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)

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 paper responds to the issues raised by D. Chalmers by offering a research direction which is quite radical because of the way in which methodological principles are linked to scientific studies of consciousness. Neuro-phenomenology is the name I use here to designate a quest to marry modern cognitive science and a disciplined approach to human experience, thereby placing myself in the lineage of the continental tradition of Phenomenology. My claim is that the so-called hard problem that animates these Special (...) Issues can only be addressed productively by gathering a research community armed with new pragmatic tools for the development of a science of consciousness. I will claim that no piecemeal empirical correlates, nor purely theoretical principles, will really help us at this stage. We need to turn to a systematic exploration of the only link between mind and consciousness that seems both obvious and natural: the structure of human experience itself. In what follows I motivate my choice by briefly examining the current debate about consciousness at the light of Chalmer’s hard problem. Next, I outline the phenomenological strategy. Finally I conclude by discussing some of the main difficulties and consequences of this strategy. (shrink)

This paper starts with one of Chalmers’ basic points: first-hand experience is an irreducible field of phenomena. I claim there is no ‘theoretical fix’ or ‘extra ingredient’ in nature that can possibly bridge this gap. Instead, the field of conscious phenomena requires a rigorous method and an explicit pragmatics for its exploration and analysis. My proposed approach, inspired by the style of inquiry of phenomenology, I have called neurophenomenology. It seeks articulations by mutual constraints between phenomena present in experience and (...) the correlative field of phenomena established by the cognitive sciences. It needs to expand into a widening research community in which the method is cultivated further. (shrink)

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)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 40.1 (2006) 35-53 [Access article in PDF] "Truth Is What Works": Francisco J. Varela on Cognitive Science, Buddhism, the Inseparability of Subject and Object, and the Exaggerations of Constructivism—A Conversation Francisco J. Varela Bernhard Poerksen Institut für Journalistik und Kommunikationswissenschaft Universität Hamburg Francisco J. Varela (1946-2001) studied biology in Santiago de Chile, obtained his doctorate 1970 at Harvard University with a (...) dissertation on the insect eye, and worked there for some time in the laboratory of Torsten Wiesel, the later Nobel Laureate for medicine. From his scientific beginnings as a researcher in biology, he not only studied and practiced biology but, resisting the dominating mainstream, pursued a research program that ignored and broke down traditional disciplinary boundaries. This research program is best characterized as experimental epistemology, a concept introduced by the neuropsychiatrist and cybernetician Warren S. McCulloch. Francisco J. Varela's great aspiration was to examine and answer the philosophical ur-question of cognition with scientific precision and with the help of the best possible theoretical framework. [End Page 35]Having obtained his doctorate, he went back to Chile to work as a professor of biology together with Humberto R. Maturana. He contributed to the writing of the theory of autopoiesis, which was to cause a furor in the world of science as a universally applicable explanatory model. After the overthrow of Allende and the installation of the dictatorship by the putsch general Pinochet, Francisco J. Varela first escaped to Costa Rica, then became a professor at the American University of Colorado and University of New York, and finally returned in 1980 to the University of Chile in Santiago for five years. Temporary positions as guest professor for neurobiology, philosophy, and cognitive science in Germany, Switzerland, and France led him to Paris in the end, where he worked as research director of the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique until his death on May 28, 2001.In his research work embracing cognitive science, evolutionary theory, and immunology, Francisco J. Varela, constantly inspired by his fundamental interest in the key questions of epistemology, gave the epistemological debate a new orientation. In his thinking he refuses to accept the strict separation of subject and object, of knower and known, which as a rule unites realists and constructivists alike. Francisco J. Varela rejects the fundamental dualism dividing mind and world, which had shaped Western philosophy from its earliest beginnings. He does not subscribe to the idea that human individuals can invent their own realities—blindly and arbitrarily, and without experiencing any resistance from the external world and all other things given. He equally distances himself, however, from the diametrically opposite position that overstates the eigenpower of the world of objects. The external world and all other things given cannot determine what happens in an organism. Varela's claim is that individual and world create each other. The Computational Model of the Mind Poerksen: The ancient key questions of philosophy are at the center of modern cognitive science. What is the essence of the mind? Do our conceptions represent a given world, which is independent from our minds? What is the formative power of external objects over our perceptions? How does cognition function? The search for an adequate answer and an improved understanding of the human mind has led many cognitive scientists to entertain the assumption that the brain is actually a kind of computer. Memory is taken to be a store. Thinking and perceiving are understood as data processing in the sense that an independent external world is computationally transformed into symbols and represented in the organism in this manner. You are very critical of this view. Why?Varela: If the brain is considered as a kind of computer, then cognitive research is limited to discovering certain self-sufficient shapes—the symbols—together with the rules [End Page 36] governing them—the programs. But this search for symbols and programs will never be profitable because it... (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.

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)

Resumen En este artículo analizaremos, a través de una serie de actividades diseñadas para implementar en el aula, el modo en el que un grupo de jóvenes gallegos co-construyen el conocimiento metalingüístico y metapragmático acerca de las diferentes variedades locales del español y gallego. La exposición de su trayectoria biográfica permite que afloren diversos saberes y conocimientos metalingüísticos que los estudiantes han ido adquiriendo a lo largo de su escolarización y, además, surgen diversas categorizaciones sobre lenguas y variedades que ponen (...) de manifiesto sus ideologías lingüísticas, pp. 157–174). A través del análisis de las prácticas metalingüísticas y metapragmáticas comprobaremos cómo se reproducen las ideologías lingüísticas de estos jóvenes; por una parte, las ideologías de la institución académica y escolar; y por otra, las ideologías lingüísticas de los jóvenes presentes en el aula, en donde etiquetan, clasifican y establecen jerarquizaciones y valoraciones de su repertorio comunicativo. Finalmente, se comprueba cómo las diferentes variedades del español y del gallego actúan como índices de identidad social diferente de la reconocida en el ámbito institucional y académico, con distintos valores en el mercado lingüístico. (shrink)

Darwin’s main contribution to modern biology was to make clear that all history of life on earth is dominated by a simple principle, which is usually summarised as 'descent with modification'. However, interpretations about how this modification is produced have been controversial. In light of the data provided by recent studies on molecular biology, developmental biology, genomics, and other biological disciplines we discuss, in this paper, how Darwin's theory may apply to two main 'types' of evolution: that occurring in the (...) prebiotic world and that regarding the acquisition of major key-innovations differentiating higher-taxa, which makes up part of the so-called macroevolution. We argue that these studies show that evolution is a fascinating, complex and multifaceted process, with different mechanisms drivin it on different occasions and in different places. (shrink)

BackgroundAssociations were examined between author-reported uses of reporting guidelines to prepare JNCI: Journal of the National Cancer Institute (JNCI) submissions, editorial decisions, and reviewer ratings for adherence to reporting guidelines and clarity of presentation.MethodsAt submission, authors were asked if they used reporting guidelines to prepare their manuscript and, if so, which one(s). Reviewers rated adherence to reporting guidelines and clarity of presentation. Data were gathered using a customized Editorial Manager Enterprise Analytics Report for submissions with first or final decisions that (...) were submitted between November 1, 2015, and April 30, 2017. Manuscript types that would benefit from the use of reporting guidelines were included. All reviews were included in the analyses. Numerical values were given to each answer (yes, 1; no, 0) or reviewer rating (not applicable, 0; fair, 1; poor, 2; good, 3; very good, 4; and outstanding, 5), and scores were compared using two-sided t tests.ResultsOf 2209 submissions included in the analysis, 1144 (51.8%) indicated that at least one reporting guideline was used. The STROBE guidelines were the most common (n = 531, 24.0%). Of the 2068 (93.6%) submissions that were rejected, 1105 (50.1%) indicated using reporting guidelines and 963 (43.6%) did not (mean [SD] scores of rejected vs not rejected, 0.53 [0.50] vs 0.49 [0.50], P =.47). Of the 1033 ratings for adherence to reporting guidelines, mean (SD) scores for not rejected vs rejected submissions were 3.2 (1.61) vs 2.9 (1.57) (P =.005), and mean (SD) scores for reporting guidelines use vs no use were 3.1 (1.48) vs 2.9 (1.70) (P =.01). Of the 1036 ratings for clarity of presentation, mean (SD) scores for not rejected vs rejected submissions were 3.6 (1.00) vs 3.1 (1.08) (P <.001), whereas mean (SD) scores for reporting guidelines use vs no use were 3.3 (1.04) vs 3.3 (1.10) (P =.64).ConclusionsAmong these JNCI submissions, reporting the use of reporting guidelines was not associated with editorial decisions or with reviewer ratings for clarity of presentation. Reviewer ratings for adherence to guidelines and clarity of presentation were associated with editorial decisions after peer review, and ratings for adherence to guidelines were associated with reported use of reporting guidelines. (shrink)

Edward Aloysius Pace, philosopher and educator, by J. H. Ryan.-Neo-scholastic philosophy in American Catholic culture, by C. A. Hart.- The significance of Suarez for a revival of scholasticism, by J. F. McCormick.- The new physics and scholasticism, by F. A. Walsh.- The new humanism and standards, by L. R. Ward.- The purpose of the state, by E. F. Murphy.- The concept of beauty in St. Thomas Aquinas, by G. B. Phelan.- The knowableness of God: its relation to the theory of (...) knowledge in St. Thomas, by Matthew Schumacher.- The modern idea of God, by F. J. Sheen.- The analysis of association of its equational constants, by T. V. Moore.- Bibliography (p. 224-225) - Character and body build in children, by Sister M. Rosa McDonough. Bibliography (p. 248-249) - The moral development of children, by Sister Mary.- Medieval education (700-900) by T. J. Shahan.- The need for a Catholic philosophy of education, by George Johnson. (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)

La normativa fiscal comunitaria, y muy especialmente el IVA, está orientada al logro del principio de neutralidad respecto del tráfico empresarial, pero por la propia competencia fiscal entre el Estado y las Comunidades Autónomas e, incluso, la forma de retribución de las Oficinas Liquidadoras se está llegando a interpretaciones discutibles, con argumentos formalistas en exceso, con el fin de encontrar nuevos hechos imponibles que, además, de incumplir el régimen de incompatibilidad de los tributos de la imposición indirecta están afectando a (...) la competitividad de nuestras empresas, encareciendo los bienes y servicios y muy especialmente el tráfico inmobiliario y el mercado del suelo, y que han afectado a la competitividad de nuestra economía de una manera estructural. (shrink)

"Knowing how we know" is the subject of this book. Its authors present a new view of cognition that has important social and ethical implications, for, they assert, the only world we humans can have is the one we create together through the actions of our coexistence. Written for a general audience as well as for students, scholars, and scientists and abundantly illustrated with examples from biology, linguistics, and new social and cultural phenomena, this revised edition includes a new afterword (...) by Dr. Varela, in which he discusses the effect the book has had in the years since its first publication. (shrink)

The Embodied Mind provides a unique, sophisticated treatment of the spontaneous and reflective dimension of human experience.

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)

Esta conversación tuvo lugar durante una visita de varios días de Pablo Posada Varela a la casa de Marc Richir en Haut-Vaucluse en junio de 2012. He aquí tres extractos (de extensión variable) de una conversación del 8 de junio, y algunos otros fechados el 10 de junio.

Pedro Alvares Cabral's ships left Portugal on 9 March 1500 en route for the territory that he first named Terra de Vera Cruz and that later came to be known as Brazil. On the 22 March they called at the island of São Nicolau [Caminha, 1500], one of the northernmost islands of the Cape Verde group; this was about forty years after the discovery of the archipelago in 1460-62 [Albuquerque, 1991]. It is known that Vasco da Gama had stopped at (...) the island of Santiago in 1498 on his voyage to India, and also in 1499 on the return journey. Straight after the discovery of Brazil Cabral sailed for India and on the way back also dropped anchor at Santiago. Indeed, our archipelago, which is situated off Cape Verde in Senegal (the place from which it appears to take its name), was to become an important stopover point for maritime traffic between Europe, Asia and the Americas in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, both to allow crews to rest and to take on water, wood and some food supplies. It also became important as a holding point for slaves (a large number of whom came from around thirty Guinean ethnic groups and subgroups). They were dispatched from Santiago, known then as Cape Verde island, to territories such as Brazil from the early sixteenth century onwards, since these territories, which had only recently been discovered and were little known, needed people to work and populate them. (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)

El lenguaje o la actividad cognoscitiva del ser humano que se debate en su lucha contra la circunstancia en la que le ha tocado vivir es hablar, decir y conocer. El hombre habla porque tiene algo que decir, dice porque se define a sí mismo ante la circunstancia en la que vive en cada momento, y esto es posible porque conoce de forma creativa. En este sentido el decir determina el hablar, por arriba, y el conocer por abajo. El conocer (...) humano empieza en una sensación sensible, la aísthesis, la cual es transformada en un universal, extracto o concepto, logos, el cual es el fruto de una serie de operaciones intelectivas realizadas por el propio sujeto en u solo acto, el acto único de hablar, decir y conocer. (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)

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)