This paper presents a method to compute a posteriori probability intervals when the initial conditional information is also given with probability intervals. The right way to make an exact computation is with the associated convex set of probabilities. Probability trees are used to represent these initial conditional convex sets because they greatly save the space required. This paper proposes a simulated annealing algorithm, which uses probability trees to represent the convex sets in order to compute the a posteriori intervals.

This collection addresses a post-WWII shift in the hierarchy of scientific explanations, where the highest goal moves from reductionism towards some ...

Se realiza un recorrido por las fuentes, tanto de la tradición directa de Lucrecio como de la tradición indirecta. Se establece una relación jerárquica de las fuentes y la dependencia entre sí.

Este artículo trata de la teoría de la percepción en el De Sensibus de Teofrasto y en el De Rerum Natura de Lucrecio. Teofrasto realiza una exposición de las opiniones de Empédocles, Clidemo, Diógenes de Apolonia, Demócrito, Anaxágoras y Platón; pero también realiza una amplia crítica de las opiniones de dichos autores. Por otra parte, el poema de Lucrecio, en su libro cuarto, expone la teoría de los simulacra (D. R. N., TV, 50-360), donde se ocupa de la percepción, y (...) más especialmente de la visión, pero también del problema del conocimiento. (shrink)

En la constitución de la historia de la filosofía como disciplina autónoma se puso el acento en que la filosofía escolástica manipuló la filosofía aristotélica, recibida a través de los árabes, para ponerla al servicio de intereses religiosos, desvirtuando y entrando en ruptura con las exigencias del espíritu filosófico. Atendiendo, sin embargo, tanto al significado histórico como a la significación filosófica del devenir de la Escuela de traductores de Toledo como centro básico, aunque no exclusivo, de la transmisión de la (...) filosofía y de la ciencia greco-arábigas al Occidente medieval, se pone de manifiesto la tendencia continuista que da sentido a la historia de la filosofía como disciplina.---In the constitution of the history of philosophy as an autonomous discipline, it was stressed that Scholastic philosophy manipulated Aristotelian philosophy inherited through the Arabs, to put it to the service of religious interests, thus disrupting the demands of the philosophical spirit. However, considering both the historical and the philosophical meanings of the translator’s School of Toledo, as a basic though not exclusive centre for the transmission of Greek-Arabic philosophy and science to Medieval Europe, the A. points out the continuity that gives sense to the history of philosophy as a discipline. (shrink)

For the theorists of crisis, the revolutionary state comes into existence through violence, and due to its inability to provide an authoritative katechon (restrainer) against internal and external violence, it perpetuates violence until it self-destructs. Writing during extreme economic depression and growing social and political violence, the crisis theorists––Joseph de Maistre, Juan Donoso Cortés, and Carl Schmitt––each sought to blame the chaos of their time upon the Janus-faced postrevolutionary ideals of liberalism and socialism by urging a return to pre-revolutionary moral (...) and religious values. They are united by three counterrevolutionary principles, all of which are purported to remedy revolutionary violence: traditional constitutional fidelity, the philosophy of the decision, and opposition to bourgeois liberalism. This essay is followed by the first complete English translation and publication of Donoso’s letter of October 24, 1851, which contains Donoso’s only reference to the “discussing class,” a political entity later popularized by Schmitt in his 1922 work Political Theology. (shrink)

Some theories of goodness are descriptively rich: they have much to say about what makes things good. Neo-Aristotelian accounts, for instance, detail the various features that make a human being, a dog, a bee good relative to facts about those forms of life. Famously, such theories of relative goodness tend to be comparatively poor: they have little or nothing to say about what makes one kind of being better than another kind. Other theories of goodness—those that take there to be (...) absolute goodness—are comparatively rich: they offer grounds for judging some types of things better than others because they have more absolute goodness. Moorean accounts, for example, can tell us that humans and human experiences are superior to bees and blades of grass. But such theories tend to be descriptively poor: they struggle to tell us in virtue of what this is so. In this essay we motivate and flesh out a view that splits the difference between accounts of goodness as relative and accounts of goodness as absolute. Such a view holds promise only if the mechanics of this kind of metaphysics of goodness can be worked out. Here we present a view on which the paradigm for absolute goodness is God and the paradigm for each kind of relative goodness is a divine idea. (shrink)

La influencia del pensamiento analítico tradicional ha sido un factor determinante de que un amplio sector del filósofo acabara por desentenderse de la historia de la filosofia. Las vicisitudes sufridas en nuestros dias por la filosofía analítica han conducido al movimiento postanalítico a acercarse a los problemas de la historia de la filosofía. La muestra mas característica de ello acaso pueda ser el peculiar replanteamiento neohistoricista llevado a cabo, desde posiciones diferentes, por Mccintyre y por Rorty. Este neohistoricismo se revela, (...) sin embargo, insuficiente para solucionar el viejo problema de las relaciones entre la filosofía y su historia, incluyendo aquí la configuración de "historiador" que debe acompañar el "filosofo" cuando trata de adentrarse en el terreno de la historia de la filosofía. (shrink)

El proyecto de traducir al latín el Shifâ-de Avicena es el reusltado directo del interés de la cultura cristiana medieval por incorporar la herencia islámica más avanzada de aquel tiempo. Así lo pone de manifiesto el prólogo en el que Avendeuth dedica la traducción del De anima al Arzobispo de Toledo. En la transmisión medieval de la filosofía se concreta la significación que la transmisión del saber en general tiene para la historia de la filosofía del Occidente medieval como búsqueda (...) de una cultura cristiana que pudiera estar de acuerdo con los progresos de la razón humana. (shrink)

Se realiza un recorrido crítico con respecto a las ideas sobre la narrativa histórica de lo filosófico y lo político en diversos autores contemporáneos. Temas y problemas como el del contextualismo y el convencionalismo, así como el del neointencionalismo en la historia de las ideas son analizados.

Las. actuales visiones discontinuistas de la Historia de la filosofía no toman frecuentemente en la suficiente consideración la interdependencia entre el significado histórico y la significación filosófica en lo concerniente al devenir histórico de la filosofía. La necesidad de una interdependencia tal se pone de manifiesto cuando el historiador de la filosofía trata de afrontar el alcance de las diferentes revisiones que han sido propuestas en relación con la Escuela de traductores de Toledo por los especialistas que se han ocupado (...) de esta cuestión, a partir de la obra de A. Jourdain. (shrink)

The author argues that behind the apparent randomness of interactions between cabdrivers and their fares in Warsaw is a temporal structure. To capture this temporal structure, the author introduces the notion of a linking ecology. He argues that the Warsaw taxi market is a linking ecology, which is structured by religious time, state time, and family time. The author then focuses on waiting time, arguing that it too structures the interactions between cabdrivers and their fares. The author makes a processual (...) argument that waiting time has been restructured by the postsocialist transformation, but only because this transformation has been continually encoded through the defensive and adaptive strategies of cabdrivers responding to the repetitive and unique events located across the social space. The author concludes with the claim that linking ecologies are a recurring structure of the social process and that they form the backbone of globalization, financialization, and mediatization. (shrink)

Since 1900, debates about the justification of punishment have also been debates about the cause of crime. In the early twentieth century, the rehabilitative ideal of punishment viewed mental illness and dysfunction in individuals as the cause of crime. Starting in the 1970s, retributivism identified the immorality of human agents as the source of crime, which dovetailed well with the “tough-on-crime” political milieu of the 1980s and 1990s that produced mass incarceration. After surveying these historical trends, Wirts argues for a (...) social critical view that crime is best understood as a product of an unjust society, not faulty human beings. This view should take the lessons learned by the critiques of rehabilitation, however, and resist the tendency to reduce human beings to recipients of social services. (shrink)

Advances in analytical understanding of the biosphere’s biogeochemical cycles have spawned concepts of Gaia and noosphere. Earlier in this century, in concert with the Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the natural scientist Vladimir Vernadsky developed the notion of noosphere-an evolving collective human consciousness on Earth exerting an ever increasing intluence on biogeochemical processes. More recently, the chemist James Lovelock postulated the Earth to be a self-regulating system made up of biota and their environment with the capacity to maintain a (...) planetary steady state favorable to life. This is the Gaia hypothesis. To many, Gaia and noosphere represent contradictory interpretations of humanity’s relation to planetary ecology. Noosphere emphasizes a free will and obligation to shape the destiny of humanity on Earth through technology and new kinds of social relations. In contrast, Gaia invokes mysterious mechanisms of planetary evolution that lie beyond human control and understanding. I argue that if brought together, noosphere and Gaia can provide a useful symbol for guiding human interventions in global ecology because the contradictions of a nature-centered view of Gaia and a human-centered view of noosphere are coming to be irrelevant with the emergence of an analytical science of the biosphere. (shrink)

Donald Davidson has made enormous contributions to the philosophy of action, epistemology, semantics and philosophy of mind and today is recognized as one of the most important analytical philosophers of the late twentieth century. _Donald Davidson: Truth, Meaning and Knowledge_ addresses * Davidson's writings on epistemology and theory of language with their implications of ontology and philosophy of mind * the central issue of whether truth is the ultimate goal of enquiry, challenged by contributions from Richard Rorty and Paul Horwich (...) * Davidson's approach to semantics and applied linguistics as addressed by Kirk Ludwig, Gabriel Segal, Peter Pagin, Stephen Neale, Herman Cappelen and Ernie Lepore and Reinaldo Elugardo * Davidson's advances in the philosophy of mind in relation to the views of Williard V. Quine, John McDowell and Peter F. Strawson, in essays by Roger Gibson and Anita Avramides. (shrink)

The topic of professionalism has dominated the content of major academic medicine publications during the past decade and continues to do so. The message of this current wave of professionalism is that medical educators need to be more attentive to the moral sensibilities of trainees, to their interpersonal and affective dimensions, and to their social conscience, all to the end of skilled, humanistic physicians. Urgent calls to address professionalism from such groups as the Association of American Medical Colleges, the American (...) Board of Internal Medicine, and the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, among others. In fact, at the 2004 annual meeting of the AAMC six separate presentations addressed professionalism with such titles as "Evaluating Humanism and Professionalism," Professionalism: Expectation, Education, Evaluation," or "Toward Assessing Professional Behaviors of Medical Students through Peer Observations". Professionalism, then, has become part of the current academic medicine parlance, used by administrators, clinical faculty, residency programs, and professional organizations with an expectation of shared meanings and goals. All of these stakeholders focus on what has become a consistent list of attributes deemed to be the essence of professionalism, which usually include variations on altruism, duty, excellence, honor and integrity, accountability, and respect. In fact, most of the scholarly work to date has been listing, describing, decrying, and measuring/evaluating it. In this collection of essays, we don’t argue with these attributes. Instead, we ask questions of the discourse from which they arise, how the specialized language of academic medicine disciplines has defined, organized, contained, and made seemingly immutable a group of attitudes, values, and behaviors subsumed under the label "professional" or "professionalism." This collection aims to be a critical text, one that questions the profession’s beliefs about the nature of its work and how such beliefs are enacted in medical education, particularly as they fuel the professionalism discourse. In addition, we will scrutinize how the discourse is enacted in both the formal and hidden curriculum, and in the larger medical environment. (shrink)

Heidegger’s thinking, according to his own testimony, is rooted in two traditions of philosophy: Platonic-Aristotelian ontology and Husserl’s phe­nomenology. Heidegger’s claim that the original understanding of Being is lost and has to be rediscovered conjoins the phenomenological claim that there is a certain mode of seeing that enables a revelatory philosophical insight. I would like to show how Heidegger combines both these claims in his supposition that the original philosophical conceptuality, as developed by Plato and Aristotle, was lost but can (...) be retrieved by means of applying the phenomenological method to the interpretation of texts. Furthermore, I would like to interpret this retrieval in the context of Heidegger’s project of “overcoming metaphysics” and Nietzsche’s suggestion that “Plato was essentially a pantheist, yet in the guise of a dualist”. (shrink)