In this paper, we argue that there are epistemic norms on evidence-gathering and consider consequences for how to understand epistemic normativity. Though the view that there are such norms seems intuitive, it has found surprisingly little defense. Rather, many philosophers have argued that norms on evidence-gathering can only be practical or moral. On a prominent evidentialist version of this position, epistemic norms only apply to responding to the evidence one already has. Here we challenge the orthodoxy. First, we argue that (...) there is no significant normative difference between responding to evidence you have and gathering more evidence. Second, we argue that our practices of epistemically criticizing agents for their poor evidence-gathering indicate the existence of epistemic norms on evidence-gathering. Finally, we show that our thesis has important implications for recent debates about the relationship between epistemic norms and inquiry. (shrink)

Delusions are deeply evidence-resistant. Patients with delusions are unmoved by evidence that is in direct conflict with the delusion, often responding to such evidence by offering obvious, and strange, confabulations. As a consequence, the standard view is that delusions are not evidence-responsive. This claim has been used as a key argumentative wedge in debates on the nature of delusions. Some have taken delusions to be beliefs and argued that this implies that belief is not constitutively evidence-responsive. Others hold fixed the (...) evidenceresponsiveness of belief and take this to show that delusions cannot be beliefs. Against this common assumption, I appeal to a large range of empirical evidence to argue that delusions are evidence-responsive in the sense that subjects have the capacity to respond to evidence on their delusion in rationally permissible ways. The extreme evidence-resistance of delusions is a consequence of powerful masking factors on these capacities, such as strange perceptual experiences, motivational factors, and cognitive biases. This view makes room for holding both that belief is constitutively evidence-responsive and that delusions are beliefs, and it has important implications for the study and treatment of delusions. (shrink)

This article comprises an up-to-date critical review of the field known as Economic Methodology or Philosophy of Economics (EM/PE). Two edited volumes (Kincaid and Ross 2021; Heilmann and Reiss 2021), a special issue of the Journal of Economic Methodology (2021), and a recent bibliometric analysis of the field (Claveau et al. 2021) constitute the basis of the review. Drawing on these sources, we identify a number of problematic trends in current EM/PE research. We claim that these trends could be interpreted (...) as two kinds of biases, namely a micro-level bias and a mainstream bias. We discuss the respective details of these biases and their normative implications for the discipline. (shrink)

Beliefs can be resistant to evidence. Nonetheless, the orthodox view in epistemology analyzes beliefs as evidence-responsive attitudes. I address this tension by deploying analytical tools on capacities and masking to show that the cognitive science of evidence-resistance supports rather than undermines the orthodox view. In doing so, I argue for the claim that belief requires the capacity for evidence-responsiveness. More precisely, if a subject believes that p, then they have the capacity to rationally respond to evidence bearing on p. Because (...) capacities for evidence-responsiveness are fallible and may be masked, beliefs can be held in the face of counter-evidence. Indeed, I will argue that our best science of belief supports the claim that evidence-resistant beliefs result from masks on evidence-responsiveness capacities. This account of belief not only allows for resistance to evidence, but provides us with a framework for describing and explaining actual cases of evidence-resistance. (shrink)

The orthodox view in epistemology is that belief is constitutively evidence-responsive. I offer a novel argument for a version of this view, one that appeals to capacities to rationally respond to evidence. I do so by developing the Sellarsian idea that the concept of belief functions to mark the space of reasons in a non-intellectualist and naturalistic direction. The resulting view does justice to the role of belief in social interactions, joint deliberation, and rational persuasion, while including evidence-resistant beliefs and (...) animal beliefs as genuine beliefs. It has a range of further benefits: it helps us account for epistemic normativity, paves the way for better psychological models of belief revision, distinguishes beliefs from imaginings and mere acceptances, and helps us avoid noxious simplistic takes on human irrationality. (shrink)

Epistemic agents interact with evidence in different ways. This can cause trouble for mutual understanding and for our ability to rationally engage with others. Indeed, it can compromise democratic practices of deliberation. This paper explains these differences by appeal to a new notion: epistemic styles. Epistemic styles are ways of interacting with evidence that express unified sets of epistemic values, preferences, goals, and interests. The paper introduces the notion of epistemic styles and develops a systematic account of their nature. It (...) then discusses the implications of epistemic styles for central questions in epistemology, in particular, for issues surrounding rational engagement and for the debate between virtue epistemologists and epistemic situationists. (shrink)

Interest in the nature of religious and mystical experiences (henceforth RMEs) is old. Recently, this interest has shifted toward understanding the relationship between brain function and RMEs. In the first section, I introduce neurocognitive data from three experiments that strongly correlate the report of religious mystical experiences with specific neural activity. Although correlations cannot be considered as “absolute” proof, strong correlations provide us with inductive grounds for justifying the belief or nonbelief of some proposition. These data suggest that the human (...) brain plays a key role in having an RME and will provide support for the claim that our explanations for phenomena should be located in the natural world. In the next section, I explore the meaning of an RME from a Jamesian perspective and discuss the use of RMEs and the apparent design of the world as proof for God’s existence. My point is to show that the whole enterprise of using phenomena “that only God could have brought about” as the proof for God’s existence is inherently question begging and so is no proof that God exists. In the third section, I lay out in detail my assumptions for my main argument in the final section. There, I argue that belief in the supernatural is not justifiable given the data we have from contemporary science and basic rules of reasoning. (shrink)

Commentary on Pablo Hubacher Haerle’s paper “Is OCD Epistemically Irrational?”. I argue for expanding our assessment of rationality in OCD by considering a wider range of epistemic parameters and how they fit together.

Delusions are standardly defined as attitudes that are not amenable to change in light of conflicting evidence. But what evidence do people with delusion have for and against it? Do delusions really go against their total evidence? How are the answers affected by different conceptions of evidence? -/- This chapter focuses on how delusions relate to evidence. I consider what delusions-relevant evidence people with delusions have. I give some reasons to think that people typically have evidence for their delusions, and (...) that the evidence they have against them is often overstated. I draw on this discussion to consider whether delusions are evidentially supported and epistemically rational. Finally, I discuss implications for the nature of delusion, responsibility, and treatment and suggest directions for future research. Throughout, the discussion is sensitive to different conceptions of evidence and rationality in epistemology. -/- A central upshot is that what we should say about the epistemic standing of delusions depends substantively on our positions in epistemology, in particular, on the debate between internalists and externalists about evidence. If we want clarity on the epistemic standing of delusions, we need to incorporate more sophisticated tools from epistemology. (shrink)

This study determined the relationship between triarchic intelligences and engagement as factors in mathematics achievement of 1148 Grade 10 students in the Division of Davao del Norte, Philippines. It also investigated the relationship among the variables utilizing a descriptive-correlational and causal-comparative research design. Modified survey questionnaires were used for triarchic intelligence and engagement scales which were validated by the panel of experts. Standardized Division Unified Test was used to measure the mathematics achievement. Mean and Pearson product moment coefficient correlation were (...) used to determine the proficiency level and the relationship between the variables while multiple linear regression was also used to derive the value and identify the predictor variable. The findings of the study showed that students did not meet the expectations on mathematics achievement; triarchic intelligences and engagement were at moderate level. Among the six indicators, only behavioral engagement was the predictor of the achievement. This indicates that the mathematics achievement of the students is best anchored on engagement. Thus, the result suggests that the more engaged the students are, the better and higher the achievement in mathematics. (shrink)

There are many possible definitions of “technology” and I will discuss some of these in this book. However, in this introduction let me use a definition of Svante Lindqvist who defines technology very intuitively as “those activities, directed towards the satisfaction of human wants, which produce change in the material world.” He says also “the distinction between human “wants” and more limited human “needs” is crucial, for we do not use technology only to satisfy our essential material requirements.” Consequently, from (...) this perspective, a technology that is “broken” could be defined as those activities, directed towards the satisfaction of human wants that are intended to produce changes in the material world that either do not manage to satisfy these wants or do not produce changes in the material world, or both. This is the third edition, updated October 2015. (shrink)

Se presenta una visión de la epistemología como lógica del pensar y se la lleva a una elaboración de la práctica clínica como una lógica del padecimiento psíquico. Esto basado en los planteamientos de Deleuze y Guattari. Para ello se toma como punto de partida la noción de los movimientos aberrantes que, leyendo la obra de Deleuze, elaboró David Lapoujade entendiéndolos como movimientos que se producen en la relación entre distintos términos heterogéneos, pero manteniendo su heterogeneidad. Esto es vinculado con (...) la invitación que hace el mismo Lapoujade a entender la obra deleuzeana como el desarrollo de lógicas irracionales, intentando pensar desde ahí una lógica de la locura y del padecimiento mental con base en, a su vez, una lógica de las obras literarias de Proust y Kafka, tal como las leen los mismos Deleuze y Guattari. En relación con ello destacamos, por un lado, cierta lógica de conjuntos abiertos y no totalizables que estos últimos autores encuentran en la obra de Proust y, por otro lado, una lógica de la contigüidad que encuentran en la obra de Kafka. Al mismo tiempo, se establecen puntos en común entre estas dos lecturas a propósito de lo esquizoide como algo que excede a la significación del discurso, así como a la normatividad de la conducta. Asimismo, en distintos puntos del escrito se extraerán las implicaciones que estos modos de pensar tienen para una práctica clínica en relación con modos de existencia subjetivos que se escapan a lo que está establecido en el campo social. De esa manera, ponemos en conjunción una aproximación epistemológica con una política. (shrink)

The 20th Century is the starting point for the most ambitious attempts to extrapolate human life into artificial systems. Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics, Claude Shannon’s Information Theory, John von Neumann’s Cellular Automata, Universal Constructor to the Turing Test, Artificial Intelligence to Maturana and Varela’s Autopoietic Organization, all shared the goal of understanding in what sense humans resemble a machine. This scientific and technological movement has embraced all disciplines without exceptions, not only mathematics and physics but also biology, sociology, psychology, economics etc. (...) New terms were developed, such as “information”, “organization”, “entropy”, “communication”, “encryption”, “computation” and “algorithmics” to mention a few, all which had an enormous impact on artificial systems. Our work follows this historical track but with a reversed order of priorities. Instead of deducing a reduced group of human acts into an artificial environment, we deduce the human aspects of machines by extrapolating algorithmic methodologies into everyday life acts. The present informational theories were insufficiently powered to achieve this objective without developing a new theoretical approach. Hence, our research is directed towards an expansion of the current informational theories. (shrink)

The widely accepted “continuing bonds” model of grief tells us that rather than bereavement necessitating the cessation of one’s relationship with the deceased, very often the relationship continues instead in an adapted form. However, this framework appears to conflict with philosophical approaches that treat reciprocity or mutuality of some form as central to loving relationships. Seemingly the dead cannot be active participants, rendering it puzzling how we should understand claims about continued relationships with them. In this article, we resolve this (...) tension by highlighting two fundamental aspects of paradigmatic loving relationships that can, and often do, continue in an adapted form following bereavement: love and mutual shaping of interests, choices, and self-concepts. Attention to these continuing features of relationships helps to capture and clarify the phenomenological and behavioral features of continuing bonds. However, love and mutual shaping must also change in important ways following bereavement. Love becomes unreciprocated, and although the dead continue to shape our interests, choices, and self-concepts, we predominantly shape their legacies and memories in return. These changes place important constraints upon the nature of our interpersonal connections with the dead. (shrink)

Building Information Modelling (BIM) is a process for managing construction project information in such a way as to provide a basis for enhanced decision-making and for collaboration in a construction supply chain. One impediment to the uptake of BIM is the limited interoperability of different BIM systems. To overcome this problem, a set of Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) has been proposed as a standard for the construction industry. Building on IFC, the ifcOWL ontology was developed in order to facilitate representation (...) of building data in a consistent fashion across the Web by using the Web Ontology Language (OWL). This study presents a critical analysis of the ifcOWL ontology and of the associated interoperability issues. It shows how these issues can be resolved by using Basic Formal Ontology (ISO/IEC 21838-2) as top-level architecture. A set of competency questions is used as the basis for comparison of the original ifcOWL with the enhanced ontology, and the latter is used to align with a second ontology – the ontology for building intelligent environments (DOGONT) – in order to demonstrate the added value derived from BFO by showing how querying the enhanced ifcOWL yields useful additional information. (shrink)

People who experience love often experience break-ups as well. However, philosophers of love have paid little attention to the phenomenon. Here, I address that gap by looking at the grieving process which follows unchosen relationship terminations. I ask which one is the loss that, if it were to be recovered, would stop grief or make it unwarranted. Is it the beloved, the reciprocation of love, the relationship, or all of it? By answering this question I not only provide with an (...) insight on the nature of break-ups, but also make a specific claim about the nature of love. I argue that the object that is universally lost in all break-ups is a person with certain intrinsic qualities, who is in a relationship characterised by certain shared activities and recognized as romantic. That means that, at least in romantic terminations, the beloved and the relationship are not independent objects of grief. So, plausibly, they may not independent objects of value in love. Hence, those who state otherwise should face up to this objection coming from the study of break-ups. (shrink)

This book is the result of a collective research effort performed during many years in both Sweden and Spain. It is the result of attempting to develop a new field of research that could we denominate «human act informatics.» The goal has been to use the technologies of information to the study of the human act in general, including embodied acts and disembodied acts. The book presents a theory of the quantification of the informational value of human acts as order, (...) opposing the living order against entropy. We present acting as a set of decisions and choices aimed to create order and to impose Modernity. Karl Popper’s frequency theory of probability is applied to characterize human acts regarding their degree of freedom and to set up a scale of order in human decisions. The traditional theory of economics and social science characterize the human act as rational, utilitarian and ethical. Our results emphasize that the unique significance of an act lies in its capacity to generate order. An adequate methodology is then presented to defend such hypothesis according to which, the rationality respective irrationality of acting, is in fact only a function of the act’s organizational capacity. From this perspective, it has been necessary to define «order» respective «disorder» as operative concepts that allowed the comparison of the organizational differences generated by each kind of act. According to the presented conclusions, the spontaneity of living, as unconscious thinking, dreaming, loving, etc. and the mainstream of the human acts, are utilitarian, but in an irrational way; they are rooted in unconscious drifts and therefore must be considered irrational-utility acts. (shrink)

Desde la conquista española ha existido una dicotomía constante en la identidad peruana, la cual se refleja en el arte y especialmente en la literatura. Es en ella en la que existe un personaje que representa en sus obras de manera magistral los encuentros y desencuentros generados por la interacción constante de esos dos hemisferios culturales presentes en la peruanidad. Es José María Arguedas, quien no solamente retrata dicha realidad, sino que a través del indigenismo logra representar y revalorizar la (...) figura del indio y por consiguiente de lo andino, todo en el marco de la problemática constante que aqueja la búsqueda de lo que consiste ser peruano. Tomando como referencia tres importantes obras de su producción intelectual como son: “Los ríos profundos”, “El Sexto” y “El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo”. (shrink)

The Golden Rule is (roughly) as follows: treat others as you would have others treat you. Philosophical reactions to it vary; it has both supporters and detractors. In any case, almost nobody who things critically about morality takes the literal version of the Golden Rule seriously, since there are just too many problems with it. To demonstrate this, I will look at a literal version of the Golden Rule espoused by John C. Maxwell, a well-known and influential motivational speaker, and (...) briefly discuss some of the obvious problems that it faces. I will then examine a more sophisticated version of the Golden Rule espoused by philosopher Harry Gensler. While able to overcome some of the problems of the literal Golden Rule, Gensler's version nevertheless shares a common difficulty with it: in both cases, the moral agent is asked to imagine themselves in the place of another. Maxwell things this is easily done, and Gensler asks for vividness and accuracy in this act of imagination. I wish to show that any version of the Golden Rule that takes seriously the need to imagine oneself in the place of another is to ask one to do the impossible, so any versions of the Golden Rule that require this should be rejected. (shrink)

The reception of the translations of Aristotelian and pseudo-Aristotelian works at the University of Paris in the thirteenth century promoted a new understanding of the sciences as specialized fields of knowledge. The huge amount of translations required a new organization of knowledge, which included novel subjects and categories. Among these there is a very special case, namely the pseudo-Aristotelian De plantis, translated from Arabic into Latin and then back into Greek to be re-translated into Latin again. De plantis was included (...) in the new curriculum in Ripoll 109, and constituted the main source for botanical studies until the sixteenth century. Throughout this paper we will explore the reception and impact of De plantis in both the Arabic and the Latin traditions. We aim to show its foundational role in the development of botany as a theoretical discipline within the natural sciences. (shrink)

In this paper we develop a view about the disorientation attached to the process of falling out of love and explain its prudential and moral value. We start with a brief background on theories of love and situate our argument within the views concerned with the lovers’ identities. Namely, love changes who we are. In the context of our paper, we explain this common tenet in the philosophy of love as a change in the lovers’ self-concepts through a process of (...) mutual shaping. This, however, is potentially dangerous for people involved in what we call ‘subsuming relationships’, who give up too much autonomy in the process of mutual shaping. We then move on to show how, through the relation between love and the self-concept, we can explain why the process of falling out of love with someone is so disorientating: when one is falling out of love, one loses an important point of reference for self-understanding. While this disorientating process is typically taken to be harmful to the person experiencing it, we will explain how it can also have moral and prudential value. By re-evaluating who we were in the relationship and who we are now, we can escape from oppressive practices in subsuming relationships. We finish by arguing that this gives us reason to be wary of seeking to re-orient ourselves -or others- too quickly after falling out of love. (shrink)

This book studies the technognomies of memory in scripto as in texts, lists, dictionaries and databases and less the technognomies of memory in vivo (as in remembering). There are of course some relations between these two kinds of memories, being memory-in-scripto a development parallel to the development of written language. We notice that the historical presentation is built upon both forms of memory. We notice that the historical explanation is tied to the concrete experience of persons belonging to a culture. (...) In the history of memory then, it is necessary to distinguish two important aspects, the development of spoken memory and the development of written memory. The essential characteristic of written memory is its muteness. Muteness is also associated to spatiality and to stability. On the other hand, audial presentations are inseparable of the notions of movement and time passing. According to Don Ihde the spheres of the invisible and the silent, limit the spheres of the visual and the audial. These two spheres overlap partially in visual presentations that also are audial presentations; however, their natural being is to be independent from each other. [Ihde, Don. Listening and Voice. Phenomenologies of Sound; State University Press; 2007; p. 50-51.] In our time, which is also the time of the globalization and digitalization of culture, a new philosophical paradigm is going on characterized by the fragmentation of experience. This fragmentation does not allow an overview of the totality of a field of experience, which is only possible to reduce to singular analytical moments. The fragmentation of experience is the result of a new jump of the capability to concretion. Inside this new paradigm, the world becomes multistable. The multistability of the world creates a gap between intention and implementation that distinguishes the “full” history as Natural history from the “broken” history as Cultural history. (shrink)

This book is a personal answer to the crisis of the left. The author of this text belongs to a generation habituated to live with global explanations. During our youth, the future of the world was the future of democracy and socialism. We belong to a generation of “leftist” that found in Marx and Freud, phenomenology and structuralism the most important answers that made sense of the everyday world. However, the developments of events during the last sixty years showed that (...) our confidence was ungrounded. The depreciation of the theoretical thought accelerated in direct proportion to the development of technologies, and among them the impact of the digital developments was devastating. One of the most notable consequences of the digitalization of culture was the depreciation of the Marxian thought, but also the less recognized depreciation of all kinds of political-economic thought. The collapse of the world created before the Second World War open for the end of the “grand narratives” and the enthronization of Postmodernism. The production of fragmentary explanations took over the historical perspective with an important influence on social and economic thought. After 60 years of postmodern thinking, we believe that the time of Postmodernism is over. Politicians and economists over the world cannot continue to produce results in small packages. The whole picture must be restituted. Of course it must be done incorporating the lessons of the past to avoid to make the same mistakes. Postmodernism has left behind lots of scattered modernist philosophical remnants. It left a chessboard with only few pieces to work with, and in this allegory, only as references. The philosophical schools remains, but the study of them is strictly for an education in the history of ideas. The situation is aggravating since the most important works from the 1960’s and forth, (post-structuralists) deliberately have avoided obvious identity patterns. A word in Rio de la Plata’s jargon language describes this situation, cambalache, a sort of “flea market” where everything lies higgledy-piggledy. Deconstruction and the focus on differences are vital to Postmodernism. Remaining is therefore the intersections, the contrasts, shadows, and sketches. When trying to orient in such an intellectual environment, the task reminds of patching scatterings, and building with tools of eclecticism. However, we believe that is time to reconstruct instead of deconstruct, moving back to Modernism that we will describe as Cyborgism. (shrink)

Most philosophers would agree that loving one’s romantic partner (i.e., being in love) is, in principle, a good thing. That is, romantic love can be valuable. It seems plausible that most would then think that the process leading to being in love—i.e. falling in love—can be valuable too. Surprisingly, that is not the case: among philosophers, falling in love has a bad reputation. Whereas philosophy of love has started to depart from traditional (and often unwarranted or false) tropes surrounding romantic (...) life, this tendency has not yet reached the analysis of falling in love. The phenomenon continues to be looked at mostly through a compendium of generalisations taken as metaphysical truths—the view of falling in love being akin to “losing one’s mind” or “not being able to think about anything else”. Here, I analyse some of these generalisations to show that although they may reflect some experiences of what falling in love feels like, they wrongly reduce falling in love to two related, but distinct, phenomena: limerence and infatuation. My aim is to refine the current terminology to lay the foundations for a neutral view of falling in love. (shrink)

The proposal that the earth has entered a new epoch called “the Anthropocene” has touched a nerve . One unsettling part of having our ecological finitude thrust upon us with the term “Anthropocene” is that, as Nietzsche said of the death of God, we ourselves are supposed to be the collective doer responsible here, yet this is a deed which no one individual meant to do and whose implications no one fully comprehends. For the pessimists about humanity, the implications seem (...) rather straightforward: humanity will die. Yet, as we will explore in this paper, the death that we may be facing cannot be assumed to be simply biological death or extinction. Indeed, even if we are not running headlong into a mass extinction and biological demise, we do seem to be facing an ontological death. Our ecological finitude is the harbinger of our ontological finitude. The vulnerability we confront in the Anthropocene is what Jonathan Lear, in a different context, called ontological vulnerability. Worlds die too; the ways of life they sustain can become impossible, ceasing to make sense and matter. The constitutive susceptibility of all human worlds to their eventual collapse is what we mean by ontological finitude. This is what we face as presumed denizens in a dawning Anthropocene. (shrink)

The idea that love changes who we are is widely shared, and has been mostly explored from a stance in the middle stage of love (i.e., when people already love each other). But how do we get there? And what happens when love ends? In this chapter, I explore how self-understanding may be shaped in different ways at different stages of love through the notions of narrative and existential feeling. As I will argue, love gains narrative momentum at the beginning, (...) which is maintained during the middle, and ultimately extinguished at the end. This momentum is triggered and later sustained by the existential feeling that ‘things make sense’, which keeps the lovers oriented towards each other. (shrink)

A common approach in the philosophy of love defines love as caring about one another and promoting one another's interests, aims and values. The view faces several problems and has been re-formulated to avoid them. However, here I argue that a larger re-formulation of the definition of love is needed in order to accommodate three instances of what I call 'non-harmonious' relationships. I identify three types of non-harmonious love (featuring problematic interests, opposing interests and neutral interests the lovers do not (...) care about) and ultimately claim that our definition of love must incorporate conflict and self- interest, and we should then abandon the excessive focus on the sharing of values. (shrink)

Este artigo discute a relação entre a questão das inferências nos contextos de justificação em ciência, nomeadamente o que ficou conhecido por “problema da indução” após Hume, em vista de esclarecer diferentes versões dos problemas de subdeterminação na filosofia da ciência.

En "La sensibilidad oculta" se analizan y critican los elementos de la ideología contemporánea que imposibilitan al ciudadano entender su vida cotidiana. La filosofía, el cine, el rock y la arquitectura sintetizan muchas de las pasiones que atormentan a los sujetos en nuestra época. En esas pasiones podemos reconocer la problemática que recorre el planeta: desde las relaciones amorosas hasta la idea de familia, del trabajo asalariado a la desocupación. En todo ello parece ocultarse una búsqueda incesante de comunidad que (...) jamás resulta satisfecha ni en familia ni fuera de ella, con trabajo o sin él. (shrink)

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

Love enhancement can give us as a say on whom we love and thus ‘free’ us from our brain chemistry, which is mostly out of our control. In that way, we become more autonomous in love and in our life in general, as long as love enhancement is a free, voluntary choice. So goes the argument in favour of this addition to medical interventions of relationships. In this paper, I show that proponents of love enhancement have overlooked, or at least (...) underestimated, the fact that love itself impacts people’s choices. Since this could include the choice for love or anti-love drugs, I call for a re-formulation of the underlying view on autonomy before this medical intervention is made available to the public. (shrink)

When travelling to a new city, we acquire knowledge about its physical terrain, directions, historical facts and aesthetic features. Engaging in tourism practices, such as guided walking tours, provides experiences of a city that are necessarily mediated and partial. This has led scholars in tourism studies, and more recently in philosophy, to question the epistemological value of city tours, critiquingthem as passive, lacking in autonomous agency, and providing misrepresentative experiences of the city. In response, we argue that the mediated and (...) partial knowledge of a city acquired through city tours is not epistemologically disvaluable. Although city tours involve the transmission of testimonial knowledge, this does not necessarily render tourists as passive and non-autonomous. Instead,tourists have the potential to participate in the generation of their knowledge actively. Moreover, we argue that city tours also provide a tourist with valuable ‘objectual’ knowledge of a city, whichhas the potential to be first-personal and active, and does not necessarily misrepresent the city’s identity. This type of knowledge is valuable both for tourists as credible epistemic agents, and for the city itself, as the knowledge generated by the tour can facilitate an accurate representation of the city and promote social transformation. We conclude by highlighting four further epistemic and ethical implications of our argument. (shrink)

In their strife for designing a moral system where everyone is given equal consideration, cosmopolitan theorists have merely tolerated partiality as a necessary evil (insofar it means that we give priority to our kin opposite the distant needy). As a result, the cosmopolitan ideal has long departed from our moral psychologies and our social realities. Here I put forward partial cosmopolitanism as an alternative to save that obstacle. Instead of demanding impartial universal action, it requires from us that we are (...) equally responsive in all the relationships we stand in. That goes from the local to the cosmopolitan sphere, since I defend that we are related with strangers as co-members of the global community. Thus, partiality not only is accommodated by cosmopolitanism, but actually supports it: only by having meaningful personal relationships we become able to care for distant strangers. (shrink)

En este capítulo, defiendo que el proceso de identificación presente en relaciones de amor romántico tiene una estructura narrativa en tres niveles: social, intersubjetivo y personal.

Can our relationship with nature be loving and reciprocal? The claim is hard to sustain when nature is taken to encompass polluted and urban places. The notion of reciprocity loses its force, and the lovability of these places is put into question. Also, the demand of love may obscure the ethical demand in our relationship with nature: to be responsible in our meaning-making practices.

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.

Current challenges in medical practice, research, and administration demand physicians who are familiar with bioethics, health law, and health economics. Curriculum directors at American Association of Medical Colleges-affiliated medical schools were sent confidential surveys requesting the number of required hours of the above subjects and the years in which they were taught, as well as instructor names. The number of relevant publications since 1990 for each named instructor was assessed by a PubMed search.In sum, teaching in all three subjects combined (...) comprises less than two percent of the total hours in the American medical curriculum, and most instructors have not recently published articles in the fields they teach. This suggests that medical schools should reevaluate their curricula and instructors in bioethics, health law, and health economics. (shrink)

Introduction to the Inaugural Issue of the Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics.

El objetivo de este artículo es comprender la influencia de la gestión del conocimiento en el fortalecimiento de habilidades gerenciales. Se realizó una revisión bibliográfica de 35 autores, a partir de la cual se destacan 7 factores claves en común, en la implementación de modelos de gestión, como: información, aplicabilidad, construcción de conocimiento, trabajo colaborativo, cultura organizacional, transferencia del conocimiento y tecnología. Adicionalmente se identificaron habilidades gerenciales que se deben fortalecer, principalmente el liderazgo inspirador, pensamiento estratégico y comunicación. Este análisis (...) permitió concluir que, en la implementación de modelos de gestión del conocimiento, se desarrollaron procesos meta cognitivos, que involucran el desarrollo de habilidades gerenciales tanto a nivel técnico, como a nivel interpersonal, al igual que el desarrollo de estrategias orientadas al aprendizaje basado en problemas el cual fortalece las competencias directivas. A su vez se identificó la importancia de continuar investigando y definiendo estrategias de capitalización del conocimiento tácito, como ventaja competitiva en una organización. (shrink)

According to the book blurb (p. iv), the themes explored in the volume include the nature of love, romanticism, and marriage; the passage and experience of time; the meaning of life; the art of conversation, the narrative self; gender; and death. All these topics are indeed touched upon to a greater or lesser extent. I find this book to be, in its essence, an investigation of love and romance. So, my main question here is: what can we learn about romantic (...) life from this philosophical exploration of the Before trilogy? (shrink)

Unlike Heidegger who reflects on the relationship between being and time, we are interested in studying the relationship between doing and time. We begin by discovering that the basis of people's doing is the starting point for any reflection on society and culture, and therefore we believe that our conclusions can be important especially for sociologists, ethnologists, political scientists, economists and psychologists. A fundamental difference between "doing" and "acting" could be that only people, not things, "do". We say "Antonio made (...) his house out of bricks to prevent the wind from blowing it down". We never refer to the "action of the wind" as a "doing". Acting, especially in "action," is erroneously associated with causation; we think, "the action of the wind on the house, is the cause of the collapse of the house." But in reality, causation is only a variant of doing. For example, in "Susanna writes a letter to Paul", Susanna is the cause of the text of the letter, but not of the reading of the letter. This is a paradigmatic example, the one that gave rise to our study. We say that the text "attracts its reader", as the poles of a magnet attract each other. From which we concluded that it is impossible to keep secrets. The importance of the study of doing in general becomes very relevant when we understand that "producing" and "consuming" are variants of doing. In Marx's work, the doing that generates social value is productive doing. But our research shows that all variants of doing generate order and all "order" generates organizational value. Note that the order of an act can be measured in "bits", which frees us from subjective measurements of the value of what we do in "money". We anticipate here that, in the following pages, we arrive at the conclusion that doing can be divided into 6 types of acts and their subgroups: the vectorial independent and hodern acts and the pendular complementary, parallel, curative and causa-dor acts. In addition, we discovered the existence of inter-acts, i.e. the "organizational resonance of the poles of a pendular act" and which includes the self-referent, bipolar, tripolar and multipole variants. This book could not have been written, without the background of the works already published and elaborated jointly, with Professor Luis de Marcos Ortega between 2018 and 2021. We refer to The Informational Foundation of the Human Act and Whispers and Shouts. The Informational Measurement of the Human Act both published by the University of Alcalá (Madrid). The texts of this book were published in weekly installments between May 2020 and December 2021, in the GaZeta portal of Guatemala. We have respected the chronological order of publication, as well as the contents of the articles. (shrink)

A philosopher's inquiry on travel may take different paths. Emily Thomas follows several in The Meaning of Travel, where she uncovers novel philosophical debates such as the ontology of maps or the ethics of ‘doom tourism’. Perhaps unexpectedly for the reader, Thomas also offers accessible and engaging discussions on—mostly Early—Modern philosophy by connecting travel-related topics to the work of some well-known authors (René Descartes and Francis Bacon), some unjustly neglected ones (Margaret Cavendish) and some known mostly to specialists (Henry More). (...) The result of this bric-a-brac approach is mostly positive: Thomas's work stands out as an entertaining, insightful read, suitable for a wide readership, whilst also having the potential to be a foundational text in the philosophy of travel. And I agree with Thomas: philosophy of travel ‘isn’t a thing, but it should be’ (p. 3). (shrink)

Honouring a career-long commitment to interdisciplinarity which has guided a prolific publication history on character, virtue, and emotion, Kristjánsson leads by example in this book. Although he is clearly a philosopher, firmly pro-Aristotelian and devotes a large proportion of the book to look at the original source, Kristjánsson is happy to question or even downright abandon Aristotelian tradition if he has to–and to push the boundaries of philosophical thought on emotions. As a result, Virtuous Emotions has something to offer to (...) emotion theorists across a range of disciplines, to Aristotelian scholars, and to educators. (shrink)