El nombre propio como modulador de vínculos sexo-afectivos y genealógicos en las novelas de Armonía Somers: una poética de la suplementariedad nominal

This article explore the potential of the proper name as a contingent identity modulator in the Uruguayan author Armonía Somers’ novels, and, specifically, of nominal supplementarity (the act of twisting, overprinting, displacing or substituting sometimes momentarily the "original" or "legal" name of the characters for another(s), as a form of nominal drift). This operation is presented as a producer of subjective transformations of the characters, as verified in certain areas of Latin American literary discourse in the 20th century. Among these are three novels by Somers: The naked woman (1950), Sólo los elefantes encuentran mandrágora (1986) and Viaje al corazón del día: elegía por un secreto amor (1986), which participate in this nominal poetics. In these texts, the nominal displacements cause the reconfiguration or even an inauguration of new forms of relationship between the characters. So the use of this thematic, structural, and subjective resource exceeds the mere change of nomenclature and reveals itself as a pole of subjective and intersubjective production.

Leading a Double Life: Statues and Pieces of Clay

Some philosophers think that two distinct things can occupy exactly the same region of space, as with a statue and a piece of clay. Others think that the statue and the piece of clay are identical, but not necessarily so. I argue that Alan Gibbard’s well-known story of Goliath and Lumpl does not support either of these claims. Not the first, as there is independent reason to think that it cannot be true. Not the second, because there is no need to invoke the dubiously intelligible notion of contingent identity to account for the facts of the story.

Powerlessness and Personalization

Is privacy the key ethical issue of the internet age? This coauthored essay argues that even if all of a user’s privacy concerns were met through secure communication and computation, there are still ethical problems with personalized information systems. Our objective is to show how computer-mediated life generates what Ernesto Laclou and Chantal Mouffe call an “atypical form of social struggle.” Laclau and Mouffe develop a politics of contingent identity and transient articulation (or social integration) by means of the notions of absent, symbolic, hegemonic power and antagonistic transitions or relations. In this essay, we introduce a critical approach to one twenty-first-century atypical social struggle that, we claim, has a disproportionate effect on those who experience themselves as powerless. Our aim is to render explicit the forms of social mediation and distortion that result from large-scale machine learning as applied to personal preference information. We thus bracket privacy in order to defend some aspects of the EU GDPR that will give individuals more control over their experience of the internet if they want to use it and, thereby, decrease the unwanted epistemic effects of the internet. Our study is thus a micropolitics in in the Deleuzian micropolitical sense and a preliminary analysis of an atypical social struggle.

Critical comments of Harold N. Noonan’s theory of contingent identity

Alla Gibbard’s famous essay on the possibility of contingent identity (1975) questions the validity of Barcan and Kripke’s argument on the necessity of identity (1947, 1971). Gibbard’s theory has inspired several philosophers to rethink the problem of personal identity. The paper presents a critical analysis of Harold N. Noonan’s theory of contingent identity (1991, 1993, 2005, Curtis-Noonan 2014).

C. S. Peirce on the dynamic object of a sign: From ontology to semiotics and back

That reality, and in particular the (dynamic) objects of signs, are independent of our thoughts or other representations is a crucial thesis of Peirce’s realism. On the other hand, his semiotics implies the claim that all reality and all real objects are real for us only because of the signs we use. Do these two claims contradict, even exclude, each other? I will argue that both Peirce’s metaphysics and his semiotics provide a natural via media: a structural account of the openness of processes, featuring transitive relations, connects process ontology implicit in his evolutionary metaphysics and the relational, quasi-inferential features embodied in interpretational sequences of signs. It is shown that Peirce’s notion of a sign, its normative role and his account of the directional force of objects implies a sort of logical causality that supports the unity of objects. In this way sign sequences are able to relate flexibly sign use with contextually specified independent objects. That is to say, relational properties of object-oriented chains of interpretations provide sign users with a flexible, fallibilistic instrument able to capture by contingent identity relations (teridentity) of the identity of objects in changing situations.Includes: Comment by Francesco Bellucci (pp. 433–437).