Rafael Ramírez Carreño  30/08/2018El gobierno de Maduro profundiza su línea de entrega de la Patria, de retroceso de todas las conquistas de nuestra soberanía, logradas con el Comandante Chávez. Una cosa es lo que Chávez dijo; y otra, lo que Maduro hace. Y le tocó al gas. Durante el gobierno del presidente Chávez nos […]

  Einstein Millán Arcia  30/08/2018. En nota reciente publicada por PDVSA, se recoge lo siguiente: “Hoy estamos garantizando el incremento de más de 600 mil barriles diarios (MBD), y en los próximos días vamos a garantizar el resto, para terminar 2018 en aceleración, y proyectar 2019 en la búsqueda de nuevas metas”. El titular de […]

This article argues for the inclusion of the Neapolitan Raimondo di Sangro, il Principe di San Severo (1710-1771) among those thinkers whose ideas, lifestyle, writings, networks and intellectual pursuits have been defined as radical. It explores the ways in which a little known Italian Radical Enlightenment thinker formed his ideas both through contact with the writings of proponents of Radical Enlightenment thought not only in England and Holland, but also in Italy and Switzerland where radical networks have been less visible to scholars. By charting the strategies for the spread and exchange of radical thought from Naples to Lausanne through heretofore unknown paths, new avenues for research are opened while the breadth and depth of the Radical Enlightenment are strengthened.

When Beaumarchais let the major antagonist of his play The Barber of Seville voice his contempt of the siècle des lumières, he was not just introducing the character as an insufferable bigot, but also ironically characterizing the movement that he himself championed: the Enlightenment. For many European intellectuals, the Enlightenment heralded the loss of the stability and structure that were regained only a century earlier over the chaos of the reformation.1 This loss of structure not only became apparent in the realm of the political, where republicanism soon ran rampant through various social strata and classes, but also in the hallowed halls of epistemology and metaphysics. If the Enlightenment was the Age of Reason, it was so only in a very peculiar sense2 : all that the seventeenth century had recognized as rational – systematic structure, deductive order, unshakable foundation and certainty – was now disdained and scorned as oppression and hierarchy, barren tautology, superstition and a headstrong insensitivity to the one truly productive force in human reasoning: doubt. It was, then, the age of Reason’s self-deprecation and self-castigation.

El actual modelo de dominación se vale de engorrosos trámites para crear una empresa, rígidos controles de cambio y de precios, abusos en las inspecciones y multas, requisa y remate de mercancías, arbitrario cierre de establecimientos, hasta llegar al extremo de encarcelar a sus gerentes y expropiar las empresas. Esta acción punitiva espanta la inversión, estimula la fuga de capitales, castiga la producción y genera desempleo y escasez. Los gobernantes y funcionarios venezolanos deberían detenerse a analizar y comprender la experiencia de la construcción socialista en China que, lejos de atizar una obsesión y fobia antiempresarial, ha entendido que solo a través del estímulo a la empresa privada es posible liberar el espíritu emprendedor para impulsar un impetuoso desarrollo de las fuerzas productivas y así poder generar una abundante riqueza que permita satisfacer las crecientes necesidades materiales, intelectuales y espirituales de su inmensa población.

The motivation for this paper arises in part from the teaching experience of its author. This does not suggest that it will be of a pedagogical nature. Quite to the contrary: we shall have to go back to first principles. But its rather unorthodox proposals wil so we hope appear less astonishing when they are seen against this background. Our pedagogical task was to teach logic to several hundreds of undergraduates in the social sciences, psychology and the humanities. Accepting such a task means believing logic to be relevant for this heterogeneous audience.

The purpose of this paper is to explain Hegel’s solution to the most fundamental problem of traditional metaphysics – how Being is absolute in its nature and also relative in its determinations. Two types of traditional approaches had been utilized to resolve the problem of Being: via immanence and via transcendence. Hegel was familiar with Spinoza’s approach through immanence by which relative determinations (i.e., modes) are reducible to an Absolute Substance in which they subsist. Hegel was also cognizant of Kant’s approach through transcendence by which the absolute is posited as the Unconditioned condition for .relative determinations and remains unknowable through consciousness.

The main object of study in this collection is the status of a theory, ascribed to Frege, popularized by Russell and widely accepted by the last two generations of teachers in logic. The theory discriminates four meanings of the term “being”. Frege, this theory claims, discovered that “is” designates (i) Existence: “God is”; (ii) Predication: The Copula in “John is ill”; (iii) Identity: “The morning star is the evening star”; and (i’v) Class inclusion: generic implication in “If something is a horse, it is an animal”. However, when historians look at classical Greek philosophy, they discover that neither Greek language, nor the expressed convictions of great thinkers such as Plato and Aristotle agree completely or even partially with the Frege-Russellian orthodoxy.

Deberíamos ser republicanos en Venezuela, pero solo lo somos de fachada. Pensamos hoy en la democracia y en su falta, sin parar mientes en el hecho de que para su establecimiento debe cumplirse el paso previo de tener una república hecha y derecha. En nuestro caso poco hemos hecho para convertirla en permanencia, o en posibilidad cercana. ¿Por qué la república puede ser la clave para explicar una conducta colectiva capaz de impedirla? Porque la asumimos en términos formales desde 1811 hasta convertirla en un credo incuestionable, pero apenas en un credo. Nadie se ha atrevido, desde entonces, a su negación en sentido formal y público, pero la conducta de las mayorías se ha empeñado en evitarla. Es decir, nadie abjura de la república, pero nadie quiere participar en el desafío del republicanismo.

29/08/2018. En el marco del «nuevo comienzo» prometido en la última campaña electoral, el presidente Nicolás Maduro anunció el Programa de Recuperación, crecimiento y prosperidad económica, un nombre demasiado exagerado para un paquete de medidas que busca sacar al país de la hiperinflación más alta de la historia latinoamericana. En verdad, no se conocen más […]