1. Le fe por la palabra -- 2. Topía y Utopía -- 3. Luz en la caverna.

In this work I argue that Descartes was not a trialist by showing that the main tenets of trialist interpretations of Descartes's theory of substance are either not supported by the text or are not sufficient for establishing the trialist interpretation.

We present a general approach to quantified modal logics that can simulate most other approaches. The language is based on operators indexed by terms which allow to express de re modalities and to control the interaction of modalities with the first-order machinery and with non-rigid designators. The semantics is based on a primitive counterpart relation holding between n-tuples of objects inhabiting possible worlds. This allows an object to be represented by one, many, or no object in an accessible world. Moreover (...) by taking as primitive a relation between n-tuples we avoid some shortcoming of standard individual counterparts. Finally, we use cut-free labelled sequent calculi to give a proof-theoretic characterisation of the quantified extensions of each first-order definable propositional modal logic. In this way we show how to complete many axiomatically incomplete quantified modal logics. (shrink)

This book offers an unprecedented quantitative portrait of analytic philosophy focusing on two seemingly marginal features of philosophical texts: citations and acknowledgements in academic publications. Originating from a little network of philosophers based in Oxford, Cambridge, and Vienna, analytic philosophy has become during the Twentieth century a thriving philosophical community with thousands of members worldwide. Leveraging the most advanced techniques from bibliometrics, citations and acknowledgments are used in this book to shed light on both the epistemology and the sociology of (...) this philosophical field, illuminating the intellectual trajectory of analytic philosophy as well as the social characteristics of the analytic community. Special attention is dedicated to the last forty years, providing insights into a phase of analytic philosophy which is still understudied by historians of philosophy. In the eight chapters of the book, readers will find not only numerous quantitative investigations and technical explanations, but also a robust theoretical framework and epistemological reflections on the strengths and limitations of quantitative methods for the study of philosophy. With its strong interdisciplinary appeal, this book will engage a wide range of scholars, including historians of philosophy seeking new methodologies, analytic philosophers interested in a new look at their discipline, and scholars in digital humanities, bibliometrics, and quantitative studies of science, who will find many innovative techniques for investigating disciplinary fields. (shrink)

Principi filosòfic fonamental utilitzat com a principi metodològic per explicar problemes ètics, antropològics, polítics, estètics i metafísics.

In this case, it is clear that the author feels that she has been treated badly by quite a few doctors throughout her life. At first read, the locus of her concern is perhaps a bit less clear. After all, many of her concerns seem to center around uses of humor in which she was not the butt of the joke. Indeed, she was included in the inner circle, treated as a confidant, by her doctors. From the perspective of someone (...) accustomed to being in the inner circle, it may not be immediately obvious why the attempts at humor failed. After all, isn’t humor meant to be a good way to help patients relax? Isn’t it a good way to bond with patients and to make them more comfortable? As Berger (2004) notes “humor offers modes of intimate communication through which these objectives can be achieved. Physicians’ use of quiet, respectful humor may provide patients with the “social license” to enter personal or sensitive content areas” (p. 827). If humor, or joking, is an effective tool in establishing channels of communication, then how or why did it go wrong here? The answer, in brief, is that not all humor is created equal. -/- Before going any further, we should acknowledge a few things. First, in this case the only form of humor that is on offer is joking, but humor is not limited to jokes. Usually, when we refer to humor broadly, as in the quotation above, the point can be taken to apply to jokes. However, if we refer specifically to jokes or joking the point may not apply to humor more broadly. This is so even if the jokes are meant to be humorous. Care should be taken lest we generalize in haste. Second, not all jokes are humorous, nor are all jokes intended to be humorous. Finally, much of what we will consider here—the purpose of joking, the orientation of care, the consideration of content—will be generally applicable to other forms of communication and, mutadis mutandis, should not be restricted to joking and humor. (shrink)

An analysis of the claim that Descartes was a substance trialist.

RESUMEN:El presente artículo tiene como objetivo principal el análisis de los estudios de Platón sobre la lengua en su diálogo «Crátilo”. Se interpreta la posición del filósofo, según la cual, si la lengua se aplica sin alteraciones, las palabras explican el contenido de las cosas de una manera correcta y adecuada. Partimos de la idea de que la metodología de Platón, respecto a la interpretación de la palabra, puede aplicarse para analizar la conciencia actual de la gente que vive una (...) crisis de los valores éticos tradicionales.PALABRAS CLAVE:LENGUA, DISCURSO, NOMBRE, SIGNIFICADO, FALSEDAD,CONCIENCIA, EXISTENCIA.ABSTRACT:The article discusses Plato’s theory of language, in the form as it is presented in the Cratylus dialogue. The article elaborates on Plato’s idea that words designate the nature of things they name if the language is used in the correct way. The authors suppose that Plato’s methodology of the interpretation of words can be applied for analyzing self-consciousness of modern man who lives in the era when the traditional ethical values are in crisis.KEYWORDS:LANGUAGE, DISCOURSE, IDEA, NAME, FALSE, CONSCIOUSNESS, EXISTENCE. (shrink)

In this article, I report on a Bulgarian female migrant caregiver's “life-story,” especially focusing on her relationship with an old Italian woman, on the care practices performed in her favor in Italy, and on her daughter and parents still living in Bulgaria. I chose to do it by means of an anthropological approach based on experience as field of mediation between personal dimensions and historical and social processes and therefore centered on the body conceived as historical product, the influence of (...) political and social forces on shaping human lives, and finally interest in the specific link between bodies and work. From this analysis, based on language and narratives, I think useful cultural aspects may emerge about “gender” and care practices, regarding the two women linked by an assistance relationship, and the activities/strategies used by the Bulgarian caregiver to fulfill her family obligations. (shrink)

Para el autor de este artículo, el rechazo kantiano de la identificación de su concepto de a priori con la noción leibniciana de lo innato solo puede comprenderse de manera clara y precisa, si recurrimos a la concepción kantiana de la epigénesis como modelo epistemológico; es decir, si consideramos las facultades cognitivas como fuerzas formativas que se componen con otras fuerzas de la naturaleza para hacer posible la adquisición originaria de intuiciones y conceptos a priori.

In the long history of the interpretations of Hume's theses on the self and personal identity, it is by now widely accepted that the conclusions reached in the first book of the Treatise must be considered in light of what the philosopher adds on these themes in the second and third books. Furthermore, there is no longer much support for the reading, which saw a contradiction here, given that while in the Book 1 he denies the reality of the self (...) or of personal identity, he then accepts that reality when he turns to his discussion of the passions. In presenting a more comprehensive reading of the theses of Hume on the self in the Treatise as a whole, it is essential not to lose sight of what Hume himself declared in Book 1, that "we must distinguish betwixt personal identity, as it regards our thought or imagination, and as it regards our passions or the concern we take in ourselves". But having recognized the necessity of integrating the theses on the self of Book 1 with those advanced in the latter two books, there are still divergent opinions on what meaning should be assigned to this integration. The relationship between what Hume writes on the self in Books 2 and 3 and the discussion of that topic in Book 1 has been seen, variously, as a mere continuation, as a new development in a continuous interpretation, or, rather, as a completely new posing of the question, with its own new solution. (shrink)

Conventional quantitative methods for the measurement of organizational legitimacy consider mainly three sources that make judgments about organizations visible: news media, accreditation bodies, and surveys. Over the last decade, however, social media have enabled ordinary citizens to bypass the gatekeeping function of these institutional evaluators and autonomously make individual judgments public. This inclusion of voices beyond functional and formally organized stakeholder groups potentially pluralizes the ongoing discussions about organizations. The individual judgments in blogs, tweets, and Facebook posts give indication about (...) the broader fit between an organization’s perceived behavior and heterogeneous social norms and therefore constitute an indicator of organizational legitimacy that can be accessed and measured. We propose the use of social media data and sentiment analysis to study the affect-based responses to organizational actions by citizens. We critically discuss and compare the method with existing quantitative methods for legitimacy measurement and apply them to a recent case in the banking industry. We discuss the value of the method for studying the process of legitimacy construction as the expression and negotiation of normative judgments about organizations by various evaluators. (shrink)

The problem is addressed of establishing the satisfiability of prenex formulas involving a single universal quantifier, in diversified axiomatic set theories. A rather general decision method for solving this problem is illustrated through the treatment of membership theories of increasing strength, ending with a subtheory of Zermelo-Fraenkel which is already complete with respect to the ∀*∀ class of sentences. NP-hardness and NP-completeness results concerning the problems under study are achieved and a technique for restricting the universal quantifier is presented.

In the last decades, research in science mapping has delivered several powerful techniques, based on citation or textual analysis, for charting the intellectual organization of research fields. To map the social network underlying science and scholarship, by contrast, science mapping has mainly relied on one method, co-authorship analysis. This method, however, suffers from well-known limitations related to the practice of authorship. Moreover, it does not perform well on those fields where multi-authored publications are rare. In this study, a new method (...) for mapping the social structure of research fields is advanced, based on the analysis of the acknowledgments of academic publications. We first discuss the standard account of the function of acknowledgments in scholarly communication, then we introduce a new interpretative framework in which the acknowledgments are intended as positioning signals exchanged by researchers. Next, we provide the formal definition of the four acknowledgments-based networks that stand at the core of the method, and we test it on a humanities field, analytic philosophy. Results show that acknowledgement-based networks allow to reconstruct the fine-grained social structure of analytic philosophy from different perspectives. Furthermore, by comparing the citation-based maps of the field with the acknowledgments-based networks, it permits to shed light on the relationship between the intellectual and social layer of analytic philosophy. We conclude by presenting practical limitations of the method and by sketching some further research lines. (shrink)

Norms conferring public or private powers, i.e., the competence to issue other norms, play a very important rôle in law. But there is no agreement among legal philosophers about the nature of such norms. There are two main groups of theories, those that regard them as a kind of norms of conduct (either commands or permissions) and those that regard them as non-reducible to other types of norms. I try to show that reductionist theories are not quite acceptable; neither the (...) command-variety (Kelsen, Alf Ross inOn Law and Justice), nor the permission-variety (von Wright, Kanger, Lindahl) provide a satisfactory account of competence norms.Among the authors who maintain that competence norms are different from (and hence not reducible to) norms of conduct are Hart, Ross inDirectives and Norms, and Searle. Ross and Searle distinguish between regulative and constitutive rules as two radically different kinds of rules and classify competence norms among constitutive rules. This distinction runs parallel to von Wright's distinction between rules that are prescriptions and determinative rules. While the first regulate actions (by commanding, prohibiting, or permitting them), determinative rules define certain concepts. To view competence norms as (partial) definitions of certain legal concepts (like those of legislator, judge, etc.) seems to open interesting perspectives and to shed light on at least one aspect of these elusive norms. (shrink)

Un misterioso aforismo del Tractatus de Wittgenstein enuncia que «ética y estética son lo mismo». Que una corriente de complicidad existe entre ética y estética es reconocido desde la antigüedad. Lo ético se argumenta en la praxis; el arte lo hace a través de la poiésis, o creación, ya definida por Platón y Aristóteles. Aquí se intenta abordar esta interesante y difícil cuestión desde el horizonte abierto, a través de mis últimas publicaciones, por la filosofía del límite, y se realizará (...) en tres etapas. Una primera dedicada a esclarecer uno de los conceptos nucleares de la ética, la libertad, en relación de interacción con la precomprensión que podemos poseer relativa a nuestra humana conditio. Se planteará luego la cuestión de que a través del arte «resuena simbólicamente» lo ético. En una tercera y última etapa se desarrolla el tema del nexo entre ética y estética, dándose algunos ejemplos pertinentes, antiguos y modernos. (shrink)

Some important ideas in Kelsen's Pure Theory of Law can be traced back to Kantian tradition, which has been very influential in Kelsen's thought, particularly in his early period. Among them we find the distinction between two radically different worlds (the world of facts and the world of norms), the normativity of legal science and the idea of validity as a binding force, based on the famous doctrine of the basic norm. These tenets and, especially, the use of a normative (...) concept of validity prove to be incompatible with Kelsen's positivistic programme of a value‐free legal science. The science of law cannot state that legal norms are obligatory or binding without trespassing the limits of Kelsen's ideal of a legal science; on the other hand, it is possible to define the concept of a legal system without resorting to the basic norm. So, if Kelsen is to be regarded as a consequent positivist, the Kantian ingredients of his theory must be rejected and the descriptive concept of validity as membership must be substituted for the normative notion of validity as a binding force. (shrink)

Eugenio Bulygin is a distinguished representative of legal science and legal philosophy as they are known on the European continent - no accident, given the role of the civil law tradition in his home country, Argentina. Over the past half-century, Bulygin has engaged virtually all major legal philosophers in the English-speaking countries, including H.L.A. Hart, Ronald Dworkin, and Joseph Raz. Bulygin's essays, several written together with his eminent colleague and close friend Carlos E. Alchourrón, reflect the genre familiar from (...) Alf Ross's On Law and Justice, Hans Kelsen's Pure Theory of Law, and Georg Henrik von Wright's Norm and Action. Bulygin's wide-ranging interests include most of the topics found under the rubric of analytical jurisprudence - interpretation and judicial reasoning, validity and efficacy of law, legal positivism and the problem of normativity, completeness and consistency of the legal system, the nature of legal norms, and the role of deontic logic in the law. The reader will take delight in the often agreeably unorthodox character of Bulygin's views and in his hard-hitting arguments in defence of them. He challenges the received opinion on gaps in the law, on legal efficacy, on permissory norms, and on the criteria for legal validity. Bulygin's essays have been wellnigh inaccessible in the past, appearing in specialized journals, often in Spanish or German. They are now available for the first time in an English-language collection. (shrink)

This paper criticizes Alexy's argument on the necessary connection between law and morality. First of all, the author discusses some aspects of the notion of the claim to correctness. Basically, it is highly doubtful that all legal authorities share the same idea of moral correctness. Secondly, the author argues that the claim to correctness is not a defining characteristic of the concepts of “legal norm” and “legal system”. Hence, the thesis of a necessary connection between law and morality based on (...) such claim cannot be accepted. (shrink)

This article proposes and discusses two scenarios in the North American culture at the end of the XIXth century and up until the end of the presentage. The first one al lows us to experience the gestation of a dynamic culture in all of its phases of creation and expression, and the second one is b..