This article explores the relationship between politics and institutionality in Hannah Arendt’s thought, focusing on the “foundational paradox,” that is, the (im)possibility of introducing the revolutionary spirit into the established political order. Through the analysis of Arendt and her commentators, three main responses are identified, evaluating their strengths and weaknesses. The study offers keys to better understand Arendt’s dilemma and to face contemporary challenges in the relationship between politics and institutionality.
This paper proposes a notion of social welfare based on the common good. It argues for a working hypothesis that enables the link between ethics and economics in general, and a grounding of social welfare in the common good in particular. The central elements of natural law ethics, basic human goods and principles of practical reasonableness, and the different conception of the common good are presented. Finally, a conception of the social welfare function based on the common good is developed.
For Antonio Machado, the solitude of modern solipsism is the true disease of Western culture. There is only human being everywhere. Humanity is alone, without anything outside itself. It believes that it is self–sufficient. The salvation of the human being lies in his awareness of his finitude. Only the recognition of his insufficiency can free him from solipsism. Only a solitude with an awareness of otherness can lead the human being to seek God as the only complementary that can take away his solitude.
In this article, we examine Paul de Man’s interpretation of the aporia of Rousseau's The Social Contract in conjunction with his thesis on language as figuration. For this purpose, we begin with Allegories of Reading and conclude with Aesthetic Ideology, while also underscoring what Jacques Derrida explains to us about de Man’s thought of the promise. Our aim is to clarify why one must by no means conclude that the aporia of the promise, consisting of executing what is at the same time declared impossible, is produced by the extratextual intervention of a subject. Rather, it is an aporia that structures language itself. De Man’s analysis of Rousseau points, then, to a crucial question: the promise, and its failure, appears as the condition of possibility of every beginning.
The assertion that the natural movement of the will is preceded by an act of intelligence presents important difficulties. The analysis of a wide range of texts by Saint Thomas, prepared from a metaphysical perspective that understands the natural inclination of the will as the ontic tendency of the intellectual being towards the ultimate end, elucidates that the natural will originates from the habitual light of the agent intellect.
