Instituto de Filosofía

En suma, en este número nos interesa reflexionar respecto a las críticas al tercer modelo identificado por Laclau y pensar en la posibilidad de la formación de un cuarto modelo en la teoría estructuralista, el cual, responda a nuevos desplazamientos o dislocaciones en las estructuras de significación. ¿De qué modo aportes teóricos como el giro afectivo y el giro performativo en las Ciencias Sociales o los llamados nuevos materialismos permiten identificar nuevos lugares de inscripción de las estructuras de significación?
En específico, nos proponemos iniciar esta reflexión crítica problematizando la perspectiva derridiana respecto a lo que hay o habría fuera del texto. ¿De qué modo los aportes contemporáneos que se plantean a partir de la reflexión de Derrida tales como el giro afectivo, la teoría queer, la teoría del actor-red y el nuevo pragmatismo cuestionan o fortalecen la propuesta del autor? ¿Qué es lo que la deconstrucción ha hecho de la teoría social, política y las humanidades? ¿Qué es lo que no puede hacer o no puede ver? ¿Cuál es su punto ciego?

En junio de 2022 los editores de este dossier invitamos a Aïcha Liviana Messina a tener una conversación sobre el estado actual del pensamiento social y político post-estructuralista. Bajo la proposición de hablar sobre el impacto de la obra de Derrida y del proyecto deconstruccionista en la filosofía y las humanidades, Aïcha aceptó nuestra invitación muy generosamente. Como es propio de los tiempos (post)pandémicos en los que nos encontramos, concertamos una reunión por videollamada, formato que nos pareció conveniente en ese momento y que demostró ser especialmente útil para el trabajo de transcripción posterior. Le hicimos llegar algunas preguntas iniciales y, entre medio de sus ocupaciones y viajes, Aïcha logró hacerse un espacio en su agenda para tener este gratificante encuentro.

En junio de 2022 invitamos a Yannis Stavrakakis a conversar sobre el estado actual de la teoría posestructuralista a partir de revisar la obra de Jacques Derrida a través del lente del psicoanálisis lacaniano y su vinculación con la teoría política. La entrevista se realizó a través de video llamada y fue grabada para su posterior transcripción. Le hicimos llegar las preguntas al profesor Stavrakakis, para luego realizar la entrevista de manera virtual.

En esta investigación se trabaja el uso político de las emociones en el discurso público. En específico, se analiza el rol problemático que juega el asco en la teoría de las emociones de Martha Nussbaum y su (in)compatibilidad con el proyecto político de una sociedad liberal aspiracional. Nussbaum reconoce que el asco es una emoción inherente a la condición humana —como tendencia presocial arraigada en nuestra herencia animal—, pero afirma que sus efectos sociales son siempre negativos. Según la autora, el asco es una emoción que sirve a la preservación de jerarquías sociales y, por tanto, no tiene lugar en las sociedades liberales justas. ¿Son realmente incompatibles los valores liberales de la igualdad, la libertad y la justicia con la emoción del asco? En este artículo se sostiene que la exclusión del asco del ámbito político es insuficiente para evitar sus efectos negativos y es incompatible con el proyecto de una sociedad liberal. Por el contrario, empleado apropiadamente, el asco puede resultar beneficioso para la defensa de los valores de la igualdad, la libertad y la justicia.

¿Tiene sentido hablar del perdón político en el Siglo XXI? Sostenemos que es posible reivindicar un sentido del político del perdón que ha sido eclipsado por leyes de amnistía en las últimas décadas en Latinoamérica y que constituyen, a nuestro juicio, un abuso del perdón. A partir de las reflexiones de Hannah Arendt y Jacques Derrida sobre el perdón, y aplicando postulados de la teoría de los actos de habla de J. L. Austin y J. Searle, se propone rescatar un sentido del perdón político que se diferencia sustantivamente de la amnistía. Para ello, se identifican las condiciones procedimentales y contextuales que posibilitan que el perdón contribuya a un acto de verdadera reconciliación política.

Recently, Emil Lask’s work has been the object of renewed interest.
As it has been noted, Lask’s work is much closer to phenomenology than that
of his fellow Neo-Kantians. Many recent contributions to current discussions
on this topic have compared his account of logic to Husserl’s. Less attention
has been paid to Lask’s original metaphilosophical insights. In this paper, I
explore Lask’s conception of transcendental philosophy to show how it led
him to a phenomenological conversion. Lask found in Husserl’s Logical Investigations
the possibility of grounding transcendental philosophy in purely
objective terms, thus avoiding any risk of psychologism. But he also concluded
that the tools found in Logical Investigations needed to be complemented by
a method which would inquire back fr om the constituted to the constituting
(anticipating Husserlian reduction) and a way of grounding such a methodological
move in experience itself (anticipating Husserlian motivation). Lask
then provided a model for reduction and motivation without bringing a transcendental
ego into the picture.

El presente artículo se propone analizar una serie de llamativas coincidencias entre el pensamiento tardío de Husserl y el pensamiento temprano de Heidegger – en particular en torno a tópicos como la muerte, la finitud, la negatividad y la posibilidad – a partir de la puesta en primer plano de ujn problema metodológico crucial para la fenomenología: el de la legitimación de las propias descripciones del ámbito de la subjetividad originaria. Ello conduce a Husserl, pretendo mostrar, al abandono de una noción estrecha de donación y legitimación asociada a la intuitividad y al desarrollo de una fenomenología constructiva centrada la pregunta por lo inconstituible y por el modo en que la esfera propiamente constituyente puede darse, si bien siempre indirectamente, en la experiencia, en el sentido de lo que Montavont ha llamado un “trascendental a posteriori”. Es allí donde las coincidencias con Heidegger saldrán a la luz.

In this paper, I will tackle a question that has been absent in the literature, namely, what is Heidegger’s conception of color-perception. Heidegger himself, who discusses at length other kinds of experiences, is silent about the topic. But why does Heidegger pay so little attention to colors, which are, for Husserl, for instance, a prime case for phenomenological analysis? A simple answer would be that colors, as such, become phenomenologically relevant only within an ontology of atomistic property-bearing entities (or as Heidegger calls it, of Vorhandenheit), an ontology such as Husserl’s, which is one of the favorite targets of Heidegger’s criticisms.
Nevertheless, I think this approach to the problem is wrongheaded for two reasons:
First, even if we start from the phenomenological fact that we cannot experience colors as separated and independent from colored objects and that we cannot experience objects outside a holistic temporally extended net of other objects, that does not allow us to eo ipso put aside questions regarding how we are to think about colors. Adams (2016, p. xviii) distinguishes between first-order and second-order claims about colors. While the former are claims about objects and colors as properties (e.g. ‘This brick is orange’), the latter are “claims about the nature of color properties themselves” (Ibid). Though it seems we are able to produce first-order claims without acknowledging second-order ones, it is far from obvious that the questions arising from the latter are philosophically unproblematic. Thus, adequately examining Heidegger’s take on colors requires that we consider whether Heidegger might be said to engage with these second-order color questions. I aim to show that Heidegger manages to shed light on the debate concerning second-order questions even though he does not explicitly address such problems.
Second, if what I just said opens a path to inquire into Heidegger’s contribution to the debate about colors, I also argue that this inquiry into Heidegger’s take on colors may prove fruitful for understanding his approach to experience, in general, and perception, in particular. In order to do so we need to challenge the assumption made by Dreyfus, Wrathall, and others that I will call the either-theory-or-praxis assumption. According to it, there are (at least) two heterogeneous ways of experiencing something: we can experience it as a tool, a piece of equipment, a meaningful part of our practical coping or we can experience it as an isolated, atomic, independent item from a theoretical perspective. There are many textual grounds to challenge such conclusion. I will not engage with the question of how to read Heidegger on these matters, but rather assume that once we abandon the either-theory-or-praxis assumption we can gain a new insight on the problem of color. The idea is this: Heidegger’s description of experience does not privilege some phenomena (say, tools or meanings) vis-à-vis others (things, colors and the like), but rather a way of understanding experience in general (as organized in terms of a whole of meaningful relations where each single thing is defined by its normative import for the whole, i.e. a relational view) vis-à-vis a way of understanding it in terms of atomic items and stratified properties. I will call this conception of experience a normative-conceptual one (Golob, 2014).
But since the world is obviously populated by colors, numbers and atoms, just as much as it is by tools, pieces of art and people, in order to be successful such a conception must be able to accommodate things such as colors, in particular, and perceptual experiences, in general. Now the question is what is to be said about colors from a normative-conceptual approach to experience such as Heidegger’s. Are colors a counterexample to Heidegger’s normative-conceptualism or, to the contrary, can colors be accounted for in normative-conceptualist terms? This is the question I would like to tackle in this paper.
My strategy will be to engage with the supposed challenges that color perception poses to conceptualism in general. So-called arguments from the fine-grainedness of perception (Speaks, 2005) find in colors a prime example of non-conceptual content. In particular, I would like to analyze some examples presented by Sean Kelly designed to show that color perception is a very good candidate for denying conceptualism, i.e the thesis that contents of experience involve a form of articulation that is at least similar to the one expressed in judgment. I will claim, on the contrary, following a Heideggerian strategy, that color perception is an excellent candidate for showing in what sense conceptualism is true, precisely by analyzing Kelly’s examples of color sorting.

This paper tackles a problem that is central to a phenomenological idea of transcendentality, namely, the problem about whether transcendental statements can be grounded in experience. According to phenomenology we should only accept philosophical descriptions that can be traced back to experience as their legitimazing source. As a consequence, in order for transcendental descriptions to find justification, we must at least be able to point to an experience whose content we know when we know the description in question is justified. So for a transcendental statement such as “Time is the form of intuition,” we would need to be able to specify what we know as its content, i.e. what would be the case if it were true. It is worth noting that the discussion is usually laid out in terms of what that knowledge justifies (that is, it is not about our mental facts but about the epistemic justificatory potential of what we know). So, for instance, a Humean would say that all we know is that we have experienced things as being in time until now or some empirical truth like that. But this would not ground our usual cognitive practice of assessing our experience, including our future experience, in light of what such statements describe. In a nutshell, if something does not adjust to time, it will not count as a legitimate object of experience. So what we know is not just how things stand but rather how things ought to be. But how can we justify statements about this ought? What makes me acknowledge, in the above example, time as a condition to which any object must adjust to even count as an object at all? The kind of experience we are searching for in order to justify transcendental statements is then an experience of an ought. But is there such an experience?
    Drawing on some Husserlian and Heideggerian ideas, I will claim that in order to find such an experience we need to shift our attention to the realm of practical philosophy. It is precisely through the peculiar way in which we grasp the reasons that govern our agency as rational beings whereby we can find a model for the right kind of transcendental experience. This will have some interesting consequences for the methodological import of what is sometimes taken to be a minor contribution of phenomenology, namely, its conception of agency.

It is a well-acknowledged fact that Husserl’s phenomenology can be adequately characterized as transcendental philosophy. Nevertheless, whether Husserl’s phenomenology and notion of the transcendental can be conceived as continuous with Kant’s critical philosophy and own transcendental program is a far more complicated issue.
Since Iso Kern’s monumental work (Kern 1964), many have attempted to explain to what extent Husserl follows Kant and where exactly he has found the limits of critical philosophy
In order to cut through some of the brambles in this monumental discussion, one might adopt a more modest and focused strategy by attempting to show that we cannot prima facie exclude the possibility of understanding the phenomenological use of ‘transcendental’ in its legitimate Kantian sense. To compare their uses of this term would require examining the various places where Husserl’s and Kant’s paths seem to diverge.
In this paper, I will look at one such divergence, namely, Husserl’s later insistence (proper to his genetic phenomenological writings from at least 1917 onwards) on including in the field of phenomenological inquiry allegedly causal, pre-personal, cognitive mechanisms: e.g. instincts, drives, stimuli (Reize), passive associations, and the like.  The inquiry into such themes seems to indicate a decided abandonment of Kantian transcendentalism and an endorsement of some hybrid form of a priori analysis and naturalistic inquiry.
This evaluation of Husserl’s genetic phenomenology seems prima facie valid. However, my main contention in this paper will be that Husserl’s genetic analysis—at least in part—can be understood as a way of defending a transcendental perspective in the strong sense and overcoming some of the flaws Husserl found in Kant’s critical philosophy. I will claim that Husserl’s appeal to mechanisms is transcendentally motivated: if transcendental philosophy is the inquiry into the conditions of possibility of cognition in terms of the justification of the validity of our claims to knowledge, analyzing the mechanisms involved and their transcendental role contributes to understanding what rational grounding is and how rational norms can inform our cognitive processes. This is a question that troubled Husserl ever since the Prolegomena to Pure Logic and that led him to contend one of Kant’s central methodological distinctions, the one between questions of genesis and questions of validity.