Susana Gomez

We propose a semiotic framework to underpin a posthumanist philosophy of education, as contrasted to technological determinism. A recent approach to educational processes as semiotic phenomena lends itself as a philosophy to understand the current interplay between education and technology. This view is aligned with the transhumanist movement to defend techno-scientific progress as fundamental to human development. Particularly, we adopt a semiotic approach to education to tackle certain tensions in current debates on the human. Transhumanism scholars share the optimistic belief that there is no limit to how the ethical use of technology can help alleviate suffering and increase our health and wisdom. From this perspective, it appears possible to acquire capacities that require rethinking the notion of human altogether. For others, this undermining of essentialist concepts of humanity entails serious risks, especially related to ethical egalitarianism. We adopte the perspective of edusemiotics, a framework that brings together semiotics, educational theory and philosophy of education. As a theoretical-practical framework, edusemiotics affords a hermeneutic and semiotic method for our approach. Peirce’s logic of signs is used to analyze socio- educational interactions as environmental. We observe two lines of thought. On the one hand, technological transhumanism enhances Cartesian mind–body dualism. On the other hand, philosophical posthumanism seeks to overcome this dichotomy. The former proposal construes human transformation as an artifactualization derived from techno-scientific enhancements. The latter position proposes an integrative posthumanism, capable not only to include edusemiotic theory but also to rethink the concept of learning as mutual to that of human.

In this paper, I respond to what I have called an epistemological objection to a dialetheist approach to the doctrine of the Incarnation, of which one example is Beall’s contradictory Christ. I discuss Anderson’s book Paradox in Christian theology, in which the author claims to account for the rationality of the doctrine of the Incarnation as a merely apparently contradictory doctrine, and I present my model, based on Anderson’s model, according to which the doctrine has the possibility to be rational by understanding it as genuinely contradictory. I show that this model fits perfectly well with the criteria that, according to Anderson, any model for the rationality of a paradoxical doctrine should meet. Beall does not address the problem of the rationality of the doctrine in his works about the contradictory Christ, and he asserts that he is not interested in it. However, I think that if he wants to make his theory more robust, less suspicious, and more convincing for theologians, philosophers, and ordinary people, he should consider this problem.

In this paper I examine the conflicting ways in which Bertrand Russell and Hegel understand indexical expressions. For this purpose, I consider some books and articles written by Russell in different moments of his life, and the first chapter of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, book published in 1807. I try to show that Russell, even being a Hegel scholar, does not respond to his proposal about indexical expressions, but takes a position that keeps him trapped in a kind of self-deception of sense-certainty. At the end, I suggest that the differences between Hegel and Russell in relation to indexical expressions can be explained by the fact that the ontologies adopted by both authors exclude each other.

This essay examines the importance of some aspects of Wittgenstein's post-Tractatus work in the realm of discussions on the nature of logic. The first part considers a relationship between certain conceptions of language and certain positions on the nature of logical laws and logical pluralism. Supposing the rejection of mentalism in the field of meaning leads to a rejection of psychologism, it presents some alternatives different from psychologism, based on non mentalistic theories of meaning. One is the Platonistic Fregean approach to language and logic, the other is Carnap's formalist view on both topics. The second part concentrates on Wittgenstein's non mentalistic and non Platonistic proposals about language and his defense of the logical pluralism proposed by psychologists. It compares two periods on Wittgenstein's work after Tractatus -the periods of ‘calculus conception’ and ‘languange games conception’- and it shows how characteristic notions of Wittgenstein's later conception of language, like ‘use’, ‘language games’, and ‘forms of life’, work on the characterization of logic and specially on the kind of logical pluralism that the author seems to defend in his last period. In doing so, this essay offers an approach to some of the author's considerations about contradictions and the possibility of the existence of a calculus that includes them. This approach emphasizes on the idea of applicability introduced by the author in some of his last works, and in some examples of functional contradictions that can help to understand and complement that idea