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This article intends to identify the metaphysical roots of projects of the foundation of human rights which incorporated genetically the doctrines of natural rights and call for an individual and anterior state to life in society to justify rights that not positivized in law. Based on the contractarian model of thinkers like Thomas Hobbes, the present article investigates the notion of "nature" contained behind the laws governing the natural state of men while questioning the methodological assumption of the individual - the free and rational human being - to legitimize the formulation of moral judgments and, especially, the enunciation of rights as human rights. The paper intended to show, in the end, that it makes no sense to approach human rights from the traditional notion of "nature", as human nature is constituted from a collective context, and not from the individual - although the contemporary discussion about human rights is completely contaminated by the metaphysics of natural rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper partly explores the debates on men's natural rights which took place in the public sphere in mid-nineteenth century Latin America. In Colombia, as in many other countries in the region, such debates were related to civil wars between liberals and conservatives which started around the year 1848. Romantic poet Julio Arboleda Pombo (1817-1862), military chief and catholic thinker, was a central figure of such doctrinal debates and of such civil wars. In his poetic and journalistic works it is possible to trace the emergence of a post-republican conservatism that would gravitate over the public sphere and academia in Nueva Granada, during the second half of the nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This articles aims at examining the several stages of time on the basis of François Ost's contribution and its connection with the hermeneutic proposal of Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer Franste. Time is presented as a privileged space where tradition meets the experience resulting from the history of Law, and the way this context helps to sustain the development of human rights, as a space for discussion and construction - with a certain degree of utopia - of the basic conditions for full human flowering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]