Rhetoric, Roman Values, and the Fall of the Republic in Cicero's Reception of Plato

This dissertation seeks to identify what makes Cicero’s approach to politics unique. The author's methodology is to turn to Cicero’s unique interpretation of Plato as the crux of what made his thinking neither Stoic nor Aristotelian nor even Platonic (at least, in the usual sense of the word) but Ciceronian. As the author demonstrates in his reading of Cicero’s correspondences and dialogues during the downward spiral of a decade that ended in the fall of the Republic (that is, from Cicero’s return from exile in 57 BC to Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon in 49 BC), it is through Cicero's reading of Plato that the former develops his characteristically Ciceronian approach to politics—that is, his appreciation for the tension between the political ideal on the one hand and the reality of human nature on the other as well as the need for rhetoric to fuse a practicable compromise between the two. This triangulation of political ideal, human nature, and rhetoric is developed by Cicero through his dialogues "de Oratore," "de Re publica," and "de Legibus."

La ciencia de los principios y de las causas primeras en el libro primero de la Metafísica

En este trabajo se presenta la concepción aristotélica de la filosofía primera como ciencia de los principios y de las causas primeras según el libro primero de la Metafísica. Para ello, se distinguen tres momentos sucesivos que constituyen el análisis de la naturaleza y la meta que debe alcanzar esta ciencia: 1) la concepción de la sabiduría como ciencia que se ocupa de ciertos principios y causas; 2) la sabiduría como ciencia de los primeros principios y de las causas; 3) la determinación de las cuatro causas primeras como tarea de la filosofía primera. De este modo, se pretende mostrar que la Metafísica de Aristóteles es un intento para explicar las últimas cuestiones, el último porqué, indicando cuatro géneros diferentes de respuesta.

Observations on the Athenian judicial procedure on the subject of Lysias XXIII

It is thought that Lysias’ speech XXIII, Against Pancleon, was delivered in a paragraphe or ‘counter-indictment process’, called antigraphe in an initial phase. However a review of these concepts and, in general, of some aspects of Athenian judicial procedure has allowed us to conclude that the mentioned speech was made by the plaintiff, client of the logographer, against the defendant in a ‘action for false testimony’, dike pseudomartyrion.

As origens pitagóricas do método filosófico : o uso das archaí como princípios metodológicos em Filolau

A história do termo arché parece apontar para uma redefinição platônico-aristotélica de um conceito arcaico, ligado inicialmente ao uso jônico do termo para expressar um ponto-de-partida cronológico. Aristóteles, em Metafísica A, transforma o significado das archaí que a passam a significar princípios explicativos do real, e neste sentido, equivalentes ao termo aitíai (causas). Apesar da maioria dos estudiosos atribuir a Aristóteles a descoberta desse uso, um estudo comparativo do termo no Corpus Hipocraticus, nos fragmentos originários do pitagórico Filolau, datados na segunda metade do V século, revela-se que esta literatura antecipa o uso da arché no sentido de princípios metodológicos para a pesquisa filosófica. ______________________________________________________________________________________________ ABSTRACT

Rostros y rastros del Nobel: Gabriel García Márquez veinticinco años después

Gabriel García Márquez asume la oralidad del homo caribbeans como síntoma de diversidad , por oposición a la universalizante estandarización trascendental de la escritura, en palabras del antillano Edouard Glissant, y representa una reacción a la cultura letrada establecida por el sistema imperial occidental, custodiada por los organismos reguladores del orden establecido en el centro. De este modo, la literatura oficia como archivo cultural. A la luz de la concepción de literatura como escritura, es preferible hablar de diseminación, de intertextualidad, de palimpsesto, en vez de recurrir al trajinado concepto de influencias literarias. En tal sentido, Cien años de Soledad se constituye en un canon emergente, un código maestro, un nuevo mapa cultural que permite múltiples lecturas y re-escrituras. El realismo mágico pone en crisis el concepto aristotélico de mimesis del arte verbal y exige una nueva perspectiva de analisis.Según un importante sector de la critica, la obra garciamarquiana en sus diferentes rostros, desde las tempranas producciones del ciclo Macondiano hasta la Summa Amorosa que concluye con Del amor y otros demonios, señala el tránsito de la narrativa colombiana de la modernidad a la posmodernidad . Por cierto, veinte años después del Nobel, su rastro se puede seguir desde el campo novelístico nacional contemporáneo hasta recónditas geografias literarias del globo. El realismo mágico, así como en general la literatura del boom, constituye desde la década del setenta una nueva fórmula de respuesta a la situación posmoderna, dado que reemplaza el antiguo canon colonial hegemónico y sus ecos esencialistas, realistas y nacionalistas posteriores a la independencia, y proporciona una ficción de autorrepresentación de la realidad híbrida del discurso otro latinoamericano, en la que la categoría de lo maravilloso reemplazará a la de lo sublime. Sin duda, Macondo existe, es una región de la memoria. Pero sus límites no son occidentales. Dentro del mapa literario mundial, es vecino de remotos espacios geolingüísticos y geoculturales.AbstractGabriel García Márquez assumes the oral tradition of the homo caribbeans as a symptom of diversity, by an opposition to the universalizing standardization of writing, to use the words of Antillean writer Edouard Glissant, and represents a reaction against the educated culture established by the Western imperial system and kept by the regulating organisms of the established order in the center. Thus, literature represents a cultural file.Following the notion of literature as writing, it is preferable to talk about dissemination, intertextuality, or palimpsest instead of resorting to the overused concept of literary influences. In this sense, One Hundred Years of Solitude becomes an emerging cannon, a master code, a new cultural map that allows multiple readings and re-writings. Magic realism puts into crisis the Aristotelian concept of mimicry of the verbal art and demands a new perspective of analysis. According to an important sector of critique, the Garciamarquian work– in its different phases, from the early productions of the Macondian cycle to the Summa Amorosa that finishes with Love and Other Demons, represents the path of the colombian narrative from the modernism to postmodernism. By the way, twenty years after the Nobel, its path can be followed from the novel national contemporary field to distant literary geographies of the world. Magic realism, as well as in general terms the literature of the boom, makes from the sixties decade a new form of answering to the postmodern situation, because it substitutes the old colonial hegemonic cannon and its essential , realistic and national voices after the independence. It gives a fiction of sel-frepresentation of the hybrid reality of the other Latin American discourse, in which the marvelous category will replaced that of the sublime. With no doubt, Macondo exists, it is a region of the memory. But its borders are not Western, inside the literary world map, it is a neighbor of remote geolinguistics and geocultural spaces.

Past, present and future of epigenetics applied to livestock breeding

This article reviews the concept of Lamarckian inheritance and the use of the term epigenetics in the field of animal genetics. Epigenetics was first coined by Conrad Hal Waddington (1905–1975), who derived the term from the Aristotelian word epigenesis. There exists some controversy around the word epigenetics and its broad definition. It includes any modification of the expression of genes due to factors other than mutation in the DNA sequence. This involves DNA methylation, post-translational modification of histones, but also linked to regulation of gene expression by non-coding RNAs, genome instabilities or any other force that could modify a phenotype. There is little evidence of the existence of transgenerational epigenetic inheritance in mammals, which may commonly be confounded with environmental forces acting simultaneously on an individual, her developing fetus and the germ cell lines of the latter, although it could have an important role in the cellular energetic status of cells. Finally, we review some of the scarce literature on the use of epigenetics in animal breeding programs.

Êthos y Eudaimonía en la Ethika de Aristóteles

The focus of Aristotelian ethics is not to understand the essence of virtue, but rather the formation of underlying principles which define each individual’s ethics (êthos) that promotes happiness (eudaimonía) as their ultimate end. In this article I will emphasize the relationship between eudaimonía and ethos. This is relevant because êthos may be interpreted as source (pegé) from decisions as character or imprint, (charaktér) thanks to actions performed in order to reach eudaimonía.

The distinctive common good

This paper defends the traditional distinctive notion of the common good against the claim that it is normatively redundant on the aggregative conception. The first two sections of the paper outline the different candidate conceptions of the common good and the normative role of the common good within natural law theories. The paper then considers some difficulties faced by the instrumental and aggregative conceptions, before developing an Aristotelian account of the distinctive conception of the common good and demonstrating its normative significance for a natural law account of political and legal authority.

Two functions of Aristotle's common advantage

This paper identifies two distinct functions of the common advantage in Aristotle’s political thought and argues that distinguishing these functions allows for a reconciliation of the individualist and holist aspects of the Aristotelian account of the polis. I demonstrate that the Aristotelian common advantage functions both as (i) a motivating reason for individuals to enter the polis and (ii) a normative reason — the political good of justice — that provides a criterion for an assessment of the correctness of constitutions (politeiai). The two functions of the common advantage are, I suggest, reconcilable insofar as the Aristotelian polis is best understood as a unity of order rather than a mere aggregation of individual citizens or an organic whole.

El daño y el nexo causal en la perdida de oportunidad

El presente escrito se ocupa de estudiar el nexo de causalidad como elemento estructural de la responsabilidad cuando éste es difuso. Para ello, se pretende abordar la pérdida de la oportunidad como una teoría especial de causalidad que tiene lugar cuando el nexo causal no resulta claro, lo cual contradice la tesis preponderante de la doctrina y la jurisprudencia tradicional según la cual, la pérdida de la oportunidad es un criterio autónomo del daño. En su contenido se realiza una explicación del por qué se entiende la pérdida de la oportunidad como una teoría especial de causalidad y no como un criterio autónomo de daño, haciendo énfasis en el elemento de certeza que caracteriza al daño. Posteriormente, se advierte del tratamiento que la jurisprudencia le ha dado a la pérdida de la oportunidad. A su turno, el presente documento, indica la naturaleza jurídica de la pérdida de la oportunidad, afirmando que es una inferencia lógica que realiza el juez y no un hecho que altere el estado de las cosas como si sucede con el daño. Finalmente, se aborda la prueba de la teoría de la pérdida de la oportunidad mediante un cálculo de probabilidades y se identifican los pasos para realizar una adecuada reparación integral.