Twice during the last fifteen years did scholars, of many callings and countries, collaborate and, by Festschrift and commemorative volume, express their appreciation of the work of ERNST CASSIRER. Since the turn of the century, in many languages and more than a hundred books, essays and articles, the thought of this great among contemporary philosophers has ranged from compendious historical investigations into the “problem of knowledge”, interpretations of culture-periods, philosophers, scientists, poets to penetrating analyses of mathematics, physics, chemistry, psychology, history, linguistics and mythology. Yet, while Cassirer achieved early fame with well-documented presentations of other men’s ideas, his own philosophy was not developed before the poblication of his Philosophie der Symbolischen Formen, the latest volume of which appeared in 1929, at a time when in Germany phenomenology and the “Lebens-philosophischen” precursors of existentialism had all but eclipsed the classicism of Cassirer’s theme and style. His philosophy proper could, therefore, neither receive the attention which a German intelligentsia gave to lesser intellectual events in the anxious pre-Hitler days; nor could an English-language audience, lacking a complete translation of his principal work, satisfy the interest in his thought which some of his (translated) books had already provoked.

En el presente artículo se abordan algunas de las principales dificultades derivadas de la interpretación del pensamiento aristotélico en el mundo contemporáneo. Se inicia con la consideración de las influencias del contexto de la Academia en el pensamiento aristotélico, incluyendo el vínculo con el referente platónico. Posteriormente, se analizan las distintas vetas de estudio aristotélico de acuerdo a los principales enfoques de sus diversos intérpretes en la historia de la filosofía occidental. En tercer orden, se realiza una revisión del concepto del no‑ser en Aristóteles, aludiendo a nuevas posibilidades de interpretación en función de su idea de límite

It is not easy to understand how a sensible object can convey a meaning. Is there something in the sensuous medium that is peculiarly capable of standing for another thing? Is the meaning conveyed in some ways independent or dependent upon the characteristics of a sensuous medium? Obviously, these questions are complex and can be approached from any number of standpoints. A promising venue of interpretation regarding the issue of how symbols symbolize and signs signify is offered by the philosophical anthropology of Ernst Cassirer. However, as excellent as this account is I believe it can be improved through a supplementation. In particular, I would suggest that Cassirer’s epistemological standpoint on symbols can be enhanced with the metaphysical standpoint of Alfred North Whitehead and Henri Bergson. The blending of these perspectives, while a difficult undertaking, provides in my view an essentially complete interpretation of the relationship between expression and representation in the process of concept formation.

Determinismus und Indeterminismus in der modernen Physik (DI) is one of Cassirer’s least known and studied works, despite his own assessment as “one of his most important achievements” (Gawronsky 1949, 29). A prominent theme locates quantum mechanics as a yet further step of the tendency within physical theory towards the purely functional theory of the concept and functional characterization of objectivity. In this respect DI can be considered an “update”, like the earlier monograph Zur Einsteinschen Relativitätstheorie: Erkenntnistheoretische Betrachtungen (1921), to Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff (1910), a seminal work considering only classical and pre-relativistic physics. But how does DI cohere with the three volumes of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1923–29) providing a systematic survey of symbolic meanings in diverse aspects of culture

Las Meditaciones Metafísicas de Descartes constituyen una narración. El ego opera en ésta como un recurso filosófico, en un itinerario reflexivo que se ha propuesto la conquista de un pensamiento cuya evidencia pueda ser considerada como fundamento de todo conocimiento. Esa evidencia es la existencia pensante del yo, evidencia en cierto modo predispuesta por la forma en que se la ha buscado, dándose como inicio la propia circunstancia mundana del yo que medita por escrito.

En la Ciencia de la lógica, Hegel analiza las dos antinomias matemáticas kantianas, realiza una crítica interna de sus pruebas y concluye que son meras peticiones de principio. A pesar de ello, reconoce la legitimidad del descubrimiento kantiano. En este artículo se analiza cómo se integran y complementan esas dos miradas, para mostrar cómo se apropia Hegel de la antinomia de la razón pura para reconducirla a su fundamento conceptual, y despojarla así de todo contenido empírico, para lo cual tendrá que desactivarla mediante una crítica a la formulación kantiana.

La lectura de la filosofía hegeliana se hace ardua cuando no conocemos nociones neurálgicas del desarrollo de su sistema; una de ellas es la oposición entendida como sentido de unidad y no como una oposición aislada. Para ello es fundamental la comprensión de su génesis estudiando aspectos como el Ser, Nada, Devenir que han sido desarrolladas en este artículo con el fin de interconectar todos los aspectos en la elevación del Espíritu propuesto por Hegel, a saber en la superación de las escisiones y por ende en la unificación de la oposición para tener como resultado una realidad más genuina que contemple la diferencia y su unificación.

En las primeras páginas de la Ciencia de la lógica, el pensar tiene la pretensión de iniciar su propio movimiento sin aceptar ningún pensamiento dado o presuposición como la paradójica y pura autorreferencia del vínculo de ser y nada. De acuerdo con esto, proponemos una lectura que afirma la presencia de una negatividad que explica la actividad inmanente del pensar en el inicio de la Ciencia de la lógica.

In the XII Latin American Symposium on Mathematical Logic we presented a work introducing a Hilbert-style propositional calculus called four-valued Monteiro propositional calculus. This calculus, denoted by M4, is introduced in terms of the binary connectives (implication), → (weak implication), ∧ (conjunction) and the unary ones (negation) and ▽ (modal operator). In this paper, it is proved that M4 belongs to the class of standard systems of implicative extensional propositional calculi as defined by Rasiowa (1974). Furthermore, we show that the definitions of four-valued modal algebra and M4 -algebra are equivalent and, in addition, obtain the completeness theorem for M4. We also introduce the notion of modal distributive lattices with implication and show that these algebras are more convenient than four-valued modal algebras for the study of four-valued Monteiro propositional calculus from an algebraic point of view. This follows from the fact that the implication → is one of its basic binary operations.

This essay delivers a serious message on life, at the core of reasoning, to wit, “I am a liar” self-destructive infests reasoning to undermine it to fill life with oxymora, then proposes a singing way out in music. This essay is naturally divided into three sections: one, how self-destructive the liar paradox is life-ubiquitous; two, the liar paradox as basic to logic and philosophy; and three, how to deal with the liar paradox in snake-charming, in “Tying.” In short, these pages say that “I am a liar” self-denies to self-destroy, to demolish the structure of living (Section 1) and reasoning (Section 2). Such self-demolition must be snake-charmed into deeply singing life and reasoning (Section 3).