In what ways and how far does virtue shield someone against suffering evils? In other words, how do non-moral evils affect the lives of virtuous people and to what extent can someone endure evils while staying happy? The central purpose of this chapter is to answer these questions by exploring what Aristotle has to say about the effects of evils in human well-being in general and his treatment of extreme misfortunes.

La cuestión de la creación artística ha sido motivo de reflexiones desde hace siglos: si es un fin en sí misma o si es medio de lograr otros fines, políticos e ideológicos. El presente trabajo se encamina a estudiar cuáles son las ideas al respecto planteadas en el marxismo y cuál ha sido el origen teórico del realismo socialista, considerado como un añadido posterior, ajeno a las concepciones de Marx.

El presente artículo versa sobre la relación entre el sistema que el filósofo mexicanoJosé Vasconcelos llama monismo estético y su teoría del conocimiento, donde primalo que denomina “conocimiento emocional”. Se ubica, además, al pensamientovasconceliano en el contexto del pensamiento latinoamericano de principios delsiglo xx y la reacción antipositivista de la época.

Reactivity, or the phenomenon by which subjects tend to modify their behavior in virtue of their being studied upon, is often cited as one of the most important difficulties involved in social scientific experiments, and yet, there is to date a persistent conceptual muddle when dealing with the many dimensions of reactivity. This paper offers a conceptual framework for reactivity that draws on an interventionist approach to causality. The framework allows us to offer an unambiguous definition of reactivity and distinguishes (...) it from placebo effects. Further, it allows us to distinguish between benign and malignant forms of the phenomenon, depending on whether reactivity constitutes a danger to the validity of the causal inferences drawn from experimental data. (shrink)

Aesthetic properties figure prominently in our daily lives, our conversations and many actions we take. Yet theoretical disagreement prevails over their nature, their variety, their epistemic and metaphysical status. This overview highlights the heterogeneity of aesthetic properties and examines repercussions for explanation. Aesthetic properties belong to natural objects or scenes, to artworks in any medium, to artefacts and built environments across historical eras; and they draw a wide variety of responses such as our perceptions, emotions or imaginative thought. Historicism about (...) artworks carries over to at least some aesthetic properties that depend on facts of their broader historical context just as works do. One issue is whether aesthetic properties can be demarcated solely in terms of non-aesthetic properties. If not, explanations of aesthetic properties need to draw on other aesthetic notions such as aesthetic experience, attention, judgement or value. The paper examines several accounts of aesthetic value to show how they extend to aesthetic properties. The paper concludes with an overview of the current metaphysical debate between realists and non-realists about aesthetic properties. (shrink)

Naturalism, construed as the idea that philosophy should be continuous with science, is a highly influential view. Its consequences for epistemology, however, are rather odd. Many believe that naturalized epistemology allows eschewing traditional skeptical challenges. This is often seen as an advantage; but it also calls into question its claim of belonging to the philosophical inquiry into knowledge. This paper argues that skeptical challenges can be stated to defy epistemic optimism within naturalized epistemology, and that there are distinctively naturalistic forms (...) of skepticism. To that end, it outlines some assumptions underlying many attempts to naturalize epistemology. It contrasts these approaches to traditional epistemology and identifies the reasons offered by naturalistic epistemologists to dismiss traditional skeptical challenges. Next, it argues that the problem of skepticism can be sensibly stated within a naturalistic setting. Finally, it contends that there are distinctively naturalistic strategies to argue for skepticism and diagnoses the prospects of naturalism vis-à-vis these kinds of skeptical challenges. (shrink)

Reichenbachian approaches to indexicality contend that indexicals are "token-reflexives": semantic rules associated with any given indexical-type determine the truth-conditional import of properly produced tokens of that type relative to certain relational properties of those tokens. Such a view may be understood as sharing the main tenets of Kaplan's well-known theory regarding content, or truth-conditions, but differs from it regarding the nature of the linguistic meaning of indexicals and also regarding the bearers of truth-conditional import and truth-conditions. Kaplan has criticized these (...) approaches on different counts, the most damaging of which is that they make impossible a "logic of demonstratives". The reason for this is that the token-reflexive approach entails that not two tokens of the same sentential type including indexicals are guaranteed to have the same truth-conditions. In this paper I rebut this and other criticisms of the Reichenbachian approach. Additionally, I point out that Kaplan's original theory of "true demonstratives" is empirically inadequate, and claim that any modification capable of accurately handling the linguistic data would have similar problems to those attributed to the Reichenbachian approach. This is intended to show that the difficulties, no matter how real, are not caused by idiosincracies of the "token-reflexive" view, but by deep facts about indexicality. (shrink)

The aim of this volume is to present Kafka not as a writer, or not only as a writer, but as a philosopher. However, even after narrowing the scope of our interest down, there will still be several Kafka’s left on the table. Themes treated in the volume include: the so-called Brentano School in Prague, Kafka’s affiliation to the Louvre Circle, Kafka and existentialist philosophy, Kafka’s Jewish heritage, his love of Nietzsche and Meister Eckhart and—last but not least, since he (...) was such an exceptional writer—his aesthetics. (shrink)

This article analyses the epistemic status of law and its presumption of being a science in relation with the so-called demarcation criterion proposed by different philosophers of science. Such criteria are the main analytical elements to differentiate scientific discourses from those who are not and the ones who pretend to be. In relation to those, pseudoscience and law are treated, to finally conclude with the exposition of the case of Daubert v. Merrill Dow Pharmaceuticals, in which a judicial process defined (...) demarcation criteria. This paper shows how the demarcation criteria of science and the concept of pseudoscience cannot be applied to law science given its own rationality. (shrink)

The specific role of empeiria in Aristotle’s ethics has received much less attention than its role in his epistemology, despite the fact that Aristotle explicitly stresses the importance of empeiria as a requirement for the receptivity to ethical arguments and as a source for the formation of phronêsis.1 Thus, while empeiria is an integral part of all explanations that scholars give of the Aristotelian account of the acquisition of technê and epistêmê, it is usually not prominent in explanations of the (...) acquisition of phronêsis.2 The abundant mentions of empeiria in Aristotle’s ethical treatises are often eclipsed in the secondary literature... (shrink)

In this paper I examine some of the positive epistemic and moral dimensions of anger in Plato’s dialogues. My aim is to show that while Plato is clearly aware that retaliatory anger has negative effects on people’s behavior, the strategy we find in his dialogues is not to eliminate anger altogether; instead, Plato aims to transform or rechannel destructive retaliatory anger into a different, more productive, reformative anger. I argue that this new form of anger plays a crucial positive role (...) in our intellectual and moral development. In relation to our intellectual development, anger is often part of people’s reactions to the Socratic interrogations and it often helps or hinders attempts to acknowledge one’s ignorance and become motivated to learn. For anger to play a positive role in the context of philosophical conversations, Plato suggests its transformation from being an outward-looking and reactive emotion oriented towards retaliation (refutation), into a mostly inward-looking emotion aimed at ones’ own moral and intellectual reform or self-betterment. In relation to our moral progress, anger is strategically linked both to the control of our appetites and to the virtue of courage, so anger is crucial to the psychology of the good citizen. Concretely, anger is needed both for the development of the right opposition to injustice and greed, and for the formation of an adequate sensitivity to justice. (shrink)

If artworks and their aesthetic properties stand in constitutive relationships to historical context and circumstances, so that some understanding of relevant facts is involved in responding to a work, what becomes of the intuitive view that we see artworks and at least some of their aesthetic properties? This question is raised by arguments in both aesthetics and art history for the historical nature of works of art. The paper argues that the answer needs to take philosophy of perception into account. (...) The principal development that has shaped philosophy of perception in the last thirty years—explaining perceptual experience in terms of contents that represent that such-and-such is the case—is directly relevant to key arguments for the historical nature of art because contents can represent complex kinds and properties. Conceptual realism is especially well-suited for explaining perception of artworks and aesthetic properties because it emphasizes that forms of understanding—in the sense of capacities, abilities and techniques—are involved in perceptual engagement with individual objects and instances of properties. To make this case, the paper examines influential arguments for the historical nature of art and aesthetic properties by Arthur C. Danto and Kendall L. Walton; and examines art-historical discussions by Michael Baxandall, Linda Nochlin and T. J. Clark. The paper argues that the aesthetic properties of an artwork depend on human intentional uses of properties, colours and contours among them, and such uses may themselves be aesthetic. The Wittgensteinian notion of use is contextual and historical, and uses are perceptible. (shrink)

La literatura universal muestra cómo resulta mucho más sencillo plasmar ciertos valores en “modelos” o ejemplos humanos que los encarnen. Y es de modelos de ese tipo que los niños - y muy especialmente- los adolescentes de todas las épocas, han tomado el ejemplo y los valores que orientarán su comportamiento durante toda la vida. Por lo menos esa constituye la intuición inicial de este trabajo, que está motivado por buscar hasta qué punto la presentación de modelos puede repercutir eficazmente (...) en la educación moral de los ciudadanos del mañana. En las líneas que vienen se procede a la investigación, siguiendo los desarrollos que al respecto han realizado diversos pensadores, en especial William Kilpatrick. (shrink)

This paper argues that perception is a mode of engagement with individuals and their determinate properties. Perceptual content involves determinate properties in a way that relies on our conceptual capacities no less than on the properties. The “richness” of perceptual experience is explained as a distinctive individual and property involving content. This position is developed in three steps: (i) novel phenomenological description of lived experience; (ii) detailed reconstruction of Gareth Evans’ proposal that we are capable of genuinely singular thought that (...) involves individuals under modes of presentation; (iii) re-consideration of the re-identification condition on conceptual contents. (shrink)

This article argues that conceptual realism offers an important alternative to naïve realist, purely relational approaches with which ‘disjunctivism’ has come to be readily associated. I argue that John McDowell’s account of perception as both contentful and relational tends to go unnoted when the options for disjunctive theories are laid out. But McDowell’s approach is important because it comes up the middle between ‘intentional’ and ‘relational’ views of perception. In doing so, it offers theoretical resources for explaining perceptual experience and (...) its epistemic standing that purely relational views associated with naïve realism do not have. McDowell’s work opens a unified approach to perception and its epistemic potential that turns on the claim that it is contents and the broader context of capacities in which such contents figure that secure the perceiver’s relation to what she sees. I call views of this kind conceptual realism, though commonsense realism might be more apt. Following comparison of the explanations that conceptual and naïve realism can provide of various difficult scenarios, the paper concludes with an example of how conceptual realist theories might disagree or diverge from the detail of McDowell’s approach. My criticism draws on aesthetics to discuss experience of aesthetic properties. (shrink)

Brexit has been widely covered in the news. Much of the attention of the press in English has gone to the British perspective. This piece seeks to present a holistic view of this event, including the European perspective. It argues that, notwithstanding this break-up and the problems it highlights (especially the tiredness of citizens with traditional party politics), the European project can survive this crisis and forge ahead into the future.

MacIntyre's is one approach among many to explain what philosophy ought to be. For Pieper (in: "Defence of Philosophy"), just to cite another one, "to engage in philosophy means to reflect on the totality of things we encounter, in view of their ultimate" or fundamental truth. And there are others. But my interest here is to explore the circumstances under which philosophers could claim a place in society due to a service they provide, as valuable as that of a mechanical (...) engineer in a factory, a waiter in a hotel or a pilot on an airplane. The circumstances, this is, which would make society see philosophers not (or not only) as oddly useless figures addressing intellectually engaging puzzles and uttering obscure conclusions, but as valuable contributors to the common good. (shrink)

The Lautsi case in Italy attracted widespread attention in Europe and beyond. Though the issue under contention was a Christian symbol, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) judgements showed changes in assessment both about religion (in contrast with former cases regarding Muslim veils) and secularism (which did not have the same meaning for everyone). In light of those rulings, this paper reflects on the concepts of neutrality and secularism and their normative implications for European citizens in terms of belonging, (...) solidarity and cohesion. An open and plural public sphere, in which intercultural exchange can flourish, is crucial if Europe is serious about the integration of its immigrants, many of whom possess a Muslim background. A ‘post-secular’ Europe may have to reconsider long-held stereotypes about religion and nuance its self-understanding as ‘secular’, in a way that religious citizens can identify with Europe too. The discussion will draw on the ideas of Taylor, Casanova, Habermas, Weiler and Beck to illustrate some of the political, ethical and theoretical complexities of the Lautsi case, specifically issues to do with neutrality, secularism and the role of religion in the public sphere. (shrink)

In der heutigen Welt der Informations- und Kommunikationstechnologie hat sich die Generation Z, die Digital Natives, wiedergefunden. Im Jahr 2021 nutzten 95% der jungen Menschen in der EU täglich das Internet (Eurostat, 2022). Um in der überwältigenden Menge an Informationen navigieren zu können, müssen Jugendliche Medienkompetenz beweisen. Der Fortschritt der Medien und Technologien erfordert eine zunehmende Anzahl an digitalen Fähigkeiten, wobei die Medienkompetenz in den letzten Jahren viele Formen und Gestalten gekannt hat. In diesem Zusammenhang befasst sich die vorliegende Literaturübersicht (...) mit dem Übergang von der Medienkompetenz der 90er Jahre (Aufderheide, 1993) zur neuen, digitalen Medienkompetenz. Unsere primären Ergebnisse deuten darauf hin, dass die neue Medienkompetenz ein Grundstein in der fortlaufenden Entwicklung und in der Bildungsphase der Jugendlichen ist. (shrink)

Este trabajo analiza los patrones de desambiguación de presuposiciones que se pueden considerar anafóricas y son generadas por partículas indexicales. En contraste con teorías recientes sobre la presuposición que privilegian la información lexical proponemos un análisis perspectivo de la presuposición según el cual la inferencia por defecto sobre este tipo de información hace uso de la perspectiva de los hablantes. En dos estudios exploramos el patrón de desambiguación de oraciones que contienen la palabra ‘también’ en contextos donde se usa el (...) indéxico ‘yo’. Los resultados confirman nuestra hipótesis y se discuten a la luz las principales ideas sobre presuposición y anáfora. A partir de estos resultados sugerimos algunas direcciones futuras de investigación. (shrink)

En este contexto se sitúa el presente escrito. Se pretende describir el estado de una problemática antigua y nueva. Antigua, porque se remonta a los cimientos mismos de la filosofía y del pensar humano, varios miles de años antes de Cristo. Nueva, porque no han terminado en el siglo XX las discusiones sobre dicha problemática, ni las aplicaciones posibles que se derivan de ella. Se trata del principio de identidad. El presente trabajo partirá de la definición del principio de identidad (...) según Aristóteles. Se matizarán algunos aspectos de tal principio según otros autores que han perseguido sobre todo fines didácticos al presentarlo, ya sea para el desarrollo de la teología como para el de la epistemología o la metafísica. Finalmente, se expondrá —de una manera bastante elemental— la utilización y las conclusiones que algunos autores contemporáneos han efectuado con relación a la identidad. El trabajo se enmarca, así, en casi una pura descripción elemental que sienta las bases para una posterior profundización. (shrink)

El presente artículo es un extracto de la Tesis Doctoral leída en la Facultad de Filosofía de la Universidad de Oviedo el 16 de abril de 2010 titulada Educación para la Libertad en el pensamiento de John Stuart Mill. Este artículo recoge de forma resumida, a lo largo de sus páginas, los aspectos más destacables de dicha Tesis Doctoral. Se subraya el aspecto de la educación como elemento fundamental en el pensamiento del filósofo inglés John Stuart Mill, en el sentido (...) de mostrar la educación como aquello que permite sacar al exterior las capacidades, talentos, destrezas que la persona posee. Al mismo tiempo es la educación, en el marco de la cultura, la que afina y refina a la persona, ayudándola a construirse como una persona que se incorpore a la ciudadanía con derechos y deberes y que ejerza esa ciudadanía responsablemente en aras del bien común. La educación hace al ser humano más libre, y la libertad es la esencia de la persona en el pensamiento de Stuart Mill. (shrink)

Our philosophical understanding of mental illness is being shaped by neuroscience. However, it has the paradoxical effect of igniting two radically opposed groups of philosophical views. On one side, skepticism and denialism assume that, lacking clear biological mechanisms and etiologies for most mental illnesses, we should infer they are constructions best explained by means of social factors. This is strongly associated with medical nihilism: it considers psychiatry more harmful than benign. On the other side of the divide, naturalism and reductionism (...) are on the look for failures in the biological functioning of the organism whenever a genuine mental illness occurs. Psychiatry as currently practiced, accordingly, exhibits the gaps of an ongoing research programme; a yet to be completed neuroscience would link mental illnesses with identifiable biological mechanisms. Both sides of this divide claim to be fostered by scientific discoveries and advances in neuroscience, when taken at face value. Against this background, we argue instead for a modest view. To that end, we draw attention to some nuances in the scientific realism debate. While contending that neuroscientific theories and models aim to provide true representations of their target systems, and can justifiably claim to have attained some, we argue that our confidence should not be placed beforehand in specific features of these scientific representations. Hence, it would be unwarranted to extract morals for psychiatry from posits (or their absence) in neuroscientific explanations of mental illnesses. To illustrate our position, we examine some recent discoveries in neuroscience concerning bipolar disorder. We conclude by linking our topic to a broader issue in the philosophy of medicine: insofar as psychiatry is a biomedical specialty, its classifications of health and disease are guided by pragmatic concerns, as well as by scientific discoveries. (shrink)

The increasing number of residents and citizens with non-Western cultural backgrounds in the European Union (EU) has prompted the question of whether EU member states (and other Western democracies) can accommodate the newcomers and maintain their free polities (‘liberal democracies’). The answer depends on how important – if at all – cultural groundings are to democratic polities. The analysis of a fascinating Habermas-Ratzinger debate on the ‘pre-political moral foundations of the free-state’ suggests that while legitimacy originates on the will of (...) the citizens that conform the political community, liberal democracies might not be completely free from moral principles implicit in their political culture. This possibility has normative implications for the political future of the EU - and of the West in general - particularly regarding immigration, integration and citizenship policies. (shrink)

The work presented has the following approach: starting from the Pope's reflection on the planet and ecological problems, it is intended to show the philosophical influences that underlie Francisco's exposition. These influences make it possible to describe a philosophical profile present in the encyclical Laudato si’. In addition, since philosophy claims to know, it is not exhausted only in knowledge, but tries to know in order to act; therefore, the presence of an ethical proposal follows; and since all ethics leads (...) to action, it follows that action cannot be without some indicators, without an axiology on which human action on the planet revolves. The result is that Francisco offers an ethic of otherness that feels the other as an authentic neighbor, even those who are in the future. It is an ethic of common benefit and caring for the other whose fundamental axis is the person and for this reason he reflects the phenomenon of human life within life on Earth, with which its philosophical approach seems personalist, from a point of Christian view. (shrink)

Postnationalists like Habermas have suggested EU citizenship as a way to overcome nationalisms, grounding political belonging on the body of laws that members of the postnational polity generate in the public sphere. Cosmopolitan communitarianist like Bellamy think that EU citizens should form a mixed-commonwealth, with political belonging based on their nations. I will argue that the second option is more desiderable and submit the analogical character of the ensuing ideas of the citizenship, identity and polity. Cosmopolitan communitarianist citizenship promises to (...) better foster the great richness of European national cultural, religious, historical, political, legal and linguistic diversity while still maintaining a certain unity to form a "mixed" polity. (shrink)

El presente artículo versa sobre cómo el espiritismo kardeciano puede ser la contraparte religiosa del positivismo; surgidos ambos del mismo clima epocal evidencian, aunque a prima facie pueda parecer paradójico, un discurso, metodología, ideales sociales y concepciones similares. Esta tesis se sustenta a partir del análisis conceptual de la obra de Kardec, en específico, de El libro de los espíritus, su texto de aspiraciones más filosóficas. En particular la denominada ley natural kardeciana se acerca mucho a las ideas comtianas, aunque (...) quizás hayan sido desarrolladas de manera independiente, a partir de la influencia común de Saint Simons y otros autores. (shrink)

En el presente artículo, el autor se ocupa de esbozar una caracterización general del autoengaño desde algunas de las principales perspectivas en la materia, señalando los problemas centrales que involucra y haciendo énfasis en la línea intencionalista. Luego analiza la relación que el autoengaño guarda con la autoridad de la primera persona y qué imagen resulta de una conjunción teórica de ambos problemas.

El presente trabajo versa sobre cómo se construye una cierta identidad y, por tanto, un cierto tipo de sujeto, a partir de los sistemas normativos propios de la adivinación en la santería cubana. Este análisis se realiza a partir de las experiencias en el trabajo de campo del autor durante cinco años en una “casa de santo” en Remedios, Villa Clara y del estudio exhaustivo de las llamadas “letras” de Ifá. La adivinación en esta religión no solo resulta un acto (...) predictivo, sino una manera de conformar un tipo de personalidad, a partir de un conjunto de reglas y recomendaciones individualizadas para cada creyente. (shrink)

El presente trabajo versa sobre cómo se construye una cierta identidad y, por tanto un cierto tipo de sujeto, a partir de los sistemas normativos propios de la adivinación en la santería cubana. Este análisis se realiza a partir de las experiencias en el trabajo de campo del autor durante cinco años en una “casa de santo” en Remedios, Villa Clara y del estudio exhaustivo de las llamadas “letras” de Ifá. La adivinación en esta religión no solo resulta un acto (...) predictivo, sino una manera de conformar un tipo de personalidad, a partir de un conjunto de reglas y recomendaciones individualizadas para cada creyente. (shrink)

The human person has been analyzed from several points of view throughout the history. Great theologians, philosophers, anthropologists and sociologists and other specialists have written extensively on the subject. The philosophical contribution centered on the human person has been significant throughout history. In the last century, Romano Guardini, who received the Erasmus Prize for Best European Humanist and called "Master of Life" offers a view of reality man-centered, through a thin, deep and coherent approach on the individual. His work has (...) been labeled by some philosophers within the personalist current, and although his contributions were many, we want to highlight the elements of the meeting, the language and the self-acceptance. In this paper we propose how this approach to the human person can become an intinerary embodied in reality, that can help today to seek clarification and start delving into own personal knowledge enlightened by faith. -/- La persona humana ha sido analizada desde varios puntos de vista a lo largo de la historia. Grandes teólogos, filósofos, antropólogos y sociólogos entre otros especialistas han escrito profusamente acerca del tema. El aporte de una filosofía centrada en la persona humana ha sido significativo a lo largo de la historia. En el último siglo, Romano Guardini, quien recibió el Premio Erasmo al Mejor Humanista Europeo y llamado “Maestro de Vida”, propone una visión de la realidad centrada en el hombre, a través de una aproximación fina, profunda y coherente sobre la persona humana. Su trabajo ha sido catalogado por algunos filósofos dentro de la corriente personalista, y si bien sus aportes fueron muchos queremos resaltar los elementos del encuentro, el lenguaje y la aceptación de sí mismo. En este trabajo proponemos cómo dicha aproximación a la persona humana se puede convertir en un itinerario encarnado en la realidad que puede ayudar hoy en día a quienes buscan esclarecer y comenzar a ahondar en el propio conocimiento personal iluminados por la fe. (shrink)

This article offers a detailed textual reexamination of the ‘family resemblance’ passages to reconsider their implications for understanding art. The reassessment takes into account their broader context in the Philosophical Investigations, including the rule following considerations, and draws on a realist interpretive framework associated principally with the work of Cavell, Diamond, McDowell, and Putnam. Wittgensteinian “realism with a human face” helps us discern that the primary issue is not whether certain concepts are definable, posing a stark opposition between essentialism and (...) its denial about kinds such as language or games. What is at issue is keeping uses of language in view in their variety and their broader life contexts. Focus on rules suggests more broadly that norms and values inhere in practices and play a constitutive role in determining the entities integral to those practices. From this perspective, a Wittgensteinian framework explains art as locally overlapping practices, each with their own constitutive norms and values for the works integral to them. What makes something art has normative force specific to a practice. This recognizes the historically contingent nature of art practices in a way that relational definitions or disjunctive ‘cluster’ explanations do not. (shrink)

El presente artículo trata, desde una perspectiva histórica, mostrar el debate entre la Razón y la Fe en la Historia de la Filosofía.

El artículo trata de mostrar las influencias de los ideales de la Ilustración en el pensamiento de John Stuart Mill. Así, puede comprobarse como en esos ideales de libertad, igualdad, tolerancia, respeto a la diferencia que propugna la Ilustración están presentes en el pensamiento de Mill y vertebran su filosofía.

This paper examines the relationship between beauty and aesthetic properties to argue that aesthetic properties are connected to a work’s content, to what a work conveys or expresses. I turn to Kant’s Critique of Judgement to make the case. My argument highlights two parts of Kant’s approach. Kant argues that pure aesthetic judgements of beauty are grounded in a harmonious yet free play of the imagination and understanding. Such free play is pleasurable and intimates that the power or capacity of (...) imagination is suitable for and can be brought within the conditions of the capacity for conceptual understanding. Within this broader frame, Kant’s account of artistic beauty specifies the relationship of aesthetic properties to the beauty of a work: aesthetic attributes help convey the aesthetic ideas that beautiful works express. I examine how Kant’s view helps us appreciate that aesthetic properties of artworks are integral to conveying the content of a work, and that the pleasure we feel has the potential to make us aware of the experience, its nature and value. (shrink)

In 2004 Jürgen Habermas and Joseph Ratzinger participated in a debate on the ‘pre-political moral foundations of the free-state’. Their contributions showed broad agreement on the role of religion in today’s Western secular state and on areas of collaboration and mutual enrichment between Modernity and Christianity in Europe and the West. They diverged regarding the need or not of a common cultural background prior to the existence of the polity. Their diverging point becomes all the more fascinating to the extent (...) that the matter requires wider empirical, analytical and normative research before it can be settled. Nevertheless, the implications that derive from one or the other possibility are very different in terms, for instance, of immigration and citizenship policies. This is already clear in Europe and is becoming more evident in general in Western democracies. (shrink)

Counselling y cuidados paliativos es el título del libro escrito por la doctora Esperanza Santos y el profesor José Carlos Bermejo. En esta obra, de fácil lectura y con consejos muy prácticos y útiles, se presentan elementos fundamentales para brindar un acompañamiento de óptima calidad en el cuidado paliativo, así como la posibilidad de hacer un autoexamen de cómo los cuidadores de los pacientes prestan sus servicios e incluso para no caer en burnout. Este libro es de gran utilidad, tanto (...) para los profesionales de la salud que trabajan en las unidades de cuidados paliativos, como para personas que dedican gran parte de su tiempo al cuidado de familiares con enfermedades terminales, o que pasan por procesos prolongados de enfermedad. Con ejemplos de conversaciones de la vida real entre cuidadores y pacientes, la lectura del libro se hace, a la vez, agradable, divertida y profundamente reflexiva. (shrink)

One of the many proposals put forth recently in the revival of bioethics concerns solidarity, which is part of the agenda for the discipline in the twenty-first century. In this article, solidarity is proposed as a bioethical value, inasmuch as it cannot be achieved without considering the person towards whom one shows solidarity and without taking into account his or her environment. It is not possible to make bioethical judgments or to accomplish in-depth biological thinking when forgetting the person who (...) is at the source or heart of the matter. Based on a study of the experience of a group of health volunteers in Medellin (Colombia), this research found evidence of the existence of three elements that, together, serve as a hinge between solidarity and bioethics. -/- Entre las muchas propuestas que se han hecho recientemente en ese resurgir de la bioética se encuentra la solidaridad, consti­tuyéndose parte de la agenda del siglo XXI sobre esta disciplina. Proponemos la solidaridad como un valor bioético puesto que así como no se puede ser solidario sin tener en cuenta a la persona con quien soy solidario y su entorno, no se pueden emitir juicios bioéticos o hacer una reflexión bioética de fondo olvidando a quien se tiene en frente. A partir de un estudio de la expe­riencia de una población de voluntarios del sector salud en Medellín, Colombia, se logró evidenciar que existen tres elementos que, en conjunto, sirven de bisagra entre la solidaridad y la bioética. (shrink)

In a world in which emotions and feelings occupy a dominant place in daily human life and especially in decision-making circumstances, it is important for us to ask ourselves whether it is possible to talk about “new” ethics or “renewed ethics.” Actually, we do not face a re-creation of principles and values, but rather we face a need for deepening our understanding of human anthropology. Thinkers such as Dietrich von Hildebrand have proposed that affectivity can shed light on ethics comprehension. (...) By means of a study of some of the works of this contemporary philosopher, we state that ethics is the result of a harmony between a clear objective comprehension of reality and a straight comprehension of that reality within the sphere of an educated, formed and well-known affectivity of the human person, which would lead us beyond the common place understanding of ethics as something rigid and full of rules and restrictions. -/- En un mundo en el que las emociones y los sentimientos ocupan un lugar preponderante en la vida cotidiana de las personas y especialmente en las decisiones que toman, cabe preguntarnos si podemos hablar de una nueva ética o de una ética renovada. En realidad no nos enfrentamos a una recreación de nuevos principios y valores, sino a una necesidad de ahondar en la antropología de la persona humana. En esta profundización se ha revalorado el importante papel que juega la afectividad en la vida humana. Pensadores como Dietrich von Hildebrand han propuesto que la afectividad puede dar luces en la comprensión de la ética. A partir de un estudio de algunas de las obras de este filósofo contemporáneo proponemos que la ética vendría siendo el resultado de una armonía entre la clara comprensión objetiva de la realidad y una recta comprensión de dicha realidad dentro de una esfera afectiva educada, formada, y ante todo conocida por la propia persona, lo cual nos conduce más allá de una ética entendida muchas veces como algo rígido lleno de normas y restricciones. (shrink)

Compassion and Moral Guidance es el título de la tesis doctoral del profesor Steve Bein de la Universidad de Hawai, publicada en el 2013 por la Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy como su monografía No. 23. En este texto el autor nos pone frente a un término utilizado muy frecuentemente pero muchas veces am-biguo o que conduce a equívocos.

Understanding sexual abuse es un libro que sorprenderá al lector por varias razones. En primer lugar, es un testimonio de la vida real del autor como víctima de abuso sexual en su niñez por una de las personas más cercanas a su familia. En segundo lugar, no es el típico libro sensacionalista que busca llamar la atención ni generar lástima ni victimizarse ni buscar fondos para alguna ONG de prevención de abuso sexual; más bien, el autor, con mucha apertura interior, (...) humildad, valentía, así como con un elevado profesionalismo, describe lo profundo que pueden ser las heridas de este tipo de abuso y lo crudo e injusto que es este crimen. En tercer lugar, la manera como el autor se aproxima al tratamiento de un trauma como el abuso sexual, permite que el lector se identifique plenamente con el autor, si ha sido abusado sexualmente, o si no, que aun así pueda tomar muchos elementos para sanar traumas de su propia vida, a pesar de no tratarse de abuso sexual, y sobre cómo acompañar a otras personas que han sufrido este tipo de abuso; he aquí la riqueza de este libro. (shrink)

Kendall Walton explains pictures in terms of games of perceptual make-believe. Pictures or depictions are props that draw us to participate in games of make-believe where we imagine seeing what a picture depicts. Walton proposes that one imagines of one’s perceptual experience of the coloured canvas that it is a different perceptual experience. The issue is whether perception and imagination can combine the way Walton suggests. Can one imagine a perception to be different? To get a clearer understanding of the (...) unified perceptual-imaginative experience Walton posits, the paper turns to competing theories that explain perceptual experience in terms of contents, relations to objects, or both contents and relations. Walton appeals to theories of perceptual content and cognitive penetration. But it is also important to examine whether his view fits with recent theories that explain perception only in terms of relations or in terms of both contents and relations. The paper argues that Walton’s view is compatible with content theories of perception and can be defended from some objection once we look at the detail these theories offer. Walton’s view is not compatible with pure relational theories of perception but it can be explained by hybrid content-relational theories of perception that posit de re senses. (shrink)

John Carvalho’s Thinking with Images, an Enactivist Aesthetics argues that puzzling artworks can draw us into a special activity – thinking when we don’t know what to think – which is valuable because it takes us beyond our skills and understanding. Enactivism is the theory of mind that best explains such thinking. The book illustrates this proposal with four chapters that detail Carvalho’s highly personal or individual encounters with enigmatic works of art. I raise two concerns. First, the four illustrative (...) chapters say that they are enactivist, but they do not show this. The illustrative chapters detail considerations about the works that are not distinguished by a particular theory of mind and might fit with any number of approaches to works of art. The suggestion that the thinking presented in each chapter is skillful is not explained. Second, the book does not just focus on thinking when we don’t know what to think, it also claims that such thinking frees us from mere looking. But enactivism does not require us to deny that our engagement with particular works in their ‘concrete singularity,’ to use Carvalho’s term, is perceptual. If perception is richly integrated or even continuous with what we understand skillfully or cognitively – and enacted in one’s circumstances – this does not erase differences between perception and thought or between their functions. When we ‘think with’ an individual so that we are engaged with it in its concrete singularity, perception is involved either in the present or the past. There is no need to shunt perception or looking aside as life activities that are just rule-bound, just part of knowing what to think rather than part of our response when we don’t know what to think. (shrink)

As the euro crisis unfolds, political discourse on both sides of the European Union (EU)’s internal divide—“North” and “South”—becomes ever more exasperated, distant and untranslatable. At the root lies a weak pan-European sense of belonging—a common political identity thanks to which European citizens may regard each other as equals, and therefore as deserving recognition, trust, and solidarity. This paper describes some of the culture-related problems that impact directly on the formation of an eventual political identity for EU citizens. It then (...) suggests that the enacting of an interculturalist paradigm can help untie some of the nuts—political but also cultural—that Europe faces in order to solve the economic crisis. A few remarks are dedicated in the conclusive part to cultural pluralism in Singapore, a key player in any future progress towards the integration of the Asia Pacific Region. (shrink)

The "new materialisms' offer an important critique of 'human exceptionalism, however they tend to overstate their case by ignoring those qualities of freedom that remain distinctive to human life. The paper turns to Simone de Beauvoir to make an argument for a more modest human exceptionalism.

El presente capítulo presenta un análisis teórico del tipo de amor que involucra la sexualidad, las altas expectativas que genera y la incertidumbre de que se cumplan. Para esclarecer el estudio se distingue entre sexualidad, impulso amoroso (“eros”) y amor propiamente dicho (“ágape”) y se echa mano de conceptos tomados de la filosofía personalista incluidos los de naturaleza, persona, racionalidad, relación y los varios tipos de amor. A final de cuentas se propone que sólo cuando se vuelve conyugal puede el (...) amor sexuado puede desarrollar su máximo potencial. (shrink)

This chapter reconstructs the neo‐Wittgensteinian proposals, and re‐examines the “family resemblances” passages from the Philosophical Investigations. Arthur Danto chooses to explain the historically contextual nature of art in some of the same terms as Wittgenstein sketches for language. The neo‐Wittgenstein view is typically reconstructed as a conjunction of two claims about the concept of art: the concept is not definable and it needs to be understood along the lines of Wittgenstein's discussion of “family resemblances.” The concept of art evolves historically (...) with different uses and conditions of application in different historical contexts. Wittgenstein briefly invokes resemblances among family members to characterize such networks of overlapping similarities and immediately proceeds to apply the idea to numbers. Danto's considered view is that the diversity of art is a matter of the historicity of both meaning and embodiment. (shrink)

Joseph T. O’Connell drew attention to the relative scarcity of academic work on religion in South Asia, and o ered as a plausible explanation for this state of a airs the tension between secular and religio‐political communal interests. This paper explores the potential role of phi‐ losophy as an established academic discipline within this situation, in the context of India. It argues that objective study, including evaluation, of the truth claims of various religious traditions is an important aspect of academic (...) as opposed to confessional engagement with religion, and that philosophy in India is especially well suited to undertake such re ection and to provide corresponding education. Unlike Western countries, philosophy and religion were never clearly separated in India and did not evolve in tension with one another. The history of Indian philosophy therefore includes and is included within the history of its ‘religions’, in a way that makes philosophical examination of the truth claims of Indian religions internal to those religions themselves. By tracing this history, the discipline of philosophy can help to unsettle the idea of religion as a matter of xed dogma. It can also continue the procedure of interpreting and evaluating metaphysical and epistemological theses that has been an intrinsic component of Indian religious thought for most of its history. (shrink)

In this thesis, I elaborate and defend Donald Davidson's account of knowing one's own mental states that exhibit first-person authority. To that end, I place Davidson's account among others in the philosophical landscape concerning self-knowledge. Next, I examine his response to philosophical challenges that arise from mental content externalism and self-deception. Finally, I draw some insights froms Davidson's account to the broader aims of epsitemology.