Brain functions are stochastic processes without intentionality whereas mind emerges from brain functions as a Hegelian “change from quantity”, that is, on the order of 1012 profusely interconnected neurons, “into a new quality”: the collective phenomenon of the brain's self-experience. This self-referential and self-observing quality we have in mind is capable of (recursively) observing its self-observations, i.e., interpreting change that is meaningful in relation to itself. The notion of self-interpretation embodies the idea of a “hermeneutic circle”, that is, (in interpretation theory) the treatment of the whole in relation to its parts.

The Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget devoted his life to following, step by step and lovingly, the development in children of the art of reasoning. In the course of the successive stages of this development, the child's view of the world changes in nature. Similarly, from its earliest infancy, medicine has viewed living things in successively different manners. For medicine, it is true, the stages overlap; one may still be using an ancient discourse from which another has daringly freed itself. Nevertheless, for the sake of clarity in this analysis, I will try to define successive epistemological attitudes as if they had represented a regular progression of medical thinking.

If we admit that Latin-American literature is a part of what is called Western culture, why, I ask myself, has it not been able to influence any of the great literatures of the West, outside of the Spanish? To be more precise, when I speak of influencing, I am not referring to the historico-cultural event that signifies Latin America, which has changed the West, but specifically to literature, that is, writing, the book, the language, the contents, the creative structure and the symbols. From its origins until today, Latin-American literature, like Jugoslavian literature—in spite of the Nobel prize awarded to Ivo Andric—or Bulgarian or Icelandic, remains a marginal phenomenon. It is produced within a closed circuit, having no real resonance except in Spain. Furthermore, it struggles between two guilt feelings: one, that of being late with regard to renovating currents of fashions of the day and the other, that of not responding to its own reality. Because of those burdens of a guilty conscience, it often feigns innovation by following outside models or exalting a nationalist realism that has not produced the slightest new form but only a mediocre art of propaganda. It simulates and copies, or it lags behind. It either tries to be up to date or pretends to overcome this uneasiness by inventing an intransigent Americanism, behaving like a telluric barbarian or accepting traditional popular forms that may produce works such as Martin Fierro, whose value for the Latin-Americans cannot be denied but whose range is limited.

Today we know, and this will be the subject of this article, that the universe is in continuous evolution, even revolution. This observation has been possible only quite recently. It was necessary to wait for the observations of distant galaxies, undertaken between 1930 and 1950 by Edwin P. Hubble, the astronomer who was the first to show that the universe as a whole is presently expanding. We know now also that the form of the constellations closest to us, such as the Great Bear, has been modified over the last millennia. Ancient astronomers, and with them the rest of humanity, imagined at that time that the universe was eternal and unchangeable. Astrophysicists today are convinced, in the large majority, that twenty billion years ago the universe went through a unique phase during which it was very hot and very dense. To this phenomenon they have given the name of the original or primordial explosion. As will be seen later, certain people believe that the universe will once again experience this great “heat”, which will be generated during future contractions. Others foresee an increasingly frozen and empty future for the universe. Between this glorious past and this uncertain future, the universe each day reveals more of its splendor thanks to the arrival of modern techniques of observation and the beginning of the conquest of space. The purpose of this article is to give a brief survey of the manner in which astronomers see the universe today; working from the position of man in the universe, his relation to it begins to be understood better.

The second half of the Fourth Century B.C. was a time of crisis for Greek city states. Aristotle lived through this crisis. He began to reflect on the ideal organization of the polis. In his analyses of ethics (Nicomachean Ethics: NE) and of politics (Politics: P), can be found the conceptual framework for the socio-economic organization of the polis in light of its “development crisis”. In these texts Aristotle distinguishes himself from practitioners of political economics (as, for example, Isocrates and Xenophon) by declaring what could be called the socio-economic paradigm of a school theoretician.

In this essay, we consider a set of related questions concerning the role and nature of money, the working of markets, and the relationship between forms of social organization and money. Among other things, we speculate that efforts to purge the neo-classical theory of markets of the phenomenon of false trading have been misguided in the sense that they fail to grasp the dependence of a market system on the existence of some false trading.

Only rarely does Descartes deal with specifically political questions, and then when he does so, it is only by denial, to justify his refusal to “become involved” in politics. All the texts show that this attitude of rejecting politics is not dictated primarily by prudence, the rule in this century of intolerance, but by a concern for philosophical consistency. This denial, as we will be attempting to establish, seems conditioned by fundamental options of Cartesian philosophy. For the moment we will only examine the theoretical effects of this refusal to write about politics other than by denial; such effects seem to us to consist in the exclusion of politics outside the realm of knowledge and its problematic inclusion into that of morality. And although it has been possible to speak of a “political Descartes”, it is completely against his stated intentions. This Descartes would be political in spite of himself. In fact, such an approach can only consist in a political interpretation of this denial, in a political reading of the texts that reject, or more often pass over in silence, politics as such. Although a reading of this kind can be at best a hazardous one, we will not attempt to challenge its legitimacy, for it is certainly possible to affirm that the work of Descartes is ridden and wrought by the question of politics (just as all philosophical thought, in one way or another, must of necessity confront political reality), but it is not without importance to begin by noting that it is never touched upon other than indirectly, obliquely, through the use of theoretical devices whose finality is not political.