James Shaw has written an excellent book on Wittgenstein’s rule-following considerations. It manages to provide fresh perspectives on a topic on which it seemed.

This is a critical notice of José Zalabardo's recent book 'Pragmatist Semantics: A Use-Based Approach to Linguistic Representation' (2023). I raise problems about specific steps of Zalabardo’s arguments and I criticize important aspects of his positive account.

I argue, through appeal to the distinction between analysis and decomposition described by Dummett, that Wittgenstein employs both of those notions in the Tractatus. I then bring this interpretation to bear upon the issue of propositional unity, where I formulate an objection to the views of both Leonard Linksy and José Zalabardo. I show that both Linsky and Zalabardo fail to acknowledge the distinction between analysis and decomposition present in the Tractatus, and that they consequently mischaracterise Wittgenstein’s (...) position with respect to propositional unity. (shrink)

: En el trabajo se busca constatar y analizar los fundamentos de la simbiosis armoniosa que se da entre lo poético y lo filosófico en el pensamiento de José Martí. Tal imbricación la encontramos no sólo en él. Ha llegado a ser bastante frecuente en un contexto como el latinoamericano. Pero, tal vez sea en Martí en quien esa fusión se acrisola de manera más brillante. Nunca se preocupó demasiado por el contenido filosófico de su poesía ni por la (...) forma poética con que vertió sus pensamientos más profundos y de mayor alcance. O, dicho de manera más exacta, sí se preocupó, y mucho, porque lo uno y lo otro nunca estuviera ausente. Y por esa misma razón fue siempre más que poeta y más que filósofo, fue escritor y pensador, o como prefirieron llamarlo sus contemporáneos, fue maestro, en cualquier caso, universal, con todas las posibles acepciones que a este último término pueda otorgársele, excepto de aquella que asume la universalidad como el despego de lo propio y particular. Eso sí no lo encontraremos en Martí. En ningún momento olvidó, no importa el lugar donde se encontrara, que escribía y pensaba desde y para su colonizada Cuba y desde y para su también sufrida América. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that a special kind of hermeneutical injustice occurs when someone is not permitted to interpret their experiences in a meaning-making way. I suggest that this occurs in certain cases where the possibility that the patient has a genuine religious experience is excluded by a medical diagnosis. In such cases, it is not that an experience is incomprehensible because of the absence of a valid interpretation. Instead, one perspective is not only dominant but exclusive, so the (...) ensuing power imbalance is absolute. I begin by introducing the notion of hermeneutical injustice and subsequent refinements that have been instrumental in applying it to psychiatry. Then I show how even though voice-hearers are liable to be victims of such injustices, the literature has neglected the specific harm done to someone whose interpretation of their own experience is obliterated because of the dominance of exclusive medical views. To illustrate this, I point to a case that evinces the harms perpetrated toward patients diagnosed with psychotic symptoms with religious content and argue that depriving persons of meaning-making interpretations of their own experiences constitutes a profound and willful form of hermeneutical injustice. I then gesture toward studies on the religious reframing of anomalous experiences through contact with a normalizing framework. Finally, I pry from a successful case a general directive toward the virtue of hermeneutical justice through the attitudes of respect to first-person authority and the hermeneutical flexibility it embodies. (shrink)

Education is essential to life, and the epidemic affected everything. Parents want to get their kids the most important teaching. However, since COVID-19 has affected schools and other institutions, providing education has become the most significant issue. Online learning pedagogy uses technology to provide high-quality learning environments for student-centered learning. Further, this study explores the experiences and challenges faced by Filipino tertiary students regarding the lack of gadgets amidst online learning. Employing the Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, the findings of this study (...) were: Some college students still have difficulty with online learning. Attending online classes is difficult, especially for students with limited resources. Smartphones, other gadgets, and internet connections play a significant role in online classrooms because they are the ones that students utilize while learning online, which is essential for successful participation in online higher education as well as for solving a variety of other difficulties in the new normal. Further, College students face similar health challenges. Having an online learning setup is not just about students' struggles with learning resources but also about their health issues. When our respondents used their smartphones for an extended period, they reported eye aches and blurred vision. They also said that some of their body parts, such as their legs and back, are aching, and feel pressured because they tend to overthink things in their surroundings, which causes them incredible difficulty in performing their best in attending online classes. Even though college students continue to suffer from a lack of learning resources during online sessions, they do their best to manage their needs and the scarcity of learning resources. Students have unique coping methods for dealing with difficulties in online classes. (shrink)

El ensayo busca fundamentar la vigencia del concepto martiano de Nuestra América y del proyecto de sociedad y de pensamiento que este entraña. Se realiza un análisis comparativo de la idea compartida por Hegel y Martí sobre la centralidad que pueden asumir ciertos pueblos en la Historia y el diferente papel que cada uno le asigna a América en el concierto universal de naciones. Se analiza la posibilidad de que sea por fin el XXI el siglo de Nuestra América, los (...) elementos que confirman el inicio de su realización y los retos y peligros que la consumación de esa posibilidad enfrenta. (shrink)

The idea that thoughts are structured is essential to Frege's understanding of thoughts. A basic tenet of his thinking was that the structure of a sentence can serve as a model for the structure of a thought. Recent commentators have, however, identified tensions between that principle and certain other doctrines Frege held about thoughts. This paper suggests that the tensions identified by Dummett and Bell are not really tensions at all. In establishing the case against Dummett and Bell the paper (...) argues (a) that Frege was committed, in virtue of his doctrine of decomposition, to the thesis that a single sentence can express a range of thoughts, and (b) that Frege was committed, in virtue of his views about truth, to the thesis that a single thought can be expressed by structurally different sentences. But neither of these theses comes into conflict with the basic principle. (shrink)

This article aims to review the standard objections to dualism and to argue that will either fail to convince someone committed to dualism or are flawed on independent grounds. I begin by presenting the taxonomy of metaphysical positions on concrete particulars as they relate to the dispute between materialists and dualists, and in particular substance dualism is defined. In the first section, several kinds of substance dualism are distinguished and the relevant varieties of this kind of dualism are selected. The (...) remaining sections are analyses of the standard objections to substance dualism : It is uninformative, has troubles accounting for soul individuation, causal pairing and interaction, violates laws of physics, is made implausible by the development of neuroscience and it postulates entities beyond necessity. I conclude that none of these objections is successful. (shrink)

En este trabajo se busca constatar y analizar los fundamentos de la simbiosis armoniosa que se da entre lo poético y lo filosófico en el pensamiento de José Martí. Tal imbricación la encontramos no sólo en él. Ha llegado a ser bastante frecuente en un contexto como el latinoamericano. Pero, tal vez sea en Martí en quien esa fusión se acrisola de manera más brillante. Nunca se preocupó demasiado por el contenido filosófico de su poesía ni por la forma (...) poética con que vertió sus pensamientos más profundos y de mayor alcance. O, dicho de manera más exacta, sí se preocupó, y mucho, porque lo uno y lo otro nunca estuviera ausente. Y por esa misma razón fue siempre más que poeta y más que filósofo, fue escritor y pensador, o como prefirieron llamarlo sus contemporáneos, fue maestro, en cualquier caso, universal, con todas las posibles acepciones que a este último término pueda otorgársele, excepto de aquella que asume la universalidad como el despego de lo propio y particular. Eso sí no lo encontraremos en Martí. En ningún momento olvidó, no importa el lugar donde se encontrara, que escribía y pensaba desde y para su colonizada Cuba y desde y para su también sufrida América. (shrink)

In this article, I broadly sketch out the current philosophical debate over immigration and highlight some of its shortcomings. My contention is that the debate has been too focused on border enforcement and therefore has left untouched one of the more central issue of this debate: what to do with unauthorized immigrants who have already crossed the border and with the “push and pull” factors that have created this situation. After making this point, I turn to the work of Enrique (...) Dussel and argue that his philosophical approach offers some insights that can help overcome these shortcomings. In particular, Dussel’s commitment to a social critique and transformation that begins with the material grievances of the most excluded and oppressed in a community. Under this type of approach, the immigration debate would begin with the grievances of the victims of immigration polices and reform (i.e. unauthorized immigrants) instead of with concerns for how to better enforce borders. Lastly, I point out that this type of approach is consistent with the current Immigrant Rights Movement in the United States. (shrink)

In debating the ethics of immigration, philosophers have focused much of their attention on determining whether a political community ought to have the discretionary right to control immigration. They have not, however, given the same amount of consideration to determining whether there are any ethical limits on how a political community enforces its immigration policy. This article, therefore, offers a different approach to immigration justice. It presents a case against legitimate states having discretionary control over immigration by showing both how (...) ethical limits on enforcement circumscribe the options legitimate states have in determining their immigration policy and how all immigrants (including undocumented immigrants) are entitled to certain protections against a state’s enforcement apparatus. (shrink)

This chapter connects the phenomenon of double bookkeeping to two critical debates in the philosophy of delusion: one from the analytic tradition and one from the phenomenological tradition. First, I will show how the failure of action guidance on the part of some delusions suggests an argument to the standard view that delusions are beliefs (doxasticism about delusion) and how its proponents have countered it by ascribing behavioral inertia to avolition, emotional disturbances, or a failure of the surrounding environment in (...) supporting the agent’s motivation to act. Second, I will show how the mismatch between the experience of double bookkeeping and that of having the usual propositional attitudes of folk psychology suggests another, more recalcitrant argument not only against doxasticism but against the very attempt to fit delusion into folk psychology. Third, I will show how phenomenologically inspired theories of delusion, such as the multiple realities hypothesis, bypass the debates above and focus on describing and understanding the disturbances in the structure of experience undergone by patients. I conclude that the philosophical discussions ensuing from an appreciation of double bookkeeping show some of the limitations of the analytic philosophical approach to delusion. (shrink)

In this Interview, Professor Robert B. Brandom answered ten detailed questions about his philosophy of Rational Pragmatism and Semantic Expressivism, grouped into four topics. 1. Metaphysics and Anthropology, 2. Pragmatics and Semantics, 3. Epistemic Expressivism and 4. Philosophy of Logic. With his careful answers Professor Brandom offers many additional insights into his rigorously constructed account of the relationship “between what we say and think, and what we are saying and thinking about” around the human practice of asking for and giving (...) reasons. A final, additional question pointed at a principal motivation for putting together the present issue: how to reconcile Wittgenstein’s assertion that philosophy must not proffer any theories with the very explicit system of explanations Brandom has constructed. This same issue is addressed to some extent already in Professor Brandom’s new article contained in this issue, but his answer, asserting that he does not proffer a theory but only makes explicit what is already there, might be seen as an unambiguous statement of the continuous presence of a contested Wittgensteinian principle in Brandom’s work. (shrink)

Cambios estructurales en el modelo económico apuntan a revalorizar el papel del trabajo en Cuba, indican expertos en mesa redonda convocada por BOHEMIA. Apremia descentralizar gestiones administrativas y que cada individuo sea responsable y participante, coinciden. Las motivaciones efectivas han de convertir al trabajo en primera necesidad y, junto a la educación de la familia, borrar la cultura del "rebusque". Formar en los valores del trabajo debe encontrar sustento en la realidad y sus ejemplos.

In this paper, we take our cue from Kevin Schilbrack’s admonishment that the philosophy of religion needs to take religious practices seriously as an object of investigation. We do so by offering Afro-Brazilian traditions as an example of the methodological poverty of current philosophical engagement with religions that are not text-based, belief-focused, and institutionalized. Anthropologists have studied these primarily orally transmitted traditions for nearly a century. Still, they involve practices, such as offering and sacrifice as well as spirit possession and (...) mediumship, that have yet to receive attention from philosophers. We argue that this is not an accident: philosophers have had a highly restricted diet of examples, have not looked at ethnography as source material, and thus still need to put together a methodology to tackle such practices. After elucidating Schilbrack’s suggestions to adopt an embodiment paradigm and apply conceptual metaphor theory and the extended mind thesis to consider religious practices as thoughtful, we offer criticism of the specifics of his threefold solution. First, it assumes language is linear; second, it takes a problematic view of the body; and third, it abides by a misleading view of the “levels” of cognition. We conclude that the philosophy of religion should adopt enactivism to understand religious practices as cognitive enterprises. (shrink)

In this paper, we discuss an abductive argument for the existence of God from the experience of awe at natural beauty. If God's creative work is a viable explanation for why we experience awe at natural beauty, and there is no satisfactory naturalistic explanation for the origins of such experiences, then we have defeasible evidence that God exists. To evaluate the argument's tenability, we assess the merits of the two main theocentric frameworks that can be marshaled to answer the question (...) of why human beings experience awe at natural beauty: (1) taking the experience of natural beauty as resulting from God's design intentions and (2) conceiving experiences of natural beauty as religious experiences in themselves. We argue that the presence of phenomenological content the fine-grainedness of which exceeds our descriptive and conceptual capacities is better accounted for by the latter hypothesis: experiencing natural beauty amounts to experiencing divine attributes. We conclude that the argument's theological premise is tenable and, having previously argued for the empirical premise (Porcher & De Luca-Noronha, 2021), we conclude that awe at natural beauty is best explained by the existence of God. (shrink)

Since at least the second half of the 19th century, the U.S. federal government has enjoyed “plenary power” over its immigration policy. Plenary power allows the federal government to regulate immigration free of judicial review and thereby, with regard to immigration cases, minimize the Constitutional protections afforded to non-citizens. The justification for granting the U.S federal government such broad powers comes from a certain understanding of sovereignty; one where limiting sovereign authority in cases like immigration could potentially undermine its legitimacy (...) and thereby lead to something like a Hobbesian “state of nature.” One of the potential downsides of allowing the federal government to have such broad powers, however, is the potential to place non-citizens in a situation analogous to what Giorgio Agamben has called the “state of exception.” This situation appears to leave us with the following dichotomy: without something like the plenary power doctrine a political community will end up with a state of nature, but with something like the plenary power doctrine they end up with a state of exception. This essay offers a two-part response to this dilemma. First, it argues that the plenary power doctrine goes against the spirit of the U.S. Constitution, specifically the Fourteenth Amendment. Non-citizens, even undocumented immigrants, are entitled to more Constitutional protections than they currently enjoy. Second, since extending these protections is more consistent with the spirit of the Constitution, I argue that curtailing the federal government’s power over matters of immigration does not undermine its sovereignty, but promotes it. In short, with regard to immigration, it is a false but seductive dichotomy that constitutional democracies must choose between a state of nature and a state of exception. (shrink)

In this article I use the tropes of El Cucuy (the Mexican version of the boogyman), La Llorona (the wailer), and La Migra (the border patrol) to provide the beginnings of an ethical critique of the treatment of undocumented immigrants in the United States.

Clinical delusions are widely characterized as being pathological beliefs in both the clinical literature and in common sense. Recently, a philosophical debate has emerged between defenders of the commonsense position (doxasticists) and their opponents, who have the burden of pointing toward alternative characterizations (anti-doxasticists). In this chapter, I argue that both doxasticism and anti- doxasticism fail to characterize the functional role of delusions while at the same time being unable to play a role in the explanation of these phenomena. I (...) also argue that though a more nuanced view of belief in which mental states are more or less belief-like instills a healthy skepticism towards the precision of folk-psychological concepts, such a stance fails to be of use in building a theory of delusion that will be able to bridge different levels of explanation, such as the phenomenology and neurobiology of delusion. Thus, I advocate moving past the question ‘Are delusions beliefs?’ and their description as propositional attitudes toward the description of the processes that generate delusion, with a view toward explaining, rather than explaining away, the personal-level aspects of the phenomenon that have been made inscrutable by investing in doxastic terminology. (shrink)

In the attempt of defending an interpretation of David Hume's moral and political philosophy connected to classical utilitarianism, intervenes in a key way the so called problem of the " Sensitive Knave " raised by this author at the end of his more utilitarian work, the Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals. According to the classic interpretation of this fragment, the utilitarian rationality in politics would clash with morality turning useless the latter. Therefore, in the political area the defense of (...) a moral utilitarianism would be an auto contradictory task. In order to show that, first, Hume does not say anything similar to this and second, that even indicates the way of overcoming this apparent contradiction between morality and rationality, we analyze briefly the arguments from which there comes basically this "anti-utilitarian" standard interpretation, and we defend an interpretation of the humean discussion on the problem of the supposed conflict between morality and rationality, or of rational incentives for immoral behavior, which allows to explain better Hume's position on this problem. Finally, we propose an instance of overcoming the contradiction morality/ rationality by a rule adjusted utilitarianism centered on the idea of the "progressive development of artificial institutions of reinforcement of morality", that Hume himself would suggest in other places in which he approaches the topic of the apparent contradiction between "morality" and "knavery". We propose also possible lines of future development of this idea, between them its use to clarify the relation of David Hume's thought with certain forms of contemporary liberalism. (shrink)

In this essay, I argue that even when they appear to help, restrictions on migration are usually only an impediment, not an aid, to cosmopolitan justice. Even though some egalitarian cosmopolitans are well intentioned in their support of migration restrictions, I argue that migration restrictions are (i) not truly cosmopolitan and (ii) will not have the kinds of consequences they expect. My argument in defense of this claim begins, in section 1, by outlining a defense of migration restrictions based on (...) egalitarian cosmopolitan grounds. Then in sections two and three, I reply to the harms this position associates with open borders and provide some reasons as to why restrictions on migration are incompatible with cosmopolitan justice. (shrink)

This essay argues that we should find Crimmigration, which is the collapsing of immigration law with criminal law, morally problematic for three reasons. First, it denies those who are facing criminal penalties important constitutional protections. Second, it doubly punishes those who have already served their criminal sentence with an added punishment that should be considered cruel and unusual (i.e., indefinite imprisonment or exile). Third, when the tactics aimed at protecting and serving local communities get usurped by the federal government for (...) immigration enforcement purposes, they often undermine these original aims or get used in ways that conflict with the U.S. Constitution. These concerns should prompt us therefore either to reject the government’s plenary power over immigration or require the federal government to be more consistent about maintaining the separation between criminal law and immigration law. (shrink)

The distinction between potentiality and possibility in Aristotle’s modal teleology is sometimes conflated by the implicative conjunction that potentiality implies possibility and possibility implies potentiality. In his unpublished doctoral dissertation Richard Rorty warns that trying to pin down Aristotle’s definition of potentiality often leads to treating the term as a “mere façon de parler.” Consonant with Rorty, this paper observes that the definition of possibility in Aristotle’s works is not without its own share of semantic snags. Subsequently, I abide by (...) Rorty’s caveat not only to resist the lure of expressive convenience some commentators have taken in describing potentiality, but also to elucidate possibility’s two-fold field of modal application. Consequently, this paper aims to present a nuanced account of how notions of potentiality and possibility are presented in Aristotle’s treatises for the sake of demonstrating that both sides of the potentiality/possibility conjunction do not mutually imply. (shrink)

Se trata de una Mesa Redonda organizada por la revista Bohemia de Cuba sobre los jóvenes, la historia y la formación de valores. El texto es la transcripción del debate en el que participaron 7 especialistas de diferentes áreas.

Este trabajo pretende mostrar las líneas generales de la propuesta humeana de una teoría de la evolución de las instituciones en clave utilitarista; en segundo lugar, analizará la objeción interna a esta teoría que supone la existencia de posibles sujetos no cooperadores pero inteligentes, en tercer lugar, intentará también defender dicha teoría de la acusación externa de no tener un auténtico carácter normativo; y al no haber desarrollado el propio Hume con detalle su contestación al problema del conflicto Moral/Racionalidad, tal (...) y como surge en el contexto de su discusión de la Knavery, finalmente, y en cuarto lugar, este trabajo, yendo en un cierto sentido algo más allá de lo propuesto por Hume, ensayará un argumento post-humeano en torno a ese conflicto, basado, por una parte, en el reconocimiento de la multidimensionalidad de la Moral, así como en la paralela aceptación de la necesidad de un ajuste contextual de ésta, asentado sobre consideraciones primaria, que no exclusivamente, utilitaristas. (shrink)

Para favorecer la interacción disciplinar y recuperar la dimensión práctica del conocimiento matemático en la escuela secundaria, Yves Chevallard plantea la necesidad de introducir en los programas de estudio la matemática mixta. La matemática mixta, cuyo apogeo tuvo lugar en Europa entre los siglos XVI y XVIII, se propone el abordaje de problemas surgidos por fuera de la propia matemática valiéndose de nociones mecánicas -como la de centro de gravedad y fuerza centrífuga- y del empleo de variados instrumentos para realizar (...) las construcciones requeridas. En este trabajo consideramos a la matemática mixta en la cultura matemática de la segunda mitad del siglo XVII y, en dicho contexto, presentamos dos casos de la práctica matemática de G. W. Leibniz en los que la investigación matemática involucra el diseño de máquinas. La consideración de tales casos permite situar a la matemática mixta, siguiendo la terminología de Ian Hacking, en un terreno medio entre representar e intervenir. El terreno medio entre representar e intervenir es un valle fértil donde la matemática aporta a, y se nutre de, una multiplicidad de otros dominios. También es una vía de acceso para historizar el conocimiento matemático, destacando las condiciones materiales para su desarrollo y el importante rol de los problemas. Palabras clave: Práctica matemática, Resolución de problemas, Siglo XVII, Máquinas, Cultura material. (shrink)

The notion of habit used in neuroscience is an inheritance from a particular theoretical origin, whose main source is William James. Thus, habits have been characterized as rigid, automatic, unconscious, and opposed to goal-directed actions. This analysis leaves unexplained several aspects of human behavior and cognition where habits are of great importance. We intend to demonstrate the utility that another philosophical conception of habit, the Aristotelian, may have for neuroscientific research. We first summarize the current notion of habit in neuroscience, (...) its philosophical inspiration and the problems that arise from it, mostly centered on the sharp distinction between goal-directed actions and habitual behavior. We then introduce the Aristotelian view and we compare it with that of William James. For Aristotle, a habit is an acquired disposition to perform certain types of action. If this disposition involves an enhanced cognitive control of actions, it can be considered a “habit-as-learning”. The current view of habit in neuroscience, which lacks cognitive control and we term “habit-as-routine”, is also covered by the Aristotelian conception. He classifies habits into three categories: (1) theoretical, or the retention of learning understood as “knowing that x is so”; (2) behavioral, through which the agent achieves a rational control of emotion-permeated behavior (“knowing how to behave”); and (3) technical or learned skills (“knowing how to make or to do”). Finally, we propose new areas of research where this “novel” conception of habit could serve as a framework concept, from the cognitive enrichment of actions to the role of habits in pathological conditions. In all, this contribution may shed light on the understanding of habits as an important feature of human action. Habits, viewed as a cognitive enrichment of behavior, are a crucial resource for understanding human learning and behavioral plasticity. (shrink)

Are philosophy and literature allies or enemies in Jorge Luis Borges's fictions? In this paper, I argue that Borges can satisfy membership in the allies camp because his fictions provide the imaginative scenarios the allies believe are so necessary to this coalition; however, because his stories question philosophy's hold on reality, they can also seem to fall into the enemies camp by countervailing any claim philosophy has on reality and truth; although, ultimately, the manner in which Borges forges an alliance (...) between philosophy and literature will be for reasons not traditionally accepted by those in either the allies or enemies camps. (shrink)

John Searle’s theory of social ontology posits that there are indispensable normative components in the linguistic apparatuses termed status functions, collective intentionality, and collective recognition, all of which, he argues, make the social world. In this paper, I argue that these building blocks of Searle’s theory are caught in a petitio of constitutive circularity. Moreover, I note how Searle fails to observe language in reciprocal relation to the institutions which not only are shaped by it but also shape language’s practical (...) applications. According to Searle, social theorists that tried to show a connection between society, culture, and language all failed to see the constitutive role of language in the making of social reality. Consequently, I believe that Searle is himself guilty of a certain kind of blind presumption, and argue that Hegel’s philosophy of culture, which Searle dismisses as implausible, offers a more cohesive account of the normative transactions between human beings and their social world. (shrink)

I assess Tamar Gendler's (2007) account of self-deception according to which its characteristic state is not belief, but imaginative pretense. After giving an overview of the literature and presenting the conceptual puzzles engendered by the notion of self-deception, I introduce Gendler's account, which emerges as a rival to practically all extant accounts of self-deception. I object to it by first arguing that her argument for abandoning belief as the characteristic state of self-deception conflates the state of belief and the process (...) of belief-formation when interpreting David Velleman's (2000) thesis that belief is an essentially truth-directed attitude. I then call attention to the fact that Velleman's argument for the identity of motivational role between belief and imagining, on which Gendler's argument for self-deception as pretense depends, conflates two senses of 'motivational role'-a stronger but implausible sense and a weaker but explanatorily irrelevant sense. Finally, I introduce Neil Van Leeuwen's (2009) argument to the effect that belief is the practical ground of all non-belief cognitive attitudes in circumstances wherein the latter prompt action. I apply this framework to Gendler's account to ultimately show that imaginative pretense fails to explain the existence of voluntary actions which result from self-deception. (shrink)

Ethics normally proceeds by establishing some kind of ground from which norms can be derived for human action. However, no such terra firma is found in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, which instead lays down a sedimentary soil consisting of a blend of nothingness and contingency. This paper aims to show how Sartre is able to build an ethical theory from this seemingly groundless mixture, and it proceeds in three sections. Section one aims to disentangle the relation between the for-itself (...) (pour-soi) and the in-itself (en-soi) from antithetical characterizations by placing them in a state of supervenience. Section two works to explain how both the in-itself and the for-itself are not divided ontologically, but are both in the same ontological state, namely, contingency. And in section three, it is argued that Sartre’s ethics reveals that because human beings share the same thrownness with Others in a world, they have to take title for such a world. Within a Sartrean ethics of nothingness, one’s nothingness leads one to the shared nothingness of Others, of which one must take responsibility. (shrink)

Mixing methods is a well-known innovative meth- odologic proposal for research in the second half of the 20th century social sciences. Reading literature about it, I observed the aspect that justifies this paper: Authors of theoretical contributions on mixing methods recognized that this was known to be a practice already in use many centuries ago. Some of them even have re-examined the whole history of the scientific method to search precedents. They are however individual and theoretical precedents. I add in (...) this paper the practical projection of these and other methodological theories on people’s training from Greek classical times. My hypothesis is that liberal arts was the basic syllabus in Western -and westernized- educaion for more than a millennium in such a way that results of their training precisely involved to mixing methods. In return, to understand the liberal arts in the light of mixing methods shows new aspects of their historical interest. I study the theoretical basis of this syllabus from Cicero to Alcuin. More important for future research, I conclude that Alcuin’s thesis about the correspondence between the gifts of the Holy Spiritu and the seven liberal arts can be extended to the Aristotelian dianoethics habits and to Dilthey’s 20th-century sciences of mind. (shrink)

Although delusion is one of the central concepts of psychopathology, it stills eludes precise conceptualization. In this paper, I present certain basic issues concerning the classification and definition of delusion, as well as its ontological status. By examining these issues, I aim to shed light on the ambiguity of the clinical term ‘delusion’ and its extension, as well as provide clues as to why philosophers are increasingly joining the ranks of psychiatrists, psychologists, and neuroscientists in the effort to come to (...) a comprehensive understanding of delusion. (shrink)

Se trata de una antología que recoge los más importantes pasajes del pensamiento sobre los valores de Risieri Frondizi (1910-1983), uno de los más importantes axiólogos de América Latina. Además de la selección de fragmentos que integra la antología, José Ramón Fabelo Corzo escribe el Prólogo (que busca ubicar a Frondizi en el contexto histórico del pensamiento axiológico latinoamericano) y el Epílogo (en el que se realiza una valoración crítica de las propuestas de este destacado pensador argentino.

Given the oncoming demographic changes—which are primarily driven by the growth in the Latinx community—the United States is predicted to become a minority-majority country by around 2050. This seems to suggest that electoral strategies that employ “dog-whistle” politics are destined for the dust-bin of history. Following the work of critical race theorists, such as Ian Haney-Lopez and Derrick Bell, I want to suggest that pronouncing the inevitable demise of dog-whistle politics is premature. This is because there are reasons to suspect (...) that certain segments of the Latinx community—much like the Southern and Eastern Europeans in the early part of 20th Century—might be co-opted into American whiteness. (shrink)

Etude de l'extension par la negation semi-intuitionniste de la logique positive des propositions appelee logique C, developpee par A. Urquhart afin de definir une semantique relationnelle valable pour la logique des valeurs infinies de Lukasiewicz (Lw). Evitant les axiomes de contraction et de reduction propres a la logique classique de Dummett, l'A. propose une semantique de type Routley-Meyer pour le systeme d'Urquhart (CI) en tant que celle-la ne fournit que des theories consistantes pour la completude de celui-ci.

In 2008 Robert Lovato coined the phrase Juan Crow. Juan Crow is a type of policy or enforcement of immigration laws that discriminate against Latino/as in the United States. This essay looks at the implications this phenomenon has for an ethics of immigration. It argues that Juan Crow, like its predecessor Jim Crow, is not merely a condemnation of federalism, but of any immigration reform that has stricter enforcement as one of its key components. Instead of advocating for increased enforcement, (...) I want to suggest that just immigration reform must adhere to two standards, equality of burdens and universal protections, and that only by doing so can the potential for Juan Crow be adequately avoided. (shrink)

This essay aims to contribute comparative points of contact between two influential figures of nineteenth century aesthetic reflection; namely, Victor Hugo’s artful considerations on architecture in his novel Notre-Dame de Paris and G.W.F. Hegel’s philosophical appraisal of the artform in his Lectures on Fine Art. Although their individual views on architecture are widely recognized, there is scant comparative commentary on these two thinkers, which seems odd because of the relative convergence of their historically situated observations. Owing to this shortage, I (...) note that, while certainly not identical, Hugo and Hegel share an aesthetic family resemblance in how they hold similar ideas on architecture’s symbolic function, cognitive content, and, ultimately, how the artform’s ability to remain a standing paragon of meaning was razed by successive modes of cultural communication. Consequently, the essay works to show some congruent aesthetic affinities between these two great figures, but which appears to be overlooked in the literature. (shrink)

This paper examines Gandhian philosophy and practice to reinterpret UNESCO's educational vision towards establishing stable and sustainable knowledge societies. The uniqueness of the Gandhian perspective is its ability to withstand the dominant political, philosophical and religious challenges with its contextually rooted, spiritually oriented, socially responsible and human person centred reinterpretations. UNESCO’s educational vision-Learning: The Treasure Within published in 1996 is a catalyst in establishing stable and sustainable knowledge societies. Consistent changes and challenges in knowledge societies necessitates the reinterpretation of this (...) educational vision. The four pillars of learning in this educational vision are analysed together with four aspects of Gandhian philosophy and practice: ‘learning to know’ and Nai Talim, ‘learning to do’ and ashrams, ‘learning to live together’ and constructive programme and ‘learning to be’ and swaraj. The paper discusses this confluence of the UNESCO’s theoretical approach of four pillars of education with Gandhian pragmatic philosophy and practice to offer a contextually rooted and future-oriented outlook for reinterpreting the educational vision for establishing stable and sustainable knowledge societies. (shrink)

La confianza ciega ya no corre. Estamos en tiempos de crisis. La pérdida de confianza está generalizada, va desde lo privado a lo público. Pasa por las desconfianzas políticas, los organismos financieros y llega hasta nuestros líderes espirituales. La ruptura de la confianza, sobre todo ante situaciones de abuso, muchas veces parece definitiva, pero vivir en la total desconfianza es imposible. Conocido por haber denunciado públicamente los abusos de un poderoso sacerdote chileno, el filósofo José Andrés Murillo ha creado (...) el concepto de confianza lúcida, que limita con la desconfianza por un lado y con la confianza ciega por el otro. La confianza lúcida es el centro de este libro que surge en días marcados por el rechazo a los abusos de poder, la desconfianza, el miedo y la obsesión por la seguridad. Una declaración de principios según la cual ningún abuso tiene derecho a robar lo más preciado del ser humano: Confiar en otros y en uno mismo. (shrink)

Philosophers have assumed that as long as discriminatory admission and exclusion policies are off the table, it is possible for one to adopt a restrictionist position on the issue of immigration without having to worry that this position might entail discriminatory outcomes. The problem with this assumption emerges, however,when two important points are taken into consideration. First, immigration controls are not simply discriminatory because they are based on racist or ethnocentric attitudes and beliefs, but can themselves also be the source (...) of social and civic ostracism. Second, by focusing so much on questions of admission and exclusion, philosophers have tended to overlook the discriminatory potential of immigration enforcement mechanisms. In this essay, I make the case that philosophers who deal with the issue of immigration cannot dispense with the potential for discrimination in a state's enforcement mechanism as easily as they have with the potential for discrimination in a state’s admission and exclusions criteria. In addition, I put forth the positive claim that the way to combat this potential for discrimination (e.g., xenophobia) must begin with a defense of, and advocacy for, immigrant rights. (shrink)

G.W.F. Hegel argues that a philosophy of history should engender comprehension of evil in the world. And yet some commentators have charged his philosophy with transcending mere explication by justifying the existence of these evils. In defense of his words, Hegel famously characterizes evil as a modal mismatch; namely, as the incompatibility between what is given and what ought to be the case. Unfortunately, some readers of Hegel’s grand narrative either continue to struggle with or overlook this fine distinction. Against (...) such readings, I organize my paper into three sections that speak directly to these concerns. In §1, against the concern that Hegel’s view of the “actual world” justifies suffering, it is shown that his philosophy does not endorse the merely extant world, which is a whole world apart from the actual world. In §2, I articulate the premises of Hegel’s Doppelsatz to argue that the famous slogan is not, as some commentators take it, an endorsement of “things as they are.” And in §3, I expose a category error that mistakes an epistemological claim made by Hegel about contingency as a metaphysical assertion in support of evil. Ultimately, I argue that Hegel views evil as neither actual nor necessary nor justified. (shrink)

The Blumenberg-Löwith 'debate' over the 'secularization hypothesis' is an evocative clash that has remained a matter of discussion both inside and outside of the mid-twentieth century German tradition, which has yet to register fully the implications of Blumenberg’s work on the topic of modernity. On one side is Hans Blumenberg, who perceives modernity as justified on its own terms. On the other side is Karl Löwith, who does not recognize a substantive break between modernity and its epochal genetic precursors. My (...) reading recognizes the heart of this debate to be over an impulse either to espouse or oppose the sovereignty of philosophical modernity in its relation to worldmaking. In this paper, I argue that Blumenberg’s thesis of 'self-assertion' describes a re-establishing of the project of worldmaking in a sophisticated and nuanced language that is missed by Löwith’s diagnosis of modern philosophy of history. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss the scientific respectability of delusion as a psychiatric category. First, I present the essentialist objection to the natural kindhood of psychiatric categories, as well as non-essentialism about natural kinds as a response to that objection. Second, I present a nuanced classification of kinds of kinds. Third, drawing on the claim that the attribution of delusion relies on a folk psychological underpinning, I present the mind-dependence objection to the natural kind status of delusion. Finally, I argue (...) that even if delusion as a generic kind stands little chance of being vindicated as a non-essentialist natural kind, we stand to gain from a natural kind methodology regarding subtypes of delusion for which there is evidence of genuine causal signatures and mechanisms. (shrink)