Journal of Philosophy of the University of Costa Rica
The Journal of Philosophy of the University of Costa Rica is the publication of the Costa Rican philosophical community and is produced under the auspices of the Department of Philosophy and the Institute of Philosophical Research of the University of Costa Rica. It was founded in 1957, making it one of the oldest periodicals devoted to philosophy in the Americas. Since its founding, it has published philosophical contributions from all philosophical traditions without interruption, and its pages have featured articles and studies by thinkers of the stature of Roderick Chisholm, George Santayana, Gerhard Funke, Ernest Lepore, Anna Teresa Tymieniecka, Dieter Wyss, Bob Hale, Peter Asquith, Herbert Csef, Bernhard Waldenfels, Rodolfo Mondolfo, and Angel Cappelletti, among many others. In addition, it has published previously unpublished translations of important documents such as Richard Wisser's interview with Heidegger and part of the correspondence between Dilthey and Husserl. The philosophical breadth of the journal reflects a tradition of the Costa Rican philosophical community, which has historically cultivated a wide range of philosophical perspectives, including European, Anglo-Saxon, and Latin American. In general terms, the journal publishes high-quality articles and book reviews from any area of philosophy that contribute to contemporary philosophical debates, and therefore targets the national and international philosophical community. Its language of publication is Spanish, although it also accepts articles in English and has published (by invitation) contributions in French and German. It publishes three issues annually (January-April, May-August, September-December) and accepts unpublished manuscripts throughout the year. All manuscripts submitted for consideration will undergo a double-blind peer review process. The editorial team guarantees absolute confidentiality for both authors and reviewers throughout the review process. The journal practices an editorial policy known as open access and, therefore, makes the specialized content published in the journal available to the general public free of charge. Starting with issue 150, the journal will follow the CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 CR license for the distribution of published material. Due to its long life and uninterrupted consistency for more than six decades, the Journal of Philosophy of the University of Costa Rica is one of the most solid and stable periodicals on the American continent. Its breadth of subject matter and its commitment to philosophical thought in all its manifestations also make it one of the most important philosophical journals in the Spanish language. We therefore encourage those engaged in philosophical research and practitioners of philosophy in general to send us their strictly unpublished manuscripts so that they can join our publishing project and become part of one of the few journals of its kind with more than 100 issues behind it. We would also like to inform you that we offer a range of services, including online shipping management and the complete, updated collection of our magazine from the first issue in downloadable PDF format, among others.
Towards a Political Philosophy of the Environmental Crisis and Climate Change
This article integrates ecology and environmental ethics to find a new political philosophy that addresses the challenge of the environmental crisis. Although ecology as a science allows us to understand the state of the environment, ethics and politics must be integrated into a new environmental democracy that systematically responds to the challenge of climate change. The epistemological demarcation of science, philosophy and politics based on the ecological question, presented by environmental thinkers, helps organize democracy so that citizens can actively participate in political decision-makingabout the environment.
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The Turing Test and the Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence
This article, in general terms, is an answer to the question posed by Alan Turing in a famous article from 1950 about whether digital machines think. This adds, within the framework of what has been called “dataism”, to one of the central debates in the philosophy of artificial intelligence. Hence, he summarily reviews the history of the latter, in which the moment of cybernetics acquires a certain milestone value, as well as Turing's contributions in the conception of the computable and the relationship of the test that he proposed with algorithmic reasoning.
Is it possible and what sense does a philosophy of the ordinary have? Stanley Cavell's thought, one of the most original todays, allows us to approach this question, from the perspective of the analysis of ordinary language, but going further, to understand it as an approach to philosophizing, a skeptical anthropology, and a formative method. The question that remains open, relating it to Foucault and Hadot, is the importance that the question of the reality of their work and the concrete effectiveness of their discourse has, for philosophy and for those who practice it. From Cavell, it follows that today's philosophers should rediscover the “extraordinary” of what we consider ordinary and the “ordinary” of what we see as extraordinary.
Differences Between The Kantian Reflective Judgment And The Arendtian Reflective Judgment, And Its Rescue Through Understanding
Kantian teleological reflective judgment was one of the unfinished concepts of the Königsberg philosopher, but it served as a basis, within the construction of Hannah Arendt's political thought, especially in the analysis of the contemplative life that the life of the spirit recorded in her work, and where he not only delves into judgment but also about will and thinking. However, this article seeks to rescue the reflective judgment coined by Hannah Arendt and appreciate the conceptual advance that she made in this regard compared to the reflective judgment given by Immanuel Kant; Likewise, the relevance of this faculty for ourtimes, being rescued from another human faculty such as understanding.
An Impossible Encounter in the New intellectual History
The new intellectual history is the result of the impact of the linguistic turn in historiography, which has been particularly welcomed in England, France and Germany. This turn conceals a barrier that prevents dialogue: while political language relies on speech acts as the key tool, for the history of concepts the long duration is situated in a complicated methodological framework, and both abandon the history of ideas. Thus, in this article I will expose the unbridgeable difference between the history of ideas of the Cambridge and Bielefeld schools.
Silence as a bridge of communication between the Sacred and the profane from the thought of Giles Lipovesky and Raimon Panikkar
This text aims to expose the meaning of Silence and its connection with the Sacred as a constitutive part of the human being, as a human need to cross the borders of speech that fixes and delimits reality. For this, the ideas and postulates of Gilles Lipovestsky and Raimon Panikkar are presented. These authors, accompanied by the secondary voices of other thinkers of the 20th century, were defenders of the need for Silence and its connection with something Transcendent in the contemporary world, characterized by its noisy everyday life, attachment to the ephemeral and desacralized experiences.
This paper claims that complexity consists in a process by which the world and the universe can be indetermined. Now, thinking about indeterminism consists, in other words, in reenchanting the world, a core idea in the center of complexity theory. Consequently, a brief state-of-the-art about indeterminism is sketched out, while point out that indeterminism is an extremely rare position both in science and philosophy. This paper explores the dimensions and reach of indeterminism, and highlights two, namely indetermination as ecology, and indetermination as the absence of time. The outcome is a counterintuitive picture of the world and the universe that allows understanding exactly what the complexity of life and nature consist of.
The resurgence of sovereign power in the face of the pandemic
This article focuses on analyzing how the sovereign power of life and death was exercised during the COVID-19 pandemic in Costa Rica in 2020. The article tries to question the Foucauldian approach that sovereign power represents a attenuated power since it can be observed on the restrictions on mobility and the delegation of the decision on life and death in the medical power how the sovereign power continues in modern legal systems operating beyond the limits of the state of emergency.
Life and death in The Seventh Seal. Reflections from a hermeneutical perspective
The essay below is a hermeneutical reflection that seeks to reach interpretations about the symbolic meaning manifest in the film “The Seventh Seal” by filmmaker Ingmar Bergman. There is no intention to impose a single interpretation, but rather a way of seeing cinema as a piece of art that provides aesthetic and philosophical references. The intention as well is to recognize the point of awareness in which we immerse ourselves when watching this film in relation to the experience of our own realities.
This article deals simultaneously with a historical and a textual gap. The first corresponds to the moment between the dissolution of the Greek world and the establishment of the Christian world. The second corresponds to the moment between «art-religion» and the «manifested religion» in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). Both gaps are thought of in close connection with the problem of the autonomy of art; which, in order to exist, prefigures a place. Following Jean-Luc Nancy, it is concluded that this place corresponds to the periods of immanence, of which there are above all two: Late Antiquity and Modernity.
An Analysis of Darwin’s Theory of Natural Selection from Leibniz’s Perspective
Charles Darwin published seven editions of The Origin of Species during his lifetime. Starting from the premise that said book is philosophical, Chapter IV of the work was analyzed here to find the elements underlying the explanation of natural selection throughout the seven editions. Using the criteria established by Leibniz in his Dissertation on the Philosophical Style of Nizolio, it was determined that the philosophical quality in the first edition is intermediate and increased in the following editions, mainly in the third compared to the second.
Gradual and categorical separation in the Phaedo
One of the problems for Plato's theory of Ideas is “separation.” And that this has a unique meaning. I propose that Plato saw “separation” non-univocally, believing that it occurs in two important ways. One that I will call “gradual” and another stronger that I will call “categorical”, and that the Phaedo shows these two different types of separation when talking about the soul. This leaves the door open to a moral interpretation of separation and contributes to diluting the mind-body problem. Also, it could support a non-univocal interpretation of the separation of the Forms.
The way of sensation: Notes on the aesthetics of painting in Merleau-Ponty
In this writing, we delve into some of Merleau-Ponty’s considerations regarding painting. The exploration will be guided by the notion of sensation, a concept that the philosopher adopts from the French painter Paul Cézanne. The aim is to elucidate how the author finds, in Cézanne and in modernist painting in general, a pathway to construct a new conception of sensory experience. This conception will be central to the philosopher’s later reflections, particularly those in which the ontological aspect of his philosophy is emphasized, mainly developed in The Visible and the Invisible.
Mediation and Totality: Jameson and the Linguistic Turn
Although Fredric Jameson's work usually refers us to cultural objects of a literary or artistic nature, the scope of his theorization has reached other important contemporary discussions. Such is the case of the linguistic turn predominant in the field of the Philosophy of history in the last 50 years. His theory of narrative as a socially symbolic act, which adopts structuralist approaches in a dialectical matrix, distanced him from the rising narrativist positions, as well as from positions that do not sufficiently problematize narrative in historical knowledge. This article, in homage to the fundamental North American Marxist theorist, examines this problem in his conception of historiographical narrative, primarily considering his approaches in The Political Unconscious (1981) and The Valences of History (2009).
This study investigates Christian (Valentinian) gnosis through Platonizing allegorization. This category serv:s as a key to Gnostic metaphysics (Judeo-Christian content), both for interpreting the Gnostic fragment of Oxyrhynchus no. 1081 and for examining Valentinian gnosis, the largest Gnostic corpus that has survived. To achieve this, the study provides the background, translation, and exegesis of the fragment. It is then interpreted and ultimately situated within the broader context of Valentinian gnosis, revealing this path as a particular alternative stemming from Plato's philosophy.
Readings of Kant's "Anticipations of Perception": The Origin of the Philosophies of Intensity
The Kantian table of categories in the Critique of Pure Reason, which posits the a priori conditions of possible experience, has been subject to recurrent criticism regarding its perceived inability to account for the dynamic and contingent nature of empirical experience. This paper undertakes an analysis of the category of quality, as articulated in the «Anticipations of Perception» section, to demonstrate how Kant, by integrating the advancements of infinitesimal calculus and its treatment of variable magnitudes, provides a framework for reevaluating the transcendental apparatus. It is argued that this opening within the transcendental system informed the philosophies of Maimon, Cohen, and Deleuze, who aimed to modify the initial categorial rigidity and enable the transcendental to function as an «intensive spatium». Through a critical examination of the «Anticipations», it is shown that transcendental schematism, rather than being a rigid mechanism of object constitution, can accommodate elements of a «logic of emergence», wherein contingency, non-linear temporality, and intensity play constitutive roles. Consequently, the analysis of the category of quality reveals the hitherto underappreciated plasticity of the Kantian categorial system.
The objective is to assess whether Kant, by grounding the Critique of Pure Reason in the principle of significance, that is, the principle according to which there is no legitimate use of concepts unless they are related to the empirical conditions of their application, returns to an Aristotelian position on the mind. To this end, the cognitive architecture of transcendental dialectic is analyzed, with particular attention to the paralogisms and the consequent dismantling of the Cartesian rational doctrine of the soul. The central question is to determine whether, by overcoming the split between rationalism and empiricism, critical philosophy leans toward idealism or realism. Adopting the second path, the development will be explicitly based on the key postulates of Peter Strawson's classic essay (1975) on the limits of meaning and implicitly on the theoretical framework of Konstantin Pollok's recent work (2017) on the space of normativity—both dedicated to Kant's work. After outlining the elements of the logic of illusion in dogmatic metaphysics, the paper concludes by refuting the hypothesis of an Aristotelian return, as for Kant, the mind is never a substance.
My paper regards a Kantian dilemma: either we omit the claim that (p) there are things in itself, because we must omit every assertion without epistemic justification, or we omit the claim, essential from the point of view of the Kantian theory of categories, that (q) categories only have cognitive significance if they inform phenomena (at least one phenomenon). P places Immanuel Kant outside from ontological realism; q places Kant, outside from empiricism. But Kantian epistemology is a realistic empiricism. Therefore, this dilemma poses Immanuel Kant out of Kantianism, that is, it compels Kant to give up Kantian epistemology.
On the Unfinished and Uncertain Paths of Logic
In the prologue of the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant offers a vision of logic as a science completely finished. Nevertheless, further advances have proven this Kantian idea wrong. The current work offers a discussion of non-monotonic logics and some of the philosophical presuppositions as an example of a formal system of very recent development with an interdisciplinary background that allows us to understand a particular class of inferences of human reasoning. In this sense, non-monotonic logics are a paradigmatic case which shows how distant is logic from being a perfect and finished science.
The Sensibility of the Subject as a Condition of Its Freedom: A Counterpoint Between Kant and Schiller
The philosophy of German idealism is influenced by the French Revolution, not only in its political dimension but also in the epistemological one. This article addresses the latter aspect, focusing on Friedrich Schiller´s aesthetics, highlighting how it becomes the former, as they are dialectically related. Consequently, the debate centers on how aesthetics constitutes an enlightened subjectivity. Schillerian subjectivity is studied through the role of autonomy, as it is fundamental to human freedom. Such a role implies a moral imperative, that is, an ethics aligns with the Enlightenment process marking the transition from the Medieval to the Moden era. Therefore, education becomes a central element in civic formation, based on Enlightenment aesthetics.
Undergraduate and graduate philosophy theses defended at the University of Costa Rica (1944–2024)
This paper aims to examine the dissertations presented in the field of philosophy at the University of Costa Rica during the years comprehended between1944 and 2024 in order to contribute with evidence that will broaden the proposal in the book Crítica de los guardianes del reino (Arlekín, 2018) wich argues that the seventies, in the twentieth century, had a significant impact as a new way to produce philosophy in Costa Rica.
Racial Justice and Social Justice in The Indian Revolution
This article explores the relationship between racial justice and social justice in the context of Fausto Reinaga’s work, The Indian Revolution (1970). Reinaga’s critique underlines the need for a radical transformation of social structures to achieve true justice. This article uses a Latin American historicist perspective to argue that social justice cannot be fully achieved without racial justice, which would recognize and value the contributions of Indian subjects, in this particular case. Also, the figure of Túpac Amaru is considered as a precursor of social justice, offering a model to address the structural inequalities of Latin American societies.
Moishe Postone’s Theory of the Value-Form versus the Expanded Theory of Production/Reproduction of Life under Capitalism
The article approaches two contemporary critical perspectives, partially aligned with the philosophical-social legacy of the Frankfurt School, such as the theory of the value form of Moishe Postone and the theory of dynamic stabilization of Hartmut Rosa. Specifically, he argues that while the first is based on a conceptualization of historically specific social forms that models the structural foundations of the production/reproduction of life in capitalism, the second incorporates materialist concerns that collaborate with the updating of the Marxian critique of political economy based on the main challenges that currently dictates the planetarian condition.
The Legal Discourse of the State of Emergency
In this research, the paradigm of the atomic bomb is used as an example to understand the changes in sociopolitical and economic dynamics caused by the emergence of imperceptible, self-threatening, and universal risks. This paradigm is utilized to demonstrate the foundation and operationalization of the state of exception under a legal discourse that employs scientific criteria as a mechanism of truth in governmental practice during exceptions. This relationship shows how risk serves as a paradigm to understand the attenuations and changes of the state of exception in Costa Rica, with respect to its scope of application and the exceptional powers of the Executive.
Artificial neural networks as regulatory devices in digital capitalism
This paper aims to analyze the role of artificial neural networks in contemporary surveillance and control dynamics, with a particular focus on the epistemic opacity that characterizes them. It argues that, although these technologies have been developed to optimize data extraction in digital capitalism, their opaque and decentralized nature has transformed surveillance into a more subtle and imperceptible phenomenon. Based on this analysis, it is suggested that ANNs can be interpreted within the Foucauldian framework as an update to disciplinary and biopolitical dispositives, expanding the ways in which power is exercised over individuals and populations.
Post-Darwinian Kantians and Post-Kantian Darwinians
In this article, I argue that Kant's work influenced the epistemology and science of the 19th and 20th centuries. This influence can be understood in both positive and negative ways. To address this, I consider two paradigmatic cases. The first is Thomas Kuhn, who defined himself as a «post-Darwinian Kantian» in his text, The Road since Structure. Kuhn is interesting in addressing the question of the meaning of this statement. The second case is Ernst Haeckel, who begins by criticizing Kant's dualist philosophy. The influence here is negative if we consider his monistic approach.
This article examines the discrepancy between the historical Jesus and his representations in Western art, aesthetically transformed to reflect European features. Drawing on the analyses of John P. Meier and historical-critical studies by Antonio Piñero, Fernando Bermejo Rubio, and others, we discuss the ideological role of these images in reinforcing Eurocentric hegemony. Supported by philosophical aesthetics, we argue for the need to reassess these representations within a religious context as well, promoting an inclusive and historically accurate aesthetic that better reflects cultural diversity and provides a meaningful image of Jesus for marginalized communities.
The concept of the person in the philosophy of Robert Spaemann
The question about the meaning of being a person has been present throughout the history of humanity, with great concern arising in investigating the origin of the human being, the qualities that make it different from other living beings, among other concerns. For this reason, the present work aims to construct a general review of the concept of person, a central theme in the philosophy of Robert Spaemann. To do this, it is important to review his thought on topics about the nature of being, the reasons why he considers every man as a person and the exclusive qualities of this same one.
An Approach to Schoenberg's Twelve-Tone Method from Schopenhauer's Musical Metaphysics
This article arises from a fundamental question: How could twelve-tone music be conceived within Schopenhauer's philosophical system? To answer this, the article begins by describing the metaphysical and aesthetic foundation of Schopenhauer's musical conception. Next, some key points of Schoenberg's twelve-tone method are presented, along with its representation in a musical work. Finally, this compositional method is introduced into that philosophical system, leading to two mutually exclusive interpretations: 1- Twelve-tone music as music that produces suffering (related to the minor key). 2- Twelve-tone music as noise.
We explore the revolutionary ideas of Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend in the context of the philosophy of science. Both challenged traditional conceptions of science, advocating for a more human, critical and pluralistic vision of the discipline and interrogating its epistemological, metaphysical and ontological foundations from a historiographic, sociological and cultural perspective, agreeing that science is a complex and human enterprise diverse that benefits from the plurality of approaches and openness to new perspectives, so only plural openness can contribute to a richer social understanding of scientific activity.