According to Alasdair Cochrane, liberty can have value for most animals only because it allows them to obtain other desirable things, such as well-being. With this he concludes that humans can continue to use other animals as long as they treat them well. In this article, I reject this conclusion by arguing against the positive conception of liberty in favor of its negative or republican conception. I suggest that it is sufficient for a being to be capable of agency in (...) order to have an interest in liberty, which deserves to be protected by the right to be free. (shrink)

Copresence, the idea that the presence of other actors shapes individual behavior, links macro- and micro-theorizing about social interaction. Traditionally, scholars have focused on the physical proximity of other people, assuming copresence to be a given, objective condition. However, recent empirical evidence on technologically mediated (e.g., e-mail), imaginary (e.g., prayer), and parasocial (e.g., watching a television show) interactions challenges classic copresence assumptions. In this article we reconceptualize copresence to provide theoretical building blocks (definitions, assumptions, and propositions) for a revitalized research (...) program that allows for the explicit assessment of copresence as an endogenous, subjective variable dynamically related to social context. We treat copresence as the degree to which an actor perceives mutual entrainment (i.e., synchronization of attention, emotion, and behavior) with another actor. We demonstrate the ramifications of this reconceptualization for classic theorizing on micro-macro linkages and contemporary research questions, including methodological artifacts in laboratory research and disparities in patient-provider rapport. (shrink)

El transhumanismo es una moda intelectual que propone la transformación de los seres humanos mediante diversas tecnologías. Expondremos brevemente los rasgos más conspicuos del TH, así como las principales críticas que se le han hecho. Pero la intención de este artículo no es entrar en esta polémica; aportaremos tan solo las claves imprescindibles para poder seguir adelante. Y una de las claves más intrigantes del TH es que, por debajo de su pátina tecno-futurista, remite a ciertas ideas filosóficas tan viejas (...) como, en apariencia, incompatibles entre sí. El TH remite al naturalismo radical, tanto como al nihilismo existencialista. La tesis que aquí se defiende es que tanto el naturalismo radical como el nihilismo existencialista son producto de las diversas oleadas del dualismo: del dualismo platónico antiguo, del dualismo cartesiano moderno. Una vez que separamos, a la manera dualista, la libertad por un lado y la naturaleza por el otro, podemos contar hasta dos, como hacen los dualistas, o quedarnos solo en uno, como hacen los existencialistas, que se paran en la libertad, y los naturalistas, que solo cuentan con la naturaleza. En cualquier caso, la imagen del ser humano, que es libertad y naturaleza, sale dañada. Asoma entonces el animal aporético y enfermizo al cual hay que salvar… de sí mismo. ¿Cómo? Siguiendo el método de Procusto, pero ahora con los prefijos bio e info en lugar de sierra y martillo. Hasta que el pobre ser humano encaje en el lecho de la utopía que algunos visionarios han urdido. ¿Y no hay otra vía, otra forma de mejorar la vida humana que sea más respetuosa para con la humana envergadura? Quizá sí, mas para trazar esa tercera vía, entre el naturalismo radical que mutila y el nihilismo existencialista que descoyunta y estira, habría que negar de antemano el dualismo que a los dos engendra, y atenerse a la sensatez común, en línea con la tradición aristotélica, antes que a las ensoñaciones utópicas. En nuestra opinión, el concepto aristotélico de naturaleza humana nos habilita para juzgar las antropotecnias mejor que la normatividad extraída de las visiones futuristas propias del TH. (shrink)

El tema de las relaciones entre ciencia y religión es central en la obra de Ruse. No se trata de una mera curiosidad o de una cuestión tratada tangencialmente, sino que está en el corazón de sus preocupaciones intelectuales e incluso vitales (sección 1). Hay que señalar, además, que la actividad de Ruse coincide con una cierta encrucijada histórica, en la cual se enfrentan dos posiciones extremas y mutuamente hostiles, el creacionismo, por una parte, y el nuevo ateísmo, por otra (...) (sección 2). Para entender las propuestas respetuosas, matizadas y constructivas que hace Ruse, hay que situarlas en un marco teórico complejo, donde sean posibles actitudes menos burdas que el simple enfrentamiento (sección 3). Quizá la fórmula que mejor recoge las ideas de Ruse en este dominio sea la de “existencialismo darwinista”, como él mismo propone (sección 4). Por último, presentaré un resumen conclusivo de lo hallado (sección 5). (shrink)

La ética ambiental nació como justa contestación a los excesos del antropocentrismo. Sin embargo, un énfasis obsesivo en lo ético y en lo ambiental, con el consiguiente olvido de lo antropológico, puede estar dañando la vida humana, la libertad de las personas y la vida en general. Abogamos aquí por la construcción de una ecología humana que vaya más allá y más al fondo que las éticas ambientales al uso. Defendemos que el humanismo es perfectamente compatible con el reconocimiento del (...) valor inherente de todos los seres naturales. Lo hacemos basándonos principalmente en algunas ideas de Hans Jonas, aunque rechazamos su heurística catastrofista. De él retomamos la idea de que existe una responsabilidad moral hacia los demás seres vivos, empezando por los más próximos en el tiempo y en el espacio, y hacia el libre florecimiento de las personas actuales. Con ello, también, se rebaja el peso de lo ético sobre nuestra acción ecológica. Esta ha de atender principalmente a criterios experienciales, antropológicos, científicos y de sentido común. Por último, defendemos que la política, la educación y la comunicación ambiental deben orientarse directamente hacia la libertad y el desarrollo virtuoso de las personas actuales, y no hacia el control de las mismas por culpabilización. El tránsito desde la ética ambiental hacia la ecología humana —concluimos— puede ser beneficioso tanto para las personas como para la naturaleza. (shrink)

En la poesía de Ramón López Velarde es fundamental la presencia del corazón y del alma. Ambos conceptos no son simples y únicos, sino complejos y diversos. Hay un corazón confesional e íntimo, llamado “Corazón de San Agustín”; un corazón como órgano del cuerpo, conocido como “Corazón de Harvey”; y un corazón simbólico, el cual recibe el nombre de “Corazón de León”. En correspondencia con estos elementos, hay un alma individual, perteneciente al sujeto lírico; un Anima mundi, relativa a la (...) belleza del mundo; y un Alma Superior, la cual remite al mundo de las ideas platónicas o arquetípicas. Con base en un enfoque propio de la Mitocrítica, se demuestra la importancia de la presencia del símbolo, del mito y del arquetipo en la poesía de López Velarde. Palabras clave: corazón, alma, mitocrítica, poesía, López Velarde. (shrink)

En este artículo se trata de explicar la influencia de algunos novelistas rusos en la vida y obra de Gabriela Mistral, ya que en su existencia artística son nombrados con cierta frecuencia, además de recomendarlos como lectura obligatoria, citándolos para referirse a ellos como ejemplo para la educación y el cambio social. En un primer momento, se describe y analiza la influencia de estos autores, a finales del siglo XIX y principios del XX en Chile, a través de hitos significativos (...) como: el primer encuentro que, gracias a la biblioteca de Bernardo Ossandón, Mistral tuvo con estos en 1904; la recomendación que Mistral hizo a Neruda sobre su lectura en 1920; y algunos escritos posteriores en prosa, entrevista y diarios íntimos donde se refiere a ellos. En un segundo momento, se intenta mostrar cómo algunos novelistas rusos no son solo inspiración literaria para Mistral, sino personas con las que se identifica plenamente, por las coincidencias que observa entre estos y ella misma, en el ámbito de los sufrimientos, dificultades y carencias, que se dan a lo largo de sus vidas. (shrink)

Preface of the ESPES: The Slovak Journal of Aesthetics symposium on Aesthetics and Ageing.

this article is based on a paper that I presented during the annual meeting of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, as a keynote speaker in the Coss Dialogue sessions. I was pleasantly surprised to hear that most participants of SAAP use the term "American" in its continental, rather than in the US-centric sense. I am glad that many of the philosophers of this community of knowledge have opened their dialogues to the voices and experiences south of the (...) Río Bravo. We are living during very difficult times in which cultures and practices of violence, as well as aggressive exclusion and intolerance, are affecting our communities on both sides of the border. In this context of multiple... (shrink)

Inventive Machine project is the matter of discussion. The project aims to develop a family of AI systems for intelligent support of all stages of engineering design.Peculiarities of the IM project:deep and comprehensive knowledge base — the theory of inventive problem solving (TIPS)solving complex problems at the level of inventionsapplication in any area of engineeringstructural prediction of engineering system developmentThe systems of the second generation are described in detail.

Linguistics of Saying is to be analyzed in the speech act conceived as an act of knowing. The speaking, saying and knowing subject, based on contexts and the principles of congruency and trust in the speech of other speakers, will create meanings and interpret the sense of utterances supplying the deficiencies of language by means of the intellective operations mentally executed in the act of speech. In the intellective operations you can see three steps or processes: first the starting point, (...) intuition or aísthesis; second, the process of abstraction; and third, the inverse: the process of determination or fixing the construct created. (shrink)

Linguistics of saying studies language in its birth. Language is the mental activity executed by speaking subjects. Linguistics of saying consists in analyzing speech acts as the result of an act of knowing. Speaking subjects speak because they have something to say. Tthey say because they define themselves before the circumstance they are in. And this is possible because they are able to know. Speaking, then, is speaking, saying and knowing. In this sense there is a progressive determination. Knowing makes (...) possible saying, and saying determines speaking, or, in other words: speaking involves saying and knowing, and saying involves knowing. The problem thus is to determine the meaningful intentional purpose of the individual speaker to say something in every speech act. (shrink)

The importance of fairness in machine learning models is widely acknowledged, and ongoing academic debate revolves around how to determine the appropriate fairness definition, and how to tackle the trade-off between fairness and model performance. In this paper we argue that besides these concerns, there can be ethical implications behind seemingly purely technical choices in fairness interventions in a typical model development pipeline. As an example we show that the technical choice between in-processing and post-processing is not necessarily value-free and (...) may have serious implications in terms of who will be affected by the specific fairness intervention. The paper reveals how assessing the technical choices in terms of their ethical consequences can contribute to the design of fair models and to the related societal discussions. (shrink)

El presente artículo hace un recuento de los andragogos que han aportado para la construcción de la Andragogía, que como ciencia incipiente, tiene aún muchas oportunidades de mejora para que los adultos estén en una situación de libertad en sus procesos de aprendizajes. Palabras claves: Andragogía, Facilitadores, Proceso de Orientación-Aprendizaje.

Family firms are ubiquitous and play a crucial role across all world economies, but how they differ in the disclosure of social and environmental actions from non-family firms has been largely overlooked in the literature. Advancing the discourse on corporate social responsibility reporting, we examine how family influence on a business organization affects CSR reporting. The arguments developed here draw on institutional theory, using a rich body of empirical evidence gathered through a content analysis of the CSR reports of 98 (...) large- and medium-sized Italian firms. The grounded theory analysis informs and contextualizes several differences in the type and content of corporate social responsibility reports of family and non-family firms. Our findings show that in comparison to non-family firms, family firms disseminate a greater variety of CSR reports, are less compliant with CSR standards and place emphasis on different CSR topics. We, thus, contribute to the family business and corporate social responsibility reporting literatures in several ways, offering implications for practice and outlining promising avenues for future research. (shrink)

In this paper, we study the effects of using an algorithm-based risk assessment instrument (RAI) to support the prediction of risk of violent recidivism upon release. The instrument we used is a machine learning version of RiskCanvi used by the Justice Department of Catalonia, Spain. It was hypothesized that people can improve their performance on defining the risk of recidivism when assisted with a RAI. Also, that professionals can perform better than non-experts on the domain. Participants had to predict whether (...) a person who has been released from prison will commit a new crime leading to re-incarceration, within the next two years. This user study is done with (1) general participants from diverse backgrounds recruited through a crowdsourcing platform, (2) targeted participants who are students and practitioners of data science, criminology, or social work and professionals who work with RisCanvi. We also run focus groups with participants of the targeted study, including people who use RisCanvi in a professional capacity, to interpret the quantitative results. Among other findings, we observe that algorithmic support systematically leads to more accurate predictions from all participants, but that statistically significant gains are only seen in the performance of targeted participants with respect to that of crowdsourced participants. Among other comments, professional participants indicate that they would not foresee using a fully-automated system in criminal risk assessment, but do consider it valuable for training, standardization, and to fine-tune or double-check their predictions on particularly difficult cases. We found that the revised prediction by using a RAI increases the performance of all groups, while professionals show a better performance in general. And, a RAI can be considered for extending professional capacities and skills along their careers. (shrink)

Drawing on the self-determination framework, the study examined the effect of coaches’ autonomy support on the leisure experience of young male football players. Specifically, a model was tested analyzing the long-term predictive power of the players’ perception of coach-autonomy support at the beginning of the season on the subjective vitality of young football players at the end of the season through needs satisfaction and intrinsic motivation. Moreover, we tested whether the effects of coach-autonomy support on the aforementioned variables (needs satisfaction, (...) intrinsic motivation, and subjective vitality) at the end of the season remained at the beginning of the following season. Because the coach in the second season was not the same one as in the first season, the perception of coach-autonomy support at the beginning of the second season was used as a control variable. Three hundred and sixty football players (M age = 12.60 years; SD = 0.52) completed a questionnaire on the variables of interest at the beginning of the first season (T1), at the end of the first season (T2), and at the beginning of the second season (T3). The results of the path analyses showed that player’ perceptions of coach autonomy support at the beginning of the season (T1) positively predicted needs satisfaction at the end of the first season (T2), which in turn predicted intrinsic motivation at the end of the first season (T2). Additionally, intrinsic motivation significantly and positively predicted subjective vitality at the end of the first season (T2). Finally, needs satisfaction, intrinsic motivation, and subjective vitality at the end of the second season (T2) positively predicted these same variables at the beginning of the second season (T3). Results emphasized the importance of the autonomy support offered by the coach in promoting the quality of young people’s leisure experience playing football and its benefits for their well-being. (shrink)

Language is nothing but human subjects in as much as they speak, say and know. Language is something coming from the inside of the speaking subject manifest in the intentional meaningful purpose of the individual speaker. A language, on the contrary, is something coming from the outside, from the speech community, something offered to the speaking subject from the tradition in the technique of speaking. The speech act is the performance of an intuition by the subject, both individual and social.

Cognitive Science is a promising field of research that deals with one of the most fundamental questions ever: how do beings know? However, despite the long and extensive tradition of the field it has not yet become an area of knowledge with scientific identity. This is primarily due to three reasons: the lack of boundaries in defining the object of study, i.e. cognition, the lack of a precise, robust and consistent scientific methodology and results, and the inner problems derived from (...) its interdisciplinary nature. This paper presents a background review, a theoretical frame and a humble reflection on these topics in order to arouse the internal debate among readers once more. (shrink)

The co-evolutionary concept of Three-modal stable evolutionary strategy of Homo sapiens is developed. The concept based on the principle of evolutionary complementarity of anthropogenesis: value of evolutionary risk and evolutionary path of human evolution are defined by descriptive (evolutionary efficiency) and creative-teleological (evolutionary correctly) parameters simultaneously, that cannot be instrumental reduced to others ones. Resulting volume of both parameters define the trends of biological, social, cultural and techno-rationalistic human evolution by two gear mechanism ˗ gene-cultural co-evolution and techno- humanitarian balance. (...) The resultant each of them can estimated by the ratio of socio-psychological predispositions of humanization/dehumanization in mentality. Explanatory model and methodology of evaluation of creatively teleological evolutionary risk component of NBIC technological complex is proposed. Integral part of the model is evolutionary semantics (time-varying semantic code, the compliance of the biological, socio-cultural and techno-rationalist adaptive modules of human stable evolutionary strategy). (shrink)

From the most prominent thinkers in Latin American philosophy, literature, politics, and social science comes a challenge to conventional theories of globalization. The contributors to this volume imagine a discourse in which revolution requires no temporalized march of progress or takeovers of state power but instead aims at local control and the material conditions for human dignity.

La sostenibilidad, por sí misma, no es un criterio útil para evaluar la adecuación y moralidad de un acto, dado que se trata de un concepto abierto, necesitado de conexión con diversos elementos heterogéneos. Por su parte, el concepto de desarrollo sostenible carece de concreción, pues se define en términos de necesidades futuras de muy difícil predicción. Como guía de nuestras acciones será más útil el concepto de desarrollo humano sostenible, formulado en términos de capacidades, fundamentado filosóficamente en un enfoque (...) aristotélico. Dicho enfoque nos permite definir una teoría política del bien común, centrada en la persona, con toda su integridad y complejidad. (shrink)

The projection of conscious content is a central feature of Max Velmans' theory of consciousness, implying that conscious experiences are built within a conversation of minds and worlds in which they form a 'reflexive' unity – as stated in his reflexive monism theory. What are the neurobiological structures and functions that underpin the experience of conscious contents being located in a spatio-temporal frame outside the nervous system that instantiates them? In this paper I offer informed speculation about these neurobiological structures (...) on the basis of the concept of projection within the psychophysical 'egocentric space', having the central nervous system at the origin of coordinates and the interface with the environment as the horizon. The reasoning is based on the work of several neuroscientists on feedback signals from the motor to sensory neuron systems, building a picture of how they support the projective process. I also call attention to the integrative role of glial cells in the generation of localized sensations and other conscious contents. (shrink)