Sufrimiento y pesimismo en Schopenhauer

El presente artículo investiga de qué forma la centralidad del sufrimiento en la filosofía de Schopenhauer sirve para fundamentar su pesimismo. Tres son los argumentos analizados: el lugar del sufrimiento en el mundo, su lugar en la conciencia humana y su lugar frente a la felicidad. A la luz de estos tres argumentos, se destaca que el vínculo indisoluble entre el sufrimiento y la esencia del mundo, la determinación del sufrimiento en la conciencia, tanto en su génesis como en su intensidad, y su anterioridad ontológica frente a la felicidad hacen del pesimismo una categoría necesaria. Finalmente, se señala una posible contribución del pesimismo schopenhaueriano a la crítica social contemporánea, considerando la idea de mundo que el capitalismo tardío promueve.

Hybrid philosophy and rational vitalism in Canguilhem and Ortega y Gasset

This paper explores the problem of the synthesis between vitalism and rationalism, in contemporary philosophy. With this aim, we compare the intellectual careers of Georges Canguilhem (1904-1995) and José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955). We contrast their conceptions of philosophy as “hybrid” knowledge, closely related to science, as well as their points of view on Vitalism, anthropology, the technique and the perspectivism. To avoid that comparison is purely abstract and ahistorical, we use the method of the sociology of philosophy. This forces us to locate both paths in their respective philosophical fields and generational units, also according to his social background and professional career.

The redemption of the past. On a main motif in Walter Benjamin’s work

The following paper examines Walter Benjamin’s reflection on the category of “redemption”, mainly developed in the theses On the concept of History. To this end, we will try firstly to reconstruct Benjamin’s critique of “fate”, as it unfolds in the twenties on the field of right, economy and, especially, history. The critique of the expiatory logic of “fate” – developed in essays such as Fate and Character, Critique of violence or Capitalism as religion – will then allow us to disclose the “dialectical” structure of redemption, whereby Benjamin mobilizes his previous theory of knowledge against the doctrine of progress.

Hegel’s Non-Metaphysical Idea of Freedom

the article explores the putatively non-metaphysical – non-voluntarist, and even non-causal – concept of freedom outlined in Hegel’s work and discusses its influential interpretation by robert Pippin as an ‘essentially practical’ concept. I argue that Hegel’s affirmation of freedom must be distinguished from that of Kant and Fichte, since it does not rely on a prior understanding of self-consciousness as an originally teleological relation and it has not the nature of a claim ‘from a practical point of view’.