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 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)

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)

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.

In this paper we examine the study of minerals from the Renaissance to the early nineteenth century in the light of the work of Michel Foucault on the history of systems of thought. In spite of a certain number of theoretical problems, Foucault's enterprise opens up to the historian of science a vast terrain for exploration. But this is the place neither for a general exegesis nor for a general criticism of his position; our aim here is the more modest (...) one of taking certain points from Foucault's study,The order of things, and seeing how far they can be extended into an area not explicitly considered in that work. (shrink)

Significant research has been devoted to detecting people in images and videos. In this paper we describe a human de- tection method that augments widely used edge-based fea- tures with texture and color information, providing us with a much richer descriptor set. This augmentation results in an extremely high-dimensional feature space (more than 170,000 dimensions). In such high-dimensional spaces, classical machine learning algorithms such as SVMs are nearly intractable with respect to training. Furthermore, the number of training samples is much (...) smaller than the dimensionality of the feature space, by at least an order of magnitude. Finally, the extraction of features from a densely sampled grid structure leads to a high degree of multicollinearity. To circumvent these data characteristics, we employ Partial Least Squares (PLS) analysis, an effi- cient dimensionality reduction technique, one which pre- serves significant discriminative information, to project the data onto a much lower dimensional subspace (20 dimen- sions, reduced from the original 170,000). Our human de- tection system, employing PLS analysis over the enriched descriptor set, is shown to outperform state-of-the-art tech- niques on three varied datasets including the popular INRIA pedestrian dataset, the low-resolution gray-scale Daim- lerChrysler pedestrian dataset, and the ETHZ pedestrian dataset consisting of full-length videos of crowded scenes. (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)

Only those whose work and interests have led them to notice it, will have realised, in all probability, the remarkable extent to which the term organization has gained currency, or acquired new and special emphasis, throughout the entire range of scientific and sociological literature during the last ten or twenty years.In biology and bio-chemistry organization has been discussed or used as a technical term, mostly since 1930 by at least thirty well-known authors; amongst the more prominent are Huxley, Wilson, Woodger, (...) Cannon, Waddington, McDougall, Needham, Block, Hopkins and Sherrington. Under this magic term some authors refer to the physico-chemical nature of the cell or cytoplasm, and usually with special reference to selective or directive catalysis; others to the general constitution or structure of the organism and almost indistinguishable from general morphology and physiology; others to embryological development as such ; others more especially to “relations” between cells, organs and structural parts, often in an abstract sense; others refer more particularly to a hypothetical integrating and/or co-ordinating factor : a few refer to re-constitution from dissociated cells as observed in experiments with Sponges and Hydroids. (shrink)