Abstract: The New Latin-American Constitutionalism (NCL) is a new theory represented by the last-two decades constitutions of Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia. These constitutional texts share special characteristics in their originality and their comprehension of the features of their societies, which have originated new mechanism and institutions in constitutional theory, in order to advance the development of their nations. This paper analyzes the aspects of democracy, economic regulation, and peace building, as fundamental elements of NCL, in order to prove the (...) advance in social development of those States. -/- Resumen: El Nuevo Constitucionalismo Latinoamericano (NCL) es una teoría que enmarca las cartas políticas surgidas en las últimas décadas en Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador y Bolivia. Estas constituciones comparten características especiales respecto a la originalidad y apropiación de los elementos particulares de sus sociedades, dando paso a nuevos mecanismos y figuras innovadoras en la teoría constitucional, buscando un avance en el desarrollo de sus naciones. El artículo analiza los postulados en la democracia, la regulación económica y la construcción de paz, como elementos fundamentales del NCL, buscando evidenciar el avance presentado por los Estados en su desarrollo social. (shrink)

Nosotres, biólogues, ecologistas y otres profesionales dedicados a proteger la vida, les escribimos con una solicitud urgente. Les pedimos muy comedidamente que su organización o institución emita un comunicado oficial condenando la crisis en curso y abordando los impactos ambientales y humanitarios en Palestina.

The article explores critical elements to understand how Origen elaborates his mystical theology in his Commentary on John. The spiritual progress process implies that rational beings are guided, by God’s Logos, from the practical life to the theoretical one becoming son or daughter of God, in the likeness of the Logos. This process aims at knowing the Father as he is known by the Logos. The article has two parts: 1. The Father’s presence, through the Logos, in rational beings, and (...) 2. a brief characterisation of the salvation, particularly in the perspective of the mediation by the Son of God. (shrink)

Las relaciones que entre mística y filosofía contemporánea establecieron algunos filósofos de la Escuela de Madrid, fueron expuestas a colación del cuarto centenario de San Juan de la Cruz celebrado en México (1942), las cuales -y según la visión de José Gaos en su breve pero denso Filosofía y mística aquí y ahora- tuvieron fuertes concomitancias entre sí, y su estela permanece en forma de “vasos comunicantes” con autores contemporáneos como Fernando Rielo (1923-2004), quien también nos ofreció su (...) visión (1992) sobre la mística y la Escuela. (shrink)

Sa pag-aaral ukol sa kasaysayang intelektuwal ng mga nasyunalistang diskurso sa akademya, kadalasang nagsisimula ang mga mananaliksik sa Dekada 70s, partikular sa tinaguriang mga kilusang pagsasakatutubo sa Unibersidad ng Pilipinas. Hindi gaanong napagtutuunan ng pansin sa mga publikasyon ang ugat ng mga nasyunalistang diskursong ito sa mga taon bago ang Dekada 1970s. Sa bagong akda ni Charlie Samuya Veric na Children of the Postcolony (COTP), tinangka niyang punan ang patlang na ito sa kasaysayang intelektuwal ng bansa, sa pamamagitan ng pagtuon (...) sa kaisipan nina Edith Tiempo, Fernando Zobel, Bienvenido Lumbera, E. San Juan Jr., at Jose Maria Sison. Ang sanaysay na ito ay isang deskriptibong pagbasa sa COTP ni Veric, na naglalayong siyasatin ang saysay ng akda sa ‘di pa tapos na proyekto ng kapantasang Pilipino na pumiglas mula sa akademikong imperyalismo ng Kanluran. (shrink)

This work offers an analysis of all the legal and moral issues surrounding humanitarian intervention: the deaths of innocent persons and the Doctrine of Double Effect Governmental legitimacy - The Doctrine of Effective Political Control; UN Charter and evaluation of the Nicaragua ruling; The Morality of not intervening; US-led invasion of Iraq; Humanitarian intervention authorised by the UN Security Council - Iraq, Somalia, Haiti, Rwanda, and Bosnia among others highlight NATO's intervention in Kosovo; The Nicaragua Decision; and The precedents of (...) Panama, Liberia and Sierra Leone. The book's features include: a new framework based on the doctrine of double effect; basic principles of international ethics; outline of the moral argument for humanitarian intervention; explores the morality and legality of military action to end tyranny or anarchy; arguments in a much more detailed and complete fashion than in previous editions; in-depth examination of philosophy of international law; the relationship between custom and moral theory; new discussion of the question of right authority; and a full analysis of recent interventions in Kosovo and Iraq. book addresses a broad interdisciplinary audience of international lawyers, philosophers, and political scientists. In this new edition, the author responds to critics while updating the discussion in the light of the momentous events that took place at the beginning of the new millennium. (shrink)

We perform an experimental investigation using a dictator game in which individuals must make a moral decision —to give or not to give an amount of money to poor people in the Third World. A questionnaire in which the subjects are asked about the reasons for their decision shows that, at least in this case, moral motivations carry a heavy weight in the decision: the majority of dictators give the money for reasons of a consequentialist nature. Based on the results (...) presented here and of other analogous experiments, we conclude that dicator behavior can be understood in terms of moral distance rather than social distance and that it systematically deviates from the egoism assumption in economic models and game theory. (shrink)

This book addresses key conceptual issues relating to the modern scientific and engineering use of computer simulations. It analyses a broad set of questions, from the nature of computer simulations to their epistemological power, including the many scientific, social and ethics implications of using computer simulations. The book is written in an easily accessible narrative, one that weaves together philosophical questions and scientific technicalities. It will thus appeal equally to all academic scientists, engineers, and researchers in industry interested in questions (...) related to the general practice of computer simulations. (shrink)

The two main theories of perceptual reasons in contemporary epistemology can be called Phenomenalism and Factualism. According to Phenomenalism, perceptual reasons are facts about experiences conceived of as phenomenal states, i.e., states individuated by phenomenal character, by what it’s like to be in them. According to Factualism, perceptual reasons are instead facts about the external objects perceived. The main problem with Factualism is that it struggles with bad cases: cases where perceived objects are not what they appear or where there (...) is no perceived object at all. The main problem with Phenomenalism is that it struggles with good cases: cases where everything is perfectly normal and the external object is correctly perceived, so that one’s perceptual beliefs are knowledge. In this paper we show that there is a theory of perceptual reasons that avoids the problems for Factualism and Phenomenalism. We call this view Propositionalism. We use ‘proposition’ broadly to mean the entities that are contents of beliefs and other doxastic attitudes. The key to finding a middle ground between Phenomenalism and Factualism, we claim, is to allow our reasons to be false in bad cases. Despite being false, they are about the external world, not our phenomenal states. (shrink)

A general mathematical framework, based on countable partitions of Natural Numbers [1], is presented, that allows to provide a Semantics to propositional languages. It has the particularity of allowing both the valuations and the interpretation Sets for the connectives to discriminate complexity of the formulas. This allows different adequacy criteria to be used to assess formulas associated with the same connective, but that differ in their complexity. The presented method can be adapted potentially infinite number of connectives and truth values, (...) therefore, it can be considered a general framework to provide semantics to several of the known logic systems (eg, LC, L3 LP, FDE). The presented semantics allow to converge to different standard semantics if the separation complexity procedure is annulled. Therefore, it can be understood as a framework that allows greater precision (in complexity terms) with respect to formula satisfaction. Naturally, because of how it is built, it can be incorporated into non-deterministic semantics. The presented procedure also allows generating valuations that grant a different truth value to each formula of propositional language. As a positive side effect, our method allows a constructive proof of the equipotence between N and N^n for all Natural n. (shrink)

Does self-control require willpower? The question cuts to the heart of a debate about whether self-control is identical with some psychological process internal to the agents or not. Noticeably absent from these debates is systematic evidence about the folk-psychological category of self-control. Here, we present the results of two behavioral studies (N = 296) that indicate the structure of everyday use of the concept. In Study 1, participants rated the degree to which different strategies to respond to motivational conflict exemplify (...) self-control. Participants distinguished between intra-psychic and externally-scaffolded strategies and judged that the former exemplified self-control more than the latter. In Study 2, participants provided various solutions to manage motivational conflict and rated their proposals on effectiveness. Participants produced substantially more intra-psychic strategies, rated them as more effective, and advised them at a higher rate than externally-scaffolded strategies. Taken together, these results suggest that while people recognize a plurality of strategies as genuine instances of self-control, purely internal exercises of self-control are considered more prototypical than their externally-scaffolded counterparts. This implies a hierarchical structure for the folk psychological category of self-control. The concept encompasses a variety of regulatory strategies and organizes these strategies along a hierarchical continuum, with purely intra-psychic strategies at the center and scaffolded strategies in the periphery. (shrink)

Many philosophers hold that if an agent acts intentionally, she must know what she is doing. Although the scholarly consensus for many years was to reject the thesis in light of presumed counterexamples by Donald Davidson, several scholars have recently argued that attention to aspectual distinctions and the practical nature of this knowledge shows that these counterexamples fail. In this paper I defend a new objection against the thesis, one modelled after Timothy Williamson’s anti-luminosity argument. Since this argument relies on (...) general principles about the nature of knowledge rather than on intuitions about fringe cases, the recent responses that have been given to defuse the force of Davidson’s objection are silent against it. Moreover, the argument suggests that even weaker theses connecting practical entities with knowledge are also false. Recent defenders of the thesis that there is a necessary connection between knowledge and intentional action are motivated by the insight that this connection is non-accidental. I close with a positive proposal to account for the non-accidentality of this link without appeal to necessary connections by drawing an extended analogy between practical and perceptual knowledge. (shrink)

This article aims to develop a new account of scientific explanation for computer simulations. To this end, two questions are answered: what is the explanatory relation for computer simulations? And what kind of epistemic gain should be expected? For several reasons tailored to the benefits and needs of computer simulations, these questions are better answered within the unificationist model of scientific explanation. Unlike previous efforts in the literature, I submit that the explanatory relation is between the simulation model and the (...) results of the simulation. I also argue that our epistemic gain goes beyond the unificationist account, encompassing a practical dimension as well. (shrink)

From our everyday commuting to the gold medalist’s world-class performance, skillful actions are characterized by fine-grained, online agentive control. What is the proper explanation of such control? There are two traditional candidates: intellectualism explains skillful agentive control by reference to the agent’s propositional mental states; anti-intellectualism holds that propositional mental states or reflective processes are unnecessary since skillful action is fully accounted for by automatic coping processes. I examine the evidence for three psychological phenomena recently held to support anti-intellectualism and (...) argue that it supports neither traditional candidate, but an intermediate attention-control account, according to which the top-down, intention-directed control of attention is a necessary component of skillful action. Only this account recognizes both the role of automatic control in skilled action and the need for higher-order cognition to thread automatic processes together into a unified, skillful performance. This applies to bodily skillful action in general, from the world-class performance of experts to mundane, habitual action. The attention-control account stresses that, for intentions to play their role as top-down modulators of attention, agents must sustain the intention’s activation; hence, the need for reflecting throughout performance. (shrink)

En este artículo presentamos las principales corrientes de la Filosofía Experimental y atendemos a una de las críticas más severas a la que se ha sometido este reciente programa de renovación metodológica. Según Antti Kauppinen la Filosofía Experimental está condenada al fracaso porque no puede obtener mediante sus métodos el tipo de intuiciones que interesan a los filósofos –las intuiciones robustas del hablante competente. Aun aceptando parte de las críticas de Kauppinen, en este artículo sostenemos, en primer lugar, que la (...) supuesta incapacidad de la Filosofía Experimental para acceder a las intuiciones robustas de los hablantes tiene que ver en gran medida con los métodos experimentales empleados hasta ahora por los filósofos experimentales. En segundo lugar, defendemos que el proyecto de reforma llevado a cabo desde la Filosofía Experimental resultará viable solo si se adoptan una serie de consejos metodológicos procedentes de la economía experimental. Únicamente entonces podrán los experimentalistas responder con éxito a la objeción de Kauppinen. (shrink)

En el marco del V Congreso Internacional «La actualidad de Michel Foucault» celebrado en la Universidad Complutense de Madrid entre el 6 y el 8 de marzo de 2018, sostuvimos una interesante conversación con Daniel Lorenzini, investigador del pensamiento ético y político de Michel Foucault y editor de varios de sus cursos y conferencias publicadas en los últimos años en Francia. Discutimos sobre el estado actual de los archivos de Foucault adquiridos por la Biblioteca Nacional de Francia (BnF), algunos de (...) los diversos proyectos editoriales que se derivan del trabajo de archivo y análisis de los manuscritos del filósofo, la reciente e inesperada publicación de Les aveux de la chair y su relación con el proyecto de la Historia de la sexualidad tal como fue planteado en 1976, la relación de Foucault con Nietzsche respecto a sus lecturas de la subjetivación y el vínculo, no siempre evidente, entre ética y política a la luz de sus investigaciones sobre el filósofo francés. (shrink)

Much of our know-how is acquired through practice: we learn how to cook by cooking, how to write by writing, and how to dance by dancing. As Aristotle argues, however, this kind of learning is puzzling, since engaging in it seems to require possession of the very knowledge one seeks to obtain. After showing how a version of the puzzle arises from a set of attractive principles, I argue that the best solution is to hold that knowledge-how comes in degrees, (...) and through practice a person gradually learns how to do something. However, the two standard accounts of know-how in the literature, intellectualism and anti-intellectualism, cannot properly account for the distinctive way in which know-how is gradually acquired by practice, a process in which conceptual representations and practical abilities are intimately interwoven. Drawing on Gareth Evans's work, I outline an account that may do so, and use this account to distinguish between two forms of learning to explain why skill generally cannot be learnt through testimony, and requires practice. (shrink)

Researchers often claim that self-control is a skill. It is also often stated that self-control exertions are intentional actions. However, no account has yet been proposed of the skillful agency that makes self-control exertion possible, so our understanding of self-control remains incomplete. Here I propose the skill model of self-control, which accounts for skillful agency by tackling the guidance problem: how can agents transform their abstract and coarse-grained intentions into the highly context-sensitive, fine-grained control processes required to select, revise and (...) correct strategies during self-control exertion? The skill model borrows conceptual tools from ‘hierarchical models’ recently developed in the context of motor skills, and asserts that self-control crucially involves the ability to manage the implementation and monitoring of regulatory strategies as the self-control exercise unfolds. Skilled agents are able do this by means of flexible practical reasoning: a fast, context-sensitive type of deliberation that incorporates non-propositional representations into the formation and revision of the mixed-format intentions that structure self-control exertion. The literatures on implementation intentions and motivation framing offer corroborating evidence for the theory. As a surprising result, the skill of self-control that allows agents to overcome the contrary motivations they experience is self-effacing: instead of continuously honing this skill, expert agents replace it with a different one, which minimizes or prevents contrary motivations from arising in the first place. Thus, the more expert you are at self-control, the less likely you are to use it. (shrink)

En el presente trabajo, analizamos el cuento El Inmortal de Borges prestándole principal atención a las situaciones donde se entrelazan, o se tratan sin diferenciar demasiado, cuestiones vinculadas con la animalidad y la divinidad. Sostenemos que esta especie de confusión o falta de precisión al tratar cuestiones que se alejan tanto de la identidad personal y del Yo, como la inmortalidad, no es un elemento casual ni sin fundamento, sino que puede ser analizado filosóficamente adentrándonos la otredad animal. El Inmortal (...) nos manifiesta que la filosofía podría no haber sido lo suficientemente precisa al tratar la otredad, permitiendo que animalidad y divinidad, o más bien ciertas propiedades características de cada una, puedan amalgamarse dentro de los lindes de este concepto. Que el cuento de Borges haga convivir de forma tan característica la inacción con la inmortalidad hace de esta obra un objeto de reflexión obligatorio para todos los interesados en el concepto de otredad. (shrink)

This paper mainly addresses the relation between essentialism and philosophical method. In particular, our analysis centers on the anti-essentialist argument that proposed, given its essentialist bonds, the abandonment of the notion of method. To this end, we make use of the empirical evidence concerning essentialism provided by psychological research, which has shown that our proneness to essentialize is not a by-product of our social and cultural practices as some anti-essentialists have thought. Rather, it is a deeply rooted cognitive tendency that (...) plays a major role in concept formation and so in our understanding of things. Thus, given that such inclination toward essentialism is certain to happen, we argue for a conception of method that, while not overcoming such tendency, avoids the presumed disastrous consequences feared by most anti-essentialists. (shrink)

Gibson defined affordances as action possibilities directly offered to an animal by the environment. Ambitiously, affordances are meant to show the inadequacy of the subjective-objective dichotomy in the study of cognition. Armed with similar concerns, some neo-Gibsonians recently thought of affordances as latent dispositions existing independently of individual organisms or whole species. It is no coincidence that critics had, on several occasions, objected that this theoretical stance dramatically neglects the role of the perceiver in the emergence of affordances. In this (...) paper, we provide a phenomenological characterization of the perceiver’s role in affordance perception. Specifically, we borrow from Husserlian phenomenology to characterize two features of affordance perception that can enrich our understanding of the individual’s engagement with the environment, namely, its affective and temporal aspects. Taking an everyday activity such as rock climbing as a case example, we show that phenomenological investigations, if not misinterpreted as mere introspection, can represent an ally for ecological psychologists. (shrink)

In the last decades there has been a great controversy about the scientific status of emotion categories. This controversy stems from the idea that emotions are heterogeneous phenomena, which precludes classifying them under a common kind. In this article, I analyze this claim—which I call the Variability Thesis—and argue that as it stands, it is problematically underdefined. To show this, I examine a recent formulation of the thesis as offered by Scarantino (2015). On one hand, I raise some issues regarding (...) the logical structure of the claim. On the other hand, and most importantly, I show that the Variability Thesis requires a consensus about what counts as a relevant pattern of response in different domains, a consensus that is lacking in the current literature. This makes it difficult to assess what counts as evidence for or against this thesis. As a result, arguments based on the Variability Thesis are unwarranted. This raises serious concerns about some current empirical theories of emotions, but also sheds light on the issue of the scientific status of emotion categories. (shrink)

Effort and the feeling of effort play important roles in many theoretical discussions, from perception to self-control and free will, from the nature of ownership to the nature of desert and achievement. A crucial, overlooked distinction within the philosophical and scientific literatures is the distinction between theories that seek to explain effort and theories that seek to explain the feeling of effort. Lacking a clear distinction between these two phenomena makes the literature hard to navigate. To advance in the unification (...) and development of this area, this article provides an overview of the main theories of the nature of effort and the nature of the feeling of effort, and then discusses how efforts and their feelings are related. Two key takeaways emerge. First, there is widespread agreement that efforts are goal-directed actions. Second, one of the main philosophical issues to be decided is whether feelings of effort should be defined by reference to efforts (effort-first approach), or whether efforts are defined by reference to the feeling of effort (feeling-first approach). (shrink)

La pobreza y la democracia guardan relaciones complejas y ya bastante estudiadas por los científicos sociales. En este artículo no volveré sobre estos enfoques, ni tampoco insistiré en los problemas de gobernabilidad que nacen de la pobreza, sino que presentaré la crítica filosófico-política al ideal democrático que resulta cuando consideramos a la pobreza como privación de libertad individual. A la pobreza se la puede entender desde múltiples perspectivas filosóficas, pero el interpretarla como privación de libertad individual, como lo hace Amartya (...) Sen, la pone en relación directa y problemática con un sistema de gobierno que precisamente hace de las libertades, y de la libertad humana en general, su nervio central. Quisiera sostener que la existencia de la pobreza pone en duda que vivamos en sociedades democráticas porque cuestiona la finalidad y la esencia de estas comunidades, a la vez que les desafía a pensar cómo pueden convertirse realmente en sociedades justas. Comenzaré con una interpretación filosófica de la pobreza a partir de algunas ideas de Sen (sección 1). Seguiré con el análisis de la relación que se podría establecer entre la privación de libertad y la comunidad política según tres filósofos de la tradición occidental: Aristóteles, Baruch de Espinosa y John Locke (sección 2), y terminaré presentando tres desafíos que la pobreza presenta a nuestras democracias (sección 3). (shrink)

Our aim is to argue for a deflationary interpretation of Aristotelian dialectic in the Topics, showing that dialectic is, for Aristotle, a specific sort of regulated debate, in contrast to a widely spread kind of interpretation which conceives dialectic as a method of philosophical investigation. Our claim is that an analysis carefully conducted of certain key texts does provide us with sufficient evidences for defending that the Topics is a handbook which codifies an existent art. This codification has a descriptive (...) character and reveals the rules of the debate, what is the specific kind of argument used in it, how premises are obtained and the predicative relation of the propositions used by the debaters. The mastery of the techniques required by the debate is not grounded in any sort of particular knowledge, rather in linguistic competence. It is by doing a technical usage of this competence that the Topics can be useful for philosophy. (shrink)

La migración internacional nos enfrenta con problemas irresolubles desde la figura moderna del Estado nacional, su concepto de ciudadanía y su noción de justicia. Juan Carlos Velasco critica las limitaciones y la orientación de las políticas contemporáneas que nos hacen percibir a la migración como una “invasión”, y propone un modo radicalmente diferente de entender e intervenir el fenómeno desde lo trasnacional. Nacer de uno u otro lado de una línea divisoria es un evento azaroso, no obstante delimitar la (...) frontera es una construcción histórico-política: la desigualdad en las oportunidades que ofrecen las naciones es una situación estructural de injusticia que se perpetúa con las políticas de exclusión de los migrantes y la deslegitimación de su derecho a buscar una vida mejor. Esa circunstancia genera fracturas sociales, injustificables pero normalizadas, que imposibilitan alcanzar la justicia global. Velasco presenta un análisis completo que abarca las dimensiones política, jurídica y moral del tema, en el que lleva a la filosofía política a un terreno práctico del que se desprenden las claves para entender y actuar en esta nueva era en la que, debido a los conflictos sociales y políticos, la migración vuelve a ser argumento de discusión relevante. (Texto de la CONTRAPORTADA del libro). (shrink)

The traditional presentation about historical time-passing consists in a linear succession of facts in which some aspects of the lifeworld evolve from others in anirreversible manner. The presentation of change is connected to the presentation of gradual or revolutionary linear changes that areirrevocable. I believe that this presentation could be considered correct for living organisms, but does not take account of some important aspects of demonstrative presentations about artefacts and technologies. For example, we can ontologically assume that “hammer-beating” evolved from (...) “stone-beating”. In this sense, the “hammer-beating-time” could be considered contemporary-time and the “stone-beating-time” could be considered past-time. However, we still beat things with stones and stone-like artefacts. The technology of the stone-beating is still been used. That means that relationship between the stone and the hammer cannot be seen as “evolutive” in the same sense that organisms “evolve” from each other. We must assume then, that the stone and the hammer must be interchangeable technologies which do not overshadow each other. This family of technologies and artefacts are contemporary to each other. Time-passing metaphors must then be substituted with metaphors of a “technological instability” that can be associated to a foundational cultural explosion. (shrink)

Cualquiera que sea la opinión que uno tenga sobre la participación de la Iglesia católica en los debates políticos del Ecuador, nadie negará que ha sido y sigue siendo un actor importante de estos debates. Conocer sus ideas políticas contribuye a entender mejor este rol y a juzgarlo con más fundamento y menos apasionamiento. Por esto, el actual volumen reúne textos selectos de cinco pensadores católicos ecuatorianos representativos, desde fines del siglo XIX hasta las últimas décadas del siglo XX. Hablamos (...) de: • Monseñor Federico González Suárez (1844 – 1917). Historiador, arqueólogo, Obispo de Ibarra (1895 – 1905) y Arzobispo de Quito (1906 – 1917). • Cardenal Carlos María de la Torre (1873 – 1968). Arzobispo de Quito (1933-1967) y Cardenal desde 1953. • Julio Tobar Donoso (1894 – 1981). Jurista, diplomático, historiador. • Cardenal Pablo Muñoz Vega (1903 – 1994). Arzobispo de Quito (1967- 1985) y Cardenal desde 1969. • Monseñor Leonidas Proaño (1910 – 1988). Obispo de Riobamba (1954-1985) y candidato al Premio Nobel de la Paz en 1986. El objetivo de esta publicación es ofrecer una síntesis coherente del pensamiento político de estos autores, a pesar de las diferencias que entre ellos existen. No ofrecemos una compilación sobre “el” pensamiento político católico, así dicho en general, porque sería exhaustivo y pretencioso. Nos limitaremos a presentar una síntesis que nos introduzca a las principales cuestiones sociales y políticas que han preocupado a estas cinco figuras. Este trabajo tiene naturalmente sus límites debidos al amplio espacio de tiempo considerado, las múltiples cuestiones políticas implicadas y la productividad de los autores, todos ellos pensadores a la vez que personas de acción. (shrink)

Many philosophers endorse “exclusionism”, the view that no instance of relearning qualifies as a case of genuine remembering, and vice versa. Appealing to simulationist, distributed causalist, and trace minimalist theories of remembering, I develop three conditional arguments against exclusionism. First, if simulationism is right to hold that some cases of remembering involve reliance on post-event testimonial information, then remembering does not exclude relearning. Second, if distributed causalism is right to hold that memory traces are promiscuous, then remembering does not exclude (...) relearning. Finally, if trace minimalism is right to hold that vicarious experiences sometimes produce the minimal traces that ground remembering, then remembering does not exclude relearning. While advocates of these theories might incorporate additional conditions designed to accommodate exclusionism, the only reason they can appeal to in favor of doing so is intuition: neither the fundamental components of the theories nor the empirical results on which they are based provide a reason to endorse exclusionism. An investigation of exclusionism thus raises metaphilosophical questions, so far overlooked in philosophy of memory, about the appropriate role of intuition in theorizing about remembering. (shrink)

This electronic document serves as a guide on how to get a LAMP stack running on a Google Compute Engine virtual machine instance running Debian.

Nesse artigo, eu procuro mostrar que a leitura tradicional que atribui um procedimento dialético à abordagem aristotélica da acrasia, em Ética Nicomaquéia VII 1-3 provoca um sério problema interpretativo ao tentar compatibilizar a posição socrática acerca da acrasia e os phanomena. Primeiramente, tento mostrar, baseando-me numa análise de Tópicos I 1-2, que o procedimento metodológico, em EN VII 1 1145b2-7, não se caracteriza como dialético. Em segundo lugar, proponho uma leitura em que Aristóteles, passo a passo refuta a tese socrática (...) que nega a existência da acrasia, uma vez que esse tese não é contada entre os phainomena que se quer preservar. (shrink)

The study aimed to comprehensively overview the experiences encountered by public school employees during the recruitment, selection, and placement (RSP) process within the DepEd Bohol Division. Employing a qualitative-descriptive research design, the researchers utilized a phenomenological approach to delve deeply into these experiences, shedding light on the nuances and intricacies of the division's RSP process. As Lambert et al. (2013) described, qualitative- descriptive studies aim to provide a comprehensive and detailed summary of specific events experienced by individuals or groups in (...) everyday terms. To achieve this, Colaizzi's (1978) data analysis method was applied, meticulously gathering, transcribing, and analyzing recorded participant responses. The rigorous analysis revealed that an overwhelming 81% of the participants recognized significant challenges within the current RSP system of the division, underscoring the pressing need for a renewed approach to address these identified challenges. This highlighted the necessity for an RSP policy that is responsive and innovative, tailored to meet the evolving needs and expectations of applicants, schools, and the division. By implementing improvements to the RSP process, a more efficient and timely filling of vacated and newly available positions is anticipated, contributing to the seamless functioning of the educational system and ultimately enhancing the prospects of success. (shrink)

Multiplicity of Beings according to Saint Thomas Aquinas is a book that aimed to find an explanation of beings' diversity on the grounds of the metaphysical intrinsic principles of beings identified by Aristótle. Are matter and form causes of identity, individuation and diversity of substances? Aquinas answers this question by means of some demonstrations grounded on the very nature of matter and form, in the line of the doctrines contained in book 7 of the Aristotle's Metaphysics.

El pasado 8 de junio 2020, Fernando Soler Escalona, estudiante de nuestra Facultad, obtuvo el grado académico de Doctor en Teología, con una tesis sobre El sentido teológico de las metáforas de comer y beber en la obra de Orí-genes, redactada bajo la supervisión de Samuel Fernández, Profesor Titular de Patrología. La defensa fue inusual: la pandemia de COVID-19 obligó a realizarla por videoconferencia, para mantener el aislamiento físico entre los participantes. En la espera de la publicación integral de (...) la tesis, reproducimos a continuación la presentación que el Doctorando hizo de sus investigaciones durante la defensa. (shrink)

Self-control is the ability to inhibit temptations and persist in one’s decisions about what to do. In this article, we review recent evidence that suggests implicit beliefs about the process of self-control influence how the process operates. While earlier work focused on the moderating influence of willpower beliefs on depletion effects, we survey new directions in the field that emphasize how beliefs about the nature of self-control, self-control strategies, and their effectiveness have effects on downstream regulation and judgment. These new (...) directions highlight the need to better understand the role of self-control beliefs in naturalistic decision-making. (shrink)

Some partitions of Natural Number set are built through recursive processesgenerating in this manner countable examples of countable and disjoint sets whose unionis a set also countable. This process is constructive, so the Axiom of choice is not used.We provide a PC program that generates one of these special partitions and shows howto generate infinite of them. This line of reasoning can have multiple applications in Settheory and Model theory. We proved that the number of ways to make these partitionsof (...) natural numbers is not countable, there are more of these partitions (named doublycountable) than natural numbers. For each natural number greater than 1, we show aneffective procedure that generates these partitions -/- . (shrink)

I argue for a novel interpretation of Leibniz’s conception of the kind of contingency that matters for freedom, which I label ‘agential contingency.’ In brief, an agent is free to the extent that she determines herself to do what she judges to be the best of several considered options that she could have brought about had she concluded that these options were best. I use this novel interpretation to make sense of Leibniz’s doctrine that the reasons that explain free actions (...) are merely inclining and not necessitating. (shrink)

In this paper, I analyse EE I 6, where Aristotle presented a famous methodological digression. Many interpreters have taken this chapter as advocating a dialectical procedure of enquiry. My claim is that Aristotle does not keep a dialectical attitude towards endoxa or phainomena in this chapter. In order to accomplish my goal, I shall show that EE I 6 does not provide enough evidence for the dialectical construal of it, and that this construal, in turn, hangs on some assumptions brought (...) out from other Aristotelian works (EN and Top.), which do not provide good evidence as well. By the analysis of these assumptions, I intend to show that Aristotle is not carrying out any sort of dialectic, especially dialectic conceived as conceptual analysis seeking the salvage of phainomena or endoxa. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that many scholars involved in the contemporary free will debates have underappreciated the philosophical appeal of agent causation because the resources of contemporary emergentism have not been adequately introduced into the discussion. Whereas I agree that agent causation’s main problem has to do with its intelligibility, particularly with respect to the issue of how substances can be causally relevant, I argue that the notion of substance causation can be clearly articulated from an emergentist framework. According (...) to my proposal, a free agent is _a causally powerful substance that emerges in an anomic way from her constitutive mental events_, downwardly constraining, selecting and, in this way, having control on them. As we shall see, this particular concept of agent causation not only makes sense of the deep insight behind agent libertarianism, but it also provides us with the resources to solve some of the main objections that have been raised against it. It is true that here I cannot develop a complete defense of the evidential credentials of emergentism. Still, even if the considerations that follow do not serve to convince detractors of agent causal libertarian accounts of free will, they do suggest that libertarian agent causation is more promising than is typically acknowledged. (shrink)

Leibniz is commonly labeled a foe of Molinism. His rejection of robust libertarian freedom coupled with some explicit passages in which he distances himself from the doctrine of middle knowledge seem to justify this classification. In this paper, I argue that this standard view is not quite correct. I identify the two substantive tenets of Molinism. First, the connection between the conditions for free actions and these free actions is a contingent one: free actions follow contingently from their sufficient conditions. (...) Second, God knows what creatures would freely do in different possible circumstances prevolitionally—that is, prior to God willing anything. I argue that Leibniz himself endorses a version of both tenets and utilizes them for theoretical purposes similar to those of Molinists. I conclude that Leibniz is much closer to Molinism than is typically acknowledged. Leibniz is best characterized as a friend—rather than a foe—of Molinism. (shrink)

This research tackled the challenges public secondary schools in Sagbayan District, Bohol, faced regarding records management. The study employed a mixed research design, combining both descriptive-qualitative and descriptive- quantitative methods. The qualitative phase involved conducting in-depth interviews and focus group discussions with relevant stakeholders involved in records management. On the other hand, the quantitative phase utilized survey questionnaires to gather data from relevant stakeholders to determine the acceptability of the proposed MIS among end-users. The first phase findings revealed various challenges (...) in records management faced by the schools, such as inefficient manual record-keeping systems, difficulties in data retrieval, and the risk of data loss due to inadequate backup procedures. These challenges highlighted the need for a comprehensive, technology-driven solution to streamline records management processes and ensure data security. The evaluation results in the second phase showed that the developed Management Information System (MIS) was well-accepted among the end users. The absence of any significant difference in the level of acceptability among the participants further validated the system's suitability for addressing their specific needs. The successful implementation of the MIS proved to be an effective solution to the records management challenges faced by the public secondary schools in Sagbayan District, Bohol. (shrink)

This paper regards Leonardo Polo’s motivation for his proposal of a new method in metaphysics, the science of being. It is presented a brief comparison with similar motivations in the area of Thomistic thought. The three main points of the proposal are: the problem of the mental limit, the notion of habitual knowledge, the distinction between metaphysics and the transcendental anthropology.

In this paper, I defend a non-mechanistic interpretation of Kant's philosophy of nature. My interpretation contradicts the robust tradition of reading Kant as a mechanist about nature – or as someone who endorses the view that we can know the internally purposive causality characteristic of organisms has no place in nature. By attending closely to Kant's remarks about the possibility of internal purposiveness in nature and to key premises from Kant's arguments in the Antinomy of Teleological Judgment, we shall see (...) that it is not only plausible, but preferable, to believe that internally purposive things (i.e., organisms) exist in nature. Making room for such a belief leaves Kant with a philosophy of nature that simultaneously aligns with and surpasses the philosophies of nature offered up by his Early Modern predecessors. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is an attempt to delimitate what the dialectical syllogism looks like in Aristotle’s Topics. Aristotle never gave an example of a dialectical syllogism, but we have some clues spread over books I and VIII of the Topics which make it possible to understand at least what within a dialectical debate is a dialectical syllogism. The interpretation advanced here distinguishes the logical order of the dialectical argumentation from the order of the debate. This distinction enables us (...) to have a better understand of what is and how the dialectical syllogism is identified in the debate. In addition, we can solve some interpretative difficulties other interpretations could not solve, and have a more solid grasp of how endoxa are used in a dialectical debate. (shrink)

This paper is a philosophical discussion about the link between utopianism and responsibility. It argues that our time demands a strong practice of political responsibility in both organizations and society based on what has been called ‘real utopianism’. It takes as a starting point Hans Jonas’ critique of utopianism. Keeping in mind the horrors of the Second World War this Jewish thinker disconnected the principle of responsibility from the idea of utopianism, and connected it to a ‘heuristics of fear’ – (...) we should be careful with ‘wild’ new technologies, but also with new utopian perspectives. In a second step Jonas’ predecessors and utopian thinkers Martin Buber, Ernst Bloch and Ernest Callenbach are revisited. They show that a fully conceptualized idea of utopianism includes at least three dimensions of responsibility: subsistence, justice and spirituality. I then argue that if one digs deeper into the work of Jonas, it seems that the concept of responsibility in fact implies the courage to overcome a heuristics of fear. This paper therefore argues that there is no need to radically disjunct responsibility from utopianism and that the concept of responsibility actually opens a path to ‘real utopianism’. Such a concept of responsibility can best be supported by a confessionally neutral but nonetheless spiritual eco-humanist worldview that develops a new attitude towards nature, in which (eco)asceticism, morality and spirituality become intertwined. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.

Leibniz endorses several tenets regarding explanation: (1) causes provide contrastive explanations of their effects, (2) the past and the future can be read from the present, and (3) primitive force and derivative forces drive and explain changes in monadic states. I argue that, contrary to initial appearances, these tenets do not preclude an intelligible conception of contingency in Leibniz’s system. In brief, an agent is free to the extent that she determines herself to do that which she deliberately judges to (...) be the best from several considered options that she could have brought about, had she come to the deliberative conclusion that these options were best. I develop a model which illustrates how Leibnizian agents could have come to different deliberative conclusions, and which thus illustrates how Leibnizian agents could have acted differently. (shrink)