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)

Confucius proposes the view of human beings as moral agents that have to behave according to their own individual thinking and reflection. In Analects, I, 4, one of his disciples says: “Have I passed on to others anything that I have not tried out myself?” And in Analects, XIII, 23, Confucius says: “The gentleman agrees with others without being an echo.” That is, when one agrees with others it is because using his (today we will say “his or her”) own (...) understanding he (or she) has arrived at the same conclusions. In Analects, XV, 16, he is quite explicit: “When a man is not in the habit of saying: What shall I think of this? What shall I think of this? I can indeed do nothing with him.” In this sense it is clear that he believes in moral autonomy and in human equality. Contrary to what a lot of scholars think, he is not a communitarian thinker; he is a philosopher who wants people to think by themselves. From this early time in the History of China he was proposing what Socrates defended in Athens; the importance of an internal moral conscience. So, if we can speak about Enlightenment in the Greek world, we cansay that Confucius was an enlightenment figure in the Chinese world. In this sense I believe we can conclude that Confucius is not a good example to argue for “Asian Values”. On the contrary, Confucius presents a universalistic theory that strengthens the position of the individual and of his or her self-cultivation. And if one of the objectives of education is that individuals can think by themselves, don’t we have to conclude that the political implication of this theory for the modern world is democracy? (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 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.

Como se ha argumentado en «La familia española en el contexto de la Unión Europea», publicado en este mismo número, la vida familiar en España, hoy como en el pasado y como en los demás países, está sujeta a un profundo proceso de cambio caracterizado por una privatización creciente de los proyectos de vida familiar, privatización que implica una mayor autonomía individual en relación a la configuración de los proyectos de vida y de formación de una familia. En este trabajo (...) se quiere analizar en qué medida este proceso de cambio está alterando o no las bases de la solidaridad entre los miembros de la familia.…. (shrink)

¿Puede una personalidad histórica ser al mismo tiempo un gran hombre, una persona completamente digna de alabanza y admiración desde el punto de vista moral, haber defendido una práctica política excepcionalmente exitosa (la no-violencia) y a la vez haber realizado algunas propuestas que nos hacen levantar las cejas con asombro y a las que no vemos sentido? ¿Qué tipo de influencia podría ejercer alguien así en sus contemporáneos? ¿Podría lo irrealizable (o no deseable) de muchas de sus ideas condenarlo a (...) la irrelevancia? O, por el contrario, ¿podrían las sociedades involucradas o el propio futuro discriminar entre lo admirable y digno de imitar y aquello que convendría dejar de lado? Estas son las preguntas que la vida y las ideas de Gandhi (completamente entremezcladas) nos obligan a plantearnos. (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)

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)

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)

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.

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)

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)

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)

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)

Defendemos la postura de la necesidad de un desarrollo y de una lectura de Zubiri en clave metafísica para ello mostramos como se han dado las interpretaciones de zubiri, luego lo que ha sido la sedimentación de la interpretación exclusivamente noológica, para en un tercer momento mostrar su carencia y por lo tanto el deber de realizar una reflexión metafísica con las herramientas de la filosofía zubiriana.

Mental imagery is perceptual processing that is not triggered by corresponding sensory stimulation in the relevant sense modality. Temporal mental imagery is perceptual processing that is not triggered by temporally corresponding sensory stimulation in the relevant sense modality. We aim to show that temporal mental imagery plays an important role in explaining a number of diverse mental phenomena, from the thickness of temporal experience and the specious present to episodic memory and postdictive perception.