This paper is mainly a provisional survey of the engagement of the Filipinos with the thoughts of Paulo Freire, a Brazilian educator and philosopher. It presents first the main tenets of Freire’s liberating pedagogy. Then, it explores the Filipinos’ engagement with his ideas. Then, it gives some observations on the said engagement. Finally, it suggests a possible way on how philosophical researches in the Philippines can continually appreciate the relevance of Freire’s liberating pedagogy especially in relating it to a form (...) of Filipino philosophy that is involved in a critique of the society. -/- Keywords: Freire, liberating pedagogy, Philippine education, Filipino philosophy. (shrink)

This paper revisits the main thoughts of the Filipino historian and social critic Renato Constantino on the role of education in the formation of a neocolonial and postcolonial consciousness. It suggests that Constantino’s critical stance towards education embodies a type of philosophizing about education that centers on the problematization of the language of instruction, on the rendering of voice to those in the margins of Philippine society, and on taking a critical stance about education itself. It suggests further that this (...) form of philosophizing about education and its instrumentalities is prospective of a Freirean liberating pedagogy that is inherently nonneutral, critical, dialogical, praxical, and transformative. (shrink)

Resumen. El siguiente artículo muestra el estado actual de la Responsabilidad Empresarial enMéxico y su efecto en el Riesgo medido a través del Costo de Capital. Para ello, revisamos lasprincipales teorías que muestran que el uso de prácticas sociales en Estados Unidos provocandisminución del riesgo y por ende del Costo de Capital, Aras y Crowther, Richardson yWelker y Diamond y Verrechia. Con el fin de contrastar que las empresas SocialmenteResponsables tienen costos de capital menores consideramos como variable de desempeño social (...) eldistintivo que otorga el Centro Mexicano de Filantropía y por otra parte para calcular elriesgo consideramos el costo de capital a través de la metodología del Capital Asset Price Modelo. Encontramos que las empresas que son socialmente responsables tienen costos de capitalsuperiores que las que no son responsables y que el rendimiento de acciones es superior en lasempresas no responsables, por lo que el diferencial de riesgo vs rendimiento es superior en lasempresas no socialmente responsables. Lo anterior rechaza la hipótesis y contrasta con la realidadempírica de otros estudios.Palabras claves. Distintivo de ESR, CEMEFI, costo de capital, riesgo, rentabilidad de acciones,Bolsa de Valores. The following article shows the current status of the corporate responsibility inMexico and their effect on risk measured by the cost of capital. To do this, we review the maintheories that show that social practices in the United States leads to decrease risk and hence the costof Capital Aras and Crowther, Richardson and Welker and Diamond y Verrechia. In order to contrast that socially responsible companies have lower capital costs we considersocial performance variable the distinction conferred by the Mexican Center for Philanthropy and the cost of capital it estimate on the methodology of the Capital Asset Price model. We find that companies that are socially responsible have capital costs higher than thosethat are not responsible. It rejects the hypothesis and contrasts with the empirical reality of otherstudies.Keywords. CSR distintive, CEMEFI, cost of capital, risk, return in shares, Capital Market Securities. (shrink)

Tractatus 4.024 inspired the dominant semantics of our time: truth-conditional semantics. Such semantics is focused on possible worlds: the content of p is the set of worlds where p is true. It has become increasingly clear that such an account is, at best, defective: we need an ‘independent factor in meaning, constrained but not determined by truth-conditions’ (Yablo 2014, p. 2), because sentences can be differently true at the same possible worlds. I suggest a missing comment which, had it been (...) included in the Tractatus, would have helped semantics get this right from the start. This is my 4.0241: ‘Knowing what is the case if a sentence is true is knowing its ways of being true’: knowing a sentence’s truth possibilities and what we now call its topic, or subject matter. I show that the famous ‘fundamental thought’ that ‘the “logical constants” do not represent’ (4.0312) can be understood in terms of ways-based views of meaning. Such views also help with puzzling claims like 5.122: ‘If p follows from q, the sense of “p” is contained in the that of “q”’, which are compatible with a conception of entailment combining truth-preservation with the preservation of topicality, or of ways of being true. (shrink)

Introduction and translation of “The Four Phases of Philosophy” by Franz Brentano.

Porfirio constitutes an essencial tie in the transition of ancient thought into the Medieval. His writings (he takes in the Enneadas of Plotino and systematically comments the works of Plato and Aristotle), offer a unitary interpretation of both systems which have enormously influenced in the medieval philosophic tradition (Saint Augustine, Boecio, Thomas Aquinas, etc.), a tradition which may be presented as the different forms of Platonism aristotelized, or aristoteleanism platonized.

Recent years have witnessed an increasing growth in mutual funds that invest according to social criteria. As a consequence, the financial performance of these portfolios has attracted the interest of academics and practitioners. This paper investigates the performance of a sample of socially responsible mutual funds from seven European countries investing globally and/or in the European market. Using unconditional and conditional models, we assess the performance of these funds in comparison to conventional and socially responsible benchmark portfolios. The results show (...) that European socially responsible funds present in general neutral performance in relation to both conventional and socially responsible benchmarks. However, performance estimates seem to be slightly higher when funds are evaluated in relation to socially responsible indices. Our results also show that socially responsible funds are more exposed to conventional than to socially responsible indices. Furthermore, conventional benchmarks are better able to explain fund returns than socially responsible benchmarks. These findings are robust to both unconditional and conditional models of performance. We also observe that conditional models lead to a slight improvement of performance estimates and to the explanatory power of the models, both when conventional and socially responsible benchmarks are considered. This is consistent with most previous empirical findings on conditional performance evaluation. Our results show that investors who wish to hold European funds can add social screens to their investment choices without compromising financial performance. (shrink)

I present a formal theory of the logic and aboutness of imagination. Aboutness is understood as the relation between meaningful items and what they concern, as per Yablo and Fine’s works on the notion. Imagination is understood as per Chalmers’ positive conceivability: the intentional state of a subject who conceives that p by imagining a situation—a configuration of objects and properties—verifying p. So far aboutness theory has been developed mainly for linguistic representation, but it is natural to extend it to (...) intentional states. The proposed framework combines a modal semantics with a mereology of contents: imagination operators are understood as variably strict quantifiers over worlds with a content-preservation constraint. (shrink)

El autor investiga el papel desarrollado por las reglas constitutivas en la construcción de la realidad social. En particular, niega que, por ejemplo, las reglas constitutivas del ajedrez sean condición suficiente de la práctica llamada juego del ajedrez. Para crear una nueva práctica, se necesita también la existencia de la gramática de esa práctica, o sea el sentido mismo de la práctica (por ejemplo: el sentido de juego). Es la gramática de una práctica (y no las reglas constitutivas) la que (...) determina la naturaleza de la práctica misma. El sentido de una práctica no puede ser creado por las reglas constitutivas. (shrink)

We give a review and critique of jury theorems from a social-epistemology perspective, covering Condorcet’s (1785) classic theorem and several later refinements and departures. We assess the plausibility of the conclusions and premises featuring in jury theorems and evaluate the potential of such theorems to serve as formal arguments for the ‘wisdom of crowds’. In particular, we argue (i) that there is a fundamental tension between voters’ independence and voters’ competence, hence between the two premises of most jury theorems; (ii) (...) that the (asymptotic) conclusion that ‘huge groups are infallible’, reached by many jury theorems, is an artifact of unjustified premises; and (iii) that the (nonasymptotic) conclusion that ‘larger groups are more reliable’, also reached by many jury theorems, is not an artifact and should be regarded as the more adequate formal rendition of the ‘wisdom of crowds’. (shrink)

This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of socially responsible funds in Sweden by assessing fund managers' abilities and performances across different market states. These issues are analyzed at the aggregate and individual fund levels. The paper also presents several new statistical tests that allow more precise inferences about differences in performance and the variability in fund returns arising from different benchmarks. In general, SR and conventional funds perform similarly to the market. At the aggregate level, SR funds investing in Sweden (...) and Europe perform similarly to conventional funds, while those investing globally tend to underperform. This underperformance seems to be linked with poor selectivity abilities of global SR fund managers. For individual funds, the performance of both types of funds is more similar. Most funds perform similarly in crisis periods compared to non-crisis periods. Overall, our results are consistent with a mature market for SR investing and support the view that the similar performance of SR and conventional funds is associated with the mainstreaming of SR investment in Sweden. These findings encourage SR investing both by socially conscious investors, who wish to align their social values with their investment decisions, as well as by conventional investors, who will not be penalized by investing in these funds. We also call attention to the difficulties investors face when trying to identify funds with high social standards, considering that there is scarce information on the extent to which each fund holds stocks that comply with ethical and social criteria. (shrink)

Fusing philosophy and theology, the book assigns both Judaism and Christianity distinct but equally important roles in the spiritual structure of the world and ...

Unification was originally introduced in automated deduction and term rewriting, but has recently also found applications in other fields. In this article, we give a survey of the results on unification obtained in two closely related, yet different, application areas of unification: description logics and modal logics.

Der Autor legt hier die erste Gesamtdarstellung der antiken Ansätze zu einer vergleichenden Zeichentheorie der Künste (Poesie, Plastik, Malerei, Musik, aber auch darstellendes Verhalten in der Lebenspraxis) vor, die für die Herausbildung und Entwicklung der griechischen Ästhetik, Literatur- und Kunsttheorie konstitutiv waren. Von Simonides über Empedokles, Gorgias, Platon und Aristoteles bis zur Stoa (von Chrysipp bis Poseidonios) und zu den Epikureern (von Epikur bis zu Philodem) werden alle wichtigen Positionen und Debattenlinien zwischen Spätarchaik und Späthellenismus behandelt, eingebettet in eine breit (...) angelegte Analyse des semiotischen Feldes (Zeichen in Medizin, Rhetorik, Geschichtsschreibung, Logik, Epistemologie, Physik und anderen Wissenschaften). Die poetologisch, kunsttheoretisch und musikologisch relevanten Probleme einer vergleichenden Zeichentheorie werden in konkreten Literatur- und Kunstanalysen am Material entwickelt (Euripides, hellenistische Plastik, Philodems Epigramme, Lukrez' De Rerum Natura). (shrink)

"Today, more than three-quarters of a century after it was written, the critique of philosophy in this book is what makes it of such great interest.

Democratic decision-making is often defended on grounds of the ‘wisdom of crowds’: decisions are more likely to be correct if they are based on many independent opinions, so a typical argument in social epistemology. But what does it mean to have independent opinions? Opinions can be probabilistically dependent even if individuals form their opinion in causal isolation from each other. We distinguish four probabilistic notions of opinion independence. Which of them holds depends on how individuals are causally affected by environmental (...) factors such as commonly perceived evidence. In a general theorem, we identify causal conditions guaranteeing each kind of opinion independence. These results have implications for whether and how ‘wisdom of crowds’ arguments are possible, and how truth-conducive institutions can be designed. (shrink)

The Description Logic Handbook covers all aspects of the research in the field of knowledge representation. Written by some of the most prominent researchers in the field, and covering the basic technical material and implementational aspects, it is both a unique reference and a self-study guide.

Unlike the first English translation in 1974, this edition contains the text corresponding to Brentano's original 1874 edition.

ABSTRACT The question of non-Western difference has come to feature prominently across the field of comparative rhetoric, where it is often presupposed that an irreducible difference separates Western from non-Western rhetorical and cultural production. It is on the basis of this presupposition that critics have established a politics of comparative inquiry, whereby restituting the pure consciousness of a non-Western subaltern subject is understood to subvert the hegemony of Western thought. But what exactly is the nature of this difference? In this (...) article I examine the recent turn toward Latin America in the field of comparative rhetoric to argue that this presupposition serves as a constitutive topos—that the object of Latin America is invented rhetorically in the very act of comparative inquiry—and that this presupposition yields a political impasse that the field has yet to think through. Drawing on recent work in Latin American studies, I argue for a rearticulated notion of subalternity as a methodological approach for dealing with this impasse. (shrink)