Individualism is one of the fundamental traits of our time, based on an emphatic and recurrent defence of individual freedom, as experienced by consciousness. This point of view seems to entail a refuse of all kinds of transcendence, cosmological or onto-theological, characterized by an authoritarian and undisputed heteronomy. However, this perspective does not take into account a third type of transcendence, one that occurs in that radical immanence, in the core of individual freedom and autonomy. This type of transcendence takes shape as an ethical and aesthetical relationship carved in the heart of each individual human being, each one of his particular conscious States and the simultaneous consciousness of his Humanity. The aim of this essay is to give an understanding of Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity and its philosophy of Revelation, as a reflection on religion and its anthropological origins. In our viewpoint, The Essence of Christianity is an effort to ascertain the genetic elements of human religiosity and clarify its meaning as a movement of reconnecting the human individual with a transcendence that is his own Humanity, given in the immanence of his conscious life. Religion remains a law of transcendence, as the feeling that binds the individual to his Humanity, an everlasting commandment coming from an Otherness that projects itself as a horizon to his free actions.

Il s’agit d’analyser les différences entre Cousin e Jouffroy à propos du rôle de l’histoire de la philosophie et aussi bien de la psychologie dans la sphère de l’éclectisme spiritualiste, dont l’hégémonie était contestée au sein même de l’école.

Symbolism is a basic synthetic activity required by human enterprise in order to be able to produce an occasion of actual existence. Whitehead regards perception as the most frequent and fundamental kind of symbolism. Language is another essential sort of symbolism. Immediacy and abstraction are two intersecting phases in the process of symbolism; we need both for the occasions of perception and the emergence of language. Whitehead unites various kinds of experience under the notion of symbolism and enhances the founding roles of perception and language. His doctrine is an outstanding insight into the wholeness of reality.

This article consists of a number of initial reflections on concepts inherent to the theoretical paths traced by J. Habermas and N. Luhmann. It was developed with the intention of showing how a confrontation between their ideas allows us to offer contrasts to specific elements of Habermas’s arguments. The understanding of these divergences is necessary for an accurate interpretation of their respective theories of law.

The purpose of this paper is to present some thoughts upon the ever pressing question of the role of justice in our societies, according to Michel Foucault. Centered upon Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, the paper draws the guidelines which Foucault developed about the aggiornamento of the exercise of power and its changing methods, from torture to the scientific methods which he named technologies of the self. Going from the exercise of violence centered upon the body to its submission by means of idea and mind control, power has associated itself to the scientific (psychiatric) approach of identity, leading to a controllable abnormality (present in prisons). All of this in the name of a population policy, a bio power which ensures the docility of individuals while optimizing their productive force. Hence the remaining epigraph quoted challenge where Plato provocatively States: justice is the same everywhere, it is the rule of the strongest.

The simplest and most widely endorsed elucidation of the notions of truth and falsehood is given in Aristotle’s dictum: “to say of what is not that it is, and of what is that it is not, is false; while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true”. Nowadays, while some take the dictum as the first Statement of truth as correspondence, the dictum may also be seen as a first Statement of deflationism. Deflationism holds that the essential about truth is captured in equivalence schemas for truth. Similar schemas are usually put forward for falsity. Can deflationism coherently deny bivalence? I will argue that it cannot since the putative counterexamples to bivalence also falsify the relevant truth-schemas. The attempts made to render the supposition of counter examples to bivalence compatible with the truth-schemas usually take two steps: in the first place, they try to deal with the way we can reject that a relevant item is bivalent without self-contradiction, and, in the second place, they try to explain how, although there are gaps, the schemas for truth and falsehood are still correct. I will argue that these attempts fail, since they are ad hoc or generally ungrounded. So, either deflationism is in adequate as an account of truth, or there cannot be counterexamples to bivalence. I conclude that it is not only deflationism that faces this dilemma; anyone who defends that some version or other of the truth-schemas is correct faces the same difficulties as the deflationist. This would corne as no surprise for Aristotle. His dictum about truth was followed by a Statement of bivalence: “so that he who says of anything that it is, or that it is not, will say either what is true or what is false”.

This paper intends to approach Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutical view of history to Walter Benjamin’s dialectical concept of it, choosing, as a contrasting point of view, historicism, which overlaps fact by comprehension on behalf of a so-called scientific neutrality. To the impossibility of ignoring the “being-there” of the historian, peculiar to gadamerian hermeneutics, Benjamin adds both the presuppositions of historical materialism and the concept of time present in Jewish-Christian theology and Jewish mystics, turning History into science and remembrance, conservation and redemption.

This paper aims at showing the interdependence between aesthetic and ethic values in appreciating nature. The Kantian concept of sublime guides us in the first part, exhibiting the primacy of ethics over aesthetics, as the sublime reveals it self to be an analogon of the moral law and the respect due to it. The second part, based on the holistic tendency in Environmental Ethics hold by Holmes Rolston III and others, analyses how the relation is inverted by means of an aesthetic of the invisible, where the sublime in nature refers to the whole and is hidden under the apparent ugliness of the parts.

Notre propos c’est de méditer le rapport reversible d’analogie qui, d’après la Critique du Jugement de Kant, on doit supposer entre l’art et la nature (entre l’esthétique et la téléologie), et de voir en quel sens cette idée, si blâmée par Schopenhauer comme appréciée par Goethe, peut encore donner à penser autrement les problèmes qui pose la conscience é cologique contemporaine, dans la mesure où elle nous dévoile une relation de l’homme vis-à-vis de la nature qui n’est plus seulement de maîtrise et de possession, mais plutôt d’admiration profonde et de respect gracieux. Seront thèmes majeures de notre exposition la notion kantienne d’une “technique de la nature” (qu’on propose de traduire par “poétique de la nature”) et surtout le rôle qui joue l’expérience esthétique (du beau et du sublime) de la nature dans l’économie de l’esthétique kantienne et dans l’architectonique même de la troisième Critique.

This article aims at analyzing the relations between art and organism in Nietzsche’s thought, having as its guiding line the attempt to build a new interpretation of the nature, beyond the ancient and modern teleological models. Using Nietzsche’s critique to Kant’s and Espinosas’s models of organism, it is questioned if the creation of artistic matrix expresses the effective relations of power in the world, or if it is a manifestation of the will to power, while being human will for illusion.

The approach to landscape complexity, elapses from the interpretation of its visible face while constellation of objective signs, which landscape architecture engages to code, inferring the action of the systemic processes as the result of the actualization of patterns or changeable configurations of existing relations between the mosaic of ecosystems, that in its relation to socio-cultural Systems have a particular expression on landscape structure. The present article clears the need of landscape narratives generated by its complexity, approaching the concept of evolutions by instability, implied on the self-organizing-systems theory due to the high connection between spatial and temporal scales, that characterize the complex interactions and the determinism-indeterminism involved in its autopoietic behaviour, causing the need of environmental narratives.

Dans cette lecture de la “Philosophie der Landschaft” de Georg Simmel, on essaie de comprendre la signification profonde de l’expérience esthétique qui est immanente à la contemplation, vécue en présence, d’un paysage naturel. Prenant en considération les principes vitalistes de l’esthétique simmélienne, on montre que l’unité esthétique inhérente à chaque paysage naturel est l’expression d’un sentiment d’harmonie - vital et non seulement formel - entre l’être humain et ce paysage; leur unité s’éprouve comme une “ambiance” spirituelle (Stimmung) commune et partagée.

This paper aims to contribute for the clarification of the concept of Landscape, from the Portuguese Landscape Architecture school’s point of view. It begins to place the origins of this school within the occidental context. It describes synthetically the evolution of the concept since the word was registered and put in the context of earlier world representation symbolic Systems’. It tries to explain the meaning of Landscape, before the emergence of ecology, as a fundamental base to its scientific approach, and how did it evolve since then. A synthesis of the Landscape representation/construction modes along the times is presented, as well as a proposal of a classification of the correspondent paradigms.

This dissertation aims to explore the role and potencial of Aesthetics to Landscape Architecture. Starting by discussing some of the most relevant aesthetical theories, this work explores the concepts of aesthetics of nature, environment and landscape, highlighting its differences and similarities. The implications of these philosophical theories to Landscape Architecture are critically reviewed. From the theoretical investigation, it may be concluded that has been a growing interest in the landscape concept. This increase can potentially be due to the growing need for identity, contextualization and contact with nature.