Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

Book Review of the Spanish translation of Timothy Morton's The ecological Thought "Ecology means less nature and more awareness." Such would be the proposal of the philosopher Timothy Morton (London, 1968) in this work. Ecological thinking is an eclectic essay where we are presented with an ecological way of thinking, which has less to do with science than with the humanities. The key to ecological thinking according to Morton is precisely this: its ramification and diversity. It starts from the consideration that all beings are connected to each other in a "mesh"; as nothing exists by itself, nothing is fully "itself". What we contemplate is an immensity of infinitesimal differences, which will require us to "think big" (that's the title of chapter 1 of the book). In the hand of art, philosophy, literature, music and popular culture, the author tries to trace in three chapters a new ecological aesthetic: dark ecology, a notion that gives title to a previous work of Morton in 2018, a thought capable of expressing the irony and uncertainty in which we locate the Mortonian ecology.

Book Review: Graham Harman (2018). Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything. Great Britain: Penguin Books. 295 pages. The Object-Oriented Ontology is a relatively new current within the contemporary problems of philosophy. One of its main exponents is the American philosopher Graham Harman. To understand Harman's philosophy, it is necessary to determine what is the fundamental problem that concerns him. His proposal is articulated as a critical dialogue with the natural sciences and with the implications of modern and contemporary philosophy. The aim of this review is one of his most recent works: Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything, which appeared in Penguin Books in 2018

  Comparative studies about human language and animal communication systems, so as the research field about language evolution, have stimulated a specific reflection about the distinctive features of human language. My aim is to examine the model of the design features proposed by Charles Hockett, whose influence has been significant on both aforementioned areas. My purpose is to highlight how the presuppositions, under which the preeminence of the structure over the function and of the features of the code over the cognitive abilities of its users are based (both common to other formal approaches that were the dominant ones in linguistics), turn it into a theoretically ineffective tool on both research fields. In particular, I will object to the role that this model has attributed to the first two design features: the vocal-auditory channel and the arbitrariness. Finally, I will contrast it with the language usage-based approaches, supported by the opposite presuppositions. These approaches characterize language as a “mosaic” of cognitive, individual and social, abilities that manifest on a variety of vehicles and modalities; therefore, these provide more suitable theoretical tools than formal approaches to explain language evolution, so as its differences and similarities to animal communication systems.

Between 1748 and 1764 Adam Smith defined a global and coherent philosophical project that he failed to publish in its entirety. The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations should be interpreted as parts of it that did come to be published. The present article presents as core elements of this project the Smithian theory of the origin of language and his vision of the human body as constitutively weak and sophisticated. Both are at the base of the historical process of socialization that, according to Smith, was together semiotic and economic in a non-problematic way. Finally, it reflects on the interest of this for the interpretation of Smith as an egalitarian no so focused on the marked and, from here, for our vision of ourselves as deficient beings that should expand their social ties as much as possible, because we need each other.

The article puts forward the thesis that it is possible in principle to express the content of animal thinking by means of a natural language. Firstly, I propose an interpretation of the research in the current cognitive ethology as making scientific progress, and I argue that this progress presupposes a possible linguistic expression of the animal thoughts (i); secondly, I try to weaken certain objections to the main thesis of the article, regarding the impossibility of grasping non-conceptual and no-familiar contents (ii); thirdly, I use the distinction between expressing and describing a thought (Dennett) to show how the linguistic expression of animal thoughts can be carried out (iii).

Marxism is often identified with the outright rejection of religion. Two recent publications look at this simplification: El dispositivo Karl Marx, by Juan Manuel Aragüés, and the compilation of Marx's texts Sobre la religión, with a preliminary study by Reyes Mate and José A. Zamora. In this article we are going to read these two works in tandem. We intend to shed new light on the problem of atheism, not just looking at the most recent contributions, but also by returning to Marx’s texts. The theoretical atheism of Marx should not be oversimplified and indeed one must see it as a consequence of his materialist conception of history, which is compatible with the practical humanism of those who share his goal of a politics of emancipation.

Cosmopolitanism is an old philosophical aspiration, claiming what we share as human beings beyond private belongings. It was expressed as a political project, as a cultural form and as a moral demand. The city offers the elements to make up a cosmopolitan sociability and a democratic way of life, although always threatened by particularist withdrawal. The understanding of cosmopolitanism by Richard Sennett engages sharply in this problematic, which becomes more present in relation to the expansion of the globalizing processes. However, the noticeable multiplication of resistances represents a new challenge for the cosmopolitan project.

Bibliographical review on the recent publication (February 2020) of a reprint of the Spanish translation of the book Los cínicos, by Bracht Branham and Goulet-Cazé (Eds.). This work is composed of fifteen articles by various specialists on the cynical school and its subsequent legacy, an essential work for any researcher or curious contemporary of cynicism.

In this paper I propose to analyze a reading of the work of Wittgenstein mainly developed by Moyal-Sharrock in which it is claimed that grammar is conditioned by certain facts (i.e. by general facts of nature). Thus, while I agree that grammar is not independent of reality, the relation (and connection) between grammar and reality is not captured, to my mind, by speaking of facts as conditions or determinants. As I will defend in this paper based on authors like Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Rhees or Feyerabend, reality, which is thought to permeate grammar, is itself, at the same time, permeated by grammar. So this paper has a twofold objective. Primarily, to show that the reading mentioned above is biased and does not adequately express, in my view, what Wittgenstein points out with that connection. Secondly, this connection shows that there are certain ‘facts’ which play a peculiar logical role: they are beyond truth and falsity (which does not mean that these facts must be true). Rather, my aim is to analyze the grammatical role of certain ‘facts’ that are not called into question, but not because they are intrinsically obvious or convincing.