Ecological Finitude as Ontological Finitude: Radical Hope in the Anthropocene

The proposal that the earth has entered a new epoch called “the Anthropocene” has touched a nerve . One unsettling part of having our ecological finitude thrust upon us with the term “Anthropocene” is that, as Nietzsche said of the death of God, we ourselves are supposed to be the collective doer responsible here, yet this is a deed which no one individual meant to do and whose implications no one fully comprehends. For the pessimists about humanity, the implications seem rather straightforward: humanity will die. Yet, as we will explore in this paper, the death that we may be facing cannot be assumed to be simply biological death or extinction. Indeed, even if we are not running headlong into a mass extinction and biological demise, we do seem to be facing an ontological death. Our ecological finitude is the harbinger of our ontological finitude. The vulnerability we confront in the Anthropocene is what Jonathan Lear, in a different context, called ontological vulnerability. Worlds die too; the ways of life they sustain can become impossible, ceasing to make sense and matter. The constitutive susceptibility of all human worlds to their eventual collapse is what we mean by ontological finitude. This is what we face as presumed denizens in a dawning Anthropocene

Testing the BalassA-Samuelson hypothesis in two different groups of countries: OECD and Latin America

This paper studies the Balassa-Samuelson hypothesis (BSH) in the context of two areas with strong differences in economic development, twelve OECD countries and twelve Latin American economies, taking the USA as the benchmark. Applying panel cointegration techniques, we find that while the first stage of the hypothesis, which links productivities and prices, is satisfied in each group of countries, the second stage, which relates relative sector prices with the real exchange rate, only holds in the Latin American area. The failure of the latter in the OECD countries as a whole is reflected in departures from PPP in the tradable sectors.Balassa-Samuelson effect, Panel cointegration, Economic development, Exchange rate systems

Postphenomenology vs Postpositivism : Don Ihde vs Bruno Latour

Our presentation will try to clarify the differences between Postphenomenology and Postpositivism. Contemporary studies of technology and its relation to science are very much inspired by the works of Don Ihde and Bruno Latour.Updated February 2016

From Husserl to Ihde and Beyond - Some Evolutionary Lines in Contemporary Philosophy of Technology

My paper is the introduction to my next book in the series 'The humanist as Engineer'. In my work, I have been deeply influenced by Don Ihde and his postphenomenological approach to the philosophy of technology. As Ihde’s postphenomenology, my approach is historical and differs strongly from the 'pure' phenomenological approach in spite of being connected with it through many common references. Instead of this, I have chosen to move freely between the ideas arising after Kant, Hegel and Marx and I do not hesitate to make references to both Modern Art and Psychoanalysis. I understand that in the history of thought there have been paradigmatic problems and frontiers that characterised a period of time which can be considered as schools or traditions; however, these collapsed with the detonation of Postmodernism and Postphenomenology. In this frame, nobody lives up to this philosophical bricolage as Don Ihde and his postphenomenological project does. Don Ihde’s work is an example of the fertility of postmodern accounts especially when it is the consequence of a well-balanced administration of the eclectic elements within the project. There are certainly many similarities in Ihde’s and my own approach, and I will try to show some of those. I could remit myself to Albert Borgmann’ words when he wrote, 'the multiplicity of perspectives of Don Ihde’s work is essential for my own work and if I do not call my approach as 'postphenomenological' is only because I do not want to force my own views in his outstanding project.' Postmodernism has left behind lots of scattered modernist philosophical remnants. It left a chessboard with only few pieces to work with, and in this allegory, only as references. The philosophical schools remains, but the study of them is strictly for an education in the history of ideas. The situation is aggravating since the most important works from the 1960’s and forth, deliberately have avoided obvious identity patterns. A word in Rio de la Plata’s jargon language describes this situation, cambalache, a sort of 'flea market' where everything lies higgledy-piggledy. Deconstruction and the focus on differences are central to Postmodernism. Remaining is therefore the intersections, the contrasts, shadows, and sketches. When trying to orient in such an intellectual environment, the task reminds of patching scatterings, and building with tools of eclecticism. Not long ago, you could develop a problem from Marx as well as from Husserl. However, today it is necessary to build upon that which makes both Marx and Husserl jigsaw pieces in a totality – characterized by its lack of focus. This situation has also resulted in a demand, greater than ever, for competence in the field of history of ideas. In this article I suggest an eclectic philosophical tool which is centered on the idea of a historical phenomenology, understood as a bricolage of approaches which connect the ideological criticism of Kant with a philosophy of praxis in Marx, to a phenomenology of essences in Husserl and another of perceptions in Merleau-Ponty and to Heidegger’s anthropology. An eclectic background to phenomenology was anticipated by Merleau-Ponty when he wrote that phenomenology 'can be practiced and identified as a manner or style of thinking that existed as a movement before arriving at complete awareness of itself as a philosophy. It has been long on the way, and its adherents have discovered it in every quarter, certainly in Hegel and Kierkegaard, but equally in Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud

From Las Casas to Che : An Introduction to Contemporary Latin America

Spanish America is a geographical area within which the power struggle between archaic and modern traits stands out very clearly. The reason for this might be found in the significant initial historical distance between the society of the Europeans and the society of the Indians. For this reason, it is very difficult to comprehend the history of ideas of this area, if one disregards the dialectics of modernity and archaicity. This dialectics was at an early stage formulated in a classical work by the Argentinean Domingo Sarmiento (Facundo, 1845) as a power struggle between civilisation and barbarism. The opposition between modernity and archaicity generated yet another historical equation that controls the main patterns in the Latin American history of ideas: the fact that the individual freedom increases at the expense of the independence of the collective, and vice versa. Archaisms and modernities have taken the form of oppositions such as that between Indian and European culture, between European colonial thought and revolutionary nationalistic thought, between conservative and liberal thought, between scholastic and modern phi-losophy, between provincial culture and urban culture, etc. Sarmiento’s conception of Spanish Latin America as barbaric has in the 20th century found new expressions in the works of writers such as Jorge Luis Bor-ges and his, by Anglo-Saxon culture inspired, literature. On the other hand, we have an archaically inspired philosophical thought, in which the nation is located at the centre, which has gained much space within political thought after the war of independence

Broken technologies : the humanist as engineer : an Introduction

There are many possible definitions of “technology” and I will discuss some of these in this book. However, in this introduction let me use a definition of Svante Lindqvist who defines technology very intuitively as “those activities, directed towards the satisfaction of human wants, which produce change in the material world.” He says also “the distinction between human “wants” and more limited human “needs” is crucial, for we do not use technology only to satisfy our essential material requirements.” Consequently, from this perspective, a technology that is “broken” could be defined as those activities, directed towards the satisfaction of human wants that are intended to produce changes in the material world that either do not manage to satisfy these wants or do not produce changes in the material world, or both

The Humanist as Engineer Manifesto

The manifesto of a new philosophy of technolog