Engineering, as a complex and multidimensional practice of technology development, has long been a source of ethical concerns. These concerns have been approached from various perspectives. There are ongoing debates in the literature of the philosophy of engineering/technology about how to organize an optimized view of the values entailed in technology development processes. However, these debates deliver little in the way of a concrete rationale or framework that could comprehensively describe different types of engineering values and their multi-aspect interrelations in (...) real engineering practices. Approaching engineering values from a meaning-based perspective, as in this paper, can be a reliable method of tackling such a controversial problem. This paper therefore proposes that technology development be considered a systemic normative practice and attempts to provide a comprehensive view of various built-in values, their different origins and features, and a way of prioritizing them in real engineering processes. Studying two cases of the Zayandeh Rood Dam and the Abbasi Dam will lead to practical insights into how to understand norms in technology development and incorporate them into engineering practice. (shrink)

Razón, poesía, historia.--La cuestión del estoicismo español.--El querer.

De Interpretatione is among Aristotle's most influential and widely read writings; C. W. A. Whitaker presents the first systematic study of this work, and offers a radical new view of its aims, its structure, and its place in Aristotle's system. He shows that De Interpretatione is not a disjointed essay on ill-connected subjects, as traditionally thought, but a highly organized and systematic treatise on logic, argument, and dialectic.

Benadering van enkele klassieke filosofische kwesties vanuit een door de Angelsaksische taalfilosofie geïnspireerde visie op de zingevende rede.

El hombre crea su moral tomando en cuenta las aportaciones más íntimas de su espíritu. Así como la historia de la humanidad presenta una serie gradual y emocional de conquistas espirituales, así también la moral se ha logrado a través de la historia, pero siempre sobre el fundamento de la esencia humana, pues no cabe duda de que la jerarquía de los valores depende de cada ser humano. Ella orienta toda su conducta y señala sus grandes metas. El espíritu religioso (...) coloca, en primer término, a los valores de la religión, el moralista a los éticos, el pragmático a los útiles; el estético a las bellas artes, dando preferencia cada una a su valor favorito. (shrink)

G. Deledalle is the author of a Histoire de la philosophie américaine, and of some excellent studies on Dewey, such as La pédagogie de Dewey, philosophie de la continuité, and "Durkheim et Dewey". These are all works that deserve full attention by students of the Golden Age of American philosophy. For a European, Deledalle has an unusual capacity to detect the vitality and freshness, but also the depth, of the growth of higher education in the U.S. in the first half (...) of this century. At the heart of this growth were philosophical ideas, and in particular those of Dewey. Philosophy did not have then dictatorial or competitive designs regarding education, the social and political sciences, psychology, or the natural sciences. It freely mingled with them, not just imparting methodological or epistemological rigor but also contributing some insights and giving the hypotheses and conclusions in these fields the character of "experiences." Experience is the guiding theme of this rich and complicated work, covering a multitude of subjects and positions. The treatment is divided into six parts dealing respectively with Dewey's leanings toward unitary experience, organic experience, dynamic experience, functional experience, instrumental experience, and transactional experience. In the study of the intellectual of Dewey's life practically all of his production is critically examined by Deledalle: a monumental task in itself, made possible by the critical bibliography of Milton Hasley Thomas. There is enough early biographical detail to make this work an effective and affectionate intellectual portrait. The best pages of this work are devoted to a thorough explication and comparative study of Dewey's final synthesis of experience. There are very helpful comparative references to Marx, Freud, Bergson, and Heidegger, and also indispensable parallels and contrasts with Peirce, James, and Whitehead. This is not a modest contribution from a regional point of view: Deledalle is, perhaps more than anybody else, aware of an ongoing international dialogue on Dewey, a dialogue that is preserving experience as a problem-complex at the front line of contemporary reflection.--A. de L. M. (shrink)

Despite its uniform appearance, the cerebellar cortex is highly heterogeneous in terms of structure, genetics and physiology. Purkinje cells (PCs), the principal and sole output neurons of the cerebellar cortex, can be categorized into multiple populations that differentially express molecular markers and display distinctive physiological features. Such features include action potential rate, but also their propensity for synaptic and intrinsic plasticity. However, the precise molecular and genetic factors that correlate with the differential physiological properties of PCs remain elusive. In this (...) article, we provide a detailed overview of the cellular mechanisms that regulate PC activity and plasticity. We further perform a pathway analysis to highlight how molecular characteristics of specific PC populations may influence their physiology and plasticity mechanisms. (shrink)

El libro que estableció la teoría de la separación de poderes -afirmando la independencia del poder judicial con respecto al ejecutivo y el legislativo, para asegurar la libertad del pueblo- es una de las obras clave del pensamiento político, jurídico, sociológico e histórico de todos los tiempos.Aquella teoría enunciada por Charles-Louis de Secondat, barón de La Brède y de Montesquieu -"No hay libertad si el poder judicial no está separado del legislativo y executivo"- es tan sólo uno de los momentos (...) cumbres de este libro{ probablemente, el más importante de todo el siglo XVIII y un verdadero clásico desde que se publicó en Ginebra en 1748.Montesquieu tardó cerca de viente años en escribir "Del espíritu de las leyes"{ obra ingente que "empecé y dejé" en numerosas ocasiones, entregando "mil veces á los vientos las hojas que había escrito" y que, finalmente, concluyó, con más de 1.000 páginas -hojas perennes- que le ofrecen una lectura imprescindible.Lex Nova pone ahora a su disposición, por primera vez, este cuidado facsímil que reproduce, en tres tomos, la edición que publicó el anónimo licenciado M.V.M. en Madrid, París y Londres -respectivamente- en 1821, traduciendo aquella obra "libremente al español".Un verdadero lujo a su alcance. (shrink)

Traditionally, in Spain bullfighting represents an ancient and well-respected tradition and a combined brand of sport, art and national identity. However, bullfighting has received considerable criticism from various segments of society, with the concomitant rise of the animal rights movement. The paper reports a survey of the Spanish citizens using a face-to-face survey during January 2016 with a total sample of 2522 citizens. The survey asked about degree of liking and approving; culture, art and national identity; socio-economic aspects; emotional perception (...) and animal welfare. The hypothesis proposed that the perception of bullfights may be affected by gender, age, occupation, origin and nationality of the persons surveyed. The hypothesis was confirmed. The majority of citizens surveyed do not like bullfights and great majorities do not attend or watch such events. Two extreme clusters were described: one representing favorable attitude towards bullfighting and other against bullfighting. The proportion of indifferent persons was important. Women and young people showed a more favorable attitude towards animal welfare issues associated with these events. Rural people were more accepting bullfights than urban people. Students were more anti-bullfight than those in other occupations. Additionally, technical economic factors made people favor more bullfights. The growth of claim against bullfights establishes an element of a far more multifaceted phenomenon that animal cruelty per se and support of a new paradigm called social change in countries as Spain. (shrink)

This paper addresses the two interpretations that a combination ofnegative indefinites can get in concord languages like French:a concord reading, which amounts to a single negation, and a doublenegation reading. We develop an analysis within a polyadic framework,where a sequence of negative indefinites can be interpreted as aniteration of quantifiers or via resumption. The first option leadsto a scopal relation, interpreted as double negation. The secondoption leads to the construction of a polyadic negative quantifiercorresponding to the concord reading. Given that (...) sentential negationparticipates in negative concord, we develop an extension of thepolyadic approach which can deal with non-variable binding operators,treating the contribution of negation in a concord context assemantically empty. Our semantic analysis, incorporated into agrammatical analysis formulated in HPSG, crucially relies on theassumption that quantifiers can be combined in more than one wayupon retrieval from the quantifier store. We also considercross-linguistic variation regarding the participation ofsentential negation in negative concord. (shrink)

En el socialismo de la transición, De los Ríos fue una figura a recuperar. Su sentido humanista del socialismo permitió al PSOE fundar en su propia historia republicana el nuevo compromiso del socialismo con la libertad. En el socialismo de los derechos civiles también tiene un lugar. De los Ríos apadrinó a Federico García Lorca, desde Granada a Nueva York y con La Barraca. El amor y el exilio acabó uniendo sus familias. También nombra a la primera mujer alto cargo (...) gubernamental: Victoria Kent, directora de prisiones.Se conoce menos otra dimensión de su trayectoria política de la que se ocupa este libro: su laicismo religioso. Dos rasgos que en la España de duelos a garrotazos parecen antagónicos. Sin embargo, ambos son característicos de su personalidad política e intelectual. Fue el ministro que lideró la política laicizadora de la II República, desde Justicia, primero, e Instrucción pública, después, llevando "siempre la batuta"?como informaba Tedeschini, el nuncio de la época -. Por otra parte, desde un cristianismo heterodoxo, no dejó de estimar la emoción religiosa, como lugar donde "fecundan los más hondos deseos del ideal". Se autodefinió "cristiano erasmista". Así le caracterizan Indalecio Prieto, en el obituario tras su muerte en el exilio, y el propio García Lorca, su poeta. (shrink)

Conceived as a set of preliminary explorations to a future study of the problem of meaning and reference by the author, these "inquiries" clarify some questions raised by the specialists in linguistics, caution us about other questions that seem only too easily settled, and generally show, with great abundance of detail, the status of contemporary research on language. Much like Husserl's Logical Investigations, which pioneered the study of correspondences between grammar and logic-ontology, these explorations proceed in a zigzag sometimes emphasizing (...) semiotic issues ; other times tackling important syntactic and semantic problems ; and once coming close to an ontological characterization of language and of the human subject insofar as it uses language. Two features of this work are noteworthy. The first is the abundance of documentation as shown in the multitude of notes: the efforts of Ferrater Mora will spare many hours of work for those who need a guide in "the labyrinth of language." A second feature is the virtuoso performance by the author in the manipulation of, and exemplifications from, a variety of languages. Indagaciones sobre el Lenguaje certainly deserves publication in English.--A. de L. M. (shrink)

The structure of Chiodi's book is based on Vuillemin's important hermeneutical thesis that existentialism is one more step in the program of the romantics to give an absolute foundation to finite reality through the establishment of necessary relations between subjectivity and being. These relations, once revealed, would dispel the facticity and contingency in which the natural world is enshrouded. The role of Heidegger in this tradition involves one further dialectical twist, since Heidegger centers all Western Philosophy, including his own, around (...) the problem of ground in the manner proposed by the romantics. The suggested dialectical twist is then Heidegger's Kehre, a step beyond the radical contingency of Dasein in Sein und Zeit. Indeed, this contingency, once reached, shows unequivocally the failure of the romantic program. The ground cannot be ontologically connected with any object nor with the subject; it is rather the necessary history of the ground that determines all categorial differentiations in the world, including the reflective differentiation of subject-objects. Thus it becomes important to distinguish Heidegger from Hegel since, in both, history and necessity are characteristics of the ground. Chiodi gets to the bottom of this matter by pointing to the transfer of negativity from the process of history to the end of history. For Heidegger what is necessary is the repeated withdrawal of the ground so that it may never be confused with that which is known in any revelation or through all of them. This move, though clear, would still leave a fundamental ambiguity in the later philosophy of Heidegger: language, which acts as messenger from the ground to the world, must reflect the superabundance of Being from the standpoint of the ground while it only reflects possibilities of being from the standpoint of the world. This is an ambiguity that Heidegger would want to maintain. Chiodi's interpretation of Heidegger as a neo-platonist totally destroys this ambiguity and with it the very delicate balance created by Heidegger between infinite meaning and the ability of finite words to dwell upon it.--A. de L. M. (shrink)

Intended as an introduction of the phenomenological writings of Pfänder to English-speaking readers, this work contains two major essays and two minor selections by Pfänder, plus an introduction and two appendixes by Spiegelberg. Because of its composition, this book should be classified as a Pfänder's anthology centered around a main essay titled "Motives and Motivation." As reasons for the translation and publishing of this main essay, Spiegelberg mentions first its influence on Ricoeur's phenomenology of the will, and secondly its topical (...) affinity with R. S. Peter's The Concept of Motivation, a work considered by Spiegelberg as capable of restoring the importance of the will in Anglo-American philosophy. The other major essay is, curiously enough, the introduction to a text-book in logic written by Pfänder in response to Husserl's own request. The two essays, though different, are not unrelated; they represent the theoretical and practical sides of the unique phenomenological method of constitution. The presence of these two essays, side by side, in this volume raises in fact the question of Pfänder's own understanding of the theoretical unity of thought and action that is the key to phenomenological subjectivity. A clarification of Pfänder's thought on this unity would certainly help us evaluate his contribution to phenomenology. Spiegelberg himself depicts Pfänder as a reasonable phenomenologist, accurate in analysis and moderate in speculative claims, a sober figure indeed in an environment sometimes seen as prone to intellectual excesses.--A. de L. M. (shrink)

Pero queda, a través de este devenir, la luz mosaica, las Tablas de la Ley, las sentencias del Talmud, las profecías de la Biblia. Este es el Tesoro del pueblo Judaico, el único que se ha conservado a través de los siglos; el que todavía suena en los momentos de la mayor angustia para la Humanidad y que vése conmovido por el impetuoso torrente de la vida contemporánea que exige nueva vitalidad en todos los aspectos de la existencia humana. DR. (...) ADALBERTO GARCÍA DE MENDOZA. (shrink)

En este libro se estudia la disciplina filosófica que trata de los pensamientos. Se divide en diferentes etapas empezando con la Lógica de la Edad Antigua con Aristóteles, el fundador de la Lógica, Platón, Euclides y otros mas. La Edad Media con Porfirio y Santo Thomas de Aquino, La Edad Moderna con René Descartes y su nueva ciencia de la Geometria Analítica y la Edad Contemporanea con Auguste Comte, fundador de la doctrina del positivismo.

El presente estudio intenta identificar el pensamiento filosófico que se esconde en la obra de K. Rahner. La filosofía de Rahner no es algo meramente ocasional, sino algo expresamente buscado y tenido constantemente en cuenta en la teología que desarrolla. El autor intenta hacer una exposición unitaria que la filosofía de Rahner desarrolla de una manera muy dispersa y casi siempre encajada bajo puntos de vista teológicos.

Se aborda el problema de qué es una ley científica. Se analiza la concepción tradicional hempeliana sobre la posibilidad de caracterizar una forma lógica para los enunciados de ley científica, que las distinguiría de las regularidades accidentales, concluyendo que ello no es posible. Se analiza entonces el problema de cómo es posible la predicción a partir de enunciados de ley, si no hay diferencia lógica con afirmaciones de regularidad, buscando criterios que permitan el establercimiento de afirmaciones proyectables. Correlativamente se trata (...) el problema de la normatividad de un criterio de identificación de candidatos a enunciados de ley, candidatos que ya no denominamos "lawlike statements" puesto que se ha abandonado la pretensión de que lo que determina los buenos candidatos a leyes sea su forma. A lo largo del texto se analizan de modo argumentado las posiciones filosóficas más tradicionales. Las conclusiones apuntan a la posibilidad de criterios de identificación a leyes sólo parcialmente normativos. (shrink)