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

The aim of this paper is to investigate the site of Ortega in the panorama of European, especially German thought, in the first half of the twentieth century, using one of the fundamental concepts of his philosophy, that is, the concept of «generation». Therefore I will defend the thesis that Ortega can be considered as one of the representatives of the post-neo-Kantian generation, called by himself the «generation of 1911» and that Ortega’s thought participates in the intellectual program of philosophers such as: Nicolai Hartmann, Heinz Heimsoeth, Karl Jaspers or Martin Heidegger. All these philosophers emerge from the neo-Kantian tradition but it overcomes, creating a new philosophical attitude, focusing on ontological reflection and on the project to overcome modern idealism.

Michael Tomasello believes that although all animals are the result (not finished) of biological evolution, and in many nonhuman animals using tools is latent (one of the main signs of cultural traits), the cumulative cultural evolution and ratchet effect, i.e., progressive (and innovative) accumulation of improvements over history about the artifacts created, occur only in humans. Contrary to this, I believe that some recent studies can be used with the purpose of, also in this regard, reaffirming the animal human continuum and extend the cumulative culture to other animals. 

The philosophy of the last Schelling presents decisive insights for an ontology of freedom. Particularly two themes of the last Schelling lead to the ontology of freedom proposed by Luigi Pareyson: the ecstasy of reason of which Pareyson himself gave a profound interpretation and the structure of God’s freedom on the configuration of which I insisted too. Ecstasy is the interruption of the development of reason, which comes to its limits and is founded by the being, which is beyond reason’s power. From here, Schelling tries to process a complex and not always linear conception of God’s freedom both as freedom of creation and, more originally, as freedom of his own being. In this attempt Schelling does not depart completely from the metaphysical tradition of the principle of necessity. The ontology of freedom thinks freedom not only as a beginning, but as a choice between being and not being. In this way, on the one hand the absolute origin escapes radically from the necessity and on the other hand, just because its being is chosen within an alternative, its position of the being is not a simple self-position, which would succumb to the necessity, but the position of something different from itself: the being with regard to which it can exercise its free power.

Natural kinds have an important epistemic value that has not been studied due to the fact that the philosophical research has been focused on both semantics and logical aspects. I propose a critical review from causality and complexity to the concept of «natural kind» advanced by Homeostatic Properties Cluster Theory (HPC) in order to demonstrate that the kinds in the HPC style s are not supported by scientific practices such as biology. I think that a different concept of “natural kind” should be based on scientific practices in order to obtain a better philosophical understanding compared to HPC of both, natural processes and obtaining successful inferences. I hold that this epistemic approach provides us a new characterization of “natural kind” that will be useful as a unifying concept of natural phenomena, as well as for generating new spaces of epistemic possibility.

The originality of Deleuze aesthetics is its implicit refuse of any anthropology o psychology of the artist or the spectator, and also a refusal of hermeneutics, language theories and structuralist semiology towards an analysis of the work of art. The problem of animality and life in general in relation to art seems to respond, in an unprecedented way, to the fading of those which classical aesthetics regarded as split topics for the analysis of the work of art, i.e., author, work of art, spectator. This paper points out some relevant aspects of individuation and life theories in Simondon, Bergson and von Uexküll, so as to understand their use and function in Deleuze aesthetics.

This article addresses Merleau-Ponty ́s conception of embodied cognition in two moments of his work, in the context of Phenomenology of Perception and The Visible and the Invisible. The central aim of this article consists in describing the epistemological consequences of the ontological turn given by merleau-pontian later thought. The study of the close relationship between perception and movement would shed light on the model of embodied cognition proposed by Merleau-Ponty and could contribute to understand the central role of the body in cognition.