We show how to reconstruct the topology on the monoid of endomorphisms of the rational numbers under the strict or reflexive order relation, and the polymorphism clone of the rational numbers under the reflexive relation. In addition we show how automatic homeomorphicity results can be lifted to polymorphism clones generated by monoids.

Los objetivos de nuestro estudio se basarán en ahondar en que el verdadero prosumer ha conformado la personificación de la interactividad absoluta en la generación de mensajes, historias o cualquier otro tipo de contenidos. Por tanto, se subraya que no solo es trascendental para la eficacia de una narración la estructura y los ingredientes de ésta, sino también la manera en que se cuenta, el medio utilizado y la plataforma de visualización. También resulta relevante el sentido de la fragmentación de (...) la propia narración para el éxito de su hiperconectividad argumental y emocional. (shrink)

Este trabajo presenta como objetivo revelar la influencia de los contextos socioeconómicos en las maneras de afrontamiento al cáncer como enfermedad. Se muestra un análisis sobre el cáncer como problema social y de salud; se analiza el papel de algunos entes sociales involucrados, el acceso de los enfermos a las terapias y de los productores de fármacos a las nuevas tecnologías. Se reflexiona acerca de la sobreevaluación de los fármacos que dificulta el acceso a novedosas y efectivas terapias; la supeditación (...) del saber tecnocientífico a los intereses del capital; la creciente contaminación ambiental como detonante al incremento de casos; y la escasez de tecnologías para la prevención y el saneamiento en países subdesarrollados. Finalmente se refiere el programa cubano de lucha contra el cáncer, su situación actual y proyecciones. This paper aimes at revealing the influence of the socioeconomic contexts on the way cancer is faced as a disease. An analysis about cancer as a social and health problem is presented; the role of some social organizations involved the sick's access to therepies and drug producers' access to new technologies. It is reflected on the over-asessment of drugs which makes access to new and effective therapies difficult; the subordination of the technoscientific knowledge to the interests of the capital; the growing environmental pollution as a trigger for cases increase; and the limited technological resources for prevention and cleanup in underdeveloped countries. Finally, it is made reference to the Cuban cancer fighting program, its current status and scope. (shrink)

Community leaders in Colombia have historically suffered processes of microaggressions and intimidation that threaten the free exercise of their voice in the processes of production of knowledge and in the participation of the planning of their territories. In this article, we explore the case study of the Network of Community Researchers (NCR), also known in Spanish as Red de Investigadores Comunitarios, promoted by the University of Antioquia, Colombia. The NCR is a commitment to the co-production of knowledge about human security (...) from below between community researchers and academics. This article analyses the contribution of the NCR to the human security of Medellin and a specific collection of capabilities for epistemic liberation of community researchers: the capability to be recognised as a producer of valid knowledge, to do through communicative openness, to learn from collective knowledge and to transform through collective action. The expansion of these four capabilities evidence processes of resistance and hermeneutic insurrection of some community leaders and activists who participate in the NCR. The analysis shows the contribution of the NCR to facilitate and generate a safe space in which community researchers communicate knowledge and practices and share experiences, risks, struggles, fears and collective dreams of transformation. (shrink)

Se presenta el reporte de una intervención docente para la enseñanza de la ética en la Educación Media Superior a través del enfoque por competencias. Primero, se contextualiza y problematiza sobre la Reforma Integral de la Educación Media Superior que tuvo lugar en México en el 2008, para observar los cambios curriculares y señalar el lugar de la ética como asignatura en este subsistema y los retos de los profesores frente a estos cambios. Segundo, se presentan los principios teóricos del (...) enfoque por competencias, así como una perspectiva filosófica sobre la enseñanza de la ética basada en la phrónesis, que desde una perspectiva aristotélica es traducida como prudencia, como modelo de ser ético. Tercero, se expone el diseño didáctico, así como los resultados que muestran las experiencias del docente en el aula, el trabajo de los alumnos y los resultados de los procesos de aprendizaje. En la conclusión se analiza el impacto del enfoque por competencias en la enseñanza de la ética, señalando las dificultades y limitaciones, pero también sus posibilidades para el trabajo docente al vincularse con concepciones filosóficas más amplias. (shrink)

Background The COVID-19 pandemic has influenced the approach to the health-disease system, raising the question about the principles of bioethics present in physician–patient relations. The principles while widely accepted may not be sufficient for a comprehensive ethical analysis. Therefore, the aim of this study was to explore the perception of these principles and the physician–patient relationship during a hospital stay through a qualitative approach. Method Sixteen semi-structured interviews took place to know the patients’ perception during their 2020 hospitalization for COVID-19. (...) The data was analyzed through the constant comparison method, creating categories and comparing them. In the end, seven categories were established and were grouped in three: bioethical principles (dignity, charity, vulnerability, autonomy), doctor-patient relationship (participant commitment, informed consent, health staff-patient relationship) and the experience of the disease (illness, the role of the family). Results The research found that most patients described a positive experience, with the feeling of having been well cared for with no sense of discrimination or injustice done. The majority also reported that their autonomy was respected in the treatment decisions. The evaluation of these attitudes is an area of opportunity, especially when the patients' vulnerability is at risk. Conclusions The ethics of virtue offers a better reflection of how human beings manifest themselves by emphasizing the development of virtuous character and behaviors that allow them to realize their values in life. Authorized by the Research Ethics Committee with registration: DI/18/105-B/3/308. (shrink)

Background Physicians play a fundamental role in the care of patients at the end of life that includes knowing how to accompany patients, alleviate their suffering and inform them about their situation. However, in reality, doctors are part of this society that is reticent to face death and lack the proper education to manage it in their clinical practice. The objective of this study was to explore the residents’ concepts of death and related aspects, their reactions and actions in situations (...) pertaining to death in their practice, and their perceptions about existing and necessary training conditions. Methods A qualitative approach was used to examine these points in depth based on interviews conducted with seven oncology residents. Results Participants do not have a clear concept of death and, although it is seen as a common phenomenon, they consider it an enemy to beat. The situations to which respondents react more frequently with frustration and sadness after the death of patients were when they felt emotionally involved, if they identify with the patient, in cases of pediatric patients and with patients who refuse treatment. To deal with death, participants raise barriers and attempt to become insensitive. Although residents in this study recognize the importance of training to learn how to better deal with death, it seems they are not fully invested in reaching more of it. Conclusions Participants face death in a daily basis without the necessary training, which appears to impact them more than they are willing to accept. They do not achieve their goals managing situations regarding death as well as they assume they do. Despite recognizing the need of more training and support for better coping with death, they prefer to continue to learn from their experience. Trial registration Not applicable. (shrink)

The assembly of products or components by operators in industries is a complex task with recurring problems. In these processes, operators often make errors that can lead to defective products. Therefore, they need to be inspected later to verify their correct assembly. The main problems are caused by several reasons including high employee turnover, lack of experience in manufacturing specific products or confusion in interpreting instructions to assemble similar components. In this paper, a novel structured language aimed to describe the (...) required actions to manufacture a product in industrial assembly environments is presented. The main contribution is to provide a formal language to feed automatic systems that can verify through visual control whether the actions performed by the operator are carried out following the standard described by this language. In general, the use of this formal language will allow to minimize the negative impact of errors during assembly and to reduce waste in many forms in the industry. (shrink)

In the context of technological dissemination sessions aimed at prospective students at the Polytechnic University of Baja California in the city of Mexicali, Baja California, the importance of engineering and its role in scientific and technological progress was stressed, as well as its role in scientific and technological progress as drivers of economic development in the region. A group of 2,154 students from 20 different institutions of public high school education answered a survey designed as an evaluation tool for a (...) career path or technology area of interest. The survey results show that students have a low preference for engineering careers. Moreover, these results were augmented with an additional study on the high attrition of students in engineering schools in the city of Mexicali, Baja California, also conducted by the authors. It raises the importance of teaching science in the early education levels, which aims to prepare scientists and technologists needed for the development of research and innovation as a foundation for economic prosperity and welfare of an emerging economy such as Mexico. (shrink)

The coronavirus disease pandemic fundamentally disrupted humans’ social life and behavior. Public health measures may have inadvertently impacted how people care for each other. This study investigated prosocial behavior, its association well-being, and predictors of prosocial behavior during the first COVID-19 pandemic lockdown and sought to understand whether region-specific differences exist. Participants from eight regions clustering multiple countries around the world responded to a cross-sectional online-survey investigating the psychological consequences of the first upsurge of lockdowns in spring 2020. Prosocial behavior (...) was reported to occur frequently. Multiple regression analyses showed that prosocial behavior was associated with better well-being consistently across regions. With regard to predictors of prosocial behavior, high levels of perceived social support were most strongly associated with prosocial behavior, followed by high levels of perceived stress, positive affect and psychological flexibility. Sociodemographic and psychosocial predictors of prosocial behavior were similar across regions. (shrink)

In this research, a sliding mode regulator with sine mapping is suggested for the stabilization of electricity generators being affected by magnet interaction nonlinearities and generator nonlinearities. To reach this goal, our suggested regulator has the following contributions: it starts from the sliding mode regulator with the modifications that the saturation mapping is used to reach a smoother performance instead of the signum mapping, and the sine mapping is applied to reach an upper bound in the proportional gain error, it (...) is used to reach some chosen constant behaviors for the angle position, angle speed, and current in the electricity generators, and its stabilization is ensured based on the Lyapunov approach. We show the simulation of the suggested regulator in two electricity generators. (shrink)

Regularization may be used as an alternative to dimensionality reduction when the number of variables in a model is much larger than the number of available observations. In a recent study from our group regularized regression was employed to quantify brain functional connectivity in a sample of healthy controls using a brain parcellation and resting state fMRI images. Here regularization is applied to evaluate resting state connectivity abnormalities at the voxel level in a sample of patients with schizophrenia. Specifically, ridge (...) regression is implemented with different degrees of regularization. Results are compared to those delivered by the weighted global brain connectivity method, which is based on averaged bivariate correlations and from the non-redundant connectivity method, a dimensionality reduction approach that applies supervised principal component regressions. Ridge regression is able to detect a larger set of abnormally connected regions than both GBC and NRC methods, including schizophrenia related connectivity reductions in fronto-medial, somatosensory and occipital structures. Due to its multivariate nature, the proposed method is much more sensitive to group abnormalities than the GBC, but it also outperforms the NRC, which is multivariate too. Voxel based regularized regression is a simple and sensitive alternative for quantifying brain functional connectivity. (shrink)

Depois da sua passagem para a fé católica, Edith Stein reformulou suas concepções filosóficas apropriando-se do conceitual tomasiano. Neste artigo, abordaremos como ela abordou as questões acerca da eternidade do ser e da criação dos entes, comparando com a concepção original de Tomás de Aquino e mostrando como esse diálogo entre os pensamentos medievais e contemporâneos foi desenvolvido de uma maneira original na obra “Ser finito e ser eterno: Ensaio de uma ascensão ao sentido do ser”.

Este artículo aborda la trayectoria política de las hermanas Claudina y Luz García Pérez en la Agrupación Femenina Socialista de Madrid y en varios sindicatos vinculados a la Casa del Pueblo entre 1918 y 1931. Sus biografías sirven para cuestionar el estereotipo del varón activista sindical y político, al evidenciar la importancia de la militancia familiar en la adopción y mantenimiento de un compromiso de por vida con el socialismo. Además, su trasgresión a los roles hegemónicos de género pone (...) de manifiesto el papel desempeñado por los espacios de sociabilidad política exclusivamente femeninos en la formación de mujeres líderes en regímenes que no reconocían derechos de ciudadanía a las mujeres. (shrink)

La primera parte se titula: “Fenomenología de la fenomenología”, cuestión presente desde los orígenes mismos de la fenomenología y preocupación constante de su fundador. En esta parte se abordan tres estudios muy diversos, cuyo eje es el interés por contribuir, sin pretensión de sistematicidad, a una meta-fenomenología. En el primer estudio, el autor se aproxima a una de las preguntas más vitales de la fenomenología, esto es, si existe o no un método fenomenológico. Luego de aclarar las dificultades históricas, epistemológicas (...) y metodológicas (estas últimas llamadas por el autor “procedimentales”) para atreverse a responder a esta pregunta, Vargas Guillén llega a la tesis de su estudio: “la fenomenología, que esencialmente es método, tiene principios, pero no procedimientos” (p. 14). De una manera clara, difícil de encontrar en la mayoría de los textos fenomenológicos, y respaldado en didácticos esquemas, el autor se dedica a explicar cada uno de los “postulados o principios metodológicos de la fenomenología”, cerrando el estudio con unas polémicas sugerencias. (shrink)

La primera parte se titula: “Fenomenología de la fenomenología”, cuestión presente desde los orígenes mismos de la fenomenología y preocupación constante de su fundador. En esta parte se abordan tres estudios muy diversos, cuyo eje es el interés por contribuir, sin pretensión de sistematicidad, a una meta-fenomenología. En el primer estudio, el autor se aproxima a una de las preguntas más vitales de la fenomenología, esto es, si existe o no un método fenomenológico. Luego de aclarar las dificultades históricas, epistemológicas (...) y metodológicas (estas últimas llamadas por el autor “procedimentales”) para atreverse a responder a esta pregunta, Vargas Guillén llega a la tesis de su estudio: “la fenomenología, que esencialmente es método, tiene principios, pero no procedimientos” (p. 14). De una manera clara, difícil de encontrar en la mayoría de los textos fenomenológicos, y respaldado en didácticos esquemas, el autor se dedica a explicar cada uno de los “postulados o principios metodológicos de la fenomenología”, cerrando el estudio con unas polémicas sugerencias. (shrink)

Well known is the fact that Husserl’s Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and phenomenological Philosophy I, published in 1913, made a strong disappointment in the phenomenological circle around Husserl, and started a reinterpretation of the husserlian phenomenology. The problem of the constitution was a real dilemma for the studentship of Munich — Göttingen. More of Husserl’s students from his Göttingen years reflected in the 1930th on the transcendental idealism, which they originated from the Ideas and found fulfilled in Husserl’s (...) Cartesian Meditations and Formal and transzendental Logic. The remarkable similarity between these papers is the questioning on being incorporated in the problematic of the method in the husserlian phenomenology. But this parallelism in the problem reveals the origin of the religious phenomenon in the husserlian phenomenology as well. Adolf Reinach’s religious terms as gratitude, charity, etc. in his religious Notes, Heidegger’s notion of being as finiteness in Being and Time, Edith Stein’s concept about the finite and eternal being in Finite and Eternal Being are originating in the problem of constitution in the transcendental phenomenology on the one hand, but these phenomenon point at the constitution theologically. In my paper I would like to show the relationship between the critique on the husserlian transcendental idealism and the roots of the experience of religious life by the phenomenological problem of being especially at Edith Stein. (shrink)

El personalismo, en general, surge como una respuesta en contra del afán moderno de dar validez sólo aquello que es mesurable y empíricamente verificable, i.e., contra la tendencia positivista a olvidar la centralidad de la persona “como creadora y depositaria del sentido de la realidad”. Cara al positivismo imperante del siglo XIX y XX, encontramos la propuesta antropológica de Edith Stein, quien asume el método fenomenológico de su maestro para articular una sólida visión de lo humano, capaz de reivindicar (...) su dignidad constitutiva. El presente libro del profesor Rubén Sánchez, en este sentido, nos permite no sólo reparar en el recorrido intelectual que realizó la filósofa de Breslau para consolidar su antropología, sino también sumergirnos, en palabras de Gonzáles Di Pierro, en “todos los niveles de este personalismo steiniano”. Se trata, pues, de un texto que, sin menoscabo de la hondura y complejidad del pensamiento de Stein, nos permite ahondar en su propuesta antropológica desde un lenguaje sencillo y accesible para todo público. (shrink)

I describe a phenomenon that has not yet been described in the epistemology literature. I label this phenomenon expression-style exclusion. Expression-style exclusion is an example of how s...

It is notable that all of the leading theories of blame have to employ ungainly fixes to deflect one or more apparent counterexamples. What these theories share is a content‐based theory of blame's nature. Such approaches overlook or ignore blame's core unifying feature, namely, its function, which is to signal the blamer's commitment to a set of norms. In this paper, we present the problems with the extant theories and then explain what signaling is, how it functions in blame, why (...) appealing to it resolves the problems in other theories, what the signaling function implies for a wider range of gray‐area cases, and what the larger significance is of blame's core function for interpersonal interactions in a variety of (non‐moral) normative domains. (shrink)

La crisis en la que estamos inmersos tiene entre sus causas una profunda crisis de relaciones entre las personas y los Estados. Si superamos esta crisis de relaciones, asumiendo nuevos paradigmas políticos y sociales, aseguraremos la base de una nueva convivencia democrática, integradora y solidaria, que responda al reto de la globalización y la interdependencia. Sólo se saldrá de la crisis de relaciones desde valores basados en la solidaridad, asentada en la confianza mutua. Algunas propuestas para regenerar el sistema de (...) valores apelan el paradigma de la fraternidad: la globalización de la solidaridad como respuesta a la crisis de la globalización. (shrink)

I argue racial injustice undermines the reliability of news source reports in the information domain of racial injustice. I argue that this in turn undermines subjects’ doxastic justification in inferences they base on these news sources in the racial injustice information domain. I explain that racial injustice does this undermining through the effect of racial prejudice on news organizations’ members and the effect of society's racially unjust structure on non-dominant racial group-controlled news sources.

Constitutive instrumentalism is the view that responsibility practices arise from and are justified by our being prosocial creatures who need responsibility practices to secure specific kinds of social goods. In particular, responsibility practices shape agency in ways that disposes adherence to norms that enable goods of shared cooperative life. The mechanics of everyday responsibility practices operate, in part, via costly signaling about the suitability of agents for coordination and cooperation under conditions of shared cooperative life. So, there are a range (...) of identifiable conditions where the ordinary operation of responsibility practices—and thus, the usual normative force of the practices—is disrupted. Even so, these conditions are not so widespread as to favor a more thoroughgoing abandonment of responsibility practices. (shrink)

In mid-twentieth-century Mexican philosophy, there was a peculiar nationalist existentialist project focused on the cultural conditions of agency. This article revisits some of those ideas, including the idea that there is an important but underappreciated experience of one's relationship to norms and social meanings. This experience—something called accidentality—casts new light on various forms of social subordination and socially scaffolded agency, including cultural alienation, biculturality, and double consciousness.

In this paper, we try to show that the existing Spanish secular model should be defined in terms of collaboration. Religious freedom is interpreted by Spanish judges in a Catholic framework, as an implementation of the Second Vatican Council's Declarations and Constitutions. In this sense, the Catholic Church has managed to impose its authority through privileged agreements with the Spanish State. _Keywords:_ religious freedom, secularism, Spain, religious law.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Examples, Stories, and Subjects in Don Quixote and the HeptameronTimothy HamptonI developed a rare and perhaps unique taste. Plutarch became my favorite reading. The pleasure that I took in reading and rereading him endlessly cured me somewhat from reading novels. Ceaselessly occupied with Rome and Athens, living, so to speak, with their great men.... I thought myself Greek or Roman.Rousseau, ConfessionsThe first part of Don Quixote reaches its rambunctious (...) climax when the Don’s neighbors, the curate and the barber, lock him in an ox cart and triumphantly wheel him back to his village. At one point during the journey home Don Quixote engages in a long and famous debate with the Canon of Toledo about the dangers of reading. The Canon attempts to convince Don Quixote to renounce both knight errantry and his passion for romances of chivalry. He also makes the following recommendation:If you are still obsessed by books of adventures and chivalry, read the book of Judges in Holy Scripture, where you will find great and genuine exploits that are as heroic as they are true. Lusitania had its Viriathus, Rome had its Caesar, Carthage its Hannibal, Greece its Alexander, Castille its Count Fernán González, Valencia its Cid, Andalusia its Gonzalo Fernández, Extremadura its Diego García de Paredes, Jérez its Garci Pérez de Vargas, Toledo its Garcilaso, Seville its Manuel de Léon: their doughty deeds will entertain, instruct, delight and amaze the highest intellects that read them. This reading will truly be worthy of your own excellent mind, my dear [End Page 597] Don Quixote, from which you will rise learned in history, enamored of virtue, instructed in goodness, bettered in manners, valiant without rashness, bold without vacillation, and all this to the honor of God, your own profit, and the glory of La Mancha, from where, as I have learned, you derive your birth and origin. 1The Canon proposes to replace one literary genre with another; he condemns the reading of romance and promotes the reading of history. In the process he presumes to substitute one type of exemplarity with another—an exchange that links Don Quixote’s imagination to his status as a political subject. For he suggests that by occupying himself with real exemplars, instead of the perfect knights of romance, Don Quixote will not only turn from a loco back into a cuerdo. He will also be made into a good citizen. The Canon offers a model of reading that links historical truth, moral amelioration, and political subjectivity. The context of this recommendation—a program of reading offered by a representative of authority to a man in a cage—stresses the relationship between reading and imprisonment, between particular uses of language and particular forms of subjection. If he reads the right kinds of exemplary stories, the Canon infers, Don Quixote will lose his desire to practice the profession of chivalry. No longer will he have to be restrained. Instead, he will live within the bounds of reason, inside the borders of mediocritas. History, as Rousseau suggests in my epigraph to this essay, can cure one of the bad habits induced by too much fiction.Yet no less striking in the Canon’s speech is the way he articulates this connection between good citizenship and good books. He links his list of exemplars to a list of geographical and political spaces: Hannibal and Carthage, Garcilaso de la Vega and Toledo, and so on. By associating heroic figures with countries, he underscores the central importance of exemplary images in the definition of group identity. One of the characteristics of the example that makes it so important in early modern intellectual life is that exemplarity defines a point at which group identity interacts with individual identity. The promotion of heroic images is, to be sure, a central feature in techniques of self-fashioning, as defined in humanist discourse from the time of Petrarch. Yet it is no less important in the definition of grouphood, from Erasmus’s exhortation to Christians to imitate the exemplary virtue of Abraham, to the iconography of patriotism. If there is a crisis of the example, then one way... (shrink)

Summary This paper aims to bridge anthropological and cognitivist research undertaken by Gilbert Durand and Mark Johnson, who studied the phenomenon of meaning making in a similar way, although they had to use different terminology as their disciplines demanded. Durand established systematization for analyzing symbolism by taking into account the position of the body and the perceptions determining the underlying schemata of symbols. Two decades later, Mark Johnson described image schemata as gestalts having an internal structure derived from bodily perceptions. (...) Owing to these similarities, a comparison between Durand and Johnson’s theories is offered first. In the second place, I reviewed the cognitive value of the anthropological regimes of imaginaire described by Durand. During the analysis, the terminology used by these theorists (like ‘image schemata’ or ‘axiomatic schemata’) was comparatively analyzed to find common ground between their positions. In conclusion, the need for recovering theories of imagination proposed by heterodox scholars like Durand is highlighted, since they anticipate the role of images and imagination not only in language, as Johnson demonstrated, but also in the formation of anthropologically relevant symbols, which are of interest for the analysis of literature and other arts. (shrink)

La distinción aristotélica entre lo justo por naturaleza y lo justo por ley fue objeto de una especial atención por parte de los comentaristas medievales de la Ética a Nicómaco. En este trabajo se examina la forma en que este texto fue entendido por tres comentaristas del primer tercio del siglo XIV: Radulfus Brito, Walter Burley y Geraldus Odonis. La lectura que hacen los dos primeros está notoriamente influida por Tomás, a pesar de la Condemnatio de 1277, pues entienden lo (...) justo natural a partir de su teoría de la ley natural. En cambio Odonis, que es el primer franciscano que comenta la Ética, es más original, como se observa en su idea de que en las manifestaciones de la justicia legal siempre subyacen algunos elementos naturales; en su preocupación por vincular las enseñanzas deAristóteles sobre lo justo natural con ciertos tópicos platónicos, y en su convincente explicación de los ejemplos que pone Aristóteles para explicar tanto el cambio de lo justo por naturaleza como el cambio de las cosas que son justas por ley. (shrink)

In this article I propose a resolution to the history issue for responsible agency, given a moderate revisionist approach to responsibility. Roughly, moderate revisionism is the view that a plausible and normatively adequate theory of responsibility will require principled departures from commonsense thinking. The history issue is whether morally responsible agency – that is, whether an agent is an apt target of our responsibility-characteristic practices and attitudes – is an essentially historical notion. Some have maintained that responsible agents must have (...) particular sorts of histories, others have argued that no such history is required. Resolution of this contentious issue is connected to a wide range of concerns, including the significance and culpability of different forms of manipulation, the plausibility of important incompatibilist criticisms of compatibilism, and of course, a satisfactory account of moral responsibility. As it turns out, history matters sometimes, but less frequently than we might think. (shrink)

There are two standard theoretical responses to putative errors in ordinary thinking about some given target property: eliminativism or revisionism. Roughly, eliminativism is the denial that the target property exists, and revisionism is the view that the property exists, but that people tend to have false beliefs about it. Recently, Shaun Nichols has proposed a third option: discretionism. Discretionism is the idea that some terms have multiple reference conventions, so that it may be true to say with eliminativists that the (...) property does not exist, and true to say with revisionists that the property does exist. This article explores the viability of discretionism, and argues that it faces serious difficulties. Even if the difficulties faced by discretionism can be overcome, it is unclear that discretionism secures anything beyond what is already available to standard revisionist views. The article concludes with some reflections about Nichols’ account of the bare retributive norm. (shrink)

The present chapter is concerned with revisionism about free will. It begins by offering a new characterization of revisionist accounts and the way such accounts fit (or do not) in the familiar framework of compatibilism and incompatibilism. It then traces some of the recent history of the development of revisionist accounts, and concludes by remarking on some challenges for them.

This essay briefly explores the phenomenon of nepantla in three representative cross-cultural encounters, in both initial and later phases: Spain-Latin America, England-India, and the West-Japan. Nepantla is a mode of in-betweenness rooted in the historical encounter between cultures and leading to mediation of various kinds. For Latin America, the essay focuses on Columbus, the Cortés-Moctezuma encounter, the Aztec-Franciscan dialogues of 1524, Gabriel García Márquez, and Mario Vargas Llosa. For India, the essay comments on the East India Company, English (...) education in India, Lord Macaulay, Dean Mahomet, Rabindranath Tagore, Salman Rushdie, V.S. Naipaul, and a number of other writers from the early, mid and late twentieth century. For Japan, the essay considers, first, Japanese reactions to missionary activities in the sixteenth century, then the opening up of Japan in the nineteenth century, the Meiji Restoration and its literature, and in particular authors like Fukuzawa, Sōseki, Endō, Kawabata, and Ōe. The essay argues, finally, that nepantla is a useful and dynamic approach to intercultural encounters that complements approaches indicated by terms like colonialism, imperialism, contact zones, hybridity or métissage, liminality, de-colonization, or post-coloniality. (shrink)

This paper studies the lessons of principled anti-corruption experts who dared to fulfill their duty of justice in highly corrupt societies, through the true story of Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the former Finance Minister of Nigeria. My thesis is that when principled anti-corruption experts are epistemic trespassers, they show moral incompetence. Okonjo-Iweala shows moral incompetence in two ways: she misread the opposition to her strategies and misled other honest reformers. Both actions bungled her efforts to eradicate corruption inasmuch as they hindered the (...) possibility of finding successful anti-corruption policies. Okonjo-Iweala’s moral incompetence is, I argue, the result of her epistemic trespassing that led her to act like an expert in an environment where she was not. I conclude that, in highly corrupt societies, principled anti-corruption experts should embrace moral humility, stop thinking that they are experts, and act more like students, asking questions and not rushing to think that they understand the answers. (shrink)