Looking for Determinants of Ontological Security in the Spain of the Crisis

The concept of ontological security has a remarkable echo in the current sociology to describe emotional status of men of late modernity. However, the concept created by Giddens in the eighties has been little used in empirical research covering various sources of risk or uncertainty. In this paper, a scale for ontological security is proposed. To do this, we start from the results of a research focused on the relationship between risk, uncertainty and vulnerability in the context of the economic crisis in Spain. These results were produced through nine focus groups and a telephone survey with standardized questionnaire applied to a national sample of 2,408 individuals over 18 years. This work is divided into three main sections. In the fi rst, a scale has been built from the results of the application of different items present in the questionnaire used. The second part explores the relationships of the scale obtained with the variables further approximate the emotional dimensions of individuals. The third part observes the variables that contribute to changes in the scale: These variables show the structural feature of the ontological security.

What is this thing called Historical Archaeology?

Historical archaeology, in its narrow temporal sense -as an archaeology of the emergence and subsequent evolution of the Modern world- is steadily taking pace in Spanish academia. This paper aims at provoking a more robust debate through understanding how Spanish historical archaeology is placed in the international scene and some of its more relevant particularities. In so doing, the paper also stresses the strong links that have united historical and prehistorical archaeology since its inception, both in relation to the ontological, epistemological and methodological definition of the first as to the influence of socio-political issues in the latter. Such reflection is partly a situated reflection from prehistory as one of the paper’s authors has been a prehistorian for most of her professional life.

What Heraclitus and Parmenides have in common on Reality and Deception

It is usually assumed that Heraclitus is, exclusively, the philosopher of flux, diversity and opposition while Parmenides puts the case for unity and changelessness. However, there is a significant common understanding of things (though in differing contexts), not simply an accidental similarity of understanding. Both philosophers, critically, distinguish two realms: on the one hand, there is the one, common realm, identical for all, which is grasped by the ‘logos that is common’(Heraclitus) or the steady nous (Parmenides) that follows a right method in order to interpret the real. On the other hand, the realm of multiplicity seen and heard by the senses, when interpreted by ‘barbarian souls’, is not understood in its common unity. Analogously, when grasped by the wandering weak nous it does not comprehend the real’s basic unity. In this paper I attempt to defend the thesis that both thinkers claim that the common logos (to put it in Heraclitean terms) or the steady intellect (to say it with Parmenides) grasp and affirm the unity of the real.

Neoliberalism as an ideology

In order to examine whether the usual identification of neoliberal ideas with an ideological discourse is valid, this paper starts off with an analysis of what Marx terms commodity fetishism in Capital, based on which a certain sense of the concept of ideology may be inferred which would result in its being both true and false. In order to determine whether this definition of ideology may be applied to neoliberal theory, we look at its fundamental features and how they continue with or break away from economic liberalism as studied in Michel Foucault’s Birth of biopolitics. Attention is later moved to the characteristics detected by David Harvey in the socalled flexible accumulation as the latest stage of capitalism which coincides with the political implementation of neoliberal doctrine. At the end of the road travelled, it is hypothesised that this theory would be a form of ideology containing a dimension of both truth and falsehood, in line with Marx’s thought.