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This book draws together anthropological studies of human-animal relations among Indigenous Peoples in three regions of the Americas: the Andes, Amazonia and the American Arctic. Despite contrasts between the ecologies of the different regions, it finds useful comparisons between the ways that lives of human and non-human animals are entwined in shared circumstances and sentient entanglements. While studies of all three regions have been influential in scholarship on human-animal relations, the regions are seldom bought together. This volume highlights the value of examining partial connections across the American continent between human and other-than-human lives.
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Modernization and conversion to world religions are threatening the survival of traditional belief systems, leaving behind only mysterious traces of their existence. This book, based upon extensive research conducted over a period of nearly four decades, brings scientific rigor to one of the questions that have always attracted human curiosity: that of the origin of the dragon.
The author demonstrates that both dragons and rainbows are cultural universals, that many of the traits that are attributed to dragons in widely separated parts of the planet are also attributed to rainbows, and that the number and antiquity of such shared traits cannot be attributed to chance or common inheritance, but rather to common cognitive pathways by which human psychology has responded to the natural environment in a wide array of cultures around the world.
This collection is the first comprehensive history of Fichte’s reception in America, highlighting the existence of a long and strong tradition of Fichtean studies throughout the continent and demonstrating the centrality of Fichtean ideas in contemporary discussions of issues such as feminism, social criticism, and decolonial thought. Read and reinterpreted in the highly diverse circumstances across the American continent, Fichte’s ideas are presented in a radically new light, uncovering the Fichtean spirit of self-activity and autonomous thought in an American context.

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This paper aims at building an accomplice reading of Fichte from Latin America. By crossing statements and perspectives from this side and the other side, of both the Atlantic Ocean and the Andes Mountains, my aim is to stress the asymmetric correspondences between words and reflections of authors as distinct as Fichte, Galeano, Cortázar, Allende, Marx, Freire and others. That is the way I propose to rescue the question of Latin America’s Second Independence from oblivion, and to demonstrate the urgency of the exemplary and consequent attitudes from both sides in order to subvert the meaning of M. Thatcher’s TINA.

In: Fichte in the Americas

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There was no direct influence of Fichte’s thought on the independence patriots of South America, but it is undeniable that his call to action in order to transform society and the State had an effect on countries fighting for their freedom after the failure of the French Revolution, as it happened in Spain after the Napoleonic invasions or in colonial America. This paper highlights the points of contact and coincidences of ethical Idealism with the ideas of the liberators Belgrano, San Martín, Miranda and Bolívar. The causes that account for this indirect process of transmission and its channels are also analyzed, focusing on three questions: (1) The human type to which Fichte’s philosophy is directed is perfectly embodied in the liberators of America, who are men of action, ethical subjects who, without the need for any coercion, fight for freedom within themselves and in society; (2) The revolution in Latin America was shaped under the deep admiration for the French Revolution and not for the North American one. In this regard, there is no doubt that Fichte was the inspiration; (3) All of these patriots were Freemasons and, before the beginning of the independence wars, had contact with the Lodge of London. Thus, Fichte’s activity in Freemasonry, thanks to his Letters to Constant, paved the way for the reform of the Order in Germany, fermented later in Great Britain.

In: Fichte in the Americas
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The contribution places Fichte’s abolitionist stand regarding unfreedom and inequality against the background of the politico-philosophical debate about the respective merits of ancient, “civic” republicanism and modern, “bourgeois” liberalism. As opposed to the emulators of classical antiquity, such as Machiavelli, who seek to retrieve and revive ancient political principles and civic practices, Fichte is allied with those propagating the spread of new principles and practices, chiefly among them freedom in its various guises as personal, civil and political liberty, into all strata of society and into every corner of the globe and, moreover, concerned with the concomitant reassessment, even removal, of traditional values and customary privileges. Yet unlike the proto-liberals, such as Locke, Fichte opposes colonial expansion and other forms of personal, civil and political exploitation on principal as well as pragmatic grounds. The contribution develops Fichte’s politico-philosophical profile with regard to colonialism, servitude and slavery in two sections: a first one on Fichte’s philosophical and political revolutionism; and a second one on the complex constellation of freedom, equality and identity in Fichte’s philosophy in general and his political philosophy in particular. In material terms, the two sections deal with the context and the text, respectively, of one of Fichte’s earliest, most neglected, though not at all insignificant publications, Contribution to the Correction of the Public’s Judgments On the French Revolution from 1793.

In: Fichte in the Americas

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The text deals with Alejandro Korn’s reception of Fichte, based on passages found in a text entitled Hegel, on the first century of his death [Hegel, en el primer centenario de su muerte] (1931) and in one of his main writings, Creative Freedom [La libertad creadora] (1922). Korn’s reception of Fichte could be characterized as a critical reception, since he accuses the Science of Knowledge of solipsism and proposes different solutions to this problem. First, we will shed light on Korn’s system, taking into account its differences with the Science of Knowledge. Secondly, we will show that, despite his criticisms, it is possible to find a link between both systems. Indeed, Korn states not only that philosophical activity must be transformative, but also that the principle upon which subjective activity is based is that of wanting or desire. Therefore, I argue that based on a similar reading of Kant, both thinkers propose that only two systems are possible: the system of freedom or Dogmatism. We shall see how Korn comes close to the way in which the First Introduction to the Science of Knowledge presents the two possible systems, as well as in the details of his arguments for and against them. This similarity is nothing less than the way in which both Fichte and Korn vindicate the spirit of freedom, of which Kant’s work is the messenger.

In: Fichte in the Americas

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In 1909, one year before the first centenary of the May Revolution, Ricardo Rojas (1882–1957) delivered to the Ministry of Justice and Public Instruction, La restauración nacionalista [The Nacionalist Restoration], a plan for the construction of a national identity or conscience that proposed a new concept of patriotism. Taking historical education as an axis, Rojas tries to solve the problem of the crisis of conscience that, according to him, was the result of the cosmopolitanism of the beginning of the 20th century. In this context, he presents a report about the impact and development of historical education in European universities. Based on the Addresses to the German Nation, Rojas recognizes Fichte as the initiator of a project aimed at the construction of a nation anchored in a past time with metaphysical foundations. This allowed the birth of an organic German unity, which the egoism of the age had made impossible. My proposal is to show that there is an influence of Fichtean idealism in the elaboration of the new concept of patriotism by Rojas.

In: Fichte in the Americas
In: Fichte in the Americas
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The aim of this paper is to study the relationship between Walt Whitman’s work and Fichte’s philosophy from four different perspectives: (1) the influence of Thomas Carlyle in Whitman’s reception of Fichte; (2) Fichte’s philosophy as an appropriate philosophy, according to our interpretation of Whitman, for the United States after the Civil War. That appropriateness is grounded in the fact that with Fichte’s philosophy it is possible to think of a unity greater than all differences, a unity in which writing about the Civil War and the oblivion of that same historical event are articulated; (3) Fichte’s philosophy as an insufficient philosophy, although it was adequate for its historical moment. Its insufficiency is to be found, or so I shall argue, in the very modern radicality of the idealist philosophy; (4) the differences between Fichte and Whitman with respect to their religious conceptions (particularly in their links to the sacred books of the Judeo-Christian tradition), differences interpreted in the light of Hans Blumenberg’s ideas on myth, dogma and German Idealism.

In: Fichte in the Americas