PAPERS

Interview with Michel Onfray, Hedonist Philosopher. By Ximo Brotons

Some years ago Michel Onfray (1959) appeared described in the cultural supplement of La Vanguardia as a Nietzscheanian iconoclast. Today Onfray, PD, is one the most read and prestigious thinkers in the neighbouring country. His works have progressively been translated into Spanish: El vientre de los filósofos (R&R, 1996), Cinismos (Paidós, 2002), Teoría del cuerpo enamorado (Pre-Textos, 2002) and Tratado de ateología (Anagrama, 2005; also in Catalan). His Anti-manual, talked about in this interview, has also been recently translated (Edaf, 2005, with foreword by J.A. Marina). Onfray is known for having popularised –not necessarily banalised- the ideas of thinkers like Deleuze or Foucault. He is a materialist hedonist and has just quit teaching in a French secondary school to found, together with other filosophy teachers, a popular university in Caen, in the fashion of those born in France in the time of the Dreyfus affaire on in Spain under the guidance of Blasco Ibáñez, amongst others. Entrance to such university is free and lectures are not accompanied by exams, nor are there official titles. We talked to him via e-mail. [Download full text]

Language, Evolution and Nationalism. About the Book 'Lenguas en guerra'. By Ester Astudillo

This review takes advantage of the recently published 2005 Espasa Book Award, Lenguas en guerra, and comments on the most fundamental ideas thereof, both about the filogenetic origins of language and about the incompatibility, according to the author, of such origins with mainstream ideas on nationalism as based on the singularity of non-state languages. The texts also aims at examining such ideas in the light of current knowledge about evolution, genetics and the history of human thought, and focuses on the contrast between the author’s idealistic stand on language’s functionality and its proper use, on the one hand, and her more pragmatic and possibilistic view about nationalism and language preservation, on the other. [Download full text]

The City of Mexico Declaration. By Eduardo Subirats

Eduardo Subirats plublished recently the book Violencia y civilización (Losada, Madrid, 2006). This texts belongs thereof and aims at unveiling some of the key ideas of the author’s. Resorting to the concept of civilising violence, he reports the abuse of a global and totalitarian power acting, paradoxically enough, in tuning with the defense of freedom, neoliberal multiculturalism and a capitalism presented as caring and deconstructing. [Download full text]

Pragmatism and Politics in Rorty. The Achievement of the Public Space. By Adolfo Vásquez Rocca.

This text, based on the distinction established by Rorty between that which is public and that which is private, aims at clarifying the conditions that may enable us to construe the public space as that springing from a pragmatic stand. To do so, I firstly defend the view that that which is public is first and foremost construed, rather than unveiled, which makes it impossible to see politics as essentially founded, and opens up the possibility to discuss the incommensurability between that which is public and that which is private. Secondly, I will attempt to give an answer to such possibility, basing my position on the notion of social hope, understood as the feeling of solidarity as a widening-up of ourselves. Finally, I will show how Rorty’s proposal entails the failure of Kant’s universal and rational ethics. [Download full text]