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The critique of "methodological nationalism" constitutes an important advance in the attempt to elaborate a theory of world society adequate to our socio-historical reality. However, I argue that this is not enough if "theoretical nationalism", which consists in assuming that globality is formed in the interaction or interplay between regions and / or states, is not disputed at all. This assumption is in opposition to the idea of "one" world society as postulates the existence of a plurality of regional and national societies. Beyond the fact that this conception may be acceptable within the framework of the epistemological and methodological openness enabled by the "World Paradigm", we point out a set of analytical dilemmas that arise from it. My thesis is that it is necessary to overcome this regionalist worldview to advance not only in a more adequate theory of world society, but also to a better understanding of the way in which inter-regional inequalities are produced and reproduced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For Henri-Pierre Jeudy, societies today are overflowing. Not from the understanding of having objects or persons in excess, which could easily be contested, but rather that there is an overflowing of senses in societies today. The profusion of discourses and images that circulate in contemporary society makes objects and people themselves insignificant, encouraging particularly the growing indifference to a reality made of images and discursive in nature that does not display any anchorage in a pre-existing reality. The information, the media produces and circulates, ceaselessly and in every way, constitutes its own referent. In other words, represented reality is considered as reality expressed, falling completely in tautism (contraction of tautology and autism), which, according to L. Sfez, characterises contemporary society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the XXI century, the possibility of projecting the ideal of a better society has apparently disappeared, as well as the possibility of utopian thought. However there is evidence of the diffusion of utopian universes in the ideology of social movements that resist capitalism. This article presents a reconstruction of the contents that have been attributed to the concept of utopia. The analysis of ideal processes as well as the determination of the dialectical content of the ideal of Marxist emancipation, are considered within the problems pro posed in the critical social theory, as the present re-vindication of utopia in the reflexive space of alternative emancipators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this conversation the Chilean intellectual Martin Hopenhayn offers a set of tools which permitted an approach to central themes in Latin American debate: the type of society or societies that make up our countries, the forms of social cohesion that appear, the gap in the expectations of youth, the communicational reality of the sub-region, and the relation between media power and citizenship. Through dialogue, the historical contents of these themes are covered which allows us to write and reflect on the exercise of citizenship, but subject to the possibility of participating in equal conditions in communicative interchange. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study we analyze the ethical-philosophical implications of developments based on scientific research in the area of neuro-sciences. The human organism never dissociates radically practical reasoning from theory, and for this reason, the practical-valorative dimensions of rational intellectual understanding. This has a profound philosophical and ethical significance. It establishes the possibility of "organic" or internal relations between cognitive processes, the structure of actions, and value processes. In the ethical field, this is an important addition to the formulation of criteria and/or universal ethical principles of a material character. The importance of this research is justified by at least three reasons: i) From the most diverse ethical currents it proposes the urgency of working on a macro-ethic of a planetary nature in order to confront problems that are ever more global and which challenge human survival. This reflection from the point of view of the neuro-sciences can contribute to enriching the material conception of ethics. ii) In our societies there is a growing need for new epistemological paradigms which lead to philosophical views that overcome anthropological, onthological and cognitive dualisms that are part of modernity, in the search for integrated visions of diverse understanding and greater complexity; and iii) The need for an ethical-philosophical reflection that cannot ignore the advances made in science, especially in the bio-sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under the sociological vision of the French philosopherMaffesoli, the burning of Paris refers to the street disturbances and public violence undergone in the French capital towards the end of 2005, when a situation occurred that demonstrated social changes resulting in the end of modernism. The disappearance of political and economic structures due to social dissident insurgence is imminent. Tribes, a strongly based anthropological term, serve as a category to interpret these violent changes, civil disobedience, patriarchy, institutional des-aggregation, fragmentary roles, sublimation aesthetics, power and resistance. A complete catalogue is offered for understanding the reality of the moment of change, towards an inevitable power co-action and revolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes into account the processes of social construction in classification frameworks or conceptual schemes that all societies use as a frame of reference, with its interpretive codes, that give meaning and value to what we do, think, utter and perceive. In modern societies there is conflict between a rigid classificatory frame, based upon "purity" and with quasi-naturalized distinctions, and a flexible classificatory frame, based upon ambivalence, with more blurred and permeable distinctions. Authors considered in this reflection are, among others: Durkheim, Mauss, Simmel, Derrida, Foucault, Rorty, Goffman, Bourdieu, Douglas, Zerubavel, Luhmann, Bauman, Haraway, Elias, Zizek, Jokisch and Marquard. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article some of the problems which arise when analytically approaching discourse in a study of ideology are discussed. Given that people generally acquire, express and reproduce their ideologies by written or spoken methods, an analytical study of ideological discourse is pertinent. Even when the focus of this paper is the interface or ideological discourse, the theoretical frame work is articulated by the fundamental triangulation of speech, cognition, and society. This frame work is critical of traditional approaches to ideology, especially from the perspective of the social sciences and philosophy, since these methods do not adequately theorize in relation to the socio-cognitive nature of the structure of ideologies, and their discursive reproduction. This paper however does not extensively treat classical approaches to ideology (among many historical studies of ideology.) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The confusion generated in the communicational field by the assumption of a signal theory (Shannon) that searches for effectiveness in the transmission of a message from a transmitter to a receiver, which is generalized as a theory of information or of communication, has proposed an orientation in communicational research directed towards the publicity market (The effects of social communication, etc.). It is necessary to recover as the basic orientation of communicational research, the character of selecting possibilities in the plural construction of realities that discuss the basis for our confidence. As the central instrument of this new orientation, a theory of social images is proposed as an operative concept that permits the observation of different mechanisms of construction of realities through the application of a code of "relevance/opaqueness" in media products "in which we live, move and exist". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]