Argument-mapping software abounds, and one of the reasons is that using the software has been shown to teach/promote/improve critical thinking skills. These positive results are very encouraging, but they also raise the question of whether the computer tutorial environment is producing these results, or whether learning argument mapping, even with just paper and pencil, is sufficient. Based on the results of two empirical studies, I argue that the basic skill of being able to represent an argument diagrammatically plays an important (...) role in the improvement of critical-thinking skills. While these studies do not offer a direct comparison between the two methods, it is important for anyone wishing to employ argument mapping in the classroom to know that significant results can be obtained even with the most rudimentary of tools. (shrink)

In recent years, philosophers have looked to empirical findings about psychopaths to help determine whether moral agency is underwritten by reason, or by some affective capacity, such as empathy. Since one of psychopaths’ most glaring deficits is a lack of empathy, and they are widely considered to be amoral, psychopaths are often taken as a test case for the hypothesis that empathy is necessary for moral agency. However, people with autism also lack empathy, so it is reasonable to think that (...) any empirically-informed attempt to answer the question of whether empathy is necessary for moral agency should give due attention to autism as well as psychopathy. Jeanette Kennett’s thought-provoking paper ‘Autism, Empathy and Moral Agency’ (2002) is an early and arguably the most notable example of such an attempt. Kennett argues that although autistic people and psychopaths both lack empathy, autistic people possess a ‘reverence for reason’ that enables them to become capable moral agents. By contrast, psychopaths lack this rational capacity, and it is this defect of reason rather than an empathic impairment that explains why they are amoral. Kennett thus concludes that empathy is not necessary for moral agency. In this chapter, I challenge Kennett’s argument. First, I review the empirical evidence in order to demonstrate that there is a component of empathy called affective empathy that is impaired in psychopaths but largely preserved in autistics. As such, the claim that psychopaths and autistics share a common lack of empathy is unjustified. Second, I challenge Kennett’s claim that empathy plays no role in explaining the moral difference between psychopaths and autistics. Instead, I contend that the intact affective empathy of autistic people is a crucial component of their capacity to act from reverence for reason. (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)

In this paper, I defend a novel skeptical view about moral disgust. I argue that much recent discussion of moral disgust neglects an important ontological question: is there a distinctive psychological state of moral disgust that is differentiable from generic disgust, and from other psychological states? I investigate the ontological question and propose two conditions that any aspiring account of moral disgust must satisfy: it must be a genuine form of disgust, and it must be genuinely moral. Next, I examine (...) two prominent accounts of moral disgust by John Kekes and Victor Kumar and argue that neither successfully establishes the existence of genuinely moral disgust: Kekes’ account does not satisfy the second condition, and Kumar’s view does not meet the first. I claim that an important general lesson can be drawn from my critiques of Kekes’ and Kumar’s accounts: to establish the existence of moral disgust, one must provide unequivocal evidence that genuinely moral disgust, not generic disgust or anger, is being elicited in response to relevant moral violations. I conclude by considering why we ought to be skeptical about the general prospect of giving a positive answer to the ontological question, given the available evidence. (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?".

This article explores the norms that govern regular users’ acts of sharing content on social networking sites. Many debates on how to counteract misinformation on Social Networking Sites focus on the epistemic norms of testimony, implicitly assuming that the users’ acts of sharing should fall under the same norms as those for posting original content. I challenge this assumption by proposing a non-epistemic interpretation of (mis) information sharing on social networking sites which I construe as infrastructures for forms of life (...) found online. Misinformation sharing belongs more in the realm of rumour spreading and gossiping rather than in the information-giving language games. However, the norms for sharing cannot be fixed in advance, as these emerge at the interaction between the platforms’ explicit rules, local norms established by user practices, and a meta-norm of sociality. This unpredictability does not leave us with a normative void as an important user responsibility still remains, namely that of making the context of the sharing gesture explicit. If users will clarify how their gestures of sharing are meant to be interpreted by others, they will implicitly assume responsibility for possible misunderstandings based on omissions, and the harms of shared misinformation can be diminished. (shrink)

Problem-Based Learning has become an increasingly popular instructional method for a variety of disciplines at all levels. Many studies and meta-analyses of these studies have shown the efficacy of this method for developing knowledge and skills. I adopted this method for teaching Engineering Ethics at Carnegie Mellon University, which has as its main course objectives the development of moral reasoning skills, as well as collaboration and communication skills, with special attention given to ethical dilemmas that may arise in the normal (...) course of an engineer’s professional career. In the most recent iteration of the course, I used the Engineering and Science Issues Test as a pretest and posttest to test the development of my students’ moral reasoning skills over the course of the semester. Based on the results of these tests, I argue that the students in my Engineering Ethics course did in fact significantly develop their moral reasoning skills. (shrink)

In A Better Ape, Victor Kumar and Richmond Campbell (2022) provide an ambitious and compelling history of the evolution of human morality. Informed by evidence from an impressively vast multidisciplinary literature, they offer a rich bio-cultural evolutionary explanation of how the human moral mind arose and developed over time that has wide appeal for philosophers and scientists alike. In this paper, I examine Kumar and Campbell’s novel moral psychology and raise questions about their account of the relationship between moral norms (...) and core moral emotions. I also argue that social essentialist cognition has a place alongside the moral emotions as a key ingredient in Kumar and Campbell’s view of the moral mind as well as in their normative account of how to work towards moral progress. (shrink)

In the age of web 2.0, the university is constantly challenged to re-adapt its ‘old-fashioned’ pedagogies to the new possibilities opened up by digital technologies. This article proposes a rethinking of the relation between university and (digital) technologies by focusing not on how technologies function in the university, but on their constituting a meta-condition for the existence of the university pedagogy of inquiry. Following Ivan Illich’s idea that textual technologies played a crucial role in the inception of the university, we (...) will first show the structural similarities between university thinking and the text as a profanation of the book. Secondly, we describe university thinking as a type of critical thinking based on the materiality of the text-on-the-page, explaining why the text has been at the centre of university pedagogy since the beginning. In the third part, we show how Illich came to see the end of the culture of the text as a challenge for the university, by describing the new features of the text-as-code incompatible with the idea of reading as study. Finally, we challenge this pessimistic reading of Illich’s and end with a call for a profanatory pedagogy of digital technologies that could mirror the revolutionary thinking behind the mediaeval invention of the text. (shrink)

An increasingly popular solution to the anti-scientific climate rising on social media platforms has been the appeal to more critical thinking from the user's side. In this paper, we zoom in on the ideal of critical thinking and unpack it in order to see, specifically, whether it can provide enough epistemic agency so that users endowed with it can break free from enclosed communities on social media (so called epistemic bubbles). We criticise some assumptions embedded in the ideal of critical (...) thinking online and, instead, we propose that a better way to understand the virtuous behaviour at hand is as critical engagement, namely a mutual cultivation of critical skills among the members of an epistemic bubble. This mutual cultivation allows members within an epistemic bubble (in contrast, as we will show, with the authority-based models of epistemic echo chambers) to become more autonomous critical thinkers by cultivating self-trust. We use the model of relational autonomy as well as resources from work on epistemic self-trust and epistemic interdependence to develop an explanatory framework, which in turn may ground rules for identifying and creating virtuous epistemic bubbles within the environments of social media platforms. (shrink)

Una deseada organización social por la cual se erige una teoría filosófica en materia política aparece en Platón como una cuestión de orden moral que tiene en la aprehensión de virtudes su naturaleza. La razón regenta sobre el alma cuya condición desiderativa puede tender a un extravío de la virtud, y por ello nada más contrario al orden de sí mismo que el estar dominado por placeres. No obstante, el placer, pese a su caracterización abyecta como sensación natural del hombre, (...) puntualiza sobre la virtud bajo una adecuada formación en su uso. Por tal razón, y por las muchas funciones que ejerce el placer (ἡδονή) en el corpus platonicum, es necesario atender al sentido que este posee en el proyecto educativo-político de Platón. (shrink)

Das Thema des Artikels sind sprachliche Fehler, die bei der schriftlichen Übersetzung aus dem Deutschen ins Polnische und aus dem Polnischen ins Deutsche Vorkommen. Das Ziel des Artikels ist, ihre Vielschichtigkeit und Entstehungsmechanismen zu zeigen, die vor allem mit der sprachlichen Interferenz als einer der Hauptursachen für Übersetzungsfehler zusammenhän gen. Der Artikel stützt sich auf die Ergebnisse der Untersuchungen, die in den Jahren 2004-2006 in der Abteilung für Angewandte Sprachwissenschaft am Lehrstuhl für Deutsche und Angewandte Sprachwissenschaft der Universität Łódź durchgeführt (...) wurden. Die Basis für das empirische Material bildeten hierbei durch Germanislikstudenten angefertigte schriftliche Übersetzungen. Am Anfang des Artikels werden verschiedene Definitionen und Klassifizierungsmöglichkeiten des sprachlichen Fehlers präsentiert. Desweiteren konzentriert sich der Autor auf das Phänomen der sprachlichen Interferenz und führt ihre Definitionen von W. Bondzio und T. Lewandowski an. Im weiteren Teil des Artikels wird die Frage der Interferenzmechanismen erörtert, zu denen die von J. Czochralski beschriebene Automatisierung der sprachlichen Strukturen, „zwischensprachliche Zuordnung“, „Übertragung des muttersprachlichen Modells“, fehlerhafte Erweiterung des Geltungsbereiches einer Aussage oder die Vermeidung besiimmter Elemente im System der Fremdsprache gehören. Im zweiten Teil des Artikels werden Ergebnisse der Forschungen präsentiert, deren Korpus einige Hunderte von deutsch-polnischen und polnisch-deutschen Übersetzungen waren, die von Studenten gemacht wurden. Die Fehler wurden zunächst nach der Richtung der Interferenz klassifiziert, dann nach den Sprachebenen. Besondere Aufmerksamkeit bei der Fehlerbeschreibung wurde аиГ die möglichen Störungen der sprachlichen Kommunikation gelenkt. Die durchgeführten Untersuchungen untermauern und erweitern die Thesen aus der Fachliteratur: Die Fehler kommen auf verschiedenen Sprachebenen vor und stören in vielen Fällen die sprachliche Kommunikation, deren Herstellung der Hauptzweck einer jeden Übersetzung ist. Der Autor des Artikels postuliert, bei der Übersetzungsdidaktik mehr Aufmerksamkeit der sprachlichen Interferenz zu widmen, was seiner Meinung nach zu besseren Resultaten verhelfen würde. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic has been accompanied on social media by an explosion of information disorders such as inaccurate, misleading and irrelevant information. Countermeasures adopted thus far to curb these informational disorders have had limited success because these did not account for the diversity of informational contexts on social media, focusing instead almost exclusively on curating the factual content of user’s posts. However, content-focused measures do not address the primary causes of the infodemic itself, namely the user’s need to post content (...) as a way of making sense of the situation and for gathering reactions of consensus from friends. This paper describes three types of informational context—weak epistemic, strong normative and strong emotional—which have not yet been taken into account by current measures to curb down the informational disorders. I show how these contexts are related to the infodemic and I propose measures for dealing with them for future global crisis situations. (shrink)

The practice of taking hand-written notes in lectures has been rediscovered recently because of several studies on its learning efficacy in the mainstream media. Students are enjoined to ditch their laptops and return to pen and paper. Such arguments presuppose that notes are taken in order to be revisited after the lecture. Learning is seen to happen only after the event. We argue instead that student’s note-taking is an educational practice worthy in itself as a way to relate to the (...) live event of the lecture. We adopt a phenomenological approach inspired by Vilém Flusser’s phenomenology of gestures, which assumes that a gesture like note-taking is always an event of thinking with media in which a certain freedom is expressed. But Flusser’s description of note-taking focusses on the individual note-taker. What about students’ note-taking in a lecture hall as a collective gesture? Nietzsche considered note-taking ‘mechanical,’ as if students were automatons who mindlessly transcribed a verbal flow, while Benjamin considered it an inaesthetic gesture: at best, boring; at worst, ‘painful to watch.’ In contrast, we argue that the educational potentiality of note-taking—or better, note-making—can be grasped only if we account for its mediaticity (as writing that displaces the voice), together with but distinct from its political potentiality as a collective mediality (as a ‘means without end’). Note-taking enables us to see how collective thinking emerges in the lecture, a kind of thinking that belongs neither to the lecturer nor the student, but emerges in the relation of attention established between the lecturer, students and their object of thought. (shrink)

Convocado inicialmente por los miembros del Semillero de Investigación «Hermenéutica y Padres de la Iglesia» de la Pontificia Universidad Javeriana de Bogotá, el Coloquio Interinstitucional de Estudiantes de Patrología se erige en 2018 como un espacio académico de reflexión sobre el pensamiento de los autores de los primeros siglos de la era cristiana. Hasta el día de hoy, el Coloquio se ha convertido en una importante iniciativa en Colombia para la visibilización de los trabajos de estudiantes que se han destacado (...) en el interés y dedicación por profundizar en torno a los Estudios Patrísticos. (shrink)

Dada la necesidad de formalizar un espacio de reflexión y discusión sobre los problemas y autores correspondientes al período de la antigüedad grecorromana, desde la Universidad Tecnológica de Pereira ingeniaron y materializaron el desarrollo de un foro académico. Con miras a la difusión y acrecentamiento de los estudios sobre el pensamiento grecolatino, se piensa para la región cafetera colombiana un avance importante en cuanto a la propuesta de proyectos y de actividades de talante dialógico a ejemplo de los países latinoamericanos (...) y europeos en que esos estudios poseen mayor alcance. De aquí que, para efectos del fortalecimiento de lo clásico en la academia colombiana, se convoca bianualmente al nominado Foro Internacional de Filosofía Antigua en la ciudad de Pereira. (shrink)

This paper proposes three principles for the ethical design of online social environments aiming to minimise the unintended harms caused by users while interacting online, specifically by enhancing the users’ awareness of the moral load of their interactions. Such principles would need to account for the strong mediation of the digital environment and the particular nature of user interactions: disembodied, asynchronous, and ambiguous intent about the target audience. I argue that, by contrast to face to face interactions, additional factors make (...) it more difficult for users to exercise moral sensitivity in an online environment. An ethics for social media user interactions is ultimately an ethics of human relations mediated by a particular environment; hence I look towards an enactive inspired ethics in formulating principles for human interactions online to enhance or at least do not hinder a user’s moral sensitivity. This enactive take on social media ethics supplements classical moral frameworks by asking us to focus on the relations established through the interactions and the environment created by those interactions. (shrink)

In a companion article, “Terrible Knowledge And Tertiary Trauma, Part I: Japanese Nuclear Trauma And Resistance To The Atomic Bomb” (this issue), I argue that we need to teach about the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, even though the material is difficult emotionally as well as intellectually. Because of the nature of the information, this topic can be as difficult for graduate students (and their professors!) as for younger students. Teaching about the atomic bombings, however, demands special treatment if (...) we are to prevent a sense of isolation, immobilization, or helplessness in students. We can do this by building a strong community of learning, offering students as much control over their learning as possible, and helping them find ways to connect to larger social and political processes and movements that make sense of an endangered world. Here I offer some thoughts on how to teach it, along with discussion questions, applicable to K-graduate school. Since middle-school students are becoming keenly aware of the larger world through the Internet, and middle school teaching can be (comparatively) easy to adapt for other age groups, I also offer some suggestions of some materials and projects appropriate for use with that age group. (shrink)

Technology should be aligned with our values. We make the case that attempts to align emerging technologies with our values should reflect critically on these values. Critical thinking seems like a natural starting point for the critical assessment of our values. However, extant conceptualizations of critical thinking carve out no space for the critical scrutiny of values. We will argue that we need critical thinking that focuses on values instead of taking them as unexamined starting points. In order to play (...) a crucial role in helping to align values and technology, critical thinking needs to be modified and refocused on values. Here, we outline what value-centred critical thinking could look like. (shrink)

In this chapter we argue that emotions are mediated in an incomplete way in online social media because of the heavy reliance on textual messages which fosters a rationalistic bias and an inclination towards less nuanced emotional expressions. This incompleteness can happen either by obscuring emotions, showing less than the original intensity, misinterpreting emotions, or eliciting emotions without feedback and context. Online interactions and deliberations tend to contribute rather than overcome stalemates and informational bubbles, partially due to prevalence of anti-social (...) emotions. It is tempting to see emotions as being the cause of the problem of online verbal aggression and bullying. However, we argue that social media are actually designed in a predominantly rationalistic way, because of the reliance on text-based communication, thereby filtering out social emotions and leaving space for easily expressed antisocial emotions. Based on research on emotions that sees these as key ingredients to moral interaction and deliberation, as well as on research on text-based versus non-verbal communication, we propose a richer understanding of emotions, requiring different designs of online deliberation platforms. We propose that such designs should move from text-centred designs and should find ways to incorporate the complete expression of the full range of human emotions so that these can play a constructive role in online deliberations. (shrink)

We propose four policies of ethical design of human-grade Artificial Intelligence. Two of our policies are precautionary. Given substantial uncertainty both about ethical theory and about the conditions under which AI would have conscious experiences, we should be cautious in our handling of cases where different moral theories or different theories of consciousness would produce very different ethical recommendations. Two of our policies concern respect and freedom. If we design AI that deserves moral consideration equivalent to that of human beings, (...) that AI should be designed with self-respect and with the freedom to explore values other than those we might impose. We are especially concerned about the temptation to create human-grade AI pre-installed with the desire to cheerfully sacrifice itself for its creators’ benefit. (shrink)

El esfuerzo humano por la búsqueda del sentido de la existencia se inscribe en la práctica discursiva que las religiones exhiben no sólo de la situación existencial del hombre sino también de la experiencia de este con lo trascendente. De hecho, un lenguaje que expresa lo trascendente es básicamente intuitivo, sin embargo, la idea de carencia de significado para los contenidos de fe aconteció por boca de filósofos analíticos. De ahí que el presente artículo intente reproducir algunas consideraciones pro et (...) contra de los contenidos de fe por parte de pensadores adscritos a la escuela analítica para luego enfatizar en una necesaria contribución de la filosofía en el tratamiento del lenguaje religioso. (shrink)

Lo que se introduce como metafísica de la luz adherida a una connotación religiosa, resulta ser uno de los temas más dominantes y discutidos durante el período medieval, aunque más exhaustivamente abordado durante el período escolástico, es decir, desde finales del siglo IX hasta mediados del siglo XIV. Sin embargo, las reflexiones sobre la idea de "lux" se iniciaron con el neoplatonismo, más precisamente con el egipcio Plotino, quien abanderó la idea de revitalizar la doctrina de la Academia, que fue (...) fundada por Platón. De hecho, la consideración de la luz se destaca como uno de los elementos que repercutió en la filosofía patrística medieval, estableciendo una base sólida para las formulaciones del dogma cristiano. Teniendo esto en cuenta, el propósito del artículo es introducir algunos significados del concepto de lux, tal como lo desarrolló Plotino. (shrink)

Las críticas que brotan en un medio en que el debate epistemológico parece encabezar los problemas que competen al filosofar, tienen en el negar el sentido de verdad al discurso de índole religiosa la ratificación del estatus de cientificidad. Esta es la apuesta de teóricos inscritos a la tradición analítica surgida en el pasado siglo. No obstante, frente a los discursos neopositivistas y el radical evidencialismo vienen las posiciones de algunos filósofos y teólogos analíticos quienes paralelamente abogaron por la validez (...) y el sentido de lo religioso. (shrink)

Los objetos sensibles y el hombre, que constituyen el mundo sometido a alteración o cambios, poseen una estructura, organización y dinámicas propias por las cuales se intuye la presencia de causas o principios que dotan a ambos de tales atributos. De aquí que el límite y la medida representen condiciones de orden establecidas por el mundo ideal, un orden que actúa como causa de la armonía y la proporción que conforman todo el mundo visible. El orden ontológico y cósmico que (...) aquí se plantea proyecta también disposiciones éticas en el plano antropológico, disposiciones que obedecen a un intento explicativo de la realidad en su totalidad y que en el presente texto se intentan dilucidar. (shrink)

Adentrarse en el pensamiento político de la Grecia clásica es retornar a las acepciones éticas proferidas por los filósofos de ese momento, como, en este caso, de Platón y de su discípulo Aristóteles, cuyos intereses por la comprensión racional de la conducta humana no eran más que una diáfana preocupación por la consecución del bienestar de los individuos al interior de las ciudades griegas, donde se consideraba de gran importancia la formación de ideas, instituciones y asociaciones. En efecto, los vínculos (...) sociales y la configuración de actitudes que decantan en el objetivo del bienestar social implican una atención especial al concepto de ética-política, en tanto que la incorporación de acciones regidas por la razón determina las relaciones entre los individuos de una misma nación. Teniendo esto en cuenta, en el presente artículo se expone la acepción aristotélica de justicia, con el objetivo de precisar la importancia de dicha virtud en el nexo ético-político de la Grecia clásica, periodo al que asistió el mismo Aristóteles. (shrink)

The practice of taking hand-written notes in lectures has been rediscovered recently because of several studies on its learning efficacy in the mainstream media. Students are enjoined to ditch their laptops and return to pen and paper. Such arguments presuppose that notes are taken in order to be revisited after the lecture. Learning is seen to happen only after the event. We argue instead that student’s note-taking is an educational practice worthy in itself as a way to relate to the (...) live event of the lecture. We adopt a phenomenological approach inspired by Vilém Flusser’s phenomenology of gestures, which assumes that a gesture like note-taking is always an event of thinking with media in which a certain freedom is expressed. But Flusser’s description of note-taking focusses on the individual note-taker. What about students’ note-taking in a lecture hall as a collective gesture? Nietzsche considered note-taking ‘mechanical,’ as if students were automatons who mindlessly transcribed a verbal flow, while Benjamin considered it an inaesthetic gesture: at best, boring; at worst, ‘painful to watch.’ In contrast, we argue that the educational potentiality of note-taking—or better, note-making—can be grasped only if we account for its mediaticity (as writing that displaces the voice), together with but distinct from its political potentiality as a collective mediality (as a ‘means without end’). Note-taking enables us to see how collective thinking emerges in the lecture, a kind of thinking that belongs neither to the lecturer nor the student, but emerges in the relation of attention established between the lecturer, students and their object of thought. (shrink)

This paper proposes a conceptual framework for evaluating how social networking platforms fare as epistemic environments for human users. I begin by proposing a situated concept of epistemic agency as fundamental for evaluating epistemic environments. Next, I show that algorithmic personalisation of information makes social networking platforms problematic for users’ epistemic agency because these platforms do not allow users to adapt their behaviour sufficiently. Using the tracing principle inspired by the ethics of self-driving cars, I operationalise it here and identify (...) three requirements that automated epistemic environments need to fulfil: (a) the users need to be afforded a range of skilled actions; (b) users need to be sensitive to the possibility to use their skills; (c) the habits built when adapting to the platform should not undermine the user’s pre-existing skills. I then argue that these requirements are almost impossible to fulfil all at the same time on current SN platforms; yet nevertheless, we need to pay attention to these whenever we evaluate an epistemic environment with automatic features. Finally, as an illustration, I show how Twitter, a popular social networking platform, will fare regarding these requirements. (shrink)

The present paper is an attempt at examining the value configuration and the socio-demographical profiles of the local political elites in four countries of East-Central Europe: Romania, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, and Poland. The treatment is a comparative one, predominantly descriptive and exploratory, and employs, as a research method, the case-study, being a quite circumscribed endeavor. The cases focus on the members of the Municipal/Local Council in four towns similar in terms of demography and developmental strategies (i.e. small-to-medium sized communities (...) of around 35,000 inhabitants, with economies largely based on food industry and commercial activities): Tecuci (Galați county, Romania), Česká Lípa (Liberec region, Czech Republic), Targovishte (Targovishte province, Bulgaria), and Oleśnica (Lower Silesia province, Poland). Hypothesizing that the local elites of the former Sovietized Erurope tend to differ in outlook, priorities, and value attainment, as compared to their Western counterparts, the paper considers the former’s attitudes and perspectives in regard to seven values: a series of values customarily connected with the concept of ‘democracy’ (i.e. citizen participation, political conflict, gradual change, economic equality), state intervention in economy, decentralization and increased local autonomy, cultural-geographical self-identification. The study uses, as well, five models of value attainment in what concerns the ‘ideal portrait’ of the local councilor (Putnam 1976): ethical, pragmatic, technocratic, political, and gender. According to the results of a study applying a standard written questionnaire among the local councilors of the three communities in the period December 2010-February 2013, the paper distinguishes among three corresponding types of local elites: (1) ‘predominantly elitistic,’ (2) ‘democratic elitist,’ and (3) ‘predominantly democratic,’ following two types of explanation accounting for the differences among the four cases: the legacy of the defunct regime and the degree of administrative decentralization. (shrink)

La sociedad católica de la vigésima centuria, en su propósito de ilustrar el alcance de la filosofía en la doctrina revelada, aboga por una injerencia del corpus clásico griego en la fe. Este es un problema que tuvo grandes repercusiones en cuanto a sostener la existencia de una philosophia christiana, tesis esta que emerge de la clásica cuestión de la relación fides et ratio. De manera que, el presente artículo, expone las razones que llevaron a los pensadores cristianos de antaño (...) al uso de ideas filosóficas y algunos ejemplos que refieren la situación. (shrink)

The main research question that this paper aims to answer is: ‘In what does today’s attack on humanities consist and how can humanities be defended?’ In order to answer this research question, one needs first to describe how the humanities have argued for their usefulness before the Bologna Process; second, provide reasons for the claim that the Bologna Process would be a new type of attack; and third, analyse the new defences for the humanities, so as to discuss whether these (...) are suitable. The main finding of this study was to show that, before deciding what type of education society needs, we need to understand who we are educating through our universities. Taking a stance on “who should we educate?” is prior to being able to judge educational policies. This decision requires a previous justification that requires arguments taken from the field of social justice: Who needs to be educated and who has the right to be educated? Furthermore, we have seen that all answers we have examined to the question underlying educational policies, i.e. ‘who is being educated?’, were linked at some level with the citizenship issue. By defining who is a full citizen, an answer to the question who had the right to a humanistic education was implicitly answered. Nussbaum’s project to universalise the definition of democratic citizenship would ensure a basis for providing humanistic education for all. Such a line of arguing would provide humanities to the well-regarded status they had starting from the Renaissance times, but this time not as a device for exclusion, but inclusion for all. We have tried to show that, by defending the humanities, one defends the idea of a plurality of educational purposes, the right to build one’s life based on an education that is not submitted to the political goals of the day, ultimately the right to have a dissenting voice and a different perspective on life. By defending humanities, one defends the true ‘usefulness’ of education, namely its potential for constructing democratic citizenship for all. (shrink)

La doctrina sugerida por el filósofo de Samos, al menos en lo que respecta al placer como fin de la vida dichosa, informa de ciertos rasgos teóricos los cuales convergen en una finalidad: la defensa de la vida feliz que, en sentido omnímodo, recoge variados aspectos de la existencia (material y anímica), siendo preeminente el propósito de un filosofar que busca de la salud del cuerpo y la imperturbabilidad del alma. Para ello, un conocimiento de la realidad de lo provechoso (...) y perjudicial, un bien que se limita a la experiencia del no sufrir en el cuerpo ni en el alma, tiene en la autosuficiencia del ser humano su criterio de adquisición; autosuficiencia que se logra en el reproche a la viciada participación en ciertas actividades de la πόλις y de sus instituciones, el desarraigo de aquellas riquezas y honores excesivos, además de las falsas creencias en los dioses. Todo esto integra lo que puede llamarse los tópicos éticos esenciales de una filosofía epicúrea. (shrink)

Con el presente libro se da razón del resultado investigativo y colaborativo que se realizó entre dos universidades chilenas, la Universidad Finis Terrae y la Universidad Alberto Hurtado, con cuatro universidades colombianas: la Universidad de La Salle (sede Bogotá), la Universidad Católica de Oriente, la Universidad Mariana de Pasto y la Universidad Católica de Pereira, en torno a la reflexión pedagógica y disciplinar que atañe a la educación religiosa escolar en ambos países. Esas disertaciones posibilitaron avanzar en la investigación y (...) hoy se reúnen en este texto, Intuiciones para el cultivo de la inteligencia espiritual en la Educación Religiosa Escolar desde la perspectiva de la libertad religiosa y de cultos. (shrink)

El humanismo cristiano constituye un permanente debate desde que el cristianismo entra en diálogo con la cultura y la filosofía en los primeros siglos, cuando recién formadas las primeras comunidades adherentes a la predicación de los apóstoles y, por tanto, anuentes al Evangelio de Jesucristo, surgen en ellas las primeras inquietudes de corte no solo religioso y teológico sino también filosófico, ético y antropológico, que tocan la esencia misma de esa religión a la cual muchos acaban de ingresar por la (...) vía de la conversión. (shrink)

Lecturing is the only educational form inherited from the universities of the middle ages that is still in use today. However, it seems that lecturing is under threat, as recent calls to do away with lecturing in favour of more dynamic settings, such as the flipped classroom or pre-recorded talks, have found many adherents. In line with the post-critical approach of this book, this chapter argues that there is something in the university lecture that needs to be affirmed: at its (...) best, the university lecture functions as a technique for thinking together or for making collective thinking happen in a lecture hall. The lecture offers the set-up, both technological and architectural, to forge a common experience that binds together the listeners and the speakers; that experience can be characterised as visualising ideas or seeing things as if they had taken on a ‘bodily form’. By looking at several examples of lecturing moments experienced by Gadamer as a student and later recounted in his autobiography, we can better understand the paradigmatic experience that characterises the lecture – as an ideal to be sought, even if, perhaps, not always actualised in everyday lectures. (shrink)

Aunque no puede hablarse en sentido estricto de una teoría moral del existencialismo a la manera de los grandes sistemas y modelos éticos de occidente, sí existen muchos argumentos que respaldan una versión en la cual es discutida la moral tradicional en contraposición a la posibilidad de una moral de la situación apoyada por las tesis más importantes de los existencialistas. Simone de Beauvoir ha elaborado un conjunto de textos donde esta posibilidad es expuesta.

Esta reflexión plantea el problema que se da al querer dar cuenta del individuo, como existencia, de manera sistemática en el terreno de las tendencias lógicas de la ética. Sören Kierkegaard, será la guía para plantear que tal pretensión es dañina y se presenta como la imposibilidad para la afirmación de la subjetividad como vitalidad abierta siempre a las posibilidades que ofrece la condición humana. Para el desarrollo de este planteamiento trataremos de confrontar algunos planteamientos de Kierkegaard -sobre todo el (...) de la irreductibilidad de la existencia a sistema- con la eticidad hegeliana en particular, para mostrar cómo se revienta el postulado de un sistema de la existencia. Este reventarse se debe entender no como destrucción de lo dado sino como enfrentamiento de ello y conducción hasta sus últimas consecuencias donde se hace manifiesta la imposibilidad de encerrar la existencia en la estrecha posición de la ética como ciencia normativa, es decir como imperativo de comportamiento y direccionamiento moral de la subjetividad por los carriles del pensamiento que absorbe al ser y que postula a la razón como la directriz de todo proyecto vital. (shrink)

Convocada por diferentes estudiosos de los Padres de la Iglesia y del cristianismo antiguo en Latinoamérica, a saber, los profesores Ana Cristina Villa Betancourt, Andrés Mauricio Quevedo Rodríguez y Estiven Valencia Marín, de Colombia; Alejandro Nicola y Francisco Basttita-Harriet, de Argentina; Bruno Gripp, de Brasil; Pamela Chávez Aguilar, de Chile; y Jesús Ma. Aguiñaga Fernández, de México.

El cambio a la educación en línea que se produjo durante la pandemia del coronavirus puso en primer plano las preguntas sobre el valor y la conveniencia de una universidad totalmente en línea. Este artículo explora hasta qué punto es deseable una universidad totalmente en línea desde una perspectiva educativa, en la que la educación se considera una experiencia valiosa tomada en sí misma, independientemente de su resultado. Parto de la hipótesis de que una dimensión fundamental de las prácticas de (...) estudio en la universidad es la experiencia del pensamiento colectivo desencadenado por acuerdos materiales y sociales específicos. Procedo a describir las condiciones materiales para desencadenar el pensamiento en términos de lo que llamo desplazamiento mediático, que es una forma de integrar los medios en las prácticas educativas que permite un tipo de atención fluctuante. El artículo concluye argumentando que necesitamos desarrollar nuevas tecnologías para la educación en línea y entrenar nuestra atención deliberadamente para los entornos en línea estableciendo nuevos protocolos para tratar la dispersión digital de la atención. (shrink)

This article aims to develop the outline of a possible philosophy of the digital, as a proper philosophy with its own domain, questions, methods and own theories. The article starts by describing the crisis of liniar thinking undersood, following Vilém Flusser, as as a crisis of historical-causal thinking. Then the digital thinking is described as a new way of thinking which aims to become the dominant way of scientific explanation of our times, by replacing historical-causal explanations with numerical models. The (...) proper domain of a philosophy of the digital is then defined as the digital-life form. The article ends by showing an example of a specific problem for the philosophy of the digital, namley the automatisation of human life. (shrink)

Algunos elementos de la filosofía platónica establecidos en tratados apologéticos de muchos escritores cristianos entre los cuales se encuentra el ateniense Atenágoras y su conocida obra πρεσβεία περὶ χριστιανῶν, cuya versión del helenista y teólogo español Daniel Ruiz será el objeto de estudio en el presente texto, demuestran un especial interés por la exposición de la cosmología. Si bien esta temática hace las veces de un intento por demostrar racionalmente la trascendencia de lo divino y la seguida generación del universo (...) por causa del designio y poder de Dios, no se trata de una exposición meticulosa de las ideas de filósofos que el mismo Atenágoras cita sino más bien de una exégesis cristiana acerca de Platón en la que pareciese que incurrieran tales escritores, al menos por ser este uno de los autores que abogan por la filosofía griega, para realizar una reflexión profunda sobre la fe. (shrink)

Un especial interés por los problemas vitales del ser humano llevó a Epicuro a distanciarse de las simples teorizaciones y consagrarse a pensar máximas por las que el hombre podría hacerse con las causas y objetos del bienestar. Epicuro asume el cuerpo y la vida sensible como principios de un bienestar que descansa en las afecciones (πάθη), si bien estas son efectos de los estímulos del ambiente que le preceden, además de ser la fuente de las actitudes de aceptación o (...) de rechazo que determinan las acciones humanas. Cierto es que esta perspectiva sensualista describe la εὐδαιμονία como simple satisfacción de deseos y de necesidades cotidianas, pero se hace manifiesto que, en ocasiones, al no coincidir los deseos con el noble interés del bienestar contradicen este fin buscado. Dicho esto, el tema que se expone en el presente texto es la pregunta por los argumentos que validaron el cuerpo y sus sentidos para conocer el mundo y actuar según lo percibido, frente a algunas de las críticas escépticas y plutarqueas. (shrink)

La búsqueda de lo divino, que aparece en el cristianismo como un asunto espiritual, perfila ser tema de importancia para una mística agustiniana que tiene referencias a la figura de Dios, esto es, expresiones que intentan describir la naturaleza divina. Así pues, el santo de Hipona, a través de términos como luz y verdad, presenta los rasgos de un Dios que parece mostrarse tal como es, pero para alcanzar una visión tan inefable, es necesario el deseo de esta; una búsqueda (...) de Dios que, traducida en amor, es un proceso de ascenso a la verdad de lo divino permeado por ese intenso deseo de ello. De manera que un deseo de Dios posiblemente connota una erótica entendida como amor vehemente; el cual, para interés del presente artículo, puede resignificar la noción común de erótica y de sexualidad inherentes al carácter relacional del ser humano, a veces visto con sospecha. (shrink)

El conocimiento ha incursionado como tema de gran alcance dadas las múltiples disciplinas que lo evocan y cuyos intereses investigativos incurren en una definición para este. Primeras cavilaciones acerca del conocimiento se adelantaron bajo una óptica dualista de materialismo e idealismo, ambas posturas de carácter filosófico que determinaron el pensar de Occidente. Dicho así, desde la Grecia clásica pensadores como Platón, entre otros clásicos, entronizaron esta cuestión, pero dicho trato dualista en el ámbito del saber estuvo fuertemente vinculado con una (...) reflexión de talante ético del que Platón no se eximió. Con lo dicho, el presente artículo busca describir los postulados gnoseológicos y éticos en Platón con el fin de esclarecer el nexo entre conocimiento y práctica humana. (shrink)