This article analyses the original core of the ‘Art’ of Ramon Llull, which, according to the author, was the result of a vision on Mount Randa. We start from the paradoxical fact that Llull describes his Art as a result of an immediate revelation, but throughout his life constantly reworked the artistic structure, in both formal and procedural aspects. We thus take a hermeneutical approach to the ontology, logic and symbolism of Llull’s Art to define as precisely as possible what (...) remained constant through the changes. We conclude that the so-called ‘illumination of Randa’ was actually a mystical vision of the cosmos and its internal relations, but not the argumentative process of the Art, which Llull clarified over the course of his life. (shrink)

Ante los indicadores de insostenibilidad ambiental y social, se busca un enfoque educativo eficaz que contribuya a revertirla. A tal efecto, se propone una educación moral, que no se centre tanto en contenidos como en facilitar que cada estudiante aprenda a buscarlos, hacerlos propios y los traduzca en compromisos de conducta personal. La propuesta educativa se presenta ejemplificada en una asignatura concreta, que sirve de hilo expositivo y ejemplo de aplicación. Tras una breve introducción sobre los indicadores de insostenibilidad, se (...) presenta la planificación, metodología y objetivo de la asignatura. A continuación, se reflexiona sobre dos de los obstáculos a los que se enfrenta la educación moral en la actualidad: la fragmentación del saber y la dificultad para que los aprendizajes teóricos se traduzcan en conductas. Por último, se exploran dos oportunidades para la educación moral que pueden facilitar ese vínculo: la búsqueda de las causas profundas de problemas ambientales y sociales actuales, y el empleo de la belleza. (shrink)

Recent technological advancements have deeply transformed society and the way people interact with each other. Instantaneous communication platforms have allowed connections with other people, forming global communities, and creating unprecedented opportunities in many sectors, making access to online resources more ubiquitous by reducing limitations imposed by geographical distance and temporal constrains. These technological developments bear ethically relevant consequences with their deployment, and legislations often lag behind such advancements. Because the appearance and deployment of these technologies happen much faster than legislative (...) procedures, the way these technologies affect social interactions have profound ethical effects before any legislative regulation can be built, in order to prevent and mitigate those effects. Ethics in Online AI-Based Systems: Risks and Opportunities in Current Technological Trends features a series of reflections from experts in different fields on potential ethically relevant outcomes that upcoming technological advances could bring about in our society. Creating a space to explore the ethical relevance that technologies currently still under development could have constitutes an opportunity to better understand how these technologies could or should not be used in the future in order to maximize their ethically beneficial outcomes, while avoiding potential detrimental effects. Stimulating reflection and considerations with respect to the design, deployment and use of technology will help guide current and future technological advancements from an ethically informed position in order to ensure that, tomorrow, such advancements could contribute towards solving current global and social challenges that we, as a society, have today. This will not only be useful for researchers and professional engineers, but also for educators, policy makers, and ethicists. (shrink)

New technological advancements have always changed the way society and human relationships work. New affordances created by technological tools inevitable modify and affect the way people interact with such tools, as well as with one another, and with the world within which this technology is embedded. -/- Technology, Users and Uses explores and discusses ethical issues around the use of technology and AI, by focusing on the way they affect individual, social and global interactions. The collection addresses topics including social (...) networks, public opinion, fake news and information warfare; digitalisation and datafication of society and individuals; and transhumanism, super-intelligent machines and the technological singularity. -/- Technology, Users and Uses aims to offer theoretical and practical guidelines and recommendations for regulators, developers, engineers and scientists, as well as for researchers, educators and scholars in the fields of technology and AI, philosophy and sociology. (shrink)

Our memories elicit, in us, both beliefs about what the external world was like in the past, and beliefs about what our own past experience of it was like in the past. What explains the power of memories to do that? I tackle this question by offering an account of the content of our memories. According to this account, our memories are ‘token-reflexives’, in that they represent their own causal origin. My main contention will be that our memories are able (...) to provide us with evidence for the two types of beliefs due to the self-referential nature of their content. First, I will put forward a series of thought-experiments intended to raise several intuitions about the veridicality of memories. Next, I will introduce the view that memories are token-reflexives, and I will motivate it by pointing out that the view accommodates the relevant intuitions. And, then, I will return to the two types of beliefs prompted by our memories, and argue that conceiving memories as token-reflexives allows us to explain why memory has the power to elicit the two types of beliefs in us. (shrink)

Memories are mental states with a number of interesting features. One of those features seems to be their having an intentional object. After all, we commonly say that memories are about things, and that a subject represents the world in a certain way by virtue of remembering something. It is unclear, however, what sorts of entities constitute the intentional objects of memory. In particular, it is not clear whether those are mind-independent entities in the world or whether they are mental (...) entities of some kind. The purpose of this chapter is to map the different positions on this issue, and to highlight the virtues and difficulties for each of the options. In Section 2, I will specify the question of what the intentional objects of memory are by clarifying the relevant notions of memory and intentional object. In Section 3, I will motivate the significance of identifying the intentional objects of memory by exploring the relations between, on the one hand, the intentionality of memory and, on the other hand, the phenomenology and the epistemology of memory. In Section 4, I will consider two natural candidates for being the intentional objects of memory, namely, worldly entities and mental entities, and I will raise some concerns for each of the two candidates. A promising alternative will emerge, in Section 5, as preserving the virtues of the two original candidates while avoiding their difficulties. The alternative will concern a certain combination of worldly and mental entities; a combination that involves both causal and truth-making relations. I will conclude by sketching how the alternative candidate can shed some light on the phenomenological and epistemological issues raised in the third section. (shrink)

El debate en torno a la antropología aborda aquí una cuestión de categorías fundamentales en torno a la estructura básica del ser humano: hombre y mujer, niño y anciano. La terminología articulada por la categoría «espíritu - pneuma» abre las posibilidades de una nueva comprensión ante los retos planteados por las ciencias experimentales, la ética, la moral, incluso la religión. El esquema diádico «cuerpo y alma» se muestra agotado ante los callejones sin salida con los que se ha encontrado al (...) llegar hasta nuestros días. Por este motivo, el artículo defiende poder recuperar la antropología brotando de los datos de la revelación judeocristiana, tomados como auténticos y válidos para vehicular la verdad de la realidad humana. En efecto, resulta necesario recuperar la originalidad de la estructura triádica de espíritu, alma y cuerpo, presentada por el apóstol Pablo, de forma totalmente inesperada en su primera carta a los Tesalonicenses (1Te 5,23). (shrink)

In procedural-law scholarship as well as in the theoretical analysis of the notion of proof as a result of the joint assessment of all items of evidence introduced in a trial, reference is frequently made to notions such as the conviction, belief, or certainty of a judge or a jury member about what happened. All these notions underscore the mental states involved in the process of determining the facts on the part of a judge or a jury. In this analysis, (...) I look at the links between beliefs and the justification in the findings of fact provided by the judge or jury in her or its verdict. (shrink)

In this introduction, I consider different problems posed by the use of singular terms in fiction (section 1), paying especial attention to proper names and, in particular, to names of real people, places, etc. As we will see (section 2), descriptivist and Millian theories of reference face different kinds of problems in explaining the use of fictional names in fiction-related contexts. Moreover, the task of advancing a uniform account of names in these contexts—an account which deals not only with fictional (...) names but also with “real” names—will prove to be very hard no matter whether we favour realist or antirealist intuitions about fictional discourse (section 3). Section 4 offers an overview of the content of this volume, with emphasis on the discussion between Manuel García-Carpintero and Stacie Friend about the meaning of “real” names in fiction-related contexts, the main topic of the Third Blasco Disputatio. (shrink)

In jurisprudential literature, the adjective ‘defeasible’ appears as a predicate of many terms: concepts, laws, rules, reasoning, justification, proof, and so on. In this paper, we analyze the effects of some versions of the thesis of the defeasibility of legal norms on the reconstruction of the notion of legal validity. We analyze some possible justifications of this thesis considered as a claim concerning validity, and enquire into two possible sets of problems related to the defeasibility of the criteria of identification (...) of a legal system. We also provide a formalization of some options regarding defeasible criteria of identification, which can be used as a tool for meta-jurisprudential analysis. Finally, the thesis according to which defeasibility is better conceived of as a feature of legal application is examined and questioned. (shrink)

El presente trabajo reconstruye la influencia de Aristóteles en Tocqueville para revitalizar el valor empírico e histórico de su psicología de la democracia, y “polemizar” con interpretaciones racionalistas. De este modo, introduce correctivos en interpretaciones exclusivamente racionalistas y cognoscitivas que yuxtaponen los diferentes modelos de despotismo concebidos por Tocqueville para reconstruir resultados equivalentes de sus efectos. En función de estas premisas, subraya la originalidad del autor francés en el tema del despotismo, argumentando una versión hegemónica de sus efectos destinada a (...) reproducirse en el comportamiento individual bajo formas “asentidas” de dominación. (shrink)

Avicenna was a physician and philosopher in an era known as the Islamic Golden Age. His early medical encyclopedia, The Canon of Medicine, was a groundbreaking text that scholars and healers read for centuries afterward.

Se analiza la situación paradójica que presenta la secularización en América reconstruida por Tocqueville. Teniendo presente este postulado, mostraremos la ruptura que se establece con respecto a la Ilustración en el tema de la secularización, en aras de descubrir una nueva variante de la crisis de la filosofía que permaneces vinculada con la nueva estructura organizacional de las sociedades democráticas modernas. Asimismo, mostraremos cómo el perfil liberal de Tocqueville se muestra superador de las versiones eurocéntricas en el tema de la (...) crisis de la filosofía, en la medida de que su devaluación no procede únicamente de anomalías metodológicas, sino del cambio de autoridad intelectual operado por la secularización para empoderar a la opinión pública. Por esta razón, procederemos finalmente a mostrar en qué medida la novedad de la paradoja de la secularización en América reconstruida por Tocqueville, define la crisis de la filosofía como asunto del futuro en virtud de la serie de problemas inéditos que demanda satisfacer. (shrink)

Se trata de una obra en la que se hace una delimitación de los diversos tipos de “contenido” del lenguaje. En esta delimitación radica la base diferencial entre una lingüística de la lengua y una lingüística del hablar.

The conceptualization of the notion of subjectivity within the Anthropocene finds in Rosi Braidotti’s posthumanism one of its most explicit and profuse modulations. This essay argues that Braidotti’s model powerfully accounts for the Anthropocene’s subjectivity by conceiving the “self” as a transversal multiplicity and its relationality to the “others” and the “world” as non-hierarchized by nature–culture distinctions; however, by being ontologically grounded on a neo-Spinozistic monism, Braidotti’s model blurs the notions of finitude, agency, and change, obscuring the possibility of critical (...) dissent while decreasing the overall theory’s consistency. An alternative ontological model capitalizing on these elements can be found in Object-Oriented Ontology and its notion of withdrawal. By associating OOO’s non-onto-taxonomical pluralism with Braidotti’s posthuman subjectivity, this essay aims at ontologically discretizing the latter in order to overcome these limitations. Grounded on this association and invoking a narrative imaginary propelled by the Greek terms xenos and xenia, the article paves the way for a form of subjectivity deviating from Braidotti’s ecological model and defined as xenological, arguing that, within the context of the Anthropocene, it constitutes an adequate alternative to Braidotti’s subjectivity. (shrink)

The ontological abyss that separates real objects from sensual objects is one of the central principles of Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO), which has its most explicit and profuse modulation in Timothy Morton’s notion of rift. This article argues that, despite succeeding in explaining the radical difference that inhabits every object, Morton’s rift fails to explain the object’s unification, rendering the overall theory inconsistent. An alternative approach that accounts simultaneously for disjunction and conjunction between essences and appearances can be found in Eugenio (...) Trías’s philosophy of the limit, a term widely ignored in OOO despite its deeply non-relational conception of the reality of things. The article further argues that the reinterpretation of Trías’s twofold liminal approach in light of OOO successfully addresses the inconsistencies found in Morton’s rift, paving the way for a theory of limits within Harman’s ontological framework. (shrink)

Esta investigación pretende aportar datos para determinar en qué medida el feedback influye en el rendimiento académico.Se ha realizado una experimentación con estudiantes universitarios de los grados de marketing y de educación física. Se ha dividido la muestra en tres grupos en función del tipo de información -feedback- que se les proporcionaba.Los resultados muestran que hay correlación entre la información facilitada y los resultados obtenidos. El rendimiento mejora en función de la información cuando ésta es correcta. Estos resultados han de (...) servir para reforzar el compromiso del docente en ofrecer retroalimentación con responsabilidad y rigor. (shrink)

After September 11, Sullivan wrote that while he wasn’t worried about the heartland, “decadent coastal liberals may well mount a fifth column.†This in response, as is well known, to a thoughtful New Yorker essay by Susan Sontag. Sullivan, who Eric Alterman—not usually a sharp wordsmith—memorably calls “Young Roy Cohn†later issued “Sontag awards.†His attitude and his popularization of a sort of Lynne Cheneyist position on what “Views†are improper and thus should not be publicly aired, probably did far (...) more damage to civil liberties than Joe McCarthy’s pal Roy, who at the very least didn’t take himself seriously. (shrink)

Although most consumers are positive about socially responsible companies, in order to benefit from CSR efforts, effective and clear CSR communication is important. However, due to the constantly rising profusion of eco-labels, based on either own claims from the organization or claims made by an external third party, consumers may encounter difficulties in identifying truly responsible firms, which could result in less effective CSR initiatives, even for those responsible firms. Therefore, building on attribution theory, this study seeks to identify how (...) uncertified internal CSR claims and external third-party CSR labels should be used in order to deter greenwashing and increase positive consumer evaluations. Within a 3 × 2 design, respondents are exposed to different coffee product packages measuring their attitude toward the brand, corporate credibility, purchase intention, and scent perception, as well as perceived attributional CSR motives. Overall, findings indicate that especially an external CSR label affects consumer responses toward the firm. Moreover, perceived CSR motives serve as a mediator between an external CSR label and corporate credibility and brand attitude, respectively. These findings warrant further consideration of introducing an external multilevel rating systems by governmental law. (shrink)

All paradoxes of self-reference seem to share some structural features. Russell in 1908 and especially Priest nowadays have advanced structural descriptions that successfully identify necessary conditions for having a paradox of this kind. I examine in this paper Priest’s description of these paradoxes, the Inclosure Scheme (IS), and consider in what sense it may help us understand and solve the problems they pose. However, I also consider the limitations of this kind of structural descriptions and give arguments against Priest’s use (...) of IS in favour of dialetheism. IS fails to identify sufficient conditions for having a paradox of self-reference. That means that, even if we identified a problem common to any reasoning satisfying IS, that problem would not explain why some of those reasonings are paradoxical and some others are not. Therefore IS cannot justify by itself the claim that some particular theory offers the best solution to the paradoxes of self-reference. We still need to consider aspects concerning the content and context of occurrence of every paradox. (shrink)

Imagination has received a great deal of attention in different fields such as psychology, philosophy and the cognitive sciences, in which some works provide a detailed account of the mechanisms involved in the creation and elaboration of imaginary worlds. Although imagination has also been formalized using different logical systems, none of them captures those dynamic mechanisms. In this work, we take inspiration from the Common Frame for Imagination Acts, that identifies the different processes involved in the creation of imaginary worlds, (...) and we use it to define a dynamic formal system called the Logic of Imagination Acts. We build our logic by using a possible-worlds semantics, together with a new set of static and dynamic modal operators. The role of the new dynamic operators is to call different algorithms that encode how the formal model is expanded in order to capture the different mechanisms involved in the creation and development of imaginary worlds. We provide the definitions of the language, the semantics and the algorithms, together with an example that shows how the model is expanded. By the end, we discuss some interesting features of our system, and we point out to possible lines of future work. (shrink)

El artículo tiene como objetivo ofrecer un panorama de los problemas que enfrenta la motivación de las resoluciones judiciales. Así, se intenta responder básicamente a tres cuestiones: ¿qué se motiva?, ¿qué significa motivar dado el rol de la función judicial? Y, derivado de ellas, ¿cuáles son las exigencias para una correcta motivación?

Environmental sensitivity and Christianism Contemporary environmental sensitivity has characterized for decades the emerging culture in the developed world. It is not yet mainstream in influencing behavior at a global level, as the growing environmental impact of consumerism testifies particularly to it. Present day environmental sensitivity seems somehow at odds with Christianism, charged for decades alongside Judaism with major responsibility in the environmental crisis. This paper explains and discusses on seven interlinked aspects of the environmental value amply recognized across environmentalism. In (...) examining them, Christian environmentalism learns particularly some demands of the Christian vocation that may remain neglected and demand a moral conversion both of Christians and of no non-Christians and non-believers. In accepting this demand, the Christian discerns the life-giving presence of Christ in many traits of the environmental sensitivity and culture. This encounter offers grounds for a reciprocal understanding and enrichment of Christians and non-believers or non-Christians, towards the attainment of a wider and deeper respect of environmental and human shared values. (shrink)

Recent research on autonoetic consciousness indicates that the ability to remember the past and the ability to project oneself into the future are closely related. The purpose of the present study was to confirm this proposition by examining whether the relationship observed between personality and episodic memory could be extended to episodic future thinking and, more generally, to investigate the influence of personality traits on self-information processing in the past and in the future. Results show that Neuroticism and Harm Avoidance (...) predict more negative past memories and future projections. Other personality dimensions exhibit a more limited influence on mental time travel . Therefore, our study provide an additional evidence to the idea that MTT into the past and into the future rely on a common set of processes by which past experiences are used to envision the future. (shrink)

Base-of-the-pyramid business models aim to achieve profitability and poverty reduction by including poor people into corporate value chains. This goal duality creates tensions. Actors’ responses to these tensions are influenced by their cognitive frames of the phenomena building the tension. Applying a cognitive perspective, I investigate how corporate actors with different frames of poverty respond proactively or defensively to the poverty–profitability tension by adapting business model elements. I find that proactive and defensive responses differ for actors holding different cognitive frames (...) of poverty. The responses have consequences for the poverty impact potential of BOP business models. (shrink)

En este trabajo exponemos algunas categorías modales orientadas al estudio y comprensión de los sistemas autoorganizados que muestran complejidad. Para ello centramos nuestra investigación en el área de la ecología y, más en particular, en el ámbito de la ecología aural, es decir, en el estudio de los sonidos que componen los ecosistemas. Las categorías modales aquí desarrolladas son, por un lado, la «repertorialidad», referida a la coherencia y estabilidad interna de todo sistema autoorganizado; la «disposicionalidad» o experimentación y variación (...) inherente a estos sistemas y, finalmente, el «paisaje», que tiene en consideración lo realmente efectivo, lo dado. Este conjunto de categorías nos lleva a explorar el sistema modal de necesidad-contingencia-posibilidad-imposibilidad, el cual, aplicado a los estudios sonoros se convierte en el juego de señales-redundancia-ruido-silencio. Estas categorías, aplicadas a ejemplos en la naturaleza, nos ayudan a comprender el devenir inherente a todo ecosistema. Finalmente, descubrimos cómo la investigación categorial de los paisajes sonoros aporta información sobre el comportamiento evolutivo y el estado de conservación de estos sistemas. (shrink)

In this paper I examine the notion and role of metaphors and illustrations in Maxwell's works in exact science as a pathway into a broader and richer philosophical conception of a scientist and scientific practice. While some of these notions and methods are still at work in current scientific research-from economics and biology to quantum computation and quantum field theory-, here I have chosen to attest to their entrenchment and complexity in actual science by attempting to make some conceptual sense (...) of Maxwell's own usage; this endeavour includes situating Maxwell's conceptions and applications in his own culture of Victorian science and philosophy. I trace Maxwell's notions to the formulation of the problem of understanding, or interpreting, abstract representations such as potential functions and Lagrangian equations. I articulate the solution in terms of abstract-concrete relations, where the concrete, in tune with Victorian British psychology and engineering, includes the muscular as well as the pictorial. This sets the basis for a conception of understanding in terms of unification and concrete modelling, or representation. I examine the relation of illustration to analogies and metaphors on which this account rests. Lastly, I stress and explain the importance of context-dependence, its consequences for realism-instrumentalism debates, and Maxwell's own emphasis on method. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Rhizomata Jahrgang: 5 Heft: 2 Seiten: 148-176.

We provide a detailed history of the concepts of atomic number and isotopy before the discovery of protons and neutrons that draws attention to the role of evolving interplays of multiple aims and criteria in chemical and physical research. Focusing on research by Frederick Soddy and Ernest Rutherford, we show that, in the context of differentiating disciplinary projects, the adoption of a complex and shifting concept of elemental identity and the ordering role of the periodic table led to a relatively (...) coherent notion of atomic number. Subsequent attention to valency, still neglected in the secondary literature, and to nuclear charge led to a decoupling of the concepts of elemental identity and weight and allowed for a coherent concept of isotopy. This concept received motivation from empirical investigations on the decomposition series of radioelements and their unstable chemical identity. A new model of chemical order was the result of an ongoing collaboration between chemical and physical research projects with evolving aims and standards. After key concepts were considered resolved and their territories were clarified, chemistry and physics resumed autonomous projects, yet remained bound by newly accepted explanatory relations. It is an episode of scientific collaboration and partial integration without simple, wholesale gestalt switches or chemical revolutions. (shrink)