Community-based participatory research (CBPR) and community engaged research (CEnR) are key to promoting community and patient engagement in actionable evidence-based strategies to improve research for health equity. Rapid growth of CBPR/CEnR research projects have led to the broad adoption of partnering principles in community-academic partnerships and among some health and academic organizations. Yet, transformation of principles into best practices that foster trust, shared power, and equity outcomes still remain fragmented, are dependent on individuals with long term projects, or are non-existent. (...) This paper describes how we designed our Engage for Equity PLUS intervention that leverages the leadership and membership of champion teams (including community-engaged faculty, community partners and patient advocates) to improve organizational policies and practices to support equity based CBPR/CEnR. (shrink)

That believing truly as a matter of luck does not generally constitute knowing has become epistemic commonplace. Accounts of knowledge incorporating this anti-luck idea frequently rely on one or another of a safety or sensitivity condition. Sensitivity-based accounts of knowledge have a well-known problem with necessary truths, to wit, that any believed necessary truth trivially counts as knowledge on such accounts. In this paper, we argue that safety-based accounts similarly trivialize knowledge of necessary truths and that two ways of responding (...) to this problem for safety, issuing from work by Williamson and Pritchard, are of dubious success. (shrink)

Could space consist entirely of extended regions, without any regions shaped like points, lines, or surfaces? Peter Forrest and Frank Arntzenius have independently raised a paradox of size for space like this, drawing on a construction of Cantor’s. I present a new version of this argument and explore possible lines of response.

Certain realists about properties and relations identify them with universals. Furthermore, some hold that for a wide range of meaningful predicates, the semantic contribution to the propositions expressed by the sentences in which those predicates figure is the universal expressed by the predicate. I here address ontological issues raised by predicates first introduced to us via works of fiction and whether the universal realist should accept that any such predicates express universals. After assessing arguments by Braun, D. and Sawyer, S. (...) for fictional universal anti-realism, I propose a novel, Kripke-inspired argument for the same conclusion. I ultimately defend the claim that while this argument presents the strongest case for fictional universal anti-realism, it is nonetheless unsound. I conclude that nothing stands in the way of accepting that some fictional predicates express fictional universals. (shrink)

La ciudadanía y lo político. Ciudadanía y crisis de la democracia liberal en un mundo en transformación es un texto provocador, que desafía directamente a las esferas de poder económico, político y social en el marco de la corrupción. Deja al descubierto las entrañas cancerígenas de una política enferma de poder, donde priman los intereses particulares o políticos sobre los intereses del pueblo. El libro es una lanza que atraviesa las profundidades que erosionan nuestra sociedad, realizando así un análisis riguroso (...) desde distintas aristas, que tienen un elemento común: la corrupción política. A lo largo de las páginas se ofrece un enorme panorama sobre el papel de la ciudadanía dentro de la sociedad, que reclama a gritos una revolución desalienante frente a la cleptoestructura. Es así como, el papel de la ciudadanía es el centro de la reflexión analítica que nos presenta Joan Lara Amat y León. (shrink)

People with the kind of preferences that give rise to the St. Petersburg paradox are problematic---but not because there is anything wrong with infinite utilities. Rather, such people cannot assign the St. Petersburg gamble any value that any kind of outcome could possibly have. Their preferences also violate an infinitary generalization of Savage's Sure Thing Principle, which we call the *Countable Sure Thing Principle*, as well as an infinitary generalization of von Neumann and Morgenstern's Independence axiom, which we call *Countable (...) Independence*. In violating these principles, they display foibles like those of people who deviate from standard expected utility theory in more mundane cases: they choose dominated strategies, pay to avoid information, and reject expert advice. We precisely characterize the preference relations that satisfy Countable Independence in several equivalent ways: a structural constraint on preferences, a representation theorem, and the principle we began with, that every prospect has a value that some outcome could have. (shrink)

Decision theorists widely accept a stochastic dominance principle: roughly, if a risky prospect A is at least as probable as another prospect B to result in something at least as good, then A is at least as good as B. Recently, philosophers have applied this principle even in contexts where the values of possible outcomes do not have the structure of the real numbers: this includes cases of incommensurable values and cases of infinite values. But in these contexts the usual (...) formulation of stochastic dominance is wrong. We show this with several counterexamples. Still, the motivating idea behind stochastic dominance is a good one: it is supposed to provide a way of applying dominance reasoning in the stochastic context of probability distributions. We give two new formulations of stochastic dominance that are more faithful to this guiding idea, and prove that they are equivalent. (shrink)

The present paper tries to answer the question Is religious education compatible with the purposes of liberal education? This work argues that it is possible, and desirable, that democratic states built on liberal ideals include religious education in all schools since increasing the number of options among which the future citizen may choose the conception of the good with which he or she wishes to live is a condition for autonomy as one of its educational purposes. However, the proposal is (...) not based on religious confessional education, which by itself does not satisfy the liberal educational goals, but is redefined from the common principles compatible both religious confessions and non-religious views of morality and citizenship. (shrink)

Few notions are more central to Aquinas’s thought than those of matter and form. Although he invokes these notions in a number of different contexts, and puts them to a number of different uses, he always assumes that in their primary or basic sense they are correlative both with each other and with the notion of a “hylomorphic compound”—that is, a compound of matter (hyle) and form (morphe). Thus, matter is an entity that can have form, form is an entity (...) that can be had by matter, and a hylomorphic compound is an entity that exists when the potentiality of some matter to have form is actualized.1 What is more, Aquinas assumes that the matter of a hylomorphic compound explains certain of its general characteristics, whereas its form explains certain of its more specific characteristics. Thus, the matter of a bronze statue explains the fact that it is bronze, whereas its form explains the fact that it is a statue. Again, the matter of a human being explains the fact that it is a material object, whereas its form explains the specific type of material object it is (namely, human). My aim in this chapter is to provide a systematic introduction to Aquinas’s primary or basic notions of matter and form. To accomplish this aim, I focus on the two main theoretical contexts in which he deploys them—namely, his theory of change and his theory of individuation. In both contexts, as we shall see, Aquinas appeals to matter and form to account for relations of sameness and difference holding between distinct individuals. (shrink)

El trabajo explora críticamente la idea de una justificación débil o pen última de la moral enmarcándola en el conjunto de la filosofía de Tugendhat, reordenan do sus escritos éticos y discriminando los diversos aspectos que incluye dicha idea. Entre ellos, revisa el concepto formal de moral, ligado a los sentimientos, antes de centrarse en el punto crucial: la fundamentación de la ética moderna. Aquí se distingue, por un lado, la justificación comparativa de un contractualismo igualitario frente a otras alternativas (...) teóricas y, por otro, los motivos que pueden llevar a un individuo autónomo a entenderse en términos morales. (shrink)

Explanation of how the universe originated from nothing in the form of movement, how everything dynamically expands without end and in a synchronized manner, what is gravity, what is time and what is the universe.

Eliminativists sometimes invoke evolutionary debunking arguments against ordinary object beliefs, either to help them establish object skepticism or to soften the appeal of commonsense ontology. I argue that object debunkers face a self-defeat problem: their conclusion undermines the scientific support for one of their premises, because evolutionary biology depends on our object beliefs. Using work on reductionism and multiple realizability from the philosophy of science, I argue that it will not suffice for an eliminativist debunker to simply appeal to some (...) object-free surrogate theory of evolution that results from converting any scientific proposition about some object K into a proposition about simples arranged K-wise. In the process, I examine some hazards peculiar to eliminative reductions of scientific theories, and propose a trilemma for eliminativists who attempt to recoup generality for ontologically sparse reducing theories by appealing to pluralities of simples arranged K-wise. The paper is intended to define and develop the object debunker’s self-defeat problem for further study, and to clarify some of the ways sparse and abundant ontologies interact with scientific theory. (shrink)

In the Philosophy of Nature, Hegel describes at length and in detail the particular workings of animal digestion and excretion, referring to the empirical research of his day (Berzelius, Spallanzani, Traviranus). By becoming engaged in the scientific disputes and insights of the time—regarding, for example, the mechanical versus chemical nature of digestion, immediate digestive assimilation and the chemical composition of feces—Hegel arrives at the novel idea that what the animal excretes as superfluous is its own particular entanglement with inorganic otherness. (...) The animal’s subsequent feeling of triumph and satisfaction constitutes the affirmation of individual purposiveness, a form of immediate ideality that Hegel presents as animal subjectivity. (shrink)

We prove a representation theorem for preference relations over countably infinite lotteries that satisfy a generalized form of the Independence axiom, without assuming Continuity. The representing space consists of lexicographically ordered transfinite sequences of bounded real numbers. This result is generalized to preference orders on abstract superconvex spaces.

This paper discusses a puzzle, the heart of which is this question: How is it that real individuals can resemble fictional individuals? It seems that any answer given by one who has taken a stand on the ontology of fictional individuals will come with significant drawbacks. An Anti-Realist will have to explain, or explain away, the apparent truth of our positive assertions of resemblance, while a Realist will have to explain how we are to understand resemblance in light of either (...) the further claim that fictional characters are not associated with properties in the same way real individuals are, or that fictional characters are nonexistent or nonactual. I here survey the different Realist and Anti-Realist strategies in hopes that reflection on (mainly the drawbacks of) each will aid those who are curious about ontologies which may include fictionalia. (shrink)

The limited aim here is to explain what John Dewey might say about the formulation of the grue example. Nelson Goodman’s problem of distinguishing good and bad inductive inferences is an important one, but the grue example misconstrues this complex problem for certain technical reasons, due to ambiguities that contemporary logical theory has not yet come to terms with. Goodman’s problem is a problem for the theory of induction and thus for logical theory in general. Behind the whole discussion of (...) these issues over the last several decades is a certain view of logic hammered out by Russell, Carnap, Tarski, Quine, and many others. Goodman’s nominalism hinges in essential ways on a certain view of formal logic with an extensional quantification theory at its core. This raises many issues, but the one issue most germane here is the conception of predicates ensconced in this view of logic. (shrink)

What degrees of belief does Sleeping Beauty's evidence support? That depends.

The most recent work by Jürgen Habermas tries to revalue religion in today's society. For this he tries to find genealogical connections between secular content and the worldviews that emerged in the Axial Age, including Jewish monotheism. In this article we try to propose that a genealogical approach to monotheism from the perspective of those involved would have to start from the context of undetected origin that constitutes the ethical universalism of Judaism: the Noahide code. To do this, we analyze (...) narrative and conceptual elements of axial and non-axial cultures and show their parallels with the seven laws of the children of Noah as the moral core of humanity. (shrink)

Why does Hegel change “Dreaming Soul” to “Feeling Soul” in the 1830 edition of the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit? By tracing the content of the Dreaming Soul section, through Hegel’s 1794 manuscript on psychology, to sources such as C.P. Moritz’s Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde, the paper shows how the section embraces a late Enlightenment mission: combating supposedly supernatural expressions of spiritual enthrallment by explaining them as pathological conditions of the soul. Responding to perceived attacks on the 1827 edition of the Encyclopedia (...) by Schleiermacher, Hegel alters the section and its heading, thereby including the pastor’s religion of feeling in the pathology of Schwärmerei. (shrink)

I examine what the mathematical theory of random structures can teach us about the probability of Plenitude, a thesis closely related to David Lewis's modal realism. Given some natural assumptions, Plenitude is reasonably probable a priori, but in principle it can be (and plausibly it has been) empirically disconfirmed—not by any general qualitative evidence, but rather by our de re evidence.

Recent years have seen a heightened focus on the study of minimal forms of awareness during sleep to advance the study of consciousness and understand what makes a state conscious. This focus draws on an increased interest in anecdotical descriptions made by classic Indian philosophical traditions about unusual forms of awareness during sleep. For instance, in the so-called state of witnessing-sleep or luminosity sleep, one is said to reach a state that goes beyond ordinary dreaming and abide in a state (...) of just awareness, a state in which one is not aware of anything else other than one’s own awareness. Moreover, for these traditions, this state is taken to be the essence or background of consciousness. Reports on such a state opens the door to exciting new lines of research in the study of consciousness, such as inquiry into the so-called “objectless” awareness during sleep—states of awareness that lack an ordinary object of awareness. In this two-staged research project, we attempted to find the phenomenological blueprints of such forms of awareness during sleep in 18 participants by conducting phenomenological interviews, informed by a novel tool in qualitative research, the micro-phenomenological interview (MPI) method. Following a phenomenological analysis, we isolated a similar phase across 12 reported experiences labelled as ‘nothingness phase’ since it described what participants took to be an experience of ‘nothingness’. his common phase was characterised by minimal sense of self—a bodiless self, yet experienced as being ‘somewhere’—, the presence of non-modal sensations, relatively pleasant emotions, an absence of visual experience, wide and unfocused attention, and an awareness of the state as it unfolded. (shrink)

Should we make significant sacrifices to ever-so-slightly lower the chance of extremely bad outcomes, or to ever-so-slightly raise the chance of extremely good outcomes? *Fanaticism* says yes: for every bad outcome, there is a tiny chance of extreme disaster that is even worse, and for every good outcome, there is a tiny chance of an enormous good that is even better. I consider two related recent arguments for Fanaticism: Beckstead and Thomas's argument from *strange dependence on space and time*, and (...) Wilkinson's *Indology* argument. While both arguments are instructive, neither is persuasive. In fact, the general principles that underwrite the arguments (a *separability* principle in the first case, and a *reflection* principle in the second) are *inconsistent* with Fanaticism. In both cases, though, it is possible to rehabilitate arguments for Fanaticism based on restricted versions of those principles. The situation is unstable: plausible general principles tell *against* Fanaticism, but restrictions of those same principles (with strengthened auxiliary assumptions) *support* Fanaticism. All of the consistent views that emerge are very strange. (shrink)

The intuitive distinction between natural and unnatural properties (e.g., green vs. grue) informs our theorizing not only in fundamental physics, but also in non-fundamental domains. This paper develops a reductive account of this broad notion of naturalness that covers non-fundamental properties: for a property to be natural, I propose, is for it to figure in a law of nature. After motivating the account, I defend it from a potential circularity charge. I argue that a suitably broad notion of lawhood can (...) be defined independently of naturalness, if we help ourselves to the notion of a fundamental physical property. I end by showing how the notions of naturalness and lawhood that my account delivers help illuminate a number of other important philosophical notions, like causation, reference/meaning, and rational induction. (shrink)

This paper examines the role of ?situations? in John Dewey's philosophy of logic. To do this properly it is necessary to contrast Dewey's conception of experience and mentality with views characteristic of modern epistemology. The primary difference is that, rather than treat experience as peripheral and or external to mental functions (reason, etc.), we should treat experience as a field in and as a part of which thinking takes place. Experience in this broad sense subsumes theory and fact, hypothesis and (...) evidence, reason and observation, thought and perception. Logic in this view is a formal study of the generic features of all possible kinds of experience in this broad (thick, deep, wide, multifaceted) sense. The goal of this paper is to explain what Dewey thinks a situation is in the context of this view of experience, and to argue for the fundamental importance of that idea for logic and philosophy in general. (shrink)

This article reconsiders the relationship between interpretivism about belief and normative standards. Interpretivists have traditionally taken beliefs to be fixed in relation to norms of interpretation. However, recent work by philosophers and psychologists reveals that human belief attribution practices are governed by a rich diversity of normative standards. Interpretivists thus face a dilemma: either give up on the idea that belief is constitutively normative or countenance a context-sensitive disjunction of norms that constitute belief. Either way, interpretivists should embrace the intersubjective (...) indeterminacy of belief. (shrink)

Abstract: In the past fifteen years Tugendhat has tentatively proposed to recover the role of anthropology as the core philosophical discipline or first philosophy. This peculiar return to the German thinking of the ‘20s is, on the one hand, a projection of the author’s whole intellectual evolution. On the other hand, it allows us to focus on classic epistemological problems of philosophical anthropology such as its object and contents, its method, and its place among other philosophical studies. The present paper (...) criticizes Tugendhat’s position, yet considers this sort of return to Kant as valuable, a return that sees anthropology as the core and ultimate self-reflective telos of philosophy. -/- Key Words: Ends of reason. Human vulnerability. Kant. Metaphilosophy. Self-reflection. (shrink)

This third paper locates the synthetic neurorobotics research reviewed in the second paper in terms of themes introduced in the first paper. It begins with biological non-reductionism as understood by Searle. It emphasizes the role of synthetic neurorobotics studies in accessing the dynamic structure essential to consciousness with a focus on system criticality and self, develops a distinction between simulated and formal consciousness based on this emphasis, reviews Tani and colleagues' work in light of this distinction, and ends by forecasting (...) the increasing importance of synthetic neurorobotics studies for cognitive science and philosophy of mind going forward, finally in regards to most- and myth-consciousness. (shrink)

There is a traditional theistic doctrine, known as the doctrine of divine simplicity, according to which God is an absolutely simple being, completely devoid of any metaphysical complexity. On the standard understanding of this doctrine—as epitomized in the work of philosophers such as Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas—there are no distinctions to be drawn between God and his nature, goodness, power, or wisdom. On the contrary, God is identical with each of these things, along with anything else that can be predicated (...) of him intrinsically. (shrink)

How should a group with different opinions (but the same values) make decisions? In a Bayesian setting, the natural question is how to aggregate credences: how to use a single credence function to naturally represent a collection of different credence functions. An extension of the standard Dutch-book arguments that apply to individual decision-makers recommends that group credences should be updated by conditionalization. This imposes a constraint on what aggregation rules can be like. Taking conditionalization as a basic constraint, we gather (...) lessons from the established work on credence aggregation, and extend this work with two new impossibility results. We then explore contrasting features of two kinds of rules that satisfy the constraints we articulate: one kind uses fixed prior credences, and the other uses geometric averaging, as opposed to arithmetic averaging. We also prove a new characterisation result for geometric averaging. Finally we consider applications to neighboring philosophical issues, including the epistemology of disagreement. (shrink)

We consider how an epistemic network might self-assemble from the ritualization of the individual decisions of simple heterogeneous agents. In such evolved social networks, inquirers may be significantly more successful than they could be investigating nature on their own. The evolved network may also dramatically lower the epistemic risk faced by even the most talented inquirers. We consider networks that self-assemble in the context of both perfect and imperfect communication and compare the behaviour of inquirers in each. This provides a (...) step in bringing together two new and developing research programs, the theory of self-assembling games and the theory of network epistemology. (shrink)

This essay proposes a reductive account of robust macro-regularities. On the view proposed, regularities can earn their elite scientific status by featuring in good summaries of restricted regions in the space of physical possibilities: our “modal neighborhoods.” I argue that this view vindicates “nomic foundationalism”, while doing justice to the practice of invoking physically contingent generalizations in higher-level explanations. Moreover, the view suggests an explanation for the particular significance of robust macro-regularities: we rely on summaries of our modal neighborhoods when (...) reasoning hypothetically about “agentially accessible” possibilities. (shrink)

The Epistemic Objection says that certain theories of time imply that it is impossible to know which time is absolutely present. Standard presentations of the Epistemic Objection are elliptical—and some of the most natural premises one might fill in to complete the argument end up leading to radical skepticism. But there is a way of filling in the details which avoids this problem, using epistemic safety. The new version has two interesting upshots. First, while Ross Cameron alleges that the Epistemic (...) Objection applies to presentism as much as to theories like the growing block, the safety version does not overgeneralize this way. Second, the Epistemic Objection does generalize in a different, overlooked way. The safety objection is a serious problem for a widely held combination of views: “propositional temporalism” together with “metaphysical eternalism”. (shrink)

In a recent article in this journal, Krzysztof Poslajko reconstructs—and endorses as probative—a dilemma for interpretivism first posed by Alex Byrne. On the first horn of the dilemma, the interpretivist takes attitudes to emerge in relation to an ideal interpreter (and thus loses any connection with actual folk psychological practices). On the second horn, the interpretivist takes attitudes to emerge in relation to individuals’ judgements (and thus denies the possibility of error). I show that this is a false dilemma. By (...) taking a model-theoretic approach to folk psychology, and marrying interpretivism with dispositionalism, interpretivists can viably reject the notion of an ideal (or canonical) interpreter—and relativize attitudes to actual lay interpreters—without taking on board the unacceptable epistemological consequences of allowing that attitudes are judgement-dependent. (shrink)

We consider two ways one might use algorithmic randomness to characterize a probabilistic law. The first is a generative chance* law. Such laws involve a nonstandard notion of chance. The second is a probabilistic* constraining law. Such laws impose relative frequency and randomness constraints that every physically possible world must satisfy. While each notion has virtues, we argue that the latter has advantages over the former. It supports a unified governing account of non-Humean laws and provides independently motivated solutions to (...) issues in the Humean best-system account. On both notions, we have a much tighter connection between probabilistic laws and their corresponding sets of possible worlds. Certain histories permitted by traditional probabilistic laws are ruled out as physically impossible. As a result, such laws avoid one variety of empirical underdetermination, but the approach reveals other varieties of underdetermination that are typically overlooked. (shrink)

Discoverability: the urgent need of an ecology of human creativity from the prolific Lorenzo Magnani is worthy of direct attention. The message may be of special interest to philosophers, ethicists and organizing scientists involved in the development of AI and related technologies which are increasingly directed at reinforcing conditions against which Magnani directly warns, namely the “overcomputationalization” of life marked by the gradual encroachment of technologically “locked strategies” into everyday decision-making until “freedom, responsibility, and ownership of our destinies” are ceded (...) and we, in parallel, build a future fit for artifacts over human beings. Professional educators - teachers and administrators serious about teaching - and policy-makers including the concerned public, parents and social activists concerned about the effects of technologies on development and well-being may benefit, as well. (shrink)

I have proposed wedding the theories of belief known as dispositionalism and interpretivism. Krzysztof Poslajko objects that dispositionalism does just fine on its own and, moreover, is better off without interpretivism’s metaphysical baggage. I argue that Poslajko is wrong: in order to secure a principled criterion for individuating beliefs, dispositionalism must either collapse into psychofunctionalism (or some other non-superficial theory) or accept interpretivism’s hand in marriage.

Famous results by David Lewis show that plausible-sounding constraints on the probabilities of conditionals or evaluative claims lead to unacceptable results, by standard probabilistic reasoning. Existing presentations of these results rely on stronger assumptions than they really need. When we strip these arguments down to a minimal core, we can see both how certain replies miss the mark, and also how to devise parallel arguments for other domains, including epistemic “might,” probability claims, claims about comparative value, and so on. A (...) popular reply to Lewis's results is to claim that conditional claims, or claims about subjective value, lack truth conditions. For this strategy to have a chance of success, it needs to give up basic structural principles about how epistemic states can be updated—in a way that is strikingly parallel to the commitments of the project of dynamic semantics. (shrink)

I examine three ‘anti-object’ metaphysical views: nihilism, generalism, and anti-quantificationalism. After setting aside nihilism, I argue that generalists should be anti-quantificationalists. Along the way, I attempt to articulate what a ‘metaphysically perspicuous’ language might even be.

A pluralistic approach to folk psychology must countenance the evaluative, regulatory, predictive, and explanatory roles played by attributions of intelligence in social practices across cultures. Building off of the work of the psychologist Robert Sternberg and the philosophers Gilbert Ryle and Daniel Dennett, I argue that a relativistic interpretivism best accounts for the many varieties of intelligence that emerge from folk discourse. To be intelligent is to be comparatively good at solving intellectual problems that an interpreter deems worth solving.

We criticize the bare theory of quantum mechanics -- a theory on which the Schrödinger equation is universally valid, and standard way of thinking about superpositions is correct.

David Lewis holds that a single possible world can provide more than one way things could be. But what are possible worlds good for if they come apart from ways things could be? We can make sense of this if we go in for a metaphysical understanding of what the world is. The world does not include everything that is the case—only the genuine facts. Understood this way, Lewis's “cheap haecceitism” amounts to a kind of metaphysical anti-haecceitism: it says there (...) aren't any genuine facts about individuals over and above their qualitative roles. (shrink)

According to the doctrine of divine simplicity, God is an absolutely simple being lacking any distinct metaphysical parts, properties, or constituents. Although this doctrine was once an essential part of traditional philosophical theology, it is now widely rejected as incoherent. In this paper, I develop an interpretation of the doctrine designed to resolve contemporary concerns about its coherence, as well as to show precisely what is required to make sense of divine simplicity.

Se trata de la Presentación al libro Coordenadas Epistemológicas para una estética en construcción, obra publicada por la Colección La Fuente y coeditada entre el Cuerpo Académico de Estética y Arte de la BUAP y el Instituto de Filosofía de Cuba. En la presentación se describen los contenidos básicos de las tres partes que componen el libro: Parte I. Una estética en construcción; Parte II: El arte en el discurso de la estética; Parte III: Espectacularidad y seducción. Miradas estéticas a (...) la socialidad contemporánea. También se hace referencia al papel jugado por la Dra. Alicia Pino en la concepción, contenido y estructura de este libro, a cuya memoria se dedica. (shrink)

“There are no gaps in logical space,” David Lewis writes, giving voice to sentiment shared by many philosophers. But different natural ways of trying to make this sentiment precise turn out to conflict with one another. One is a *pattern* idea: “Any pattern of instantiation is metaphysically possible.” Another is a *cut and paste* idea: “For any objects in any worlds, there exists a world that contains any number of duplicates of all of those objects.” We use resources from model (...) theory to show the inconsistency of certain packages of combinatorial principles and the consistency of others. (shrink)

The paper explores Hegel's theory of language, from the Subjective Spirit book of his Encyclopedia. Hegel distinguishes between linguistic signs, as arbitrary signifiers and words, which occur when the signs are filled with thought or meaning. Words have greater objectivity than signs. The words of the positive, empirical sciences are taken up into Hegelian Science (system), affording it greater objectivity, which it, reciprocally re-confers on its linguistic contents.

The Christian doctrine of the Trinity poses a serious philosophical problem. On the one hand, it seems to imply that there is exactly one divine being; on the other hand, it seems to imply that there are three. There is another well-known philosophical problem that presents us with a similar sort of tension: the problem of material constitution. We argue in this paper that a relatively neglected solution to the problem of material constitution can be developed into a novel solution (...) to the problem of the Trinity. (shrink)

Many pragmatist and non-representational approaches to cognition, such as the enactivist, have focused on the relations between actions, affectivity, and habits from an intersubjective perspective. For those adopting such approaches, all these aspects are inextricably connected; however, many questions remain open regarding the dynamics by which they unfold and shape each other over time. This paper addresses a specific topic that has not received much attention: the impact on future behavior of not fulfilling possibilities for social interaction even though their (...) fulfillment is desirable within a given context. Inspired by Gibson’s theory of affordances and Dewey’s account of habits, these situations will be characterized as events where an agent does not act upon an inviting affordance for social interaction due to a conflict which he or she experiences between given concerns, needs, and social norms. This conflict leads to a sense of unfulfillment that may eventually bring about a crisis and revision of habits. Through specific examples, this work presents the potential impact of the connection between affordances, habits, and affectivity on everyday situations. It therefore represents an exploration of the common ground between pragmatism and enactivism and an attempt to contribute to a process-based approach to social interaction. (shrink)