Gabriel Donoso Umaña

Can Gilles Deleuze be read as a naturalist philosopher within analytic philosophy of science? This position has recently been defended by Manuel DeLanda. In order to examine it critically, I first delimit a minimalist conception of ontological naturalism, understood as a broad commitment to the ontology inherited from our best scientific theories and to criteria of intersubjective evaluability. I then reconstruct, following DeLanda, the Deleuzian notions of multiplicity, virtuality, event, and individuation, showing that they can be understood as theoretical resources for thinking real dynamic processes. On this reading, Deleuzian ontology leads to a processual and anti-essentialist realism sensitive to scientific modelling. However, this reading depends on a selective reconstruction which is philosophically fertile but exegetically problematic, and whose explanatory yield diminishes where scientific mediation becomes more tenuous. I conclude by arguing that Deleuze can be accepted as a sui generis ontological naturalist, but that this is insufficient to make his philosophy of science especially useful when set against clearer, more revisable, and more fully integrated analytic naturalist alternatives within contemporary scientific practice.

I maintain that philosophy of science regains its public legitimacy when it connects its internal progress with effective forms of impact. To that end, I first reconstruct the genealogy of its institutional retreat in the twentieth century and its subsequent re-emergence as a socially engaged practice. I then integrate recent evidence on the actual pathways of academic influence to show that philosophical impact is primarily relational rather than bibliometric. Against that background, I argue that the most fertile internal metric for assessing philosophical progress is an increase in structural understanding: the capacity to articulate maps of dependence among concepts, phenomena, and practices that enable epistemic co-ordination and support reliable decision-making. Finally, I propose a professional ethics for the contemporary philosopher of science built around four operational principles—epistemic integrity, horizontal collaboration, social responsibility, and institutional transparency—each accompanied by indicators and evaluative metrics beyond citation counts. The result is a normative framework that offers institutional guidance for measuring and demanding impact.

Elemer Nemesszeghy, S. J. (1925-2007), a Hungarian philosopher living in Chile between1956 and 1971, taught Mathematical logic for fifteen years in a country that lacked a local tradition in the field. Despite his contributions, his figure has been omitted by both the historiography of logic and Chilean intellectual history. This article seeks to reconstruct Nemesszeghy's philosophical and logical trajectory and to characterize his work from a historical-philosophical point of view. To this end, it analyzes his intellectual formation within the framework of the Central European neo-scholastic tradition, his links with the Lwów–Warsaw school and the Institut Supérieur de Philosophie of Louvain, and his institutional contributions to the Universidad Católica de Valparaíso. The article examines in detail his academic production, both solo and co-authored. From these texts, the technical and philosophical character of his production, its critical reception and its theoretical limitations are evaluated. It is argued that,although his work was neither propositional nor original in a strong sense, it constitutes a significant contribution to logical education in Chile and an early example of local appropriation of Mathematical logic. Finally, the structural and historiographical reasons that explain the relative oblivion of his figure are discussed, placing his legacy in the broader framework of the intellectual history of the formal sciences in the country.

“Assemblage theory” is the name given to the philosophical proposal of the philosopher Manuel DeLanda, one of the less explored strands within the realist turn in twenty-first-century philosophy. His proposal offers conceptual clarification and enrichment for undertaking, with due depth, the ontological examination of the real, providing a powerful ontology for use in the study of the social as well as of the entities of the sciences in a generic sense, insofar as it does not undermine the autonomy of entities while nonetheless not denying their relations with others, taking as its conceptual axis the Deleuzian notion of assemblage. DeLanda’s work contributes to blurring the oft-invoked division between analytic and Continental philosophy, seeking to generate an encounter between scientists and philosophers and defending a realist and materialist philosophy on the basis of sources traditionally associated with postmodernity. The present paper undertakes a survey of its most general aspects.

This thesis investigates whether acids can be regarded as a natural kind, critically assessing Pieter Thyssen’s microessentialist proposal—which identifies acidity with the presence of an accessible LUMO orbital—and advancing the Homeostatic Property Cluster Theory (HPC theory) as an alternative. It situates the discussion within the broader debate between essentialism and conventionalism in the philosophy of chemistry, emphasizing microessentialism’s limitations in addressing multiple realization cases and the context dependence of reactivity. The methodology involves conceptual analysis, critical literature review, and a comparative study of chemical theories. Findings indicate that the LUMO, rather than being an invariant empirical microstructure, is a theoretical representation dependent on specific models, undermining its role as a defining essence. In contrast, HPC theory accounts for acids as clusters of co-occurring properties causally sustained by mechanisms such as proton dissociation or electronic vacancy, without requiring structural uniformity. The study concludes that acids qualify as natural kinds in a weak realist, pluralist, and accommodationist sense, grounded in scientific practice and justified by their explanatory and inferential success, thereby preserving objectivity without reducing chemistry to microphysics.