El presente ensayo estudia temas que cursa quien se propone optar al titulo profesional en matemática. Epistemología de la matemática es conocimiento del conocimiento matemático. La matemática estudia relaciones (cada vez mas profundas) entre elementos de naturaleza no precisada. El resultado es una multiplicidad, por lo menos, con tres dimensiones. Longitudinal: donde se estudia génesis (¿Quiénes aportaron qué?), estructura (¿hasta donde llegaron?), método (¿Cómo?), función (¿para qué?), problemas (¿Qué hay por hacer?). Transversal: donde se ensaya captar lo que la matemática es tan esencialmente que hay quienes han intentado reducirla a algunos de estos atributos: caracterización (descripción en caracteres de existencia y unicidad), combinación (conjunto de partes según los caracteres considerados), condicionalización (coordinación de enunciados antecedentes y consecuentes de acuerdo con la lógica), cualificación (exploración de propiedades involucradas en los axiomas o postulados), cuantificación (todos, todos menos algunos, algunos, al menos uno, ninguno). La matemática, como otros grandes conceptos de la cultura, no se puede abarcar en ensayos descriptivos. Vertical: donde se contempla según el troquel de los tres grandes tipos estructuras al modo Bourbaki, propiedades de operadores sobre relaciones entre elementos de naturaleza tácita.

This book explores the concept of 'cognitive injustice': the failure to recognise the different ways of knowing by which people across the globe run their lives and provide meaning to their existence. Boaventura de Sousa Santos shows why global social justice is not possible without global cognitive justice. Santos argues that Western domination has profoundly marginalised knowledge and wisdom that had been in existence in the global South. She contends that today it is imperative to recover and valorize the epistemological diversity of the world. Epistemologies of the South outlines a new kind of bottom-up cosmopolitanism, in which conviviality, solidarity and life triumph against the logic of market-ridden greed and individualism.

The world is configured in ways that seem systematically hospitable to life forms, especially the human race. Is this the outcome of divine planning or simply of the laws of physics? Ancient Greeks and Romans famously disagreed on whether the cosmos was the product of design or accident. In this book, David Sedley examines this question and illuminates new historical perspectives on the pantheon of thinkers who laid the foundations of Western philosophy and science. Versions of what we call the "creationist" option were widely favored by the major thinkers of classical antiquity, including Plato, whose ideas on the subject prepared the ground for Aristotle's celebrated teleology. But Aristotle aligned himself with the anti-creationist lobby, whose most militant members—the atomists—sought to show how a world just like ours would form inevitably by sheer accident, given only the infinity of space and matter. This stimulating study explores seven major thinkers and philosophical movements enmeshed in the debate: Anaxagoras, Empedocles, Socrates, Plato, the atomists, Aristotle, and the Stoics.

J. D. Bernal's important and ambitious work, The Social Function of Science, was first published in January 1939. As the subtitle -What Science Does, What Science Could Do - suggests it is in two parts. Both have eight chapters. Part 1: What Science Does: Introductory, Historical, The Existing Organization of Scientific Research in Britain, Science in Education, The Efficiency of Scientific Research, The Application of Science, Science and War and International Science. Part 11: What Science Could Do: The Training of the Scientist, The Reorganization of Research, Scientific Communication, The Finance of Science, The Strategy of Scientific Advance; Science in the Service of Man, Science and Social Transformation and The Social Function of Science. To quote Bernal's biographer, Andrew Brown, 'The Social Function of Science . . . was Bernal's attempt to ensure that science would no longer be just a protected area of intellectual inquiry, but would have as an inherent function the improvement of life for mankind everywhere. It was a groundbreaking treatise both in exploring the scope of science and technology in fashioning public policy, with Bernal arguing that science is the chief agent of change in society, and in devising policies that would optimize the way science was organized. The sense of impending war clearly emerges. Bernal deplored the application of scientific discoveries in making war ever more destructive, while acknowledging that the majority of scientific and technical breakthroughs have their origins in military exigencies, both because of the willingness to spend money and the premium placed on novelty during wartime.' Anticipating by two decades the schism C. P. Snow termed 'The Two Cultures', Bernal remarked that 'highly developed science stands almost isolated from a traditional literary culture.' He found that wrong. Again, quoting Andrew Brown, 'to him, science was a creative endeavour that still depended on inspiration and talent, just as much as in painting, writing or composing.' The importance of this book was such that twenty-five years after its publication, a collection of essays, The Science of Science, was published, in part in celebration, but also to explore many of the themes Bernal had first developed.

The first translation into English of 'Le Système colonial dévoilé', the first systematic critique of colonialism ever written from the perspective of a colonized subject.