C. James

“The idol of communism, which spread social strife, enmity and unparalleled brutality everywhere, which instilled fear in humanity, has collapsed.” These words, spoken by Russian president Boris Yeltsin before a joint session of the U.S. Congress in 1992, brought a tumultuous response from America's political leaders. The evocation of the theme of idolatry by a former member of the Communist Party was striking, all the more so because it must have called to his listeners' minds the dramatic scenes of the destruction of the statues of Lenin then taking place throughout the Communist world. Nothing of the kind had been seen since the end of the Pagan era, when temples of the old gods were toppled throughout the Roman Empire. The events that historian Edward Gibbon, in his classic The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, described as happening in Alexandria in A.D. 389 might just as well have applied to what was happening in Minsk or Tirana: “The huge idol [of Serapis] was overthrown and broken into pieces, [its] limbs ignominiously pulled through the streets.

As the expansion of the Internet and the digital formatting of all kinds of creative works move us further into the information age, intellectual property issues have become paramount. Computer programs costing thousands of research dollars are now copied in an instant. People who would recoil at the thought of stealing cars, computers, or VCRs regularly steal software or copy their favorite music from a friend's CD. Since the Web has no national boundaries, these issues are international concerns. The contributors-philosophers, legal theorists, and business scholars, among others-address questions such as: Can abstract ideas be owned? How does the violation of intellectual property rights compare to the violation of physical property rights? Can computer software and other digital information be protected? And how should legal systems accommodate the ownership of intellectual property in an information age? Intellectual Property is a lively examination of these and other issues, and an invaluable resource for librarians, lawyers, businesspeople, and scholars.

Según el autor, el antiamericanismo descansa en la idea singular de que algo asociado con los Estados Unidos, algo en el propio corazón de la vida americana, resulta profundamente equivocado y amenazante para el resto del mundo. El artículo penetra en las fuentes históricas de tal idea convertida de algún modo en “paradigma” de la cultura occidental desde el siglo XX, y muestra su vínculo con la fi losofía europea a partir de la Ilustración, así como con la teoría racista y el eurocentrismo de algunos filósofos europeos. El propósito del artículo es develar las peligrosas consecuencias de esta idea que en la actualidad vienen manifestándose, sin que se adviertan claramente sus orígenes.According to the author, anti-Americanism rests on the singular idea that something associated with the United States, something at the core of American life, is deeply wrong and threatening to the rest of the world. The paper approaches to the historical sources of such idea, which has been changed into a west culture’s “paradigm”, in some way since the 20th. century. The paper shows the relation between this idea and the typical eurocentrism of some european philosophers. The target is to clear the development of this idea and its dangerous consequences at the present time.