Neoclassical economics assumes that individuals have stable and context-independent preferences, and uses preference satisfaction as a normative criterion. By calling this assumption into question, behavioural findings cause fundamental problems for normative economics. A common response to these problems is to treat deviations from conventional rational choice theory as mistakes, and to try to reconstruct the preferences that individuals would have acted on, had they reasoned correctly. We argue that this preference purification approach implicitly uses a dualistic model of the human (...) being, in which an inner rational agent is trapped in an outer psychological shell. This model is psychologically and philosophically problematic. (shrink)

Relying on some auxiliary assumptions, usually considered mild, Bell’s theorem proves that no local theory can reproduce all the predictions of quantum mechanics. In this work, we introduce a fully local, superdeterministic model that by explicitly violating ‘settings independence’—one of these auxiliary assumptions, requiring statistical independence between measurement settings and systems to be measured—is able to reproduce all the predictions of quantum mechanics. Moreover, we show that contrary to widespread expectations, our model can break settings independence without an initial state (...) that is too complex to handle, without visibly losing all explanatory power, and without outright nullifying all of experimental science. Still, we argue that our model is unnecessarily complicated and does not offer true advantages over its non-local competitors. We conclude that while our model does not appear to be a viable contender to its non-local counterparts, it provides the ideal framework to advance the debate over violations of statistical independence via the superdeterministic route. (shrink)

This study investigates the effectiveness of pedagogical practices used to teach business ethics. The business community has greatly increased its demands for better ethics education in business programs. Educators have generally agreed that the ethical principles of business people have declined. It is important, then, to examine how common methods of instruction used in business ethics could contribute to the development of higher levels of moral judgment competence for students. To determine the effectiveness of these methods, moral judgment competence levels (...) for undergraduate and graduate students from three institutions were measured and compared based upon the pedagogical method used in a business class. Significant differences were found for moral reasoning and moral competence scores depending on the method used for ethics instruction. Students in classes with more highly integrated ethics coverage scored higher in moral reasoning and moral competence. (shrink)

This note replies to a comment by Daniel Hausman on our paper ‘Preference purification and the inner rational agent: a critique of the conventional wisdom of behavioural welfare economics’. We clarify our characterisation of behavioural welfare economics and acknowledge that Hausman does fully endorse this approach. However, we argue that Hausman’s response to our critique, like behavioural welfare economics itself, implicitly uses a model of an inner rational agent.

A central debate in the current philosophical literature on temporal experience is over the following question: do temporal experiences themselves have a temporal structure that mirrors their temporal contents? Extensionalists argue that experiences do have a temporal structure that mirrors their temporal contents. Atomists insist that experiences don’t have a temporal structure that mirrors their contents. In this paper, I argue that this debate is misguided. Both atomism and extensionalism, considered as general theories of temporal experience, are false, since temporal (...) experience is not a single undifferentiated phenomena as both theories require. I argue for this conclusion in two steps. First, I show that introspection cannot settle the debate. Second, I argue that the neuroscientific evidence is best read as revealing a host of mechanisms involved in temporal perception - some admitting of an extensionalist interpretation while others admitting only of an atomistic interpretation. As a result, neither side of the debate wins. (shrink)

The Scottish philosopher David Hume had a major influence on the Founding Fathers. While Hume was friends with Benjamin Franklin (who stayed at Humes home on one of his visits to Edinburgh), his real influence came from the fact that his works were widely read and passionately discussed in what would become the United States. Chapters include a biography of the affable Scot, a discussion of the philosophical schools that he is most associated with, an in-depth examination of his seminal (...) "A Treatise of Human Nature," and a discussion of his importance to early American history. (shrink)

Ever since the popular revolt of December 2001, Argentinian political life changed radically, with the force of a ’destituting power’ which runs through all daily demonstrations in the streets of Buenos Aires. The occupations of the city exhibit new political subjectivities organized in the form of assemblies, which are characterized by the capacity of mobilization and the public expression of social demands, outside of the traditional mediation of institutions.

While Isocrates regarded rhetoric not as a rigid discipline, but as a creative and pliable art, it is not possible to standardize art. According to his point of view, good speech depends on certain principles: opportunity ; suitability and novelty. The sophists, according to Isocrates, did not pay attention to these principles, and that was their main mistake. The problem was, however, that it was difficult to teach these principles to the disciples, precisely because rhetoric was a flexible art. Still, (...) although it is not possible to provide fixed rules concerning rhetorical principles, the ancient rhetor provided some useful suggestions in his works which make it possible to reconstruct the nature of these principles. (shrink)

We argue that animals are not cognitively stuck in time. Evidence pertaining to multisensory temporal order perception strongly suggests that animals can represent at least some temporal relations of perceived events.

While we perceive events in our environment through multiple sensory systems, we nevertheless perceive all of these events as occupying a single unified timeline. Time, as we perceive it, is unified. I argue that existing accounts of the perceived unity of time fail. Instead, the perceived unity of time must be constructed by integrating our initially fragmented timekeeping capacities. However, existing accounts of multimodal integration do not tell us how this might occur. Something new is needed. I finish the paper (...) by articulating the hurdles that must be overcome to provide an account of the perceived unity of time. (shrink)

Este artículo presenta una visión histórica de la utopía social cristiana en la Edad Media.Se pone de presente que la praxis social y religiosa conducida por la Iglesiainstitucional en ese periodo de tiempo está relacionada con una crisis u ocaso de lautopía social cristiana, entendida ésta como la búsqueda de una sociedad en la queimpere la igualdad social y religiosa, que se rija por el principio de misericordia, y queesté abierta no sólo a los elegidos, sino a todos los sereshumanos, (...) con especial predilección por los pobres, como primeros destinatarios delmensaje cristiano. Se presenta la Edad Media como un periodo de tiempo que se guiópor una mentalidad religiosa y una praxis económica y social que ocultó la utopía, lacual resurgió en el humanismo y en algunas prácticas evangelizadoras en el NuevoMundo. (shrink)

It took a very long time before I encountered the systematic study of religious processes and dynamics as a distinctive and expansive area of scholarship. Using an autobiographical account, I trace the development of my scholarship in the social scientific study of religion. I have now experienced a great diversity of approaches to the study of religion. Driven by insatiable curiosity and knowing that no one can capture religion comprehensively, I now am committed to stimulating imaginative, rigorous, and wide-ranging developments (...) in religious scholarship. We require new, inventive, and even incompatible approaches to our study of religion if we ever hope to try adequately grasping the richness of religion. (shrink)

How should the hospital’s ethics consultation service respond to this request from the Emergency Department for advice about “how to proceed” in caring for ED patient Benjamin? In order to off...

It’s often claimed in the philosophical and scientific literature on temporal representation that there is no such thing as a genuine sensory system for time. In this paper, I argue for the opposite—many animals, including all mammals, possess a genuine sensory system for time based in the circadian system. In arguing for this conclusion, I develop a semantics and meta-semantics for explaining how the endogenous rhythms of the circadian system provide organisms with a direct information link to the temporal structure (...) of their environment. In doing so, I highlight the role of sensory systems in an information processing architecture. (shrink)

Memories often come with a feeling of pastness. The events we remember strike us as having occurred in our past. What accounts for this feeling of pastness? In his recent book, Memory: A self-referential account, Jordi Fernández argues that the feeling of pastness cannot be grounded in an explicit representation of the pastness of the remembered event. Instead, he argues that the feeling of pastness is grounded in the self-referential causal content of memory. In this paper, I argue that this (...) account falls short. The representation of causal origin does not by itself ground a feeling of pastness. Instead, I argue that we can salvage the temporal localization account of the feeling of pastness by describing a form of egocentric temporal representation that avoids Fernández’s criticisms. (shrink)

A partir de los conceptos de carácter, virtud y amistad propuestos por la ética de la ficción de Wayne Booth, realizamos un análisis comparativo entre los efectos éticos provocados por el territorio y la música en las novelas Península, Península de Hernán Lara Zavala y en El llamado de los tunk’ules de Marisol Ceh Moo. Sugerimos que, a pesar de estar ante dos novelas que comparten el mismo contexto geo-histórico, los efectos éticos causados por el territorio y la música, bajo (...) la idea de Yucatán, guardan diferencias que ameritan llevar a cabo una co- ducción para dilucidar el tipo de compañía literaria que nos ofrecen. (shrink)

Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, EarlyView.

Recent debates in the history of science aimed at reconstructing the history of scientific diplomacy have privileged the analysis of forms of diplomacy coming from above. Instead, the objective of this paper is to raise awareness of these debates by looking at attempts at scientific diplomacy from below. Such a shift in perspective might allow us to observe the impact of marginalized social agents on the construction of international diplomatic choices. This article particularly focuses attention on how the legacy of (...) Bernalism has fostered the emergence of two different types of science diplomacy. On the one hand, Bernalism has influenced the goals of organizations such as UNESCO and the World Peace Council, which are forms of science diplomacy I would term from above. On the other hand, Bernalism has also been at the origin of radical scientific movements that I propose to interpret as forms of scientific diplomacy from below. These have, in fact, played a cardinal role not only in raising public awareness of the social and political roles of science, but also in the more direct participation of scientists in defining the political objectives of their research activity. From this point of view, I analyze how an association like the World Federation of Scientific Workers proposed (at least in the beginning) greater democratic participation than the top‐down structures of other forms of scientific internationalism. (shrink)

El autor recupera el planteamiento de Jacques Maritain respecto de la presencia que deben tener en la teoría democrática los pequeños grupos dinámicos libremente organizados, o “minoría de choque” que desatan luchas de emancipación y materializan su crítica, a través de una acción práctica, movimientista y asambleísta, orientada al autogobierno. Analiza el artículo su legitimidad en las condiciones actuales del neoliberalismo y la globalización.

Various writers have attempted to use the sender-receiver formalism to account for the representational capacities of biological systems. This paper has two goals. First, I argue that the sender-receiver approach to representation cannot be complete. The mammalian circadian system represents the time of day, yet it does not control circadian behaviours by producing signals with time of day content. Informative signalling need not be the basis of our most basic representational capacities. Second, I argue that representational capacities are primarily about (...) control, and only when specific conditions obtain does this control require informative signalling. (shrink)

This article analyses the Swedish TV series Hållbart näringsliv (HN) to study hegemonic discursive formations over the meaning of the climate crisis. Combining new materialist approaches in discourse studies with a political ecology understanding of the socio-ecological entanglement, we propose the concept of technocratic solutionism to understand how the neo-liberal green economy secures instrumentalist discourses on nature in the Swedish context. The discourse-theoretical analysis of nine HN episodes identifies four nodal points which articulate the technocratic solutionist discourse: capital’s leading role, (...) Nordic exceptionalism, substitutionalism and long-termism. We argue that the climate crisis can be understood as a materiality that dislocates capitalist assemblages, which then, in response, deploy a techno-solutionism discourse to protect the core principles of economic growth and profitability while marginalizing potential radical alternatives. (shrink)

Chile’s recent history has gone through a hybrid conjuncture between what has been called the “social outbreak” on October 18, 2019, and the declaration of health emergency by COVID-19 promulgated on March 18, 2020. In such a context, this article describes and interprets two presidential speeches that announce the States of Exception based on conjunctural enemies’ rise. This social problem is investigated from Critical Discourse Studies and Systemic Functional Linguistics, particularly the appraisal system, together with the categories of legitimation proposed (...) by van Leeuwen. This research is positioned from a qualitative perspective and takes as a corpus of analysis the two speeches declaring a State of Exception by President Piñera in 2019 and 2020, respectively. These speeches are available to the public at https://prensa.presidencia.cl/. The results show that an enemy is constructed in both cases by contrasting the actions taken or not, which present negative appreciation valuations in the case of COVID-19 and negative integrity judgments in the case of the social outbreak. In both cases, key social actors emerge that are firmly legitimized within the State of Exception framework, which in turn is based on the categories of authority and moral legitimation. In conclusion, the enemy’s construction is identified in both cases with modification of the actors that interact through a problem, an action, and an agent that solves the problem constructed. (shrink)