Ecología y Bioética. La insuficiencia de los límites

2016 ◽  
Vol 65 (6) ◽  
Author(s):  
José Miguel Serrano Ruiz-Calderón

La ecología y la bioética como disciplinas nuevas aparecen durante el siglo XX como consecuencia del horror producido por los abusos técnico-industriales. Tienen pues un origen común y positivo, como está generalmente admitido. Sin embargo, autores críticos han observado que principalmente la bioética ha derivado en una actitud complaciente que, en definitiva, ha servido como coartada moral a buena parte de los abusos realizados en nombre de la Ciencia. Todo lo que es técnicamente posible hacer se acaba haciendo y además encuentra una justificación bioética construida por los expertos de forma analítica. Se puede sospechar que lo mismo sucede con la ecología. Esto constituye en definitiva una traición a las pretensiones de los fundadores de las nuevas ciencias. No se trata de algo nuevo en la Historia humana donde los hallazgos más valiosos o los valores más altos han sido habitualmente manipulados. Parte del problema actual radica en la divinización del hombre, ya sea en su aspecto individual o bajo el concepto de Humanidad. Paradójicamente esta divinización causa la perdida de la noción de dignidad y favorece la conversión del hombre concreto en mero instrumento de la acción técnica. Nuestra época alberga, sin embargo, motivos para el optimismo. La respuesta fundamental se encuentra en la noción de “límite” o si se prefiere de marco que sitúa al hombre en su lugar en el universo, distinto del puro mundo natural y relacionado con la divinidad. La Humanae Vitae es un ejemplo claro de esta concepción globalizadora. ---------- Ecology and bioethics as new disciplines appear during the twentieth century as a result of horror produced by industrial technical abuses. Therefore they have a common and positive origin, as is generally admitted. However, critics mainly authors have observed that bioethics has led to a complacent attitude that ultimately served as a moral alibi for much of the abuses made in the name of science possible. All that is technically possible is just doing and also finds a justification built by bioethics experts analytically. You may suspect that the same is true in the field of ecology. This is definitely a betrayal of the claims of the founders of the new sciences. This is not something new in human history where the most valuable findings or higher values have been routinely manipulated. Part of the current problem is the deification of man, either in its individual aspect or under the concept of humanity. Paradoxically, this deification causes the loss of the notion of dignity and promotes the conversion of concrete man into a mere instrument of technical action. Our era houses, however, grounds for optimism. The fundamental answer lies in the notion of “limit” or “frame” which puts man in his place in the universe, other than pure natural world and related to divinity. Humanae Vitae is a clear example of this globalizing conception.

Daímon ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 87-102
Author(s):  
Jesús Díaz Álvarez

Este artículo trata de mostrar la forma en que tres destacados filósofos del siglo XX ––Edmund Husserl, José Ortega y Gasset y José Gaos–– han lidiado con la diversidad cultural. Ligados entre sí por fuertes vínculos intelectuales, los protagonistas del texto plantean tres modos diferentes de acercarse a este crucial y espinoso asunto en donde el papel asignado a la razón resulta de especial relevancia. Husserl confiará plenamente en ella. Ortega, incluso el Ortega más husserliano, abajará considerablemente tales pretensiones. Y Gaos, radicalizando las tesis perspectivistas de su maestro, considerará que es mejor asumir su impotencia. El juego de espejos que el ensayo pretende crear con el cruce de las tres propuestas quiere poner en valor la pertinencia de la filosofía hecha en español en los debates más acuciantes del presente. This article tries to show how three leading philosophers of the twentieth century ––Edmund Husserl, José Ortega y Gasset and José Gaos–– have addressed the issue of cultural diversity. Linked to each other by strong intellectual relations, the protagonists of the text will offer three different ways of approaching this crucial and thorny issue where the role assigned to reason is of special relevance. Husserl will fully trust her. Ortega, even the most Husserlian one, will lower such claims considerably. And Gaos, radicalizing the perspectivist theses of his teacher, will consider that it is better to assume her impotence. The game of mirrors that the essay tries to recreate with the crossing of the three proposals wants to value the relevance of the philosophy made in Spanish in the most pressing debates of the present.


Among the celestial bodies the sun is certainly the first which should attract our notice. It is a fountain of light that illuminates the world! it is the cause of that heat which main­tains the productive power of nature, and makes the earth a fit habitation for man! it is the central body of the planetary system; and what renders a knowledge of its nature still more interesting to us is, that the numberless stars which compose the universe, appear, by the strictest analogy, to be similar bodies. Their innate light is so intense, that it reaches the eye of the observer from the remotest regions of space, and forcibly claims his notice. Now, if we are convinced that an inquiry into the nature and properties of the sun is highly worthy of our notice, we may also with great satisfaction reflect on the considerable progress that has already been made in our knowledge of this eminent body. It would require a long detail to enumerate all the various discoveries which have been made on this subject; I shall, therefore, content myself with giving only the most capital of them.


Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (11) ◽  
pp. 597
Author(s):  
Yuxiao Su

This paper considers C.S. Lewis’ “doctrine of objective value” in two of his major works, The Abolition of Man and The Discarded Image. Lewis uses the Chinese name Tao, albeit with an incomplete understanding of its origins, for the objective worldview. The paper argues that Tao, as an explicit theme of The Abolition of Man, is also a determining undercurrent in The Discarded Image. In the former work, Tao is what Lewis wants to defend and restore against twentieth-century secular ideologies, which Lewis condemns as infected with “the poison of subjectivism”. In the latter work, where Lewis presents one of the best accounts of the European medieval model of the Universe, objective value (the Tao in Lewis’ argument) underlies both how the model has been shaped, and how Lewis, as a medievalist, accounts for and draws upon it as an intellectual and spiritual resource. The purpose of this parallel study is to show that Lewis’ explication of the Tao in The Abolition of Man, which is a “built-in”, implicit belief in The Discarded Image, provides a critique of tendencies towards the subjectivism prevalent in Lewis’ lifetime. These tendencies can be traced into the moral relativism, pluralism and reductionism of the twenty-first century, giving Lewis’ work the status of twentieth-century prophecy.


2019 ◽  
Vol 127 ◽  
pp. 02009
Author(s):  
Boris Shevtsov

Nonlinear oscillations in the dynamic system of gravitational and material fields are considered. The problems of singularities and caustics in gravity, expansion and baryon asymmetry of the Universe, wave prohibition of collapse into black holes, and failure of the Big Bang concept are discussed. It is assumed that the effects of the expansion of the Universe are coupling with the reverse collapse of dark matter. This hypothesis is used to substantiate the vortex and fractal structures in the distribution of matter. A system of equations is proposed for describing turbulent and fluctuation processes in gravitational and material fields. Estimates of the di usion parameters of such a system are made in comparison with the gravitational constant.


Philosophies ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abir Igamberdiev

Relational ideas for our description of the natural world can be traced to the concept of Anaxagoras on the multiplicity of basic particles, later called “homoiomeroi” by Aristotle, that constitute the Universe and have the same nature as the whole world. Leibniz viewed the Universe as an infinite set of embodied logical essences called monads, which possess inner view, compute their own programs and perform mathematical transformations of their qualities, independently of all other monads. In this paradigm, space appears as a relational order of co-existences and time as a relational order of sequences. The relational paradigm was recognized in physics as a dependence of the spatiotemporal structure and its actualization on the observer. In the foundations of mathematics, the basic logical principles are united with the basic geometrical principles that are generic to the unfolding of internal logic. These principles appear as universal topological structures (“geometric atoms”) shaping the world. The decision-making system performs internal quantum reduction which is described by external observers via the probability function. In biology, individual systems operate as separate relational domains. The wave function superposition is restricted within a single domain and does not expand outside it, which corresponds to the statement of Leibniz that “monads have no windows”.


2013 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-202
Author(s):  
Duncan Reid

AbstractIn response to the contemporary ecological movement, ecological perspectives have become a significant theme in the theology of creation. This paper asks whether antecedents to this growing significance might predate the concerns of our times and be discernible within the diverse interests of nineteenth-century Anglican thinking. The means used here to examine this possibility is a close reading of B. F. Westcott's ‘Gospel of Creation’. This will be contextualized in two directions: first with reference to the understanding of the natural world in nineteenth-century English popular thought, and secondly with reference to the approach taken to the doctrine of creation by three late twentieth-century Anglican writers, two concerned with the relationship between science and theology in general, and a third concerned more specifically with ecology.


Author(s):  
JACOB KRIPP

This paper argues that the idea of global peace in early twentieth-century liberal international order was sutured together by the threat of race war. This understanding of racial peace was institutionalized in the League of Nations mandate system through its philosophical architect: Jan Smuts. I argue that the League figured in Smuts’s thought as the culmination of the creative advance of the universe: white internationalist unification and settler colonialism was the cosmological destiny of humanity that enabled a racial peace. In Smuts’s imaginary, the twin prospect of race war and miscegenation serves as the dark underside that both necessitates and threatens to undo this project. By reframing the problem of race war through his metaphysics, Smuts resolves the challenge posed by race war by institutionalizing indirect rule and segregation as a project of pacification that ensured that settlement and the creative advance of the cosmos could proceed.


Human Affairs ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Krzysztof Skowroński

AbstractIn the present paper, the author looks at the political dimension of some trends in the visual arts within twentieth-century avant-garde groups (cubism, expressionism, fauvism, Dada, abstractionism, surrealism) through George Santayana’s idea of vital liberty. Santayana accused the avant-gardists of social and political escapism, and of becoming unintentionally involved in secondary issues. In his view, the emphasis they placed on the medium (or diverse media) and on treating it as an aim in itself, not, as it should be, as a transmitter through which a stimulating relationship with the environment can be had, was accompanied by a focus on fragments of life and on parts of existence, and, on the other hand, by a de facto rejection of ontology and cosmology as being crucial to understanding life and the place of human beings in the universe. The avant-gardists became involved in political life by responding excessively to the events of the time, instead of to the everlasting problems that are the human lot.


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