In der Kritik der Urteilskraft vertritt Kant noch die analogische Beziehung zwischen Schönheit und Sittlichkeit (KU, AA 05: 351–354). Aber wir befinden uns hier in einem ganz anderen Zusammenhang. Und dies nicht nur, weil die Erörterung dieser analogischen Beziehung eine Lösung für das Problem der Verknüpfung zwischen theoretischer und praktischer Vernunft beansprucht. Die Reflexionen in den Vorlesungen über Anthropologie über die pragmatische Dimension des Geschmacks setzten die Möglichkeit dieser Verknüpfung bereits voraus, bevor Kant eine kritische Begründung derselben erreichte. Wir dürfen (...) aber diese Reflexionen nicht als das Ergebnis unreifer Versuche zur Lösung dieses kritischen Problems der Rationalitätstheorie Kants deuten. Während der Paragraph 59 der Kritik der Urteilskraft Teil der spekulativen Philosophie ist, wird die Kritik des Geschmacks in den Vorlesungen über Anthropologie vielmehr insofern sinnvoll, da sie zu einem pragmatischen, populären und aufgeklärten Bildungsprogramm der Anthropologie Kants gehört. (shrink)

Aunque no es posible ofrecer aquí un análisis detallado de las diferentes cues tionesimplicadas en la teoría de las representaciones en la Modernidad, sí pode mos atender auno de sus aspectos más relevantes, presente en la exposición de Leibniz, Wolff,Baumgarten y Kant, a saber: el reconocimiento progresivo y la vin dicación de unconocimiento específicamente sensible como un tipo específico de conocimiento en lafilosofía escolar alemana del siglo XVIII. A pesar de que Leibniz atribuye al conocimiento claro y confuso el grado (...) más bajo en su esquema de los niveles del conocimiento, tambiénes cierto que su exposición apunta ya a la irre ductibilidad de este ámbito en unconocimiento finito como el humano. Por lo demás, lo confuso aquí adquiere sentido en elsistema del saber en la medida en que Leibniz considera que todos los conocimientos obre cuestiones de hecho, si bien falibles, se encuentran en conexión con la verdad en lamedida en que parti cipan de la misma, al expresar el fundamento último de lo real y sersusceptibles de perfectibilidad en el seno de una subjetividad dinámica que comienza aser entendida como unidad vital. En Wolff y Baumgarten se profundiza en la vía que esabierta ya por Leibniz: la exposición de los niveles de conocimiento en el marco de unaimbricación de la lógica de la representación con una psicología vitalista, en la que sereconocerá la experiencia del sentimiento como expresión subjetiva de la perfectibilidaddel conocimiento humano. Aunque la filosofía de Kant supondrá una ruptura con laexposición escolar de esta teoría de los niveles de conocimiento o los tipos derepresentación, lo cierto es que el nacimiento de su teoría de la sensi bilidad tiene lugar enel marco histórico de esta concepción tradicional. (shrink)

Como dice en la presentación de esta obra el profesor Javier Sánchez Cañizares, director del Grupo Ciencia, Razón y Fe (CRYF) de la Universidad de Navarra, los autoreshan tomado sobre sí, cada uno, la plena responsabilidad respecto de las verdades en las que sostienen a diario sus vidas. Han aceptado el desafío de acoger valientemente el empeño de pensar los problemas actuales, de modo interdisciplinar, para intentar iluminar los retos que presenta la sociedad de nuestros días. Es por esto (...) que el profesor Sergio Sánchez-Migallón señala en el prólogo de este libro que Jorge Martín Montoya Camacho y José Manuel Giménez Amaya «se comprometen con sus páginas porque hablan de lo que nos pasa y de lo que nos espera, así como de lo que nosotros miramos o dejamos de ver. No se habla aquí solo de ideas, ni solo de diagnósticos de algo ajeno al investigador. Se tratan problemas de los que todos somos en alguna medida responsables: y los filósofos no menos que los científicos, ni los creyentes menos que los increyentes». (shrink)

A raíz de la traducción que hace el profesor José Manuel Romero Cuevas de los escritos del joven Marcuse, esta reseña se centra en dos de estos inéditos del autor alemán: Nuevas fuentes para la fundamentación del materialismo histórico (1932) y Sobre los fundamentos filosóficos del concepto científico-económico de trabajo (1933). Este volumen entrega, además, un intercambio epistolar entre Marcuse y Heidegger en el que se advierten, gracias a la traducción de Romero, no únicamente las intenciones filosóficas y políticas (...) de Marcuse sino también sus puntos de encuentro y desencuentro con respecto a Heidegger. Este norte se traza debido a las preocupaciones del pensador de Frankfurt por constituir una filosofía concreta, es decir, la reflexión radical del mundo que afirma la posibilidad de su transformación. En este punto la reseña hace referencia a las diferentes posturas que contiene el pensamiento de Marcuse sobre el pensamiento existencial de Sartre y su superación. (shrink)

Esta entrevista realizada al vicedirector de la Real Academia Española, José Manuel Sánchez Ron, busca resolver las inquietudes que se formulan a partir de las posibilidades de hallar una conjunción metodológica entre la Literatura y la Física. Para ello, se toma en cuenta la organización especializada de la RAE, que se encarga de la difusión y la preservación del buen uso del lenguaje y la creación literaria. El discurso, junto con las personalidades que se dedican a desarrollarlo, cumplen (...) también un rol importante para ello, ya que sirven como ejes para construir un lenguaje apropiado del castellano. Para terminar, este intercambio de conocimientos será de utilidad para desentrañar cómo se desenvuelve esta dicotomía de disciplinas en otros ámbitos, como el universitario. (shrink)

How are biases encoded in our representations of social categories? Philosophical and empirical discussions of implicit bias overwhelmingly focus on salient or statistical associations between target features and representations of social categories. These are the sorts of associations probed by the Implicit Association Test and various priming tasks. In this paper, we argue that these discussions systematically overlook an alternative way in which biases are encoded, that is, in the dependency networks that are part of our representations of social categories. (...) Dependency networks encode information about how features in a conceptual representation depend on each other. This information determines the degree of centrality of a feature for a conceptual representation. Importantly, centrally encoded biases systematically disassociate from those encoded in salient-statistical associations. Furthermore, the degree of centrality of a feature determines its cross-contextual stability: in general, the more central a feature is for a concept, the more likely it is to survive into a wide array of cognitive tasks involving that concept. Accordingly, implicit biases that are encoded in the central features of concepts are predicted to be more resilient across different tasks and contexts. As a result, the distinction between centrally encoded and salient-statistical biases has important theoretical and practical implications. (shrink)

Conceptual engineering is the method for assessing and improving our concepts. However, little has been written about how best to conceive of concepts for the purposes of conceptual engineering. In this paper, I aim to fill this foundational gap, proceeding in three main steps: First, I propose a methodological framework for evaluating the conduciveness of a given concept of concept for conceptual engineering. Then, I develop a typology that contrasts two competing concepts of concept that can be used in conceptual (...) engineering — namely, the philosophical and psychological ones. Finally, I evaluate these two concepts of concept using the proposed methodological framework and I show that, when it comes to making conceptual engineering an actionable method, the psychological concept of concept outclasses its philosophical counterpart on all counts. This provides a baseline from which the concept of concept can be further improved for the purposes of conceptual engineering. (shrink)

The aims of this paper are twofold. First, I offer a new insight into Shepherd’s theory of mind by demonstrating that she distinguishes a threefold ‘Variety of Intellect’, that is, three kinds of minds grouped according to their cognitive limitations. Following Shepherd, I call them (i) minds afflicted with idiocy, (ii) inferior understandings, and (iii) sound understandings. Second, I show how Shepherd’s distinction informs her theory of education. While Shepherd claims that her views serve to improve educational practices, she does (...) not explain how her threefold ‘Variety of intellect’ does so. I argue that Shepherd’s distinction contributes to her aim by providing pedagogues with a more comprehensive grasp of the various cognitive limitations of the people in their care. This allows the former to adjust their expectations and to provide need-oriented guidance. (shrink)

The meaning that expressions take on particular occasions often depends on the context in ways which seem to transcend its direct effect on context-sensitive parameters. ‘Truth-conditional pragmatics’ is the project of trying to model such semantic flexibility within a compositional truth-conditional framework. Most proposals proceed by radically ‘freeing up’ the compositional operations of language. I argue, however, that the resulting theories are too unconstrained, and predict flexibility in cases where it is not observed. These accounts fall into this position because (...) they rarely, if ever, take advantage of the rich information made available by lexical items. I hold, instead, that lexical items encode both extension and non-extension determining information. Under certain conditions, the non-extension determining information of an expression e can enter into the compositional processes that determine the meaning of more complex expressions which contain e. This paper presents and motivates a set of type-driven compositional operations that can access non-extension determining information and introduce bits of it into the meaning of complex expressions. The resulting multidimensional semantics has the tools to deal with key cases of semantic flexibility in appropriately constrained ways, making it a promising framework to pursue the project of truth-conditional pragmatics. (shrink)

Recent work in formal semantics suggests that the language system includes not only a structure building device, as standardly assumed, but also a natural deductive system which can determine when expressions have trivial truth-conditions (e.g., are logically true/false) and mark them as unacceptable. This hypothesis, called the `logicality of language', accounts for many acceptability patterns, including systematic restrictions on the distribution of quantifiers. To deal with apparent counter-examples consisting of acceptable tautologies and contradictions, the logicality of language is often paired (...) with an additional assumption according to which logical forms are radically underspecified: i.e., the language system can see functional terms but is `blind' to open class terms to the extent that different tokens of the same term are treated as if independent. This conception of logical form has profound implications: it suggests an extreme version of the modularity of language, and can only be paired with non-classical---indeed quite exotic---kinds of deductive systems. The aim of this paper is to show that we can pair the logicality of language with a different and ultimately more traditional account of logical form. This framework accounts for the basic acceptability patterns which motivated the logicality of language, can explain why some tautologies and contradictions are acceptable, and makes better predictions in key cases. As a result, we can pursue versions of the logicality of language in frameworks compatible with the view that the language system is not radically modular vis-a-vis its open class terms and employs a deductive system that is basically classical. (shrink)

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

This paper discusses the logical space of alternative conceptual engineering projects, with a specific focus on (1) the processes, (2) the targets and goals, and (3) the methods of such projects. We present an overview of how these three aspects interact in the contemporary literature and discuss those alternative projects that have yet to be explored based on our suggested typology. We show how choices about each element in a conceptual engineering project constrain the possibilities for the others, thereby giving (...) rise to distinct groupings of possible projects under the banner of conceptual engineering. We conclude with a critical reflection on the potential ethical issues that arise as a result of effectively putting conceptual engineering into practice. (shrink)

The logicality of language is the hypothesis that the language system has access to a ‘natural’ logic that can identify and filter out as unacceptable expressions that have trivial meanings—that is, that are true/false in all possible worlds or situations in which they are defined. This hypothesis helps explain otherwise puzzling patterns concerning the distribution of various functional terms and phrases. Despite its promise, logicality vastly over-generates unacceptability assignments. Most solutions to this problem rest on specific stipulations about the properties (...) of logical form—roughly, the level of linguistic representation which feeds into the interpretation procedures—and have substantial implications for traditional philosophical disputes about the nature of language. Specifically, contextualism and semantic minimalism, construed as competing hypotheses about the nature and degree of context-sensitivity at the level of logical form, suggest different approaches to the over-generation problem. In this paper, I explore the implications of pairing logicality with various forms of contextualism and semantic minimalism. I argue that to adequately solve the over-generation problem, logicality should be implemented in a constrained contextualist framework. (shrink)

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

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

Grammatical theories of Scalar Implicatures make use of an exhaustivity operator exh, which asserts the conjunction of the prejacent with the negation of excludable alternatives. We present a new Grammatical theory of Scalar Implicatures according to which exh is replaced with pex, an operator that contributes its prejacent as asserted content, but the negation of scalar alternatives at a non-at-issue level of meaning. We show that by treating this non-at-issue level as a presupposition, this theory resolves a number of empirical (...) challenges faced by the old formulation of exh (as well as by standard neo-Gricean theories). The empirical challenges include projection of scalar implicatures from certain embedded environments (‘some under some’ sentences, some under negative factives), their restricted distribution under negation, and the existence of common ground-mismatching and oddness-inducing implicatures. We argue that these puzzles have a uniform solution given a pex-based Grammatical theory of implicatures and some independently motivated principles concerning presupposition projection, cancellation and accommodation. (shrink)

Kim Diaz's translation of Guillermo Hurtado's "Retratos de Luis Villoro".

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

Conceptual engineering means to provide a method to assess and improve our concepts working as cognitive devices. But conceptual engineering still lacks an account of what concepts are (as cognitive devices) and of what engineering is (in the case of cognition). And without such prior understanding of its subject matter, or so it is claimed here, conceptual engineering is bound to remain useless, merely operating as a piecemeal approach, with no overall grip on its target domain. The purpose of this (...) programmatic paper is to overcome this knowledge gap by providing some guidelines for developing the theories of concepts and of cognition that will ground the systematic unified framework needed to effectively implement conceptual engineering as a widely applicable method for the cognitive optimization of our conceptual devices. (shrink)

Over the past decade or so, a new interdisciplinary field has emerged in the ground between, on the one hand, computer science – and artificial intelligence in particular – and, on the other, the area of philosophy concentrating on the language and structure of argument. There are now hundreds of researchers worldwide who would consider themselves a part of this nascent community. Various terms have been proposed for the area, including "Computational Dialectics," "Argumentation Technology," and "Argument-based Computing," but the term (...) that has stuck is simply Argument & Computation. It encompasses several specific strands of research, such as: . the use of theories of argument, and dialectic in particular, in the design and implementation of protocols for multi-agent action and communication; . the application of theories of argument and rhetoric in natural language processing and affective computing; . the use of argument-based structures for autonomous reasoning in artificial intelligence, and in particular, for defeasible reasoning; . computer-supported collaborative argumentation – the implementation of software tools for enabling online argument in domains such as education and e-government. These strands come together to form the core of a research field that covers parts of artificial intelligence (AI), philosophy, linguistics, and cognitive science, but, increasingly, is building an identity of its own. (shrink)

Una pandemia ha golpeado a millones de familias en el mundo. Este problema global parecía que cuestionaba todas nuestras formas de vida. No obstante, los malos hábitos y las viejas estructuras corruptas comenzaron a aprovecharse de esta situación. Y la corrupción volvió a la escena, en la sobrevaloración de medicamentos o equipos médicos, en la mala repartición de víveres o de dinero, en el cobro de dinero por ingreso a una unidad de cuidado intensivo, aprovecharse de su posición política para (...) vacunarse antes, etc. ¿Se ha normalizado la corrupción en la vida nacional? (shrink)

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

Conceptual engineering is the method for assessing and improving our concepts. Some have recently claimed that the implementation of such method in the form of ameliorative projects is truth-driven and should thus be epistemically constrained, ultimately at least (Simion 2018; cf. Podosky 2018). This paper challenges that claim on the assumption of a social constructionist analysis of ideologies, and provides an alternative, pragmatic and cognitive framework for determining the legitimacy of ameliorative conceptual projects overall. The upshot is that one should (...) not ameliorate for the sake of truth or knowledge, in the case of ideologies—at least, not primarily. (shrink)

This paper explores various notions of aesthetic affordance recently developed through embodied, situated and enactive approaches to aesthetic experience by Maria Brincker and Shaun Gallagher, and the similarities and differences between them and the idea of affective affordance put forward by Joel Krueger and Giovanna Colombetti. This discussion is a way to try to offer some answers to the question of what aesthetic affordances particularly afford compared to affective affordances. I will focus on the affordances that we perceive during various (...) aesthetic experiences in which we find ourselves more moved by the object, event or person(s) causing the experience than we had anticipated. I will argue that these experiences emerge as opportunities to carry out an active exploration of aspects of the narrative self that we feel is related to features of the experience; and that one particular brain network likely to be involved in these experiences – i.e. the default network – might help us to understand how these experiences meaningfully change our relationship with ourselves and with the social context of which we are a part. (shrink)

This paper is a contribution to graded model theory, in the context of mathematical fuzzy logic. We study characterizations of classes of graded structures in terms of the syntactic form of their first-order axiomatization. We focus on classes given by universal and universal-existential sentences. In particular, we prove two amalgamation results using the technique of diagrams in the setting of structures valued on a finite MTL-algebra, from which analogues of the Łoś–Tarski and the Chang–Łoś–Suszko preservation theorems follow.

For more than 200 years scholars have proceeded on the assumption that there was a controversy (in the sense of an argumentative exchange) between the bishop of Cork and Ross, Peter Browne (c. 1665–1735), and his nowadays more famous contemporary, the bishop of Cloyne, George Berkeley (1685–1753) about what we might call ‘the problem of divine attributes’. This problem concerns one of the most vexing issues for 17th /18th century Irish intellectuals. Simply put, it turns on two interconnected questions, namely (...) (1) an ontological question regarding God’s attributes and (2) a semantical question regarding the proper conception of analogy: -/- (1) Do God’s attributes only differ in degree or also in kind from their human counterparts? -/- (2) Is “analogical attribution” only concerned with the structure or the modus of the attribution? That is, is it a separate mode of speech (apart from the metaphorical and literal) or does it just mean we have to use analogies for our divine attributions? -/- In regard to the first question Berkeley argues the attributes of God and humans only differ in degree but not in kind (Alc. 4.22). Browne, on the other hand, is convinced that human and divine attributes differ in kind: “What Knowledge and Goodness are in the Nature of Man, that some inconceivable but correspondent Perfections are in the Nature of God […] which tho’ totally different in Kind from those Properties in us bearing the same Name” (Procedure, 138). Furthermore, Berkeley rejects the notion that analogical attribution is a separate mode of speech in addition to the literal and the metaphorical. Rather, it is an attribution made in the form of an analogy in which the words can be used literally or metaphorically (Alc. 4.21). By contrast, Browne repeatedly insists analogical attribution is more than just using analogies for attributing something to God. He thinks it is a separate mode of speech that ought to be distinguished from literal and metaphorical language (Procedure, 12, 23–29, 123–46). -/- Hence, there can be no doubt that Browne and Berkeley advance conflicting solutions to the problem of divine attributes. Yet, advancing disagreeing positions is not the same as having a (heated) argumentative exchange, i.e., a controversy. In contrast to the controversy-reading, I will defend the following view: Browne surely felt attacked by Berkeley’s elaborations in Alciphron (1732) and reacted to them in his Divine Analogy (1732/3). However, there was no argumentative exchange because Browne’s Procedure (1728) had virtually no influence on Berkeley when he was writing Alciphron. Furthermore, the available evidence suggests that Berkeley was indifferent to the (elaborate) criticisms of Alciphron found in Browne’s Divine Analogy. Thus, while the two bishops have differing positions and Browne reacted to Berkeley there is no reaction on Berkeley’s part and hence there is no argumentative exchange between the two at all, which is why their differing opinions are best described as such and not as a controversy. (shrink)

This is a short scholarly note about my retrieval an original copy of the Daily Post-Boy issue no. 7024 from September 9th,1732 from a private seller. In this issue we find an anonymous letter addressed to Berkeley which gave rise to him writing the Theory of Vision Vindicated. While Berkeley Berkeley appended a copy of the anonymous critic’s letter to TVV, until now an original copy of The Daily Post-Boy issue had yet to be discovered. -/- I have donated the (...) original copy to the Marsh's Library in Dublin, but you will find a scan of the original document attached to the note. -/- . (shrink)

In the recent literature, it has been argued that Nietzsche’s perspectivism should not be reconstructed as an epistemological position. This article criticizes both this view and interpretations that reduce perspectivism to a theory of knowledge. It claims that “perspectivism” is also an appropriate name for Nietzsche’s meta-ethical position. The paper argues that Nietzsche should be interpreted as an anti-realist and moral skeptic. Its epistemological claim is that Nietzsche perspectivism provides a hermeneutic method that allows the human animal to achieve knowledge (...) and truth about the world. The article distinguishes between a strong metaphysical and a weak hermeneutic version of the correspondence theory of truth. It argues that Nietzsche only rejects the former: the possibility of knowledge about the essence of the world and things-in-themselves. With his perspectival hermeneutic method, Nietzsche mainly aims at knowledge and truth about objects that are human products and phenomena. (shrink)

In Go Set a Watchman, Harper Lee reveals that American man of integrity Atticus Finch harbors deep-seated racist beliefs. Bob Ewell, Finch's nemesis in To Kill a Mockingbird, harbors the same beliefs. But the two men live out their shared racist beliefs in dramatically different fashions. This article argues that extant dispositionalist accounts of belief lack the tools to accommodate Finch and Ewell's divergent styles of believing. It then draws on literary and philosophical character studies to construct the required tools.

One challenge faced by aesthetics is the development of an account able to trace out the continuities and discontinuities between general experience and aesthetic experiences. Regarding this issue, in this paper, I present an enactive model of some raw cognitive dynamics that might drive the progressive emergence of aesthetic experiences from the stream of general experience. The framework is based on specific aspects of John Dewey’s pragmatist philosophy and embodied aesthetic theories, while also taking into account research in ecological psychology, (...) cognitive sciences, and dynamic systems theory. The model focuses on dynamically relevant nodes at the pre-reflective and the reflective side of experience that would work as nested rhythmic constraints at different cognitive timescales with the potential to shunt experiences toward the aesthetic in everyday situations. My proposal constitutes a way to explore aesthetic experiences from an enactive perspective that regards them as transformative events in which cognitive processes entrain and are entrained by changes taking place in the environment, the brain, and the body. (shrink)

En este texto nos proponemos abordar la última clase del semanario de Deleuze sobre el poder en Foucault a partir de dos momentos. El primero tiene que ver con el concepto de imagen y la interpretación sobre el cine que ya venía siendo una constante —aunque marginalmente— en estas clases de Deleuze. Seguidamente, el segundo momento tiene que ver con la relación entre poder y resistencia que arroja como resultado una interpretación del pensamiento de Foucault por parte de Deleuze como (...) una obra viva y en constante construcción. Así, cumpliremos con la exigencia de una lectura que invita a pensar en los conceptos como herramientas de análisis integradas al desarrollo de situaciones donde el poder se presenta como noción central. (shrink)

This book is conceived as an introductory text into the theory of syntactic and semantic information, and information flow.

According to the `grammatical account', scalar implicatures are triggered by a covert exhaustification operator present in logical form. This account covers considerable empirical ground, but there is a peculiar pattern that resists treatment given its usual implementation. The pattern centers on odd assertions like #"Most lions are mammals" and #"Some Italians come from a beautiful country", which seem to trigger implicatures in contexts where the enriched readings conflict with information in the common ground. Magri (2009, 2011) argues that, to account (...) for these cases, the basic grammatical approach has to be supplemented with the stipulations that exhaustification is obligatory and is based on formal computations which are blind to information in the common ground. In this paper, I argue that accounts of oddness should allow for the possibility of felicitous assertions that call for revision of the common ground, including explicit assertions of unusual beliefs such as "Most but not all lions are mammals" and "Some but not all Italians come from Italy". To adequately cover these and similar cases, I propose that Magri's version of the Grammatical account should be refined with the novel hypothesis that exhaustification triggers a bifurcation between presupposed (the negated relevant alternatives) and at-issue (the prejacent) content. The explanation of the full oddness pattern, including cases of felicitous proposals to revise the common ground, follows from the interaction between presupposed and at-issue content with an independently motivated constraint on accommodation. Finally, I argue that treating the exhaustification operator as a presupposition trigger helps solve various independent puzzles faced by extant grammatical accounts, and motivates a substantial revision of standard accounts of the overt exhaustifier "only". (shrink)

Conceptual engineering is the method for assessing and improving our representational devices. On its ‘broad-spectrum’ version, it is expected to be appropriately applicable to any of our representation-involving cognitive activities, with major consequences for our whole cognitive life. This paper is about the theoretical foundations of conceptual engineering thus characterised. With a view to ensuring the actionability of conceptual engineering as a broad-spectrum method, it addresses the issue of how best to construe the subject matter of conceptual engineering and successively (...) defends the theses that conceptual engineering should be: (i) About concepts, (ii) psychologically theorised, (iii) as multiply realised functional kinds. Thereby, I claim to theoretically secure and justify the maximum scope, flexibility, and impact for the method of conceptual engineering on our representational devices in our whole cognitive life—in other words, a broad-spectrum version of conceptual engineering. (shrink)

"El ser es uno con la comida; ser significa comer; es (ist) lo que come (isst) y lo que ha comido. Comer es la forma subjetiva, activa, siendo lo comido la forma objetiva, pasiva, pero ambas son inseparables. Por tanto, únicamente comiendo se llena el concepto vacío del ser y se revela el carácter absurdo de la pregunta: ¿el ser y el no ser son idénticos, es decir, comer y pasar hambre son idénticos?".

Of all the risks we face in life, ranging from unemployment to old age, early death is among the most tragic and yet most neglected by modern states. Liberal egalitarians might find it easy to dismiss social insurance against early death, but I argue they should not. Early in this paper, I explain why social insurance should include the risk of premature death by replying to four common criticisms. What follows is a case for a novel form of insurance that (...) is more liberal and egalitarian across ages than the status quo. More specifically, I show that granting storable pensions in all life stages - youth, middle and old age - promotes liberty and reduces lifetime inequality. Writers on age group and longevity justice often overlook the extent to which liberal lifetime equality can supply insightful arguments against inequality across ages. These call for a policy that gives each age group the freedom to draw a storable pension. I call that policy "freetirement". (shrink)

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

The purpose of this article is to present the main contributions to peace, democracy, and the philosophy of education in Colombia, made by philosopher Guillermo Hoyos-Vásquez (Medellín, 1935 – Bogotá, 2013). The work of this Colombian philosopher stands out for its important contributions to political philosophy as the vital, supportive, and responsible exercise of thought concerning the public interest. Using Kant’s concept of practical reason, Husserl’s lifeworld [Lebenswelt], and Habermas’s communicative action as starting points, Hoyos-Vásquez succeeded in going beyond (...) these political philosophers by trying to apply their ideas in the midst of the difficult context of corruption, drug trafficking and armed conflict in Colombia over the past five decades. At the same time, Hoyos-Vásquez developed throughout his life a varied public activity as a thinker and educator, belying the myth of the theoretical distance between the philosopher and his/her political present or historical reality. The thought of Guillermo Hoyos-Vásquez, and his public action as an educator, represent a substantial contribution to contemporary political and educational philosophy, maintaining a close connection between theory and practice. (shrink)

Resumen: Este artículo trata del método y su relación con la investigación educativa. El objetivo es analizar la relevancia del método en ciencias humanas y sociales, en especial, en educación. Para ello, dividimos este artículo en tres secciones: 1. ¿Hay método? 2. ¿Hay uno o varios métodos? 3. La discusión sobre el método en la investigación educativa. A la primera pregunta, respondemos que hay método. Respondemos a la segunda señalando la necesidad de adoptar un pluralismo metodológico. La tercera sección defiende (...) que las discusiones sobre el método de investigación educativa implican dimensiones ontológicas, epistemológicas y éticas que se han tornado críticas, y se hace una revisión de cada una de ellas. En el apartado conclusivo, sugerimos algunas vías para desanudar esos asuntos críticos en la investigación educativa.: This article deals with method and its relation to educational research. The objective is to analyze the relevance of method in human and social sciences, especially in education. To this end, we divide this article into three sections: 1. Is there a method? 2. Is there one or more methods? 3. The discussion on method in educational research. To the first question, we answer that there is a method. We answer the second question by pointing out the need to adopt methodological pluralism. The third section argues that discussions on the method of educational research involve ontological, epistemological, and ethical dimensions that have become critical, and a review is made of each of them. In the concluding section, we suggest some ways to disentangle these critical issues in educational research. (shrink)

The concepts expressed by social role terms such as artist and scientist are unique in that they seem to allow two independent criteria for categorization, one of which is inherently normative. This study presents and tests an account of the content and structure of the normative dimension of these “dual character concepts.” Experiment 1 suggests that the normative dimension of a social role concept represents the commitment to fulfill the idealized basic function associated with the role. Background information can affect (...) which basic function is associated with each social role. However, Experiment 2 indicates that the normative dimension always represents the relevant commitment as an end in itself. We argue that social role concepts represent the commitments to basic functions because that information is crucial to predict the future social roles and role-dependent behavior of others. (shrink)

Conceptual engineering is commonly characterized as the method for assessing and improving our representational devices. Little has been said, however, on how best to construe these representational devices—in other words, on what conceptual engineering should be all about. This paper tackles this problem with a basic strategy: First, by presenting a taxonomy of the different possible subject matters for conceptual engineering; then, by comparatively assessing them and selecting the most conducive one with a view to making conceptual engineering an actionable (...) method, that is, a method that can be applied effectively and consistently to specific case studies. The outcome is that conceptual engineering should be all about concepts on pain of pragmatic inconsistencies otherwise. (shrink)

We review some results in the theory of non-relativistic quantum unstable systems. We account for the most important definitions of quantum resonances that we identify with unstable quantum systems. Then, we recall the properties and construction of Gamow states as vectors in some extensions of Hilbert spaces, called Rigged Hilbert Spaces. Gamow states account for the purely exponential decaying part of a resonance; the experimental exponential decay for long periods of time physically characterizes a resonance. We briefly discuss one of (...) the most usual models for resonances: the Friedrichs model. Using an algebraic formalism for states and observables, we show that Gamow states cannot be pure states or mixtures from a standard view point. We discuss some additional properties of Gamow states, such as the possibility of obtaining mean values of certain observables on Gamow states. A modification of the time evolution law for the linear space spanned by Gamow shows that some non-commuting observables on this space become commuting for large values of time. We apply Gamow states for a possible explanation of the Loschmidt echo. (shrink)

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

Discussions in social psychology overlook an important way in which biases can be encoded in conceptual representations. Most accounts of implicit bias focus on ‘mere associations’ between features and representations of social groups. While some have argued that some implicit biases must have a richer conceptual structure, they have said little about what this richer structure might be. To address this lacuna, we build on research in philosophy and cognitive science demonstrating that concepts represent dependency relations between features. These relations, (...) in turn, determine the centrality of a feature f for a concept C: roughly, the more features of C depend on f, the more central f is for C. In this paper, we argue that the dependency networks that link features can encode significant biases. To support this claim, we present a series of studies that show how a particular brilliance-gender bias is encoded in the dependency networks which are part of the concepts of female and male academics. We also argue that biases which are encoded in dependency networks have unique implications for social cognition. (shrink)

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

Through modern driver assistant systems, algorithmic decisions already have a significant impact on the behavior of vehicles in everyday traffic. This will become even more prominent in the near future considering the development of autonomous driving functionality. The need to consider ethical principles in the design of such systems is generally acknowledged. However, scope, principles and strategies for their implementations are not yet clear. Most of the current discussions concentrate on situations of unavoidable crashes in which the life of human (...) beings is existentially affected. In this paper, we argue that ethical considerations should be mandatory for any algorithmic decision of autonomous vehicles, instead of a limitation to hazard situations. Such an ethically aligned behavior is relevant because autonomous vehicles, like any other traffic participants, operate in a shared public space, where every behavioral decision impacts the operational possibilities of others. These possibilities concern the fulfillment of a road-user’s safety, utility and comfort needs. We propose that, to operate ethically in such space, an autonomous vehicle will have to take its behavior decisions according to a just distribution of operational possibilities among all traffic participants. Using an application on a partially-autonomous prototype vehicle, we describe how to apply and implement concepts of distributive justice to the driving environment and demonstrate the impact on its behavior in comparison to an advanced but egoistic decision maker. (shrink)

Das Ziel, die Lernenden zu befähigen, als selbstbestimmte und -ermächtigte Bürger*innen am Politischen teilzuhaben, verlangt in einer Mediengesellschaft unter anderem danach, jene Systeme verstehen, kritisieren und gestalten zu können, die politische Information kreieren und verbreiten. Um der Komplexität und den Interdependenzen dieser Systeme gerecht zu werden, ist auf verschiedenste Fachbereiche und deren Zugänge zurückzugreifen. Diese bilden die Grundlage, um Lernende zu befähigen, sich selbstbestimmt und emanzipiert mit den gesellschaftspolitischen Fragen des 21. Jahrhunderts auseinanderzusetzen. Basierend auf den Beiträgen dieses Sammelbandes skizzieren (...) wir grundlegende Aspekte einer Politischen Bildung für die digitale Öffentlichkeit. (shrink)