The Infinite between the Inexhaustible and the Negation

Después de haber analizado las razones que indujeron a las antiguas matemáticas griegas y de que Aristóteles sólo admitiera una débil forma de lo infinito (el potencial), se explora una ampliación de este concepto más allá de sus referencias numéricas y geométricas. El infinito puede expresar la "inagotable" riqueza ontológica de los atributos de las entidades individuales o, en otro sentido, el infinito puede ser entendido como aquello "ilimitado". En este segundo sentido la "negación" (de las limitaciones) se presenta como una fuerza positiva en la formación del sentido ontológico de lo infinito.After having analyzed the reasons that induced ancient Greek mathematics and Aristotle to admit only a weak form of the infinite (the potential one) a broadening of this notion beyond its numerical and geometrical references is explored. The infinite can express the "inexhaustible" ontological richness of the attributes of individual entities or, in another sense, the infinite can be understood as the "unlimited". In this second sense the "negation" (of limitations) appears as a positive force in the shaping of the ontological meaning of the infinite

Ser italiano en Bolivia, siendo un cineasta bolivano

Paolo Agazzi, boliviano nacido en Italia en 1949, habla de su experiencia como director y su punto de vista sobre el cine de Bolivia y de América Latina

El impacto epistemológico de la tecnología

La tecnología y la ciencia moderna están estructuralmente conectadas. En primer lugar porque la ciencia moderna es ciencia experimental, es decir, sus experimentos se realizan mediante instrumentos y son situaciones artificiales. Pero, en un sentido más importante, la tecnología es un elemento estructural del conocimiento científico moderno, porque en éste son necesarios, por un lado, conceptos, y por otro, tecnologías que conecten los conceptos con sus referentes. El impacto tecnológico sobre el conocimiento científico es, pues, relevante en tres direcciones: control teórico de la experiencia, comprobación del éxito de la predicción y constitución del ámbito de objetos.Technology and modern science are structurally connected. In the first place, because modern science is experimental science. that is to say. experiments are accomplished by instruments, and they are artificial situations. Moreover, in a most important sense, technology is a structural elcment of thc rnoc.lcrn scicntific knowledge, hecause it necds. 0 11 the one hand, concepts, and on the other hand, tcdmologics connecting these concepts with their rcfcrcnccs. Accordingly, the tedmological impact on scicntific knowledgc is relevan! in thrcc levels: the theoretical control of experience, the corroboration of predictions. and the elaboration of the field of scientific objects

One reason, several logics

Humans have used arguments for defending or refuting statements long before the creation of logic as a specialized discipline. This can be interpreted as the fact that an intuitive notion of "logical consequence" or a psychic disposition to articulate reasoning according to this pattern is present in common sense, and logic simply aims at describing and codifying the features of this spontaneous capacity of human reason. It is well known, however, that several arguments easily accepted by common sense are actually "logical fallacies", and this indicates that logic is not just a descriptive, but also a prescriptive or normative enterprise, in which the notion of logical consequence is defined in a precise way and then certain rules are established in order to maintain the discourse in keeping with this notion. Yet in the justification of the correctness and adequacy of these rules commonsense reasoning must necessarily be used, and in such a way its foundational role is recognized. Moreover, it remains also true that several branches and forms of logic have been elaborated precisely in order to reflect the structural features of correct argument used in different fields of human reasoning and yet insufficiently mirrored by the most familiar logical formalisms

Die Täter-Opfer-Debatte und die Schuldfrage: Eine (nicht nur) literarische Bilanz nach der Wende

The present contribution is mainly aimed at retracing some pivotal elements of the debate on “German collective guilt” in the last two decades of Germany’s cultural history. The search for truth about the past has complex implications; yet it is thanks to historians and writers, such as Wehler and Frei, on the one hand, and Sebald, Kempowski, Walser and Grass, on the other, that the problem of “collective sufferings” could be brought into sharper focus, including the loss of civilians due to air bombings against German cities. Dagmar Barnouw, an eyewitness to the bombings of Dresden, has therefore called for a “renegotiation” of collective guilt, critically facing what she has defined the supra-historical status of Auschwitz crimes. The semantic field articulated by terms such as “Last”, “Scham”, “Schande” as synonyms for “Schuld” testifies to strong emotional distress on the part of the subject, but also to an ongoing attempt to consciously or unconsciously overcome the obsession with memory, setting the future free from the past. Forms of real guilt removal or guilt usage for propaganda purposes between East and West Germany in the aftermath of WW2 are taken into account in the second part of the essay. And this not only to show the twofold stance of moral issues at stake, but also to identify the milestones of historical reconstructions in cinema, literature and theatre at the time when the trauma of the war was still recent

Presence of fast quenching mechanisms in Al2O3:Er3+

The measurement of luminescence decay curves and non-saturable absorption in erbium-doped aluminum oxide waveguides reveals the presence of fast quenching effects, leading to a revised value of the microscopic and macroscopic parameters of energy-transfer upconversion