Problemáticas del lenguaje: Mecanismos y propósitos en usos discursivos
Vol. 2 No. 6 (2022)

One of the current problems in language studies is the principle that linguistic categories are discrete and perfectly bounded. During these last decades, instead of considering them as closed and well-defined, we are understanding all categorization as a predominance or selection of attributes that represent it to a greater or lesser degree with respect to other categories. This look changes not only our way of studying certain mental processes but also our interpretation of the world. Linguistic analysis from prototype theory can refract a network of interpreted relationships that have been mentally grouped. For this reason, linguistic categories are interpreted as cognitive categories. On this occasion, we consider it necessary to return to some of these categories to value them and describe them with respect to others in the context of real linguistic uses. On the other hand, the challenge of describing and analyzing the use of the language by the speakers is based on considering language as a communication instrument made up of signs, whose design and structure are directly motivated by the communicative act. In other words, the syntax is not only semantically, but also pragmatically motivated. In this edition we ask ourselves: How, then, is grammar understood, studied and described, if linguistic routines are constantly renegotiated in speech according to the context of enunciation and the intentions of the speakers?

The Dossier "Language Problems: Mechanisms and Purposes in Discursive Uses" aims to contribute to current language studies from the cognitive-prototypical perspective. We call, within the framework of discursive studies, to address studies of language and cognitive processes involved in the choice of linguistic forms. We will also consider the communicative intention of the speaker as an aspect to identify and describe from the analysis of discursive uses of real texts and their frequencies of use.

Inputs from antiquity: creative readings from classical philosophies
Vol. 1 No. 6 (2022)

A disturbing subject: philosophies and their times. Here we begin to weigh a new dossier proposal. We ask ourselves, where does the novelty lie? What is the value of rereads? That's where we think of creativity. Perhaps that is one of the words that inspires curiosity. It is difficult to ask ourselves about something without noticing the assumptions that rest under the terms we use, and this suggests another situation about how we think about ancient philosophies. It is common to assume that Ancient Philosophy rests below its later productions, just as the meanings run aground, agglutinating or accumulating in the terms. So much so that philosophy would seem to be composed of a constant series of repetitions of terms whose anchorage is traceable below what stands as novelty. It is difficult, for example, to think about politics without owing at least a margin of theorization to the concepts, ideas and meanings that Antiquity poured into that term. We suspect that there is no point, on the one hand, in wanting to evade the historical journey of the terms with which we make philosophical reflection today, nor in clinging to ancient appreciations as if it were a primordial truth, on the other.
Creativity is what we resort to in order to assume that readings are not exhausted, that all literature can be an input for alternative reflections. So Antiquity, in quotes, is susceptible to our view of multiple forms of revitalization, resignification or reflection (in the sense of looking back on the same) philosophical, and even more: we think that it is not the ideas or concepts, the terms or problems that remain at a specific time; but rather the way in which they have been worked. Today we see clear examples of readings, writings, works and ways of making ancient ideas or thoughts speak, but whose novelty necessarily lies in an ingenious pivot that provoked a contemporary reading and a new way of philosophical work. Today we want to invite you to rethink, make talk and write about this problem that we have selected as the theme of Dossier, which we have entitled: Inputs from Antiquity: creative readings from classical philosophies. We look forward to your input!

Critical Theory: updates, folds and reformulations
Vol. 2 No. 5 (2021)

The dossier aims to promote and sustain dialogue between different textual, aesthetic and academic resources related to the various geographical, political and epistemological locations of Critical Theory.


In recent decades the question of “the critical” ─ canonically installed in the 20th century by Max Horkheimer in Traditional Theory and Critical Theory (1937) ─ has undergone mutations , surveys and new configurations in different geocultural areas. Directly or indirectly, the initial concerns of Critical Theory have been crossed by displacements and surveys that modify its original meaning and its classic directions: the anti-colonial critiques of the second half of the 20th century, Enrique Dussel's Philosophy of Liberation, Latin American cultural criticism of the 1980s and 1990s, postcolonial theory, the Latin American decolonial turn, critical feminisms, Antonio Negri's theory of constituent power, and Nancy Fraser's anti-capitalism, just to name a few.


This pluralization and decentering of Critical Theory accounts for updates, folds and reformulations that deepen conjectures about narratives and conventional representations of what is understood by "critical ”. Some of the questions that guide the contributions to which this issue calls are: what are the main categories of Critical Theory that have spread in recent decades? Is it possible to think of a survey of Critical Theory in Latin America? What policies does Critical Theory enable in its classic and/or current formulations? What are the limits and possibilities of Critical Theory? How is Critical Theory updated?

Aesthetic discussions: tensions and intersections between modernity and contemporaneity
Vol. 1 No. 5 (2021)

"In art it is difficult to say something that is as good as saying nothing ”. With these words Wittgenstein refers to aesthetics advising silence, but what is aesthetics if not to talk about art? And in that case, what is art? How to think aesthetics or how to think from that disciplinary field after a phrase as decisive as it is disturbing? If these questions are not complex enough to problematize, we can think about them by placing ourselves in the present. How is aesthetics outlined today? Perhaps Wittgenstein's words do not signal a withdrawal from aesthetics but rather promote a new theoretical commitment. We cannot ignore all the problems that have arisen throughout the history of aesthetics and art, for this reason we came up with multiple triggers to encourage publication in this Dossier.

Destabilizing thresholds. Debates around the problematic distinction between the human and the non-human
Vol. 2 No. 4 (2020)

From TRAZOS. Revista de Estudiantes de Filosofía invites those who wish to participate in a special issue, dedicated to multiple approaches that are located on the horizon of posthumanist thought, a philosophical current that has its starting point in the crisis of humanism and its modern concept of Man, as a self-referential, autonomous and determining subject of existence. This way of being was outlined in clear opposition to the "animal form of life", condemned to the field of instincts and reaction (González, 2018). However, since the end of the 20th century, posthumanism, as well as Critical Animal Studies, cyberfeminism, biopolitical studies and the "philosophy of plant life", have questioned those thresholds that allowed establishing a taxonomy of subordination of the living, functional limits to various devices of domination, subjection and extermination of non-human life forms. In these coordinates, alternative figurations emerged to imagine multiple and irreducible particular ways of inhabiting the shared world: the notions of animot, cyborg, species in company, becoming-animal, becoming-vegetable, herd, multispecies alliances, monstrosity and abnormality make this evident. Thus, the challenge of thinking of non-human, inhuman or post-human worlds opens up, beyond the thresholds between culture/nature, civilized/savage, man/machine, human/animal, and, ultimately, between the human and the non-human.