Este artículo se centra en describir la problemática acerca de si los humanos deben seguir atrapados en una ciega evolución biológica o bien ellos deben pasar a elegir qué desean asumir. Ante tal disyuntiva se recuerdan la hipótesis optimista y la hipótesis pesimista. Al parecer, la especie humana, como el resto de las especies vivas, ha surgido en un proceso de evolución; es la única con capacidad de ser consciente de ello y, en parte, ha sido capaz, mediante las técnicas, (...) de poder adaptarse y de planificar en parte su futuro. Las biotecnologías están utilizándose cada vez más para el mejoramiento y perfeccionamiento de lo humano, convirtiéndose de ese modo en antropotecnias. Así, al orientarse estas nuevas tecnologías hacia y sobre su autor, el ser humano puede también convertirse en un peligro para él mismo. Los «transhumanistas » estiman, sin embargo, que los humanos deben arrebatar su destino biológico al proceso ciego de la evolución de la variación aleatoria y la adaptación, y pasar a la siguiente etapa como especie: la elección de nuestro ser. En la conclusión se patentizan las implicancias y consecuencias del hecho de ser humano y racional. (shrink)

En el presente artículo se presenta, desde la filosofía, primeramente la tesis de L. Zea, según el cual la universidad del hombre americano, se halla en la aceptación de la diversidad concreta de las pluriformes maneras de ser de los americanos. Europa recién ahora se pone filosóficamente el problema de la pluralidad cultural. Se analiza luego la forma de considerar el gobierno y las leyes tanto de los americanos sajones como de los americanos latinos, cuando construyen sus propias formas de (...) ser. Se considera el intento y el fracaso al querer éstos imitar a aquéllos. Trata, además, la hipótesis de L. Zea según el cual la identidad de los pueblos latinoamericanos está en no tener ninguna que lo marque como pueblo y hombre común a toda América Latina, salvo ciertos rasgos de conducta común, derivados del talante conquistador español. Ortega y Gasset prolonga este análisis y lo centra en las influencias de la inmigración en Argentina, de lo que -entre otras causas- surge una explicación para ciertas conductas que dan forma a la identidad de los argentinos. Algo no ha cambiado en el modo de ser argentino: éste no se dedica primeramente a vivir la vida, sino a hacer fortuna y defenderse. Se identifica por lo que posee o desea poseer.This article presents, from a philosophical stand, firstly Leopoldo Zea's thesis according to which the American man's universality resides in his acceptance of the concrete diversity of the various ways of being American. Only now Europe is starting to consider philosophically the problem of cultural pluralism. Secondly, we analyze the way the Saxon Americans and the Latin Americans consider government and laws during their respective processes of becoming their own selves. We examine the intent and subsequent failure of the latter at trying to imitate the former; also, Zea's thesis according to which the identity of Latin American peoples lies precisely in not having a unique identity that define them as a man and people common to all Latin America, except for some behavioral traits deriving from the Spanish conqueror temper. Ortega y Gasset extends this analysis focusing on Argentina's immigration and concluding that this partially accounts for the Argentinean behavior and identity, their priority being to make a fortune and to defend themselves. Their identity rises from what they have or what they want to have. (shrink)

En su inicio, el empirismo ha querido ser, en una época de profundas dudas y cambio:como ha sido la Época Moderna, una honesta crítica a los argumentos presentados por el racionalismo, según el cual se debía poner el fundamento del conocimiento en algunas verdade: innatas. La propuesta del empirismo hizo descansair esta esperanza en los datos fidedignos de la impresiones o experiencias sensofiales. En este artículo se analiza la concepción de idea que empleaba John Locke y sus argumentos para desautorizar, (...) una tras otra, las razones del innatismo. No obstante, en el ámbito moral, sigue manteniendo una luz de la naturaleza, ínsita em los hombres, que es recta norma para la razón., para quienes buscan conocetrla. De todos modos, que da establecido, con el empirismo de Locke, que explicar el conocimiento de una cosa implica explicar el origen que el hombre tiene de esse conocimiento, revalidando el valor de la investigación humana y de la historicidad del conocimiento. (shrink)

From the technical point of view, philosophically neutral, the duality between a paraconsistent and a paracomplete logic lies in the fact that explosion does not hold in the former and excluded middle does not hold in the latter. From the point of view of the motivations for rejecting explosion and excluded middle, this duality can be interpreted either ontologically or epistemically. An ontological interpretation of intuitionistic logic is Brouwer’s idealism; of paraconsistency is dialetheism. The epistemic interpretation of intuitionistic logic is (...) in terms of preservation of constructive proof; of paraconsistency is in terms of preservation of evidence. In this paper, we explain and defend the epistemic approach to paraconsistency. We argue that it is more plausible than dialetheism and allows a peaceful and fruitful coexistence with classical logic. (shrink)

Let us say that an extended object is “composed wholly of simples” just in case it is an aggregate of absolutely unextended parts spread throughout an extended region—that is, just in case there is a set S such that: every member is a point-sized part of the object, and for every x, x is part of the object if and only if it has a part in common with some member of S. Could a truly extended substance be composed entirely (...) of unextended parts? Reflection upon the fact that it must be at least possible for extended objects to touch one another suggests that the answer to this question is: No. (shrink)

_Imagination_ is an outstanding contribution to a notoriously elusive and confusing subject. It skillfully interrelates problems in philosophy, the history of ideas and literary theory and criticism, tracing the evolution of the concept of imagination from Hume and Kant in the eighteenth century to Ryle, Sartre and Wittgenstein in the twentieth. She strongly belies that the cultivation of imagination should be the chief aim of education and one of her objectives in writing the book has been to put forward reasons (...) why this is so. Purely philosophical treatment of the concept is shown to be related to its use in the work of Coleridge and Wordsworth, who she considers to be the creators of a new kind of awareness with more than literary implications. The purpose of her historical account is to suggest that the role of imagination in our perception and thought is more pervasive than may at first sight appear, and that the thread she traces is an important link joining apparently different areas of our experience. She argues that imagination is an essential element in both our awareness of the world and our attaching of value to it. (shrink)

Eric Olsen argues from the fact that we once existed as fetal individuals to the conclusion that the Standard View of personal identity is mistaken. I shall establish that a similar argument focusing upon dead people opposes Olson’s favored Biological View of personal identity.

Physical boundaries and the earliest topologists. Topology has a relatively short history; but its 19th century roots are embedded in philosophical problems about the nature of extended substances and their boundaries which go back to Zeno and Aristotle. Although it seems that there have always been philosophers interested in these matters, questions about the boundaries of three-dimensional objects were closest to center stage during the later medieval and modern periods. Are the boundaries of an object actually existing, less-than-three-dimensional parts of (...) the object—that is, are solids bounded by two-dimensional surfaces, surfaces by one-dimensional “edges” or “physical lines”, edges by dimensionless “simples”? If not, how does a perfectly spherical object manage to touch a perfectly flat object—what part of the sphere is in immediate contact with the plane, if the sphere has no unextended parts? But if such parts be admitted, are we not then saddled with “actual infinities” of simples, lines, and surfaces spread throughout each continuous object—the boundaries of all the object’s internal parts? Does it help to say that these internal boundaries exist only “potentially”? (shrink)

This book addresses two basic questions: What is the proper philosophical analysis of the concept of substance? and What kinds of compound substances are there? The second question is mainly addressed by asking what relations among objects are necessary and sufficient for their coming to compose a larger whole. The first 72 pages of the book contain a short history of attempts to answer the first question, and a brief presentation of the analysis the authors defend at length in their (...) earlier book, Substance Among Other Categories. In the remaining 119 pages, the authors take up the second question. This order of presentation makes sense; but it may help to create a false impression in those who only glance at the first few pages—that this book is just a simplified version of the earlier one, with a little bit of history thrown in. It would be quite unfortunate, however, if very many potential readers get this impression; for it might discourage them from looking closely at the bulk of the book, which is new. The issues discussed in the later chapters are at the center of one of the most lively debates in contemporary metaphysics; and the position Hoffman and Rosenkrantz stake out is appealing and carefully articulated. Their views deserve careful attention from philosophers working on the metaphysics of persistence through time, personal identity, artifact identity, and mereology. (shrink)

Historians of technology have provided important accounts of technological innovation, but they rarely employ concepts which permit a rigorous analysis ofinvention as a mental or cognitive process. This article seeks to address this theoretical lacuna by using concepts adapted from cognitive psychology to compare the mental processes of two telephone inventors, Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison. Specifically, we suggest that invention may be seen as a process in which inventors combine ideas with objects, or what we call mental models (...) and mechanical representations. The strategies by which inventors generate and manipulate these mental models and mechanical representations are what we refer to as heuristics. Using these concepts to narrate the development of the telephone, this article shows how invention can be interpreted as being much more than simply a mysterious act of individual genius. (shrink)

I defend an alternative to the two traditional accounts of the relationship between metacognition and social cognition: metacognition as primary versus social cognition as primary. These accounts have complementary explanatory vices and virtues. They also share a natural assumption: that interpretation in terms of mental states is “spectatorial”, aiming exclusively for an objective description of the mental facts about self and others. I argue that if one rejects this assumption in favor of the view that interpretation in terms of mental (...) states also plays important regulative roles with respect to minds and behavior, a new and superior conception of the relationship between metacognition and social cognition comes into view. On this conception, person-level metacognitive concepts are socio-cognitive tools that shape us into better cognitive agents and more predictable cognitive objects, thereby enhancing our abilities at social coordination. Mastery of these metacognitive concepts relies on subpersonal, non-conceptual, procedural metacognition. This reconceptualization of the relationship between metacognition and social cognition combines the complementary explanatory virtues of the two traditional conceptions, while avoiding their complementary explanatory vices. (shrink)

This is a study that investigated the extent of use of the three principles of ethics – utility, morality, and justice – in managerial ethical decision making, in addition to the personal attitude towards them. It involved undergraduate and graduate business students (total N=163) from the Olayan School of Business in the American University of Beirut, Lebanon. Two kinds of measurements were done: self assessment, and testing with the Saschkin’ s Managerial Value Profile (1997). It showed that morality was the (...) overriding ethical principle used, especially in the graduate group (professionals). Business students still believed in the justice system despite the weakness of the country’s law. Utility was the least used, although males were found to be more utilitarian than females. Finally there was no relation between personal attitudes toward the three ethical principles, and the intentional behavior when faced with ethical dilemmas. The findings were discussed and recommendations were given. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Full Collection of Personal NarrativesZohar Lederman, Ola Ziara, Rachel Coghlan, Oksana Sulaieva, Anna Shcherbakova, Oleksandr Dudin, Vladyslava Kachkovska, Iryna Dudchenko, Anna Kovchun, Lyudmyla Prystupa, Yuliya Nogovitsyna, Ghaiath Hussein, Kathryn Fausch, P. P. Kyaw, Ayesha Ahmad, Richard W Sams II, Handreen Mohammed Saeed, Artem Riga, Ryan C. Maves, Elizabeth Dotsenko, Irina Deyneka, Eva V. Regel, and Vita Voloshchuk• An Unsettling Affair• How We Keep Caring While Walking Through Our Pain• (...) Adjusting Laboratory Practices to the Challenges of Wartime• Why We Stay• A Semi-Personal Story from a Ukrainian NGO Professional (or a Semi-Professional Story from a Ukrainian Person) Living through the War• When Ethics Survives Where People Do Not: A Story From Darfur• Burma’s Healthcare Under Fire: My Experience as an Exiled Medical Professional• When a Conflict Collapses on a Child: An (Aborted) Medical Evacuation of a Hazara Toddler During the Kabul Airport Blast and the Taliban Takeover• The Vagaries and Vicissitudes of War• Providing Care to a Potential Aggressor: An Ethical Dilemma• One Surgeon’s Experience During Armed Conflict in Ukraine• The Limits of Our Obligations• A Liberating Breath• Soldiers of the Invisible Front: How Ukrainian Therapists Are Fighting for the Mental Health of the Nation Under Fire• Stories of Families with Chronically Ill Pediatric Patients during the War in UkraineCopyright © 2023 Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

Although the same environmental regulations apply to all regions in China, legal enforcement can be different due to local economic development priorities. There is still a lack of knowledge about how regional disparities affect the operating performance results of the implementation of corporate environmental management practices, thus providing little information for foreign companies when they invest and develop their production base in China. To fill this research gap, this paper collects data from the Fortune 500 Chinese firms to investigate the (...) moderating role of regional disparities in affecting the performance results of corporate environmental management efforts based on the institutional theory. The disclosed corporate environmental responsibility practices serve as proxy to represent corporate environmental management practices. Content analysis approach was applied to collect and analyze CER practices published in the corporate reports of Chinese manufacturers. The results show that CER has a positive impact on operating income, while regional disparities influence the relationship between CER and corporate operating income. Specifically, CER and operating income are positively related in Eastern China; on the contrary, they are negatively related in Western China. This paper adds to the body of knowledge about environmental discrepancies in the same emerging economy, and provides insights for systematic consideration in terms of the issues of government environmental regulations and corporate environmental strategies. (shrink)

Two recent papers by Michael Burke bearing upon the persistence of people and commonplace things illustrate the fact that the quest for synchronic ontological economy is likely to encourage a disturbing diachronic proliferation of entities. This discussion argues that Burke's promise of ontological economy is seriously compromised by the fact that his proposed metaphysic does violence to standard intuitions concerning the persistence of people and commonplace things. In effect, Burke would have us achieve synchronic economy (rejection of coincident entities) by (...) postulating strongly counterintuitive transtemporal claims of numerical diversity. The argument is made that the price of Burkean economy is too high. (shrink)

Decentralized clinical trials (DCTs) have the potential to advance the conduct of clinical trials, but raise several ethical issues, including obtaining valid informed consent. The debate on the ethical issues resulting from digitalization is predominantly focused on direct risks relating to for example data protection, safety, and data quality. We submit however, that a broader view on ethical aspects of DCTs is needed to touch upon the new challenges that come with the DCT practice. Digitalization has impacts that go beyond (...) its direct purposes, by shaping behaviors, experiences, social relations, and values. We examine four elements of the informed consent procedure that are affected by DCTs, while taking these soft impacts of technologies into account: (i) informing participants and testing understanding, (ii) freedoms in relation to responsibilities and burdens, (iii) trust in participant-researcher relations, and (iv) impacts on the concept of privacy. Our analysis reveals that a broad view is key for optimal conduct of DCTs. In addition, it provides insight into the ethical impacts of DCTs on informed consent. Technologies such as DCTs potentially have profound impacts which are not immediately addressed by the existing regulatory frameworks, but nonetheless important to recognize. These findings can guide future practices of DCTs to foster the important values of clinical research in this novel approach for conducting clinical trials. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Painting Outside the Lines: Patterns of Creativity in Modern ArtMatthew ZiffPainting Outside the Lines: Patterns of Creativity in Modern Art, by David W. Galenson. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001, 272 pp., $29.95.The relationship between the market value of paintings and the chronological point in an artist's working life when the paintings were produced is the driving mechanism for exploring creativity and innovation in David W. Galenson's book "Painting (...) Outside the Lines: Patterns of Creativity in Modern Art. The working thesis of this book is that Modern artists have worked creatively and innovatively in one of two distinctly different manners. The terminology Galenson uses to describe these distinct ways of working are "finders" and "seekers." Finders are artists like Pablo Picasso, who at age 26, make startling and important innovations with little advance indication that such a burst is about to take place. Seekers are artists like Paul Cezanne, whospend their entire working lives engaged in the pursuit of a singular approach or achievement. The differences between these methodologies are carefully presented through the details of the working lives of a variety of Modern artists. French nineteenth century and early twentieth-century artists and mid-twentieth-century American artists are used as the source data for these comparisons.Early in the book Galenson presents lists of chronological events within the lives of artists and market valuation of their work within this chronology. The dramatic clarity of the relationships presented in this data sets the stage for the detailed information that follows. Factors that in some cases only partly, and in others nearly completely, explain an artist's way of working are offered through biographic information, information about the aesthetic and cultural milieu, and about the economic and educational structures that are predominant during the relevant time in the life of the artist.The relationship between the aesthetic and cultural milieu surrounding an artist and the capacity or inclination of an artist to be innovative is an important aspect of the book's analysis. The scope of the book is limited to Modern artists because of the shift that took place at the outset of Modern art, during the mid 1860s, that brought a strong emphasis on innovation and change for their own sake as an important characteristic within a work of art. This emphasis "created incentives for painters to produce new approaches to art" (p. 111). Prior to the time of Modern art, innovation and change were often unnecessary for an artist to be successful. Modern art introduced the demand that innovation and change be necessary ingredients in art, and therefore the search for innovation became a significant element within the work of many artists. The manner in which this search took place, as presented through the data at hand, reveals how individual artists viewed the need for innovation and change within their own [End Page 123] work. Paul Cezanne, for example, was aware of the impact that his painting was having on the art world, but he insisted that he was not yet finished with discoveries that would reveal the truest expression of his beliefs about aesthetic expression.In the American movement, "Abstract Expressionism," Galenson finds a useful counter example to the art scene in Paris. In the United States, especially during the 1940s and 1950s — the peak years of creative output by Abstract Expressionist artists — the demand for their work was quite low. There were few economically viable outlets for the work of de Kooning, Pollack, Rothko, and the others of this group. Consequently there is a shift in the chronological point at which these artists achieve market value success. Nearly all of these artists receivedrecognition at an older age than the French artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.The thesis of the book, that there are two fundamentally different ways of working to produce works of art, is directly applicable to, and useful in, exploring issues of teaching and learning in design education. As a teacher of interior architecture I was interested to follow the details that Galenson presented in support of his analysis of the careers of numerous Modern artists. The methodological differences between seeking and... (shrink)

No one who cares about equal opportunity can derive much comfort from the present occupational distribution of working women. In the various industrial societies of the West, women comprise between one quarter and one-half of the national labor force. However, they tend to clustered in employment sectors – especially clerical, sales, and service J occupations – which rank relatively low in remuneration, status, autonomy, and other perquisites. Meanwhile, the more prestigious and rewarding managerial and professional positions, as well as the (...) major categories of blue-collar labor, remain largely a male preserve. In the same societies the average income earned by full-time female workers is one-half to two- J thirds that of their male counterparts. Although this disparity owes much to i other factors, including lower pay for work similar or even identical to that r standardly done by men, much of it can be explained only by the concentration of working women in traditional female job ghettos. (shrink)

In a series of recent publications, orofacial researchers have debated the question of how ‘bruxism’ should be defined for the purposes of accurate diagnosis and reliable clinical research. Following the principles of realism-based ontology, we performed an analysis of the arguments involved. This revealed that the disagreements rested primarily on inconsistent use of terms, so that issues of ontology were thus obfuscated by shortfalls in terminology. In this paper, we demonstrate how bruxism terminology can be improved by paying attention to (...) the relationships between (1) particulars and types, and (2) continuants and occurrents. (shrink)

Two recent papers by Michael Burke bearing upon the persistence of people and commonplace things illustrate the fact that the quest for synchronic ontological economy is likely to encourage a disturbing diachronic proliferation of entities. This discussion argues that Burke’s promise of ontological economy is seriously compromised by the fact that his proposed metaphysic does violence to standard intuitions concerning the persistence of people and commonplace things. In effect, Burke would have us achieve synchronic economy (rejection of coincident entities) by (...) postulating strongly counterintuitive transtemporal claims of numerical diversity. The argument is made that the price of Burkean economy is too high. (shrink)

In the last two decades we have witnessed considerable efforts directed towards making electronic healthcare records comparable and interoperable through advances in record architectures and (bio)medical terminologies and coding systems. Deep semantic issues in general, and ontology in particular, have received some interest from the research communities. However, with the exception of work on so-called ‘controlled vocabularies’, ontology has thus far played little role in work on standardization. The prime focus has been rather the rapid population of terminologies at the (...) level of fine detail. In this paper, we argue that more efforts are needed on the side of both research and standardization to ensure that the coding systems used in electronic healthcare records enjoy a semantics that is coherent with the semantics of the record. We propose realist ontology as a method to bring about this coherence by means of a robust system of top-level ontological categories. (shrink)

We affirm the utility of integrative modeling, according to which it is advantageous to move beyond “one-at-a-time binary paradigms” through studies that position themselves within realistic multidimensional design spaces. We extend the integrative modeling approach to a target domain with which we are familiar, the consequences of bilingualism on mind and brain, often referred to as the “bilingual advantage.” In doing so, we highlight work from our group consistent with integrative modeling.