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

The aim of this paper is to offer a brief survey of the relationship between Hilary Putnam and pragmatism. In the first and second sections I comment on Putnam’s philosophical shift from “orthodox” analytic philosophy to “neopragmatism”, and take a look at his controversy with Richard Rorty concerning the meaning of pragmatism. The third section points at Putnam’s and Rorty’s rejection of the Peircean definition of truth as a key issue to account for the differences between neopragmatist philosophers and classic pragmatists (including Dewey). The final section draws some conclusions from the previous discussion concerning the “narrative” of contemporary pragmatism.

II Miguel Servet Lecture. Christian Laval. Universidad de Zaragoza, November 8, 2017.

In several works produced in the 60's and 70's, Putnam introduced the notion of contextually a priori, trying to give an account of the principles that fix the limits of the possible experience within a conceptual scheme. According to Putnam, these principles are originated by the satisfaction of specific cognitive needs, and not by conventional stipulations. This paper discusses the putnamian notion of the a priori in relation to the stances of Poincaré, Reichenbach and Carnap, trying to establish in each case the points of convergence with the putnamian conception, as well as the reasons that led Putnam to reject the conventionalist views of the a priori. It is argued that the putnamian account can be considered as a rehabilitation of the transcendental component of the Kantian a priori, as for Putnam the a priori principles are not only constitutive of the objects, but they fix cognitive limits that can only be overcome in contexts of conceptual change.

As is well known, Putnam changed his philosophical position on a number of occasions throughout his career. In this paper, I reconsider the position of internal realism which Putnam defended from the mid-1970’s until around 1990. The paper opens with a discussion of the position that Putnam called “metaphysical realism”, since his internal realism emerged out of a critique of that position. The paper then briefly presents the internal realist view as one which involves an epistemic conception of truth, as well as an anti-realist metaphysical outlook on which objects depend on conceptual scheme. The paper then provides a survey of the key objections to internal realism which emerged in the ensuing debate with defenders of realism. The paper concludes with a brief consideration of the relevance of Putnam’s later adoption of a direct realist theory of perception with respect to the issue of realism.

During his long and extraordinarily productive career Hilary Putnam occasionally flirted with pragmatism. But his scientific realism provided a fixed point of his attempts to interpret quantum theory. I have argued recently that pragmatist treatments of representation, explanation and probability are keys to understanding how we use quantum theory so successfully, and so how it should be interpreted. For Putnam, scientific realism is itself a scientific hypothesis that explains the success of science. If I am right, the success of quantum theory undermines this kind of scientific realism while supporting a rival pragmatism. Scientific realism remains immune to empirical refutation if it is viewed not as a scientific hypothesis but as a regulative ideal. But a pragmatist view of quantum theory poses a challenge to a certain kind of metaphysical realism.

Philosophy of religion and mysticism of the latest Tugendhat belong to the centre of his anthropological period but are related to the whole of his previous work. The anthropological roots of spirituality lie in practical or existential self-consciousness, which refers to our life in its entirety and is exposed —Heideggerian more— to contingency. According to Tugendhat, contingency elicits religion, with its beliefs in spiritual beings (that he strongly rejects), and several forms of impersonal oriental mysticisms, such as Buddhism and Tao, which mitigate the voracity of an egotistical self. This paper analyses the Tugendhatian theorization of both phenomena and dicusses his argument in favour of atheism for the sake of “intellectual honesty”, as well as his claim of adoptng mystical doctrines but only from their practical-existential aspect.

This article reviews the most relevant contributions made by Hilary Putnam to the interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, specifically to the so-called “measurement problem”. We discuss his ideas regarding the apparent non-applicability of the quantum rules to the macroscopic world and the emergence of the Born rule, which determines the probabilistic nature of the quantum world. Some of the logical studies of Putnam are also reviewed due to their special relevance to the novel field of quantum computation.

In this article I intend to present the moral of universal respect and its commitment to a conception of egalitarian justice. For this, I intend to clarify what it means, according to Tugendhat, to justify a concept of morality, and, more specifically, to accept the moral of universal respect. For the author, the question of accepting or not a moral perspective is related to the question of the type of person we want to be, to construction of our qualitative identity. With this, Tugendhat discards the possibility of responding to the so-called moral skepticism and proposes the substitution of the promise of an ultimate foundation of morality, by the justification of the greater plausibility of a moral perspective, against competing moral perspectives. Promoting a re-reading of the Kantian moral principle as the best expression of our moral demand, Tugendhat will defend our commitment to a concept of equal justice and respect for the basic rights of all individuals.

The great prominence that international migrations occupy in our era, which could be described as "the era of mobility", is undeniable. In this sense, the book by Juan Carlos Velasco (El azar de las fronteras: Políticas migratorias, ciudadanía y justicia) is very topical and becomes fundamental to understand, from different perspectives, the migratory processes that shape our present.

The main moral motive for Tugendhat’s contractualist approach is the desire to be recognized as a member of the contractual community. But this reason can not justify the prohibition of cruelty to animals. With regard to this problem, Tugendhat fluctuates between the adoption of a second motive, compassion, and the externalization of the attitude toward animals and nature as a whole to mysticism. This article attempts to solve this problem by explaining the human-animal relationship and its ethical implications. It is argued that morality generally refers to the consideration of the welfare of beings who are capable of suffering. Since the welfare of these individuals has different dimensions and our relationships with them also have different types, so the moral action is based on different reasons, without having to assume a tension between incompatible motives.