts’ semio-anthropological experience of human rights and cooperative coexistence seems to have been left in orbit. The future requires awareness and action by anthropologists, semioticians, cognitive scientists, geographers and lawyers, working all together in an interdisciplinary effort to move beyond approaching the experiential with a territorial mindset. The hope is that the “dark dream” of human exploitation/colonization of outer space will not turn from a political and legal speculation into a future reality. (shrink)

This paper offers a metaethical analysis of so-called political moralism’s metaethical assumptions and proposes shifting away from them. It does so by taking migration ethics’ methodology as a case study of the field. First, the paper shows political moralism’s commitment to moral monism and moral overridingness. Second, it explains how such commitments are likely to lead to the formulation of toy theories - and, hence, moral regress. Third, it proposes the recognition of prudential normativity and normative pluralism as a way (...) to avoid the toy theory problem. And, fourth, it deals with two objections to this proposal. (shrink)

This essay, between serious and facetious, addresses an apparently secondary implication of the planetary tragedy produced by Covid-19. It coincides with the ‘problem of the veil,’ a bone of contention in Islam/West relationships. More specifically, it will address the question of why the pandemic has changed the proxemics of public spaces and the grammar of ‘living together.’ For some time—and it is not possible to foresee how much—in many countries people cannot go out, or enter any public places, without wearing (...) a sanitary mask. In short, almost all of us, by obligation or by urgent advice from the public authorities of the various countries, will not live the public sphere with our faces uncovered. The alteration of the social context affecting many Western countries will inevitably involve also the ‘local’ perception of the Islamic veil and—as a matter of equality—the consistency of the prohibition of wearing it. What will thus become of the ban on wearing it in public places established by some countries such as France and asseverated by the ECHR? If everyone can and will have to go around with their faces covered, why should only Islamic women be discriminated against? Will not the change in boundary conditions produced by Covid-19 also induce Western people to re-categorize the meaning of the veil? And will this re-categorization not directly affect the ‘fact’ of wearing the veil, that is, its empirical perception? And still, will this psycho-semantic change not show how empirical perceptions are cultural constructs rather than ‘objective facts,’ as such allegedly independent from the observer’s point of view? Consequentially, will the plurality of perceptions and cultural meanings related to the gesture of covering one’s own face not gain renewed relevance in determining the legitimacy of wearing the veil? The socio-semantic earthquake produced by Covid-19 compels us to rethink this and other issues orbiting around the translation of ‘facts’ into legal language; furthermore, it highlights the instrumentality of many ideological/partisan and ethnocentric assumptions passed off as objectivity regarding those alleged ‘facts.’ The essay will attempt to provide an answer to the above questions by proposing a semiotic-legal approach to intercultural conflicts and, indirectly, the pluralism in law. (shrink)

Recently the CJEU decision in the case of ‘Ewa Glawischnig-Piesczek v. Facebook Ireland Limited’ has raised the issue of the transcultural/trans-territorial signification of hate speech and hate crimes. Taking a cue from this decision and the related semiotic/legal implications, the paper proposes an analysis of the semio/pragmatic conditions for the production of performativity inherent in hate speech across different cultural universes of discourse. Given that web-based digital communication is global—at least, potentially—regardless of any spatial/political compartmentalization, it crosses different semio-cultural circuits. (...) This trans-spatiality implies transcultural crossings that can multiply and even transfigure the semantic implications of the original signifier and the related prognoses of ‘semantic effectiveness.’ Cultural boundaries therefore may function as a kind of ‘horizon of events’ for hate speech and, more inclusively, all linguistic acts and their legal signification/classification. The question then arises regarding whether and to what extent the performativity of hate speech is able to withstand the variation of cultural boundary conditions. Insofar as cultures are universes of experience, the issue to be investigated broadens, and ends up invoking the question of whether or not the production of performativity implicitly presupposes and tacitly epitomizes the semio-pragmatic implications/consequences (or, in Peircean terms, ‘bearings’) coextensive with cultural universes of experience. Were this the case, it would seem to call into question the very possibility of ‘making things only with words,’ or more explicitly, the alleged meaning of ‘linguistic acts.’. (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.