: This response to Nikolaus Knoepffler's paper in the same issue of the Journal agrees that if the arguments supporting the first two of the eight human embryonic stem cell research policy options discussed are unsound, as Knoepffler argues, then it seems natural to move to the increasingly permissive options. If the arguments are sound, however, then the more permissive options should be rejected. It is argued that three of the rejected arguments, taken together, constitute very good reasons to hold (...) that a human embryo is endowed with dignity from fertilization onward. Thus, countries that want their public policies to match the moral imperative of respect for human beings should refrain from allowing destructive human embryo research and should devote considerable energy and public funds to research and clinical trials using non-embryonic ("adult") stem cells. (shrink)

Contiene tres trabajos sobre Arturo Ardao: sobre la noción de sujeto (Yamandú Acosta); sobre la interpretación de Andrés Bello (Arturo A. Roig); y sobre su libro Filosofía de lengua española (ver HLAS 36:5047). Mencionamos algunas de las otras contribuciones: el tema de la historia de la filosofía latinoamericana (Horacio Cerutti Guldberg); el batllismo (Manuel A. Claps); el tema de Calibán (Roberto Fernández Retamar); el pensamiento de Pedro Figari (Juan Fló); la universidad latinoamericana en el siglo XVIII (Gregorio Weinberg); (...) el pensamiento socialista en el Uruguay (Carlos Zubillaga). Es de lamentar que no se agregara al volumen una bibliografía de Ardao"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 58. (shrink)

From the first books published by Jean-Paul Sartre, it is possible to observe the criticism that the French author makes to the Western metaphysical tradition, directed specifically at philosophers of modernity. For example, L'imagination and L'Imaginaire are two texts dedicated to questioning “the great metaphysical systems”. Furthermore, in these early investigations, Sartre discovers a principle that would allow him to elabo- rate his work Being and nothingness. What is this principle? The main objective of this essay is to determine this (...) principle and its importance in the elaboration of Being and nothingness. In order to achieve this purpose, I will analyze Sartre's criticism of modern philosophers (Descartes and Hume) and his proposal to overcome what Sartre himself calls: the “naive metaphysics of the image” (1978, p. 9), which is nothing more than the fact of reifying the image. (shrink)

Frente a los riesgos del monopolio de significados sobre la vida en común, la sociedad civil puede actuar como fuente de reconocimiento y desarrollo de identidades, pero afirmarlo requiere que previamente se establezcan nuevos puntos de partida para el análisis sobre su significado. Apoyados en esta premisa, proponemos un cuestionamiento a la apropiación teórica y práctica que desde la dimensión política se ha hecho y establecemos la redefinición de lo cívico como el sustento para un tipo de pluralismo basado en (...) la capacidad para expresar y conocer por medio de la razón. (shrink)

El autor trabaja en este artículo una de las obras más citadas y controvertidas del Hegel de su periodo maduro cual es los Principios de la Filosofía del Derecho o Derecho Natural y Ciencia Política, comúnmente conocida como Filosofía del Derecho y desarrolla algunos temas que permanecen como cuestiones abiertas al debate o como aspectos objetables, tanto en su teoría del espíritu objetivo como en su interpretación.

Desde inicios del siglo xx la filosofía parecía haber despachado la legitimidad del realismo, llamando a la descripción del mundo dentro de los límites de nuestra subjetividad. El agotamiento y los problemas de esta premisa filosófica han sido finalmente enunciados y señalados por el realismo especulativo. En el presente artículo mostramos de qué manera tres de sus representantes más reconocidos, Meillassoux, Harman y Gabriel, llevan a cabo esta tarea. Pero para evitar una posición ingenua, este realismo se expresa de forma (...) especulativa, es decir, a partir de argumentos lógicos, matemáticos y abstractos que no carecen de problemas. Después de una breve exposición de sus filosofías, presentamos problemas centrales en ellas que se derivan de una falta de reflexión sobre los recursos lógicos y matemáticos que emplean explícita o implícitamente. Mostramos que la constante en todos ellos consiste tanto en un desconocimiento de las paradojas de autorreferencia que ponen en juego, como en la falta de una teoría de relaciones reales que explique las relaciones sujeto-objeto y objeto-objeto. Concluimos con una breve referencia a Fréredic Nef para mostrar qué puntos debería considerar una teoría general de relaciones. (shrink)

El autor sigue a Ana Arendt para examinar el tema de la responsabilidad personal bajo dictadura. Ante el argumento de que no había opciones pues se era una ‘ruedecilla del engranaje’, afirma que el mal menor no deja de ser un mal, y que la verdadera pregunta moral no es ‘por qué obedeciste’ sino ‘por qué ayudaste’.

El artículo relaciona el nuevo orden narrativo con la técnica del “storytelling” y cómo se manifiestan en el periodismo actual. Se estudian los casos de tres periodistas: David Simon, Stieg Larsson y Ryzard Kapuscinski y cómo su obra muestra la difusa línea de los hechos, la recreación, la invención, la fábula, la historia, la apariencia y la verdad. Se contrastan estos casos con las aportaciones del paradigma narrativo de Fisher. Nos preguntamos también cómo se crean narraciones en Internet a partir (...) de los periodistas estudiados. El ámbito de la verdad periodística se entremezcla con una apariencia de verdad mientras la ficción que aparenta realidad se convierte en acercamiento a ésta. La aproxi-mación a este fenómeno, que se inicia a finales del siglo XX y se consolida en la primera década del siglo XXI, se lleva a cabo desde las aportaciones de la Teoría de la Comunicación. (shrink)

Interest in the intersection between bilingualism and cognitive control and accessibility to neuroimaging methods have resulted in numerous studies with a variety of interpretations of the bilingual cognitive advantage. Neurocomputational Emergentism (or Neuroemergentism for short) is a new framework for understanding this relationship between bilingualism and cognitive control. This framework considers Emergence, in which two small elements are recombined in an interactive manner, yielding a non-linear effect. Added to this is the notion that Emergence can be captured in neural systems (...) using computationally inspired models. This review poses that bilingualism and cognitive control, as examined through the Neuroemergentist framework, are interwoven through development and involve the non-linear growth of cognitive processing encompassing brain areas that combine and recombine, in symbiotic and parasitic ways, in order to handle more complex types of processing. The models that have sought to explain the neural substrates of bilingual cognitive differences will be discussed with a reinterpretation of the entire bilingual cognitive advantage within a Neuroemergentist framework incorporating its neural bases. It will conclude by discussing how this new Neuroemergentist approach alters our view of the effects of language experience on cognitive control. Avenues to move beyond the simple notion of a bilingual advantage or lack thereof will be proposed. (shrink)

Oportuna reedición de una obra clásica sobre el pensamiento en Uruguay antes de la creación de la Universidad de la República (1849). Esta edición tiene aumentado el apéndice documental"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 58.

The aim of this paper is focused on presenting the method of historical analysis built by Michel Foucault in his book Histoire de la Folie à l’Âge Classique as a “History of the Other”. Such term appears for the first time at Les Mots et les Choses’s Preface, in which Foucault analyses his method in the quoted book on madness (but also in La Naissance de la Clinique). In this sense, firstly we have to verify the hypothesis of this relation (...) between Foucault’s archeological method as a Thought of the Otherness, precisely concerning to that “Other History” proposed by the philosopher. Secondly, we need to analyse specifically Histoire de la Folie as a privileged work, as far as the approach on the relation with the other is concerned. KEY WORDS – Archeology of knowledge. History. Alterity. Madness. (shrink)

The contribution describes some aspects related to the representation of special curves; recalling mechanisms created specifically for the design of these curves, which have particular characteristics. Through the construction of a simple apparatus, consisting of two pendulums—which oscillate at the same time- it is possible to graphically reproduce Lissajous’ experiments on the commuting vibrations of the diapasons. This equipment was first built by Samuel Charles Tisley (London 1829-Unknown), under the name of harmonographer. The contribution aslo illustrates the essential characteristics of (...) the harmonograph—born as a means of analysing vibrations—but which, by its principle belongs to mechanics, for its applications to acoustic science and geometry for the ability to draw “harmonious” curves. (shrink)

Inspired by Columbus, Spaniards set out on an adventurous voyage of the circumnavigation of the globe and, to their surprise, encountered a new continent.This is the essential fact. There were no preliminaries, no previous knowledge, but an abrupt and unexpected meeting between a handful of men who represented the mentality of Spain at the end of the 15th century and an immense geographical panorama that slowly and continuously unfolded, populated by beings for whom there was not even a name and (...) who represented native cultures in different stages of devopment with no previous contact with Europeans, almost diametrically opposed in values, concepts and mentalities to what the transatlantic navigators represented and brought with them. (shrink)

En sus primeros escritos fenomenológicos, Jean-Paul Sartre sostiene la tesis de que la conciencia es exterioridad pura, es decir, no existe interioridad en la conciencia que pudiese albergar instancias metafísicas, como lo podría ser el yo, el cogito, el inconsciente, etc. Ya para El ser y la nada, el filósofo francés mantendrá dicha tesis, profundizándola y estableciendo un diálogo con su teoría del ser. En esta medida, el artículo se propone explorar tal relación, para conocer el lugar que ocupa la (...) noción de conciencia en el Ser y la nada. (shrink)

This paper examines how international law contributes to contemporary understandings of transitional justice with respect to reparations for victims of gross and systematic human rights abuses. The author surveys the jurisprudence of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights through 2003 to determine how the Court’s practice can be used to guide the formulation of reparatory policies during political transition. Recognizing that the direct application of Inter-American case law to situations of mass atrocity is not always viable in practice, the author (...) analyzes regional human rights jurisprudence, particularly that relating to compensation, to determine what role the Court’s rules can and cannot play as a reference for policymakers and societies faced with the challenge of designing a reparations program. He concludes that while landmark Court decisions like Velásquez Rodríguez provide general normative guidance, there are significant obstacles to extending to the transitional justice context many of the measures, amounts, and formulas relied upon by the Court in awarding compensation. The fairness of compensation outside the courtroom cannot be determined with reference to predetermined rules, but depends on the factual context in which the measures are adopted including the number of victims involved. A better source of comparative inspiration is found in the Court’s growing practice of adopting non-monetary reparations measures to deal with moral harm. (shrink)

The settler-colonial and republican principles of early U.S. politics tend to be studied as paradoxical ambitions of American nation-building. This article argues that early republican thought in the United States developed through what I call ‘ideological code-switching’, a vernacular practice that allowed popular actors to strategically vacillate between anti-colonial and neo-colonial discourses as complementary principles of revolutionary change. I illustrate these claims by tracing a genealogy of anti- and neo-colonial thought from the founding of the United States to its transnational (...) emergence in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. I demonstrate that ideological code-switching first appeared as a rhetorical strategy among the Federalist debates, where Publius argued for the feasibility of expansionist republics via a hemispheric account of American exceptionalism. These appeals to hemispheric unity remained salient into the nineteenth century among groups like the ‘Republicans of ‘Nacogdoches’, a militia comprised of Indigenous, Mestizo, and White actors that mobilized an attack on Spain and founded the Republic of Texas in April of 1813. Drawing on archival research, I turn to the U.S.-Mexico borderlands as an example of the way marginalized groups instrumentalized links between anti- and neo-colonial politics to envision their position in the rapidly evolving landscapes of transnational revolution. (shrink)

This essay has two goals. The first is to define the behavioristic study of natural events and to classify behavior. The second is to stress the importance of the concept of purpose.Given any object, relatively abstracted from its surroundings for study, the behavioristic approach consists in the examination of the output of the object and of the relations of this output to the input. By output is meant any change produced in the surroundings by the object. By input, conversely, is (...) meant any event external to the object that modifies this object in any manner. (shrink)

Con una belleza literaria incomparable, la Comedìa refleja la cosmovisión católica que vertebra la Cristiandad medieval, que tuvo su máximo exponente filosófico y teológico en santo Tomás. A lo largo de todo el itinerario poético, vemos la impronta del Aquinate presente en el meollo de la narración. Aquí analizaré cómo la cuestión teológica fundamental del gobierno divino del mundo permea la Comedìa, tanto en su estructura formal como en ciertos aspectos concretos del viaje de Dante. A partir de dicha premisa, (...) estudiaré las consecuencias que ello tiene en ese orden jurídico manifestado en la «arquitectura» del infierno, cuyo dintel es elocuente: «Giustizia mosse il mio alto fattore; / fecemi la divina podestate, / la somma sapienza e ‘l primo amore». Finalmente, abordaré la proporcionalidad de las penas que sufren los condenados, como indicador de la medida natural de los castigos dictados por justicia divina. (shrink)

When does a human being begin to exist? Barry Smith and Berit Brogaard have argued that it is possible, through a combination of biological fact and philosophical analysis, to provide a definitive answer to this question. In their view, a human individual begins to exist at gastrulation, i. e. at about sixteen days after fertilization. In this paper we argue that even granting Smith and Brogaard's ontological commitments and biological assumptions, the existence of a human being can be shown to (...) begin much earlier, viz., with fertilization. Their interpretative claim that a zygote divides immediately into two substances and therefore ceases to exist is highly implausible by their own standards, and their factual claim that there is no communication between the blastomeres has to be abandoned in light of recent embryological research. (shrink)

Decisions of regulatory government bodies and courts affect many aspects of citizens’ lives. These organizations and courts are expected to provide timely and coherent decisions, although they struggle to keep up with the increasing demand. The ability of machine learning (ML) models to predict such decisions based on past cases under similar circumstances was assessed in some recent works. The dominant conclusion is that the prediction goal is achievable with high accuracy. Nevertheless, most of those works do not consider important (...) aspects for ML models that can impact performance and affect real-world usefulness, such as consistency, out-of-sample applicability, generality, and explainability preservation. To our knowledge, none considered all those aspects, and no previous study addressed the joint use of metadata and text-extracted variables to predict administrative decisions. We propose a predictive model that addresses the abovementioned concerns based on a two-stage cascade classifier. The model employs a first-stage prediction based on textual features extracted from the original documents and a second-stage classifier that includes proceedings’ metadata. The study was conducted using time-based cross-validation, built on data available before the predicted judgment. It provides predictions as soon as the decision date is scheduled and only considers the first document in each proceeding, along with the metadata recorded when the infringement is first registered. Finally, the proposed model provides local explainability by preserving visibility on the textual features and employing the SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP). Our findings suggest that this cascade approach surpasses the standalone stages and achieves relatively high Precision and Recall when both text and metadata are available while preserving real-world usefulness. With a weighted F1 score of 0.900, the results outperform the text-only baseline by 1.24% and the metadata-only baseline by 5.63%, with better discriminative properties evaluated by the receiver operating characteristic and precision-recall curves. (shrink)

La percepción puede proponerse como uno de los factores centrales que propician el inicio de procesos semiósicos. La complejidad de esta primera fase cognitiva exige una perspectiva trans e interdisciplinar. Así, desde una postura biosemiótica, trataremos de proponer uno de los conceptos centrales de esta novel teoría, a saber, ‘biosemiosis’. Para ello, nos apoyaremos en ciertos experimentos emanados de las neurociencias. Esta vinculación, en la actualidad, ya no debe resultar extraña si comprendemos que, en nuestro caso, el ser humano es (...) una entidad compuesta por dos esferas fundamentales: la biológica y la cultural. Nos encontramos en un momento en el que el Universo puede entenderse como una enorme red interconectada. Así, la cooperación entre diferentes campos del conocimiento permitirá una mejor comprensión de dichas redes. (shrink)

La polarización, los populismos y la posverdad forman tres fenómenos sociopolíticos fundamentales para comprender cómo se está orientando la política en los sistemas demoliberales. La polarización política se suele entender como un proceso dinámico de activación de las divisiones entre dos o más grupos sociales en el transcurso de los debates públicos que puede terminar con una ruptura comunicativa o una comunicación fallida. Si bien los especialistas no coinciden a la hora de definir el populismo, se puede comprender como una (...) forma concreta de construir el pueblo mediante un discurso que contrapone este al anti-pueblo. La posverdad se referiría a una tendencia cultural donde las verdades de hecho sufren una merma en favor de las verdades vivenciadas subjetivamente. Estos fenómenos tienden a ser percibidos por una buena parte de la sociedad y del mundo académico como una amenaza grave para las bases pluralistas y reflexivas de la democracia. Sin embargo, esa consideración está decantada normativamente. Este artículo trata de explorar un marco referencial diferente, el emotivismo, y cómo, desde este ángulo, toman sentido los tres conceptos clave: polarización, populismo y posverdad. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: References.

El interés por caracterizar la noción del entendimiento científico es relativamente nuevo, no obstante que el término ha sido ampliamente utilizado en la literatura científica y filosófica, sin mencionar muchas otras. Como aportación a las investigaciones actuales sobre esta noción, el objetivo del siguiente escrito es presentar un análisis crítico de la relación entre el entendimiento científico y las emociones.

In the context of life sciences, we are constantly confronted with information that possesses precise semantic values and appears essentially immersed in a specific evolutionary trend. In such a framework, Nature appears, in Monod’s words, as a tinkerer characterized by the presence of precise principles of self-organization. However, while Monod was obliged to incorporate his brilliant intuitions into the framework of first-order cybernetics and a theory of information with an exclusively syntactic character such as that defined by Shannon, research advances (...) in recent decades have led not only to the definition of a second-order cybernetics but also to an exploration of the boundaries of semantic information. As H. Atlan states, on a biological level "the function self-organizes together with its meaning". Hence the need to refer to a conceptual theory of complexity and to a theory of self-organization characterized in an intentional sense. There is also a need to introduce, at the genetic level, a distinction between coder and ruler as well as the opportunity to define a real software space for natural evolution. The recourse to non-standard model theory, the opening to a new general semantics, and the innovative definition of the relationship between coder and ruler can be considered, today, among the most powerful theoretical tools at our disposal in order to correctly define the contours of that new conceptual revolution increasingly referred to as metabiology. This book focuses on identifying and investigating the role played by these particular theoretical tools in the development of this new scientific paradigm. Nature "speaks" by means of mathematical forms: we can observe these forms, but they are, at the same time, inside us as they populate our organs of cognition. In this context, the volume highlights how metabiology appears primarily to refer to the growth itself of our instruments of participatory knowledge of the world. (shrink)

In 1985, when I graduated from medical school, I thought that medicine in 2018 would be more advanced than it is today. Coloring that view were the dizzying medical advances made from 1950 to 1980, three decades that were Figure 1 Major biomedical advances as a function of the time perhaps the most innovative period in modern medicine. Recent times have seen fewer revolutionary advances, although remarkable progress continues to be made in certain areas, including imaging of disease, the treatment (...) of retroviral infections such as those caused by HIV and hepatitis C virus, nucleic acid-based diagnostics, and cancer immunotherapy. The critical question is not whether we are continuing to make progress... (shrink)

Using an international sample of banks, we study how differences in religiosity across countries affect earnings management. Given that religiosity is a major source of morality and ethical behavior, it may reduce excessive risk taking and act as deterrence for earnings manipulations. Therefore, we predict lower earnings management in societies that have higher religiosity. Consistent with expectations, our cross-country analysis indicates that religiosity is negatively related to income-increasing earnings management for loss-avoidance and just-meeting-or-beating prior year’s earnings. We also find that (...) religiosity reduces income-increasing earnings management through abnormal loan loss provisions. In additional tests, we document that religiosity increases the information value of bank earnings, with both earnings persistence and cash flow predictability being enhanced by higher religiosity. For the crisis period analysis, our evidence shows that banks in countries with higher religiosity exhibit lower probability of reporting asset deterioration and lower probability of having poor performance. (shrink)

Original, or 'old', institutional economics (OIE) – also known as 'institutionalism' – played a key role in its early stages; it could be said that it was once the 'mainstream economics' of the time. This period ran approximately from the first important contributions of Thorstein Veblen in 1898 to the implementation of the New Deal in the early 1930s, where many institutionalists played a significant role. However, notwithstanding its promising scientific and institutional affirmation, institutional economics underwent a period of marked (...) decline that spanned from the mid-1930s to the late 1980s, when a new season for institutional economics was set in motion. In order to cast some light on this complex issue – without any claim of completeness – we have organised the work as follows: in the first section we consider the main interpretations of this phenomenon. In the subsequent sections we analyse a number of 'endogenous' aspects which might have played a significant role in the period of decline: (i) the relations of institutional economics with Keynes's macroeconomic theory; (ii) the links between theoretical and empirical analysis and the supposed lack of a clear theory; (iii) the interdisciplinary orientation. (shrink)