The current literature on nanoethics focuses on a wide array of topics such as equity, privacy, military, environment, human enhancement, intellectual property, and security. The identification of those topics leads to the adoption of an ethical stance, which we call the in itself dimension . In this article we argue that even though it is correct to identify the areas where ethical problems are imperative to deal with ( in itself dimension ), it is a partial approach. This is because (...) the in itself dimension pays no attention to another ethical stance; one that does not have anything to do with individual or collective responsibilities, but rather with the socio-economic system into which those responsibilities are embedded. We call this second issue the contextual dimension. (shrink)

El artículo analiza el desarrollo de las nanotecnologías en el contexto de la irrupción de la crisis económica mundial. Comienza destacando los elementos claves de una revolución tecnológica: las características técnicas, el papel en la acumulación de capital y el impacto sobre las clases sociales. Luego se analiza el lugar de la tecnología en el desarrollo, para terminar mostrando cómo las tendencias a la concentración del capital están envolviendo a las nanotecnologías, lo cual puede llevar a un mundo más desigual (...) al que ya existe hoy en día. Las nanotecnologías constituyen la base de la próxima revolución industrial que ya se está estableciendo. Con la irrupción de la crisis económica mundial también las nuevas tecnologías se verán impactadas. Algunos voceros gubernamentales de países desarrollados han mencionado que podrían ser utilizadas como palanca para salir de la crisis, por el contrario en este artículo se presenta el tema en el contexto de las tendencias a la concentración del capital. (shrink)

La sociedad humana está inmersa en una crisis ambiental de proporciones alarmantes. A pesar de las políticas y acuerdos internacionales por revertir la situación, existen fuerzas socio-económicas que reproducen continuamente la degradación y depredación del medio ambiente externo; pero también degradan a la propia naturaleza humana. Estas fuerzas son las relaciones capitalistas. Uno de los ejemplos más claros de cómo el capitalismo reedita las crisis ambientales es, actualmente, el caso de China. En lo que sigue vamos a mostrar las grandes (...) tendencias de degradación y ejemplificarlas con algunos datos elocuentes del panorama chino. (shrink)

This analysis of Mexico’s nanotechnology policies utilizes indicators developed by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, which in 2008 conducted a pilot survey comparing the nanotechnology policies of 24 countries. In this paper, we apply the same questionnaire to the Mexican case, adding business information derived from the National Institute of Statistics and Geography survey on nanotechnologies, also an OECD instrument.

The resurgence of infectious diseases and the emergence of infectious diseases raise questions on how to cope with the situation. The germ or clinical approach is the hegemonic biomedical paradigm. In this article, the author argues that the spread of infectious diseases has posted a challenge to the biomedical paradigm and shows how lock-in procedures maintain alternative and complementary medicine paradigms in the backyard.

The presence of nanotechnologies grew and spread throughout Latin America during the first decade of the 21st century. Science and Technology policies have played an important role in the performance of these new technologies. Various international institutions, such as the World Bank, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, and the Organization of American States promoted similar Science and Technology policies, and included nanotechnology as a priority area. This article shows the role of these Science and Technology policies in the (...) promotion of specific objectives and the gap that was left due to the failure to incorporate an examination of the potential risks to health and environment, not to mention other labor-related effects. The omission of matters relevant to workers and consumers by these institutions led to a distancing from organized civil society. (shrink)

Lindström’s theorem obviously fails as a characterization of first-order logic without identity ( $\mathcal {L}_{\omega \omega }^{-} $ ). In this note, we provide a fix: we show that $\mathcal {L}_{\omega \omega }^{-} $ is a maximal abstract logic satisfying a weak form of the isomorphism property (suitable for identity-free languages and studied in [11]), the Löwenheim–Skolem property, and compactness. Furthermore, we show that compactness can be replaced by being recursively enumerable for validity under certain conditions. In the proofs, we (...) use a form of strong upwards Löwenheim–Skolem theorem not available in the framework with identity. (shrink)

We present a mathematical approach to defeasible reasoning based on arguments. This approach integrates the notion of specificity introduced by Poole and the theory of warrant presented by Pollock. The main contribution of this paper is a precise, well-defined system which exhibits correct behavior when applied to the benchmark examples in the literature. It aims for usability rather than novelty. We prove that an order relation can be introduced among equivalence classes of arguments under the equi-specificity relation. We also prove (...) a theorem that ensures the termination of the process of finding the justified facts. Two more lemmas define a reduced search space for checking specificity. In order to implement the theoretical ideas, the language is restricted to Horn clauses for the evidential context. The language used to represent defeasible rules has been restricted in a similar way. The authors intend this work to unify the various existing approaches to argument-based defeasible reasoning. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Origins of the Ateneo de la Juventud The Lectures at the Ateneo de la Juventud The Ateneo de la Juventud and the Mexican Revolution References Further Reading.

The Reading Augustine series presents short, engaging books offering personal readings of St. Augustine of Hippo's contributions to western philosophical, literary, and religious life. This two-volume work provides a new understanding of Western subjectivity as theorized in the Augustinian Rule. A theopolitical synthesis of Antiquity, the Rule is a humble, yet extremely influential example of subjectivity production. In these volumes, Jodra argues that the Classical and Late-Ancient communitarian practices along the Mediterranean provide historical proof of a worldview in which the (...) self and the other are not disjunctive components, but mutually inclusive forces. The Augustinian Rule is a culmination of this process and also the beginning of something new: The paradigm of the monastic self as protagonist of the new, medieval worldview. Three main theoretical challenges leading to, and present in the Rule are tackled: What are the sources of our modern understanding of subjectivity? Can Ancient sources provide an alternative genealogy that resists the individualistic turn of Modernity? And can the commons be saved without suppressing individuality? Jodra seeks to prove that the synthesis-which is also an appropriation-of Greek and Judaic sources carried out by the first Christians allowed for two contrasting models of subjectivity, the self-less and the other-less, to 'take turns' to dominate our understanding of human nature. The Greek world provided the political dimension and the Jewish world established the key theological principles of a Mediterranean synthesis which took place in Rome. Coherently and progressively, Jodra emphasizes the theopolitical nature of our worldview even today, and claim that the subject of the primitive Church is its most visible incarnation. These volumes therefore restore the unity of the Hellenistic and Judaic world as found by the first Christians, proving that the self and the other are two essential pieces in the construction of our world. (shrink)

Los caminos del exceso.--El casuista de Pascal.--La existencia como economía, como desinterés y como caridad.

The meaning that expressions take on particular occasions often depends on the context in ways which seem to transcend its direct effect on context-sensitive parameters. ‘Truth-conditional pragmatics’ is the project of trying to model such semantic flexibility within a compositional truth-conditional framework. Most proposals proceed by radically ‘freeing up’ the compositional operations of language. I argue, however, that the resulting theories are too unconstrained, and predict flexibility in cases where it is not observed. These accounts fall into this position because (...) they rarely, if ever, take advantage of the rich information made available by lexical items. I hold, instead, that lexical items encode both extension and non-extension determining information. Under certain conditions, the non-extension determining information of an expression e can enter into the compositional processes that determine the meaning of more complex expressions which contain e. This paper presents and motivates a set of type-driven compositional operations that can access non-extension determining information and introduce bits of it into the meaning of complex expressions. The resulting multidimensional semantics has the tools to deal with key cases of semantic flexibility in appropriately constrained ways, making it a promising framework to pursue the project of truth-conditional pragmatics. (shrink)

Recent work in formal semantics suggests that the language system includes not only a structure building device, as standardly assumed, but also a natural deductive system which can determine when expressions have trivial truth-conditions (e.g., are logically true/false) and mark them as unacceptable. This hypothesis, called the `logicality of language', accounts for many acceptability patterns, including systematic restrictions on the distribution of quantifiers. To deal with apparent counter-examples consisting of acceptable tautologies and contradictions, the logicality of language is often paired (...) with an additional assumption according to which logical forms are radically underspecified: i.e., the language system can see functional terms but is `blind' to open class terms to the extent that different tokens of the same term are treated as if independent. This conception of logical form has profound implications: it suggests an extreme version of the modularity of language, and can only be paired with non-classical---indeed quite exotic---kinds of deductive systems. The aim of this paper is to show that we can pair the logicality of language with a different and ultimately more traditional account of logical form. This framework accounts for the basic acceptability patterns which motivated the logicality of language, can explain why some tautologies and contradictions are acceptable, and makes better predictions in key cases. As a result, we can pursue versions of the logicality of language in frameworks compatible with the view that the language system is not radically modular vis-a-vis its open class terms and employs a deductive system that is basically classical. (shrink)

Recent work in formal semantics suggests that the language system includes not only a structure building device, as standardly assumed, but also a natural deductive system which can determine when expressions have trivial truth‐conditions (e.g., are logically true/false) and mark them as unacceptable. This hypothesis, called the ‘logicality of language’, accounts for many acceptability patterns, including systematic restrictions on the distribution of quantifiers. To deal with apparent counter‐examples consisting of acceptable tautologies and contradictions, the logicality of language is often paired (...) with an additional assumption according to which logical forms are radically underspecified: i.e., the language system can see functional terms but is ‘blind’ to open class terms to the extent that different tokens of the same term are treated as if independent. This conception of logical form has profound implications: it suggests an extreme version of the modularity of language, and can only be paired with non‐classical—indeed quite exotic—kinds of deductive systems. The aim of this paper is to show that we can pair the logicality of language with a different and ultimately more traditional account of logical form. This framework accounts for the basic acceptability patterns which motivated the logicality of language, can explain why some tautologies and contradictions are acceptable, and makes better predictions in key cases. As a result, we can pursue versions of the logicality of language in frameworks compatible with the view that the language system is not radically modular vis‐á‐vis its open class terms and employs a deductive system that is basically classical. (shrink)

O artigo – desde uma perspectiva da educação como direito humano universal que reconhece a diversidade – realiza um recorrido panorâmico por uma série de dimensões da educação intercultural no ensino superior do Chile, especialmente universitária, discute criticamente a situação atual da interculturalização na universidade – entendida genericamente – e conclui com algumas perguntas que podem orientar pesquisas ou decisões que levem a que o ensino superior considere os direitos indígenas, permita a expressão de sua cultura, promova a interculturalidade, forme (...) os técnicos e profissionais que requerem o desenvolvimento da sociedade e das comunidades e enriqueça a docência e a ciência com outros paradigmas de conhecimento. Desse modo, que reconheça e valide a interculturalidade e os aportes das culturas indígenas a sua identidade, formação e produção de conhecimento. Trata das comunidades e dos estudantes indígenas em geral, mas aprofunda a situação desde o povo mapuche, embasando-se em projetos de pesquisa e desenvolvimento e em experiências em e desde a Região da Araucanía. A proposta se centra na ideia de que o direito à educação, desde a lei e inconstitucionalidade atual, se centra no sistema escolar formal de ensino básico e médio e não considera a educação superior ou a um sistema de educação continuado como direito universal, no qual poderia se especificar uma condição especial aos estudantes indígenas. Por isso, hoje se luta pela igualdade de oportunidades de inclusão entre indígenas e não indígenas. Palavras-chave: Ensino Superior. Interculturalidade. Cultura mapuche. (shrink)

In this article we offer a detailed assessment of current approaches to the origins of language, with a special foots on their historical and theoretical underpinnings. It is a widely accepted view within evolutionary linguistics that an account of the emergence of human language necessarily involves paying special attention to its communicative function and its relation to other animal communication systems. Ever since Darwin, some variant of this view has constituted the mainstream version in evolutionary linguistics; however, it is our (...) contention in this article that this approach is seriously flawed, and that “animal communication” does not constitute a natural kind on which a sound theoretical model can be built. As a consequence, we argue that this communicative perspective is better abandoned in favor of a structural/formal approach based on the notion of homology, and that some interesting and unexpected similarities may be found by applying this venerable comparative method founded in the 19th century by Richard Owen. (shrink)

According to Kratzer’s influential account of epistemic must and might, these operators involve quantification over domains of possibilities determined by a modal base and an ordering source. Recently, this account has been challenged by invoking contexts of ‘epistemic tension’: i.e., cases in which an assertion that must\ is conjoined with the possibility that \, and cases in which speakers try to downplay a previous assertion that must\, after finding out that \. Epistemic tensions have been invoked from two directions. Von (...) Fintel and Gillies :351–383, 2010) propose a return to a simpler modal logic-inspired account: must and might still involve universal and existential quantification, but the domains of possibilities are determined solely by realistic modal bases. In contrast, Lassiter :117–163, 2016), following Swanson, proposes a more revisionary account which treats must and might as probabilistic operators. In this paper, we present a series of experiments to obtain reliable data on the degree of acceptability of various contexts of epistemic tension. Our experiments include novel variations that, we argue, are required to make progress in this debate. We show that restricted quantificational accounts à la Kratzer fit the overall pattern of results better than either of their recent competitors. In addition, our results help us identify the key components of restricted quantificational accounts, and on that basis propose some refinements and general constraints that should be satisfied by any account of the modal auxiliaries. (shrink)

The logicality of language is the hypothesis that the language system has access to a ‘natural’ logic that can identify and filter out as unacceptable expressions that have trivial meanings—that is, that are true/false in all possible worlds or situations in which they are defined. This hypothesis helps explain otherwise puzzling patterns concerning the distribution of various functional terms and phrases. Despite its promise, logicality vastly over-generates unacceptability assignments. Most solutions to this problem rest on specific stipulations about the properties (...) of logical form—roughly, the level of linguistic representation which feeds into the interpretation procedures—and have substantial implications for traditional philosophical disputes about the nature of language. Specifically, contextualism and semantic minimalism, construed as competing hypotheses about the nature and degree of context-sensitivity at the level of logical form, suggest different approaches to the over-generation problem. In this paper, I explore the implications of pairing logicality with various forms of contextualism and semantic minimalism. I argue that to adequately solve the over-generation problem, logicality should be implemented in a constrained contextualist framework. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to analyse the concepts used by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their elaboration of the notions of plane of immanence and processes of subjectification, which are connected through a complex interrelationship. More specifically, the essay proposes to cross the concept of ‘diagram’, which Deleuze inherited from the thought of Michel Foucault, with the concept of a life, singular and impersonal. To this end, an argument is made for a concept that can be called (...) the virtual body, where this is understood as something other than a biological or social body, even if this difference remains inscribed within them. Since by virtual body what is intended is not something that someone is – which means it isn’t a essence – but something that someone ‘owns’, it can also be used to think the subject outside the limits of ontology. (shrink)

El autor presenta en primer lugar los fundamentos conceptuales que dieron origen al psicoanálisis, siguiendo las influencias de época que recibe Freud y argumentando que éste construyó el psicoanálisis como una ciencia más dentro del territorio que definieron las ciencias de la naturaleza. Luego problematiza algunos temas que la ciencia deja de lado en su consideración sobre los cuales el psicoanálisis puede aportar: el problema del sujeto de la ciencia y el problema del pensamiento y la lógica del descubrimiento.

El autor postula que el campo psicológico dista mucho de estar unificado, por lo que nos obliga a hablar de las psicologías y no de la psicología. Ellas remiten a una concepción de mundo, a una manera entender al hombre, a una concepción de la realidad y a una teoría sobre su cambio. El trabajo profundiza en temas tales como la relación sujeto/objeto, la especificación del objeto de estudio, el concepto de implicación y la producción de subjetividad. Elabora también los (...) conceptos de causalidad, conflicto y determinación estructural; y aborda los problemas de naturaleza y lenguaje, y de historicidad. Concluye proponiendo que se puede elegir diversas psicologías, pero no todas. (shrink)