Jesús Mosterín
Encyclopedia
Jesús Mosterín is a leading Spanish
philosopher and a thinker of broad spectrum, often at the frontier between science and philosophy.
and set theory
in Spanish. He has worked on topics of first and second order logic, axiomatic set theory, computability and complexity. He has shown how the uniform digitalization of each type of symbolic object (such as chromosomes, texts, pictures, movies or pieces of music) can be considered to implement a certain positional numbering system. This result gives a precise meaning to the notion that the set of natural numbers constitutes a universal library and indeed a universal data base. Mosterín has edited the first edition of the complete works of Kurt Gödel
in any language. Together with Thomas Bonk, he has edited an unpublished book of Rudolf Carnap
on axiomatics (in German). He has also delved in the historical and biographical aspects of the development of modern logic, as shown in his original work on the lives of Gottlob Frege
, Georg Cantor
, Bertrand Russell
, John von Neumann
, Kurt Gödel
and Alan Turing
, intertwined with a formal analysis of their main technical contributions.
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Karl Popper
tried to establish a criterion of demarcation between science and metaphysics, but the speculative turn taken by certain developments in theoretical physics has contributed to muddle the issue again. Mosterín has been concerned with the question of the reliability of theories and claims. He makes a distinction between the standard core of a scientific discipline, that at a certain point in time should only include relatively reliable and empirically supported ideas, and the cloud of speculative hypothesis surrounding it. Part of the theoretical progress consists in the incorporation of newly tested hypothesis of the cloud to the standard core. In this connection, he has analyzed epistemic notions like detection and observation. Observation, but not detection, is accompanied by awareness. Detection is always mediated by technological instruments, but observation only sometimes (like glasses in vision). The signals received by detectors have to be transduced into types of energy accessible to our senses. Following the path open by Patrick Suppes
, Mosterín has paid much attention to the structure of metric concepts, because of their indispensable mediating role at the interface between theory and observation where reliability is tested. He has also made contributions to the study of mathematical modeling and of the limits of the axiomatic method in the characterization of real-world structures. The real world is extremely complex, and sometimes the best we can do is to apply the method of theoretical science: to pick up in the set-theoretical universe a mathematical structure with some formal similarities with the situation we are interested in, and use it as a model of that parcel of the world. Together with Roberto Torretti
, Mosterín has written a uniquely comprehensive encyclopedic dictionary of logic and philosophy of science.
’s and Schrödinger’s footsteps, he has been asking the simple question: what is life? He has analyzed the main proposed definitions, based on metabolism, reproduction, thermodynamics, complexity and evolution, and found all of them wanting. It is true that all organisms on Earth share many characteristics, from the encoding of genetic information in DNA to the storage of energy in ATP, but these common features merely reflect the inheritance from a common ancestor that possibly acquired them in a random way. From that point of view, our biology is the parochial science of life on Earth, rather than a universal science of life in general. Such a general biology seems impossible, as long as we do not detect and come to know other forms of life in the galaxy (in case they exist). Concerning the ontological thesis of Michael Ghiselin
and David Hull
on the individuality of biological species, Mosterín shows that they are neither classes nor individuals in the usual meaning of these words. He tries to extend and make more precise the available conceptual framework of the discussion. Specifically, he shows the formal equivalence of the set-theoretical and the mereological (or part and individual) approach, so that everything that can be said about the classes can be translated into the jargon of individuals, and the other way around.
, he has undertaken a thorough critical review of the paradigm of cosmic inflation
. Earman and Mosterín conclude that, despite the widespread influence of the inflationary paradigm and the fact that it does not contradict any known results, there are as yet no good grounds for admitting any of the models of inflation into the standard core of scientific cosmology. He has also dealt with the role of speculation in cosmology. In particular, Mosterín has shown the multiple misunderstandings underlying the so-called anthropic principle and the use of anthropic explanations in cosmology. Mosterín concludes that "in its weak version, the anthropic principle is a mere tautology
, which does not allow us to explain anything or to predict anything that we did not already know. In its strong version, it is a gratuitous speculation". Mosterín also points to the flawed “anthropic” inferences from the assumption of an infinity of worlds to the existence of one like ours:
had distinguished theoretical from practical reason. Rationality theorist Jesús Mosterín makes a parallel distinction between theoretical and practical rationality, although, according to him, reason and rationality are not the same: reason would be a psychological faculty, whereas rationality is an optimizing strategy. Humans are not rational by definition, but they can think and behave rationally or not, depending on whether they apply, explicitly or implicitly, the strategy of theoretical and practical rationality to the thoughts they accept and to the actions they perform. Theoretical rationality has a formal component that reduces to logical consistency and a material component that reduces to empirical support, relying on our inborn mechanisms of signal detection and interpretation. Mosterín distinguishes between involuntary and implicit belief, on the one hand, and voluntary and explicit acceptance, on the other. Theoretical rationality can more properly be said to regulate our acceptances than our beliefs. Practical rationality is the strategy for living one’s best possible life, achieving your most important goals and your own preferences in as far as possible. Practical rationality has also a formal component, that reduces to Bayesian decision theory, and a material component, rooted in human nature (lastly, in our genome).
, famous Spanish naturalist and media personality, in the advancement of knowledge and appreciation of wild nature and particularly of wild animals. Mosterín has repeatedly taken a strong public position against bullfighting and other forms of mistreatment of animals. He contributed decisively to the discussion leading to the ban of bullfighting in Catalonia (Spain) in July 2010. Subsequently he has published a lucid analysis of this cruel tradition and a devastating philosophical refutation of all proposed attempts to justify it. As honorary president of the Spanish Great Ape Project
, he has cooperated with Peter Singer
in advocating certain minimal legal rights for great apes. Mosterín does not believe in the existence of intrinsic, metaphysical rights (neither for animals in general nor for humans in particular), but he thinks that any political society can create rights through legislative action of Parliament. Following Hume
and Darwin
, and taking into account Giacomo Rizzolatti
’s results on mirror neurons, Mosterín suggests that our inborn capacity for compassion, fed by knowledge and empathy, is a more solid basis for the moral consideration of non-human animals than just abstract and uncheckable speculations on intrinsic rights.
. Mosterín emphasizes their differences: freedom comes down to doing what I want to do; democracy, to doing what (the majority of) the others want me to do. Rejecting as muddled the metaphysical notion of free will, he focuses on political freedom, the absence of coercion or interference by others in my personal decisions. Because of the tendencies to violence and aggression that lurk in human nature, some constraint on freedom is necessary for peaceful and fruitful social life, but the more freedom we enjoy, the better. Especially, there is no rational ground for curtailing the cultural freedoms (of language, religion and customs) in the name of the nation, the church or the party. From this point of view, Internet
provides a much more attractive model than the obsolete nation-state
or the nationalistic movements. Mosterín thinks that the nation-state is incompatible with the full development of freedom, whose blossoming requires the reorganization of the world political system along cosmopolitan
lines. He proposes a world without nation-states, territorially organized in small autonomous but not-sovereign cantonal polities, complemented by strong world organizations.
, Steven Pinker
and Jesús Mosterín. The successful sequencing of the human genome and the ongoing research on the function of genes and of regulatory sequences, together with the insights on the workings of the brain, have brought a new actuality and significance to this classical notion. According to Mosterín, the nature of our species Homo sapiens is the information genetically transmitted and present in the human genome (in the genetic pool). Your individual nature lies in your own genome, present in the chromosomes of your cells. The human genome has a layered structure and (up to a point) recapitulates the history of our human lineage. The oldest and deepest strata of our nature represent the living functions common to all life on Earth. Subsequent strata reflect later novelties. The newest layers are devoted to the most recent acquisitions, like bipedalism, grip of precision, large brain cortex, language and other abstract or recursive cognitive processes. Mosterín has dealt with the methods and criteria for distinguishing natural from cultural aspects of human capacities and behaviors and has provided a solid basis to theoretical anthropology. He has also engaged in the discussion and clarification of bioethical issues, like research with embryonic stem cells, birth control, abortion and euthanasia, taking always a scientific point of view and a position in favor of human freedom.
brought about by cultural anthropology, archeology and biology, Mosterín has developed a new philosophical understanding of what culture is, where it is localized and how it evolves in time. Human nature is information, and so is human culture, but both are distinguished by their different means of transmission: whereas nature is transmitted genetically and is encoded in the genome, culture is transmitted through social learning and is encoded in the brain. Only individuals have a brain, and only they have a culture. Talk of collective cultures has to be understood as a statistical artifact for talking about a plurality of individual cultures. The set of elementary chunks of culture (variously known as memes, cultural variants or cultural traits) codified as neuronal circuits in the long term memory of the individual make up that individual’s culture. Corresponding to the different uses of ‘culture’ in ordinary and scientific language, Mosterín defines several notions of collective culture, going from the cultural pool (the union of the cultures of all individuals of the group) to the unanimous culture (the intersection of all those cultures). In 2009 he has completed a thoroughgoing analysis of the forces driving cultural change, paying special attention to the role of Internet and other factors of information technology. He considers that preserving the freedom and efficiency of Internet is crucial for the future thriving of human culture.
’s History of Western Philosophy, whose foreword he composed, as well as a critic of some of its shortcomings, Mosterín has undertaken the ambitious plan of writing all by himself a universal history of thought, not only Western, but also Asian and even archaic. His series of books on Historia del Pensamiento aims at covering all main intellectual traditions from an interdisciplinary approach dealing simultaneously with contemporary developments in philosophy, science and ideology. The analysis of the ideas is critical and uncompromising, but combines rigor with clarity and straightforward language. Besides, he delves into the arguments and does not hesitate to dig out their eventual flaws.
Some of the books of the series are devoted, for example, to Aristotle, the Jews and the philosophy of India. Aristotle is presented not only as a philosopher, but also as a seminal scientist in different fields. The Jewish myths are not spared, but a deeply sympathetic position is taken to such important thinkers as Maimonides
(ben Maimon), Spinoza and Einstein. The volume on India, besides dealing with linguistics and mathematics, contains a compact presentation of the main philosophical schools, from the Upanishad, through the Jaina and Buddhist developments, to the Advaita Vedanta
of Shankara
, which obviously attracts the author. The book on the Christians is the largest of the series. Jesus is presented as a typical Jew. Most of the original Christian ideas come from Paul, not from Jesus. After Constantine became a sort of Christian, theological discussions about such issues as the Holy Trinity were settled by force. The intellectual contributions of the main Christian thinkers (like Augustine, Thomas Aquinas
and Luther
) are analyzed and evaluated, but also the great historical processes are covered, like the Crusades, the universities, the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation. Less attention is devoted to the last two centuries, as Mosterin thinks that in this period Christianity has decoupled itself from all new developments in science and philosophy, and Christian ideas have become increasingly irrelevant.
Spain
Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...
philosopher and a thinker of broad spectrum, often at the frontier between science and philosophy.
Biography
He was born in Bilbao in 1941. He studied in Spain, Germany and the USA. Professor of Logic and Philosophy of Science at the University of Barcelona since 1983, he founded there an active Department of Logic, Philosophy and History of Science. Since 1996, he has been Research Professor at the National Research Council of Spain (CSIC). He is a fellow of the Center for Philosophy of Science in Pittsburgh and a member of several international academies. He has played a crucial role in the introduction of mathematical logic, analytical philosophy and philosophy of science in Spain and Latin America. Besides his academic duties, he has fulfilled important functions in the international publishing industry, especially in the Salvat and Hachette groups. He has being actively involved in the protection of wildlife and its defense in the mass media.Logic
Mosterín acquired his initial logical formation at the Institut für mathematische Logik und Grundlagenforschung in Münster (Germany). He published the first modern and rigurous textbooks of logicLogic
In philosophy, Logic is the formal systematic study of the principles of valid inference and correct reasoning. Logic is used in most intellectual activities, but is studied primarily in the disciplines of philosophy, mathematics, semantics, and computer science...
and set theory
Set theory
Set theory is the branch of mathematics that studies sets, which are collections of objects. Although any type of object can be collected into a set, set theory is applied most often to objects that are relevant to mathematics...
in Spanish. He has worked on topics of first and second order logic, axiomatic set theory, computability and complexity. He has shown how the uniform digitalization of each type of symbolic object (such as chromosomes, texts, pictures, movies or pieces of music) can be considered to implement a certain positional numbering system. This result gives a precise meaning to the notion that the set of natural numbers constitutes a universal library and indeed a universal data base. Mosterín has edited the first edition of the complete works of Kurt Gödel
Kurt Gödel
Kurt Friedrich Gödel was an Austrian logician, mathematician and philosopher. Later in his life he emigrated to the United States to escape the effects of World War II. One of the most significant logicians of all time, Gödel made an immense impact upon scientific and philosophical thinking in the...
in any language. Together with Thomas Bonk, he has edited an unpublished book of Rudolf Carnap
Rudolf Carnap
Rudolf Carnap was an influential German-born philosopher who was active in Europe before 1935 and in the United States thereafter. He was a major member of the Vienna Circle and an advocate of logical positivism....
on axiomatics (in German). He has also delved in the historical and biographical aspects of the development of modern logic, as shown in his original work on the lives of Gottlob Frege
Gottlob Frege
Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege was a German mathematician, logician and philosopher. He is considered to be one of the founders of modern logic, and made major contributions to the foundations of mathematics. He is generally considered to be the father of analytic philosophy, for his writings on...
, Georg Cantor
Georg Cantor
Georg Ferdinand Ludwig Philipp Cantor was a German mathematician, best known as the inventor of set theory, which has become a fundamental theory in mathematics. Cantor established the importance of one-to-one correspondence between the members of two sets, defined infinite and well-ordered sets,...
, Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM, FRS was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, and social critic. At various points in his life he considered himself a liberal, a socialist, and a pacifist, but he also admitted that he had never been any of these things...
, John von Neumann
John von Neumann
John von Neumann was a Hungarian-American mathematician and polymath who made major contributions to a vast number of fields, including set theory, functional analysis, quantum mechanics, ergodic theory, geometry, fluid dynamics, economics and game theory, computer science, numerical analysis,...
, Kurt Gödel
Kurt Gödel
Kurt Friedrich Gödel was an Austrian logician, mathematician and philosopher. Later in his life he emigrated to the United States to escape the effects of World War II. One of the most significant logicians of all time, Gödel made an immense impact upon scientific and philosophical thinking in the...
and Alan Turing
Alan Turing
Alan Mathison Turing, OBE, FRS , was an English mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, and computer scientist. He was highly influential in the development of computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of "algorithm" and "computation" with the Turing machine, which played a...
, intertwined with a formal analysis of their main technical contributions.
Concepts and theories in science
Karl Popper
Sir Karl Raimund Popper, CH FRS FBA was an Austro-British philosopher and a professor at the London School of Economics...
tried to establish a criterion of demarcation between science and metaphysics, but the speculative turn taken by certain developments in theoretical physics has contributed to muddle the issue again. Mosterín has been concerned with the question of the reliability of theories and claims. He makes a distinction between the standard core of a scientific discipline, that at a certain point in time should only include relatively reliable and empirically supported ideas, and the cloud of speculative hypothesis surrounding it. Part of the theoretical progress consists in the incorporation of newly tested hypothesis of the cloud to the standard core. In this connection, he has analyzed epistemic notions like detection and observation. Observation, but not detection, is accompanied by awareness. Detection is always mediated by technological instruments, but observation only sometimes (like glasses in vision). The signals received by detectors have to be transduced into types of energy accessible to our senses. Following the path open by Patrick Suppes
Patrick Suppes
Patrick Colonel Suppes is an American philosopher who has made significant contributions to philosophy of science, the theory of measurement, the foundations of quantum mechanics, decision theory, psychology, and educational technology...
, Mosterín has paid much attention to the structure of metric concepts, because of their indispensable mediating role at the interface between theory and observation where reliability is tested. He has also made contributions to the study of mathematical modeling and of the limits of the axiomatic method in the characterization of real-world structures. The real world is extremely complex, and sometimes the best we can do is to apply the method of theoretical science: to pick up in the set-theoretical universe a mathematical structure with some formal similarities with the situation we are interested in, and use it as a model of that parcel of the world. Together with Roberto Torretti
Roberto Torretti
Roberto Torretti is a Chilean philosopher, author and academic who is internationally renowned for his contributions to the history of philosophy, physics and mathematics.-Biography:...
, Mosterín has written a uniquely comprehensive encyclopedic dictionary of logic and philosophy of science.
Philosophy of biology
Besides actively participating in the current discussions on evolutionary theory and genetics, Mosterín has also tackled issues like the definition of life itself or the ontology of biological organisms and species. Following in AristotleAristotle
Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and polymath, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology...
’s and Schrödinger’s footsteps, he has been asking the simple question: what is life? He has analyzed the main proposed definitions, based on metabolism, reproduction, thermodynamics, complexity and evolution, and found all of them wanting. It is true that all organisms on Earth share many characteristics, from the encoding of genetic information in DNA to the storage of energy in ATP, but these common features merely reflect the inheritance from a common ancestor that possibly acquired them in a random way. From that point of view, our biology is the parochial science of life on Earth, rather than a universal science of life in general. Such a general biology seems impossible, as long as we do not detect and come to know other forms of life in the galaxy (in case they exist). Concerning the ontological thesis of Michael Ghiselin
Michael Ghiselin
Michael T. Ghiselin is an American biologist, philosopher/historian of biology currently at the California Academy of Sciences.B.A., University of Utah ; Ph.D., Stanford University ; Postdoctoral Fellow, Harvard University ; Postdoctoral Fellow, Marine Biological Laboratory ; Assistant Professor of...
and David Hull
David Hull
David Lee Hull was a philosopher with a particular interest in the philosophy of biology. In addition to his academic prominence, he was well-known as a gay man who fought for the rights of other gay and lesbian philosophers....
on the individuality of biological species, Mosterín shows that they are neither classes nor individuals in the usual meaning of these words. He tries to extend and make more precise the available conceptual framework of the discussion. Specifically, he shows the formal equivalence of the set-theoretical and the mereological (or part and individual) approach, so that everything that can be said about the classes can be translated into the jargon of individuals, and the other way around.
Philosophy of cosmology
The role of our scientific image of the universe in a rational world view has always caught the attention of Mosterín. He has devoted much work to the epistemic analysis of cosmological theories and of the reliability of their claims. Together with John EarmanJohn Earman
John Earman is a philosopher of physics. He is currently an emeritus professor in the History and Philosophy of Science department at the University of Pittsburgh. He has also taught at UCLA, the Rockefeller University, and the University of Minnesota, and was president of the Philosophy of...
, he has undertaken a thorough critical review of the paradigm of cosmic inflation
Cosmic inflation
In physical cosmology, cosmic inflation, cosmological inflation or just inflation is the theorized extremely rapid exponential expansion of the early universe by a factor of at least 1078 in volume, driven by a negative-pressure vacuum energy density. The inflationary epoch comprises the first part...
. Earman and Mosterín conclude that, despite the widespread influence of the inflationary paradigm and the fact that it does not contradict any known results, there are as yet no good grounds for admitting any of the models of inflation into the standard core of scientific cosmology. He has also dealt with the role of speculation in cosmology. In particular, Mosterín has shown the multiple misunderstandings underlying the so-called anthropic principle and the use of anthropic explanations in cosmology. Mosterín concludes that "in its weak version, the anthropic principle is a mere tautology
Tautology (logic)
In logic, a tautology is a formula which is true in every possible interpretation. Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein first applied the term to redundancies of propositional logic in 1921; it had been used earlier to refer to rhetorical tautologies, and continues to be used in that alternate sense...
, which does not allow us to explain anything or to predict anything that we did not already know. In its strong version, it is a gratuitous speculation". Mosterín also points to the flawed “anthropic” inferences from the assumption of an infinity of worlds to the existence of one like ours:
Theory of rationality
KantKANT
KANT is a computer algebra system for mathematicians interested in algebraic number theory, performing sophisticated computations in algebraic number fields, in global function fields, and in local fields. KASH is the associated command line interface...
had distinguished theoretical from practical reason. Rationality theorist Jesús Mosterín makes a parallel distinction between theoretical and practical rationality, although, according to him, reason and rationality are not the same: reason would be a psychological faculty, whereas rationality is an optimizing strategy. Humans are not rational by definition, but they can think and behave rationally or not, depending on whether they apply, explicitly or implicitly, the strategy of theoretical and practical rationality to the thoughts they accept and to the actions they perform. Theoretical rationality has a formal component that reduces to logical consistency and a material component that reduces to empirical support, relying on our inborn mechanisms of signal detection and interpretation. Mosterín distinguishes between involuntary and implicit belief, on the one hand, and voluntary and explicit acceptance, on the other. Theoretical rationality can more properly be said to regulate our acceptances than our beliefs. Practical rationality is the strategy for living one’s best possible life, achieving your most important goals and your own preferences in as far as possible. Practical rationality has also a formal component, that reduces to Bayesian decision theory, and a material component, rooted in human nature (lastly, in our genome).
Ethics, animals and rights
From the beginning, Mosterín collaborated with Félix Rodríguez de la FuenteFélix Rodríguez de la Fuente
Félix Samuel Rodríguez de la Fuente was a Spanish naturalist and broadcaster. He is best known for the highly successful and influential TV series El Hombre y la Tierra . Degree in medicine and self-taught in biology, was a multifaceted charismatic figure whose influence has endured despite the...
, famous Spanish naturalist and media personality, in the advancement of knowledge and appreciation of wild nature and particularly of wild animals. Mosterín has repeatedly taken a strong public position against bullfighting and other forms of mistreatment of animals. He contributed decisively to the discussion leading to the ban of bullfighting in Catalonia (Spain) in July 2010. Subsequently he has published a lucid analysis of this cruel tradition and a devastating philosophical refutation of all proposed attempts to justify it. As honorary president of the Spanish Great Ape Project
Great Ape Project
The Great Ape Project , founded in 1994, is an international organization of primatologists, anthropologists, ethicists, and other experts who advocate a United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Great Apes that would confer basic legal rights on non-human great apes: chimpanzees, bonobos,...
, he has cooperated with Peter Singer
Peter Singer
Peter Albert David Singer is an Australian philosopher who is the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University and Laureate Professor at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the University of Melbourne...
in advocating certain minimal legal rights for great apes. Mosterín does not believe in the existence of intrinsic, metaphysical rights (neither for animals in general nor for humans in particular), but he thinks that any political society can create rights through legislative action of Parliament. Following Hume
David Hume
David Hume was a Scottish philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist, known especially for his philosophical empiricism and skepticism. He was one of the most important figures in the history of Western philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment...
and Darwin
Charles Darwin
Charles Robert Darwin FRS was an English naturalist. He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestry, and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection.He published his theory...
, and taking into account Giacomo Rizzolatti
Giacomo Rizzolatti
Giacomo Rizzolatti is an Italian Neurophysiologist who works at the University of Parma. He is the Senior Scientist of the research team that discovered mirror neurons in the frontal and parietal cortex of the macaque monkey, and has written many scientific articles on the topic. He is a past...
’s results on mirror neurons, Mosterín suggests that our inborn capacity for compassion, fed by knowledge and empathy, is a more solid basis for the moral consideration of non-human animals than just abstract and uncheckable speculations on intrinsic rights.
Political philosophy
Modern liberal democracy is a compromise between the twin ideals of freedom and democracyDemocracy
Democracy is generally defined as a form of government in which all adult citizens have an equal say in the decisions that affect their lives. Ideally, this includes equal participation in the proposal, development and passage of legislation into law...
. Mosterín emphasizes their differences: freedom comes down to doing what I want to do; democracy, to doing what (the majority of) the others want me to do. Rejecting as muddled the metaphysical notion of free will, he focuses on political freedom, the absence of coercion or interference by others in my personal decisions. Because of the tendencies to violence and aggression that lurk in human nature, some constraint on freedom is necessary for peaceful and fruitful social life, but the more freedom we enjoy, the better. Especially, there is no rational ground for curtailing the cultural freedoms (of language, religion and customs) in the name of the nation, the church or the party. From this point of view, Internet
Internet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
provides a much more attractive model than the obsolete nation-state
Nation-state
The nation state is a state that self-identifies as deriving its political legitimacy from serving as a sovereign entity for a nation as a sovereign territorial unit. The state is a political and geopolitical entity; the nation is a cultural and/or ethnic entity...
or the nationalistic movements. Mosterín thinks that the nation-state is incompatible with the full development of freedom, whose blossoming requires the reorganization of the world political system along cosmopolitan
Cosmopolitanism
Cosmopolitanism is the ideology that all human ethnic groups belong to a single community based on a shared morality. This is contrasted with communitarian and particularistic theories, especially the ideas of patriotism and nationalism...
lines. He proposes a world without nation-states, territorially organized in small autonomous but not-sovereign cantonal polities, complemented by strong world organizations.
Human nature
The 21st century has witnessed a vigorous revival of the idea of human nature in the hands of authors like Edward WilsonE. O. Wilson
Edward Osborne Wilson is an American biologist, researcher , theorist , naturalist and author. His biological specialty is myrmecology, the study of ants....
, Steven Pinker
Steven Pinker
Steven Arthur Pinker is a Canadian-American experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, linguist and popular science author...
and Jesús Mosterín. The successful sequencing of the human genome and the ongoing research on the function of genes and of regulatory sequences, together with the insights on the workings of the brain, have brought a new actuality and significance to this classical notion. According to Mosterín, the nature of our species Homo sapiens is the information genetically transmitted and present in the human genome (in the genetic pool). Your individual nature lies in your own genome, present in the chromosomes of your cells. The human genome has a layered structure and (up to a point) recapitulates the history of our human lineage. The oldest and deepest strata of our nature represent the living functions common to all life on Earth. Subsequent strata reflect later novelties. The newest layers are devoted to the most recent acquisitions, like bipedalism, grip of precision, large brain cortex, language and other abstract or recursive cognitive processes. Mosterín has dealt with the methods and criteria for distinguishing natural from cultural aspects of human capacities and behaviors and has provided a solid basis to theoretical anthropology. He has also engaged in the discussion and clarification of bioethical issues, like research with embryonic stem cells, birth control, abortion and euthanasia, taking always a scientific point of view and a position in favor of human freedom.
Human culture
Building on the wide understanding of cultureCulture
Culture is a term that has many different inter-related meanings. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions...
brought about by cultural anthropology, archeology and biology, Mosterín has developed a new philosophical understanding of what culture is, where it is localized and how it evolves in time. Human nature is information, and so is human culture, but both are distinguished by their different means of transmission: whereas nature is transmitted genetically and is encoded in the genome, culture is transmitted through social learning and is encoded in the brain. Only individuals have a brain, and only they have a culture. Talk of collective cultures has to be understood as a statistical artifact for talking about a plurality of individual cultures. The set of elementary chunks of culture (variously known as memes, cultural variants or cultural traits) codified as neuronal circuits in the long term memory of the individual make up that individual’s culture. Corresponding to the different uses of ‘culture’ in ordinary and scientific language, Mosterín defines several notions of collective culture, going from the cultural pool (the union of the cultures of all individuals of the group) to the unanimous culture (the intersection of all those cultures). In 2009 he has completed a thoroughgoing analysis of the forces driving cultural change, paying special attention to the role of Internet and other factors of information technology. He considers that preserving the freedom and efficiency of Internet is crucial for the future thriving of human culture.
History of philosophy
An admirer of the freshness and clarity of Bertrand RussellBertrand Russell
Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM, FRS was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, and social critic. At various points in his life he considered himself a liberal, a socialist, and a pacifist, but he also admitted that he had never been any of these things...
’s History of Western Philosophy, whose foreword he composed, as well as a critic of some of its shortcomings, Mosterín has undertaken the ambitious plan of writing all by himself a universal history of thought, not only Western, but also Asian and even archaic. His series of books on Historia del Pensamiento aims at covering all main intellectual traditions from an interdisciplinary approach dealing simultaneously with contemporary developments in philosophy, science and ideology. The analysis of the ideas is critical and uncompromising, but combines rigor with clarity and straightforward language. Besides, he delves into the arguments and does not hesitate to dig out their eventual flaws.
Some of the books of the series are devoted, for example, to Aristotle, the Jews and the philosophy of India. Aristotle is presented not only as a philosopher, but also as a seminal scientist in different fields. The Jewish myths are not spared, but a deeply sympathetic position is taken to such important thinkers as Maimonides
Maimonides
Moses ben-Maimon, called Maimonides and also known as Mūsā ibn Maymūn in Arabic, or Rambam , was a preeminent medieval Jewish philosopher and one of the greatest Torah scholars and physicians of the Middle Ages...
(ben Maimon), Spinoza and Einstein. The volume on India, besides dealing with linguistics and mathematics, contains a compact presentation of the main philosophical schools, from the Upanishad, through the Jaina and Buddhist developments, to the Advaita Vedanta
Advaita Vedanta
Advaita Vedanta is considered to be the most influential and most dominant sub-school of the Vedānta school of Hindu philosophy. Other major sub-schools of Vedānta are Dvaita and ; while the minor ones include Suddhadvaita, Dvaitadvaita and Achintya Bhedabheda...
of Shankara
Adi Shankara
Adi Shankara Adi Shankara Adi Shankara (IAST: pronounced , (Sanskrit: , ) (788 CE - 820 CE), also known as ' and ' was an Indian philosopher from Kalady of present day Kerala who consolidated the doctrine of advaita vedānta...
, which obviously attracts the author. The book on the Christians is the largest of the series. Jesus is presented as a typical Jew. Most of the original Christian ideas come from Paul, not from Jesus. After Constantine became a sort of Christian, theological discussions about such issues as the Holy Trinity were settled by force. The intellectual contributions of the main Christian thinkers (like Augustine, Thomas Aquinas
Thomas Aquinas
Thomas Aquinas, O.P. , also Thomas of Aquin or Aquino, was an Italian Dominican priest of the Catholic Church, and an immensely influential philosopher and theologian in the tradition of scholasticism, known as Doctor Angelicus, Doctor Communis, or Doctor Universalis...
and Luther
Martin Luther
Martin Luther was a German priest, professor of theology and iconic figure of the Protestant Reformation. He strongly disputed the claim that freedom from God's punishment for sin could be purchased with money. He confronted indulgence salesman Johann Tetzel with his Ninety-Five Theses in 1517...
) are analyzed and evaluated, but also the great historical processes are covered, like the Crusades, the universities, the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation. Less attention is devoted to the last two centuries, as Mosterin thinks that in this period Christianity has decoupled itself from all new developments in science and philosophy, and Christian ideas have become increasingly irrelevant.