The ability to perform movements is vital for our daily life. Our actions are embedded in a complex environment where we need to deal efficiently in the face of unforeseen events. Neural oscillations play an important role in basic sensorimotor processes related to the execution and preparation of movements. In this review, I will describe the state of the art regarding the role of motor gamma oscillations in the control of movements. Experimental evidence from electrophysiological studies has shown that motor (...) gamma oscillations accomplish a range of functions in motor control beyond merely signaling the execution of movements. However, these additional aspects associated with motor gamma oscillation remain to be fully clarified. Future work on different spatial, temporal and spectral scales is required to further understand the implications of gamma oscillations in motor control. (shrink)

Se aborda la literatura homosexual en México desde una perspectiva político-social en el que el auge de la literatura hispanoamericana, retoma los principios de la lucha del reconocimiento de derechos homosexuales, en un contexto histórico de cambios, partiendo de un análisis crítico que permitirá al lector, dar cuenta de los hechos libertarios de un movimiento que, aunque no es nuevo en nuestro país, sí se postula como un momento de concientización social que rompe estereotipos y esquemas tradicionales de la libertad (...) sexual. (shrink)

When interacting with others, we often use bodily signals to communicate. Among these signals, pointing, whether with the eyes or the hands, allows coordinating our attention with others, and the perception of pointing gestures implicates a range of social cognitive processes. Here, we review the brain mechanisms underpinning the perception and understanding of pointing, focusing on eye gaze perception and associated joint attention processes. We consider pointing gesture perception, but leave aside pointing gesture execution as it relates to a distinct (...) area of cognitive neuroscience research. We describe the attention orienting effects of pointing and the neural substrates for the perception of biological cues. We consider the multiple high-level social cognitive processes elicited by pointing gesture perception and examine how pointing gestures are related to the general taxonomy of gestures. We conclude by emphasizing that pointing is a social phenomenon and that a full account of pointing will require an integrative approach taking into account the distinct perspectives from which this phenomenon can be investigated. (shrink)

Dubourg and Baurmard ask why people consume fiction with imaginary worlds. We extend this inquiry to ask why people engage in creating imaginary worlds. In Fanfiction, the writing of fiction by fans involves both an immersive creative experience and a very interactive community that may explain the high (social) engagement of people with Fanfiction.

Undoubtedly, democracy is in constant danger. The Athenian creation -later taken by the Latin American countries in the political-administrative figure of the Republic- has demonstrated not to be the best government model, but, the less evil, as expressed by an English politician when he saw that his empire era was coming to an end. And one of those defenders was the critical acid of the Vienna Circle and contemporary philosopher Karl Popper, who lived on his own flesh the mistakes of (...) democracy and the horrors of totalitarianism. Popper, defender of democracy to the limit, who even within his writings we can appreciate the paradoxes he sees in this, will not hesitate when the system of government of the people, for the people and the people, fall into the temptation to choose the dictatorship. For this, the philosopher tells us, democracy must create mechanisms so that this does not happen and we do not have a popular election that takes a demagogue and criminal to power, as was Hitler’s Germany. The thinking of the critical philosopher of historicism is liberal. An English liberalism and not as we understand it and we live in several States of America, where people is economic liberal and conservative in the ideas. No, Popper is liberal. A true liberal. (shrink)

Este texto se escribió y se publicó como parte de las celebraciones del 80 aniversario del Departamento de Filosofía de la Universidad Iberoamericana, Ciudad de México.

Paul Silva has recently argued that doxastic justification does not have a basing requirement. An important part of his argument depends on the assumption that doxastic and moral permissibility have a parallel structure. I here reply to Silva's argument by challenging this assumption. I claim that moral permissibility is an agential notion, while doxastic permissibility is not. I then briefly explore the nature of these notions and briefly consider their implications for praise and blame.

Given plausible assumptions about the nature of evidence and undercutting defeat, many believe that the force of the evidential problem of evil depends on sceptical theism’s being false: if evil is...

Die Mehrheit der Kant-Forscher meint, dass Kant Handlungen bloss als Verhaltnis von Ursache und Wirkung aufgefasst und die Unterschiede zwischen dem Handlungsbegriff und dem Begriff der actio als Bewirken einer Wirkung aufgehoben habe. Luis Placencia zeigt, dass Kants Philosophie, auch wenn sie keine vollstandige Handlungstheorie formuliert hat, im Hinblick auf grundlegende Fragen fruchtbar gemacht werden kann: Was ist das Spezifikum des menschlichen Handelns? Was ist wollen, was ein Wille? Sind Absichten nur Grunde oder zugleich Ursachen des Handelns? Gibt es (...) einen Widerspruch zwischen der Freiheit des Handelns und einer Determination der Natur? (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be (...) preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

We point out the need to clarify some of the ideas related to the connection between development and sustainability in the Report of the Open Working Group of the General Assembly on Sustainable Development. In particular, the meaning of ‘sustainable’ is not clear when applied to specific areas of human activity. A more detailed explanation of the kind of equality sought for in the proposal is also needed. Because of potential conflicts between goals, we miss some considerations on the impact (...) of population increase both on development and on sustainability. A distinction is made here between two kinds of goals included in the Report. Some of the proposed 17 goals can then be seen as ends in themselves, whereas others seem to be means for the first set. The two sets thereby established should be seen in theory and dealt with in practice in a differentiated manner. (shrink)

Las edificaciones con valor patrimonial son un testimonio excepcional del progreso de una comunidad y representan ejemplos innegables de la transferencia de conocimientos a lo largo de las generaciones. Es inevitable caminar por centro consolidado de Pasaje y no reconocer el legado cultural de muchas edificaciones. Sin embargo, también resulta fácil observar las alteraciones erróneas que sea han realizado a estas edificaciones con el objetivo de responder a las “nuevas exigencias” de la actualidad. La conservación de los bienes patrimoniales resulta (...) necesaria para la preservación de la integridad e identidad de la ciudad. La presente investigación posibilita entender el nivel de susceptibilidad que presentan las edificaciones consideradas como bienes patrimoniales, debido a que estás viviendas poseen un valor cultural. El objetivo de la investigación es el de identificar la susceptibilidad sísmica a las que están expuestas, para esto se utilizaron métodos de matrices de evaluación sísmica para medir el nivel de susceptibilidad en las edificaciones patrimoniales. (shrink)

Análisis historiográfico del relato de las vicisitudes del alfaquí Ṭālūt, elaborado por Ibn al-Qūṭiyya y reproducido por numerosas fuentes andalusíes y orientales. De dicho análisis se desprende que la supuesta versión amplia de la crónica de Ibn al-Qūṭiyya nunca existió y que la coincidencia entre varias obras en presentar una versión extensa del relato es debida a su común dependencia de un subarquetipo que amplificó retóricamente el texto original de Ibn al- Qūṭiyya.

One of the key ethical and political issues in South Africa today is the decolonization of education. In 2015, a movement called Rhodes Must Fall was born in South Africa precisely with the purpose of engaging in activism to promote this decolonization. The Rhodes Must Fall movement to further this purpose engaged in some violent protests. The objective of this article is to assess whether South Africans are justified to believe that these protests can or cannot be morally justified from (...) the perspective of Ubuntu. To explore this question, I assess the morality of the actions using a consequentialist interpretation of African values. I contend that the symbolic violent protests of the Rhodes Must Fall movement were morally justified, whereas its indiscriminate violent protests were not. Hence, I do not myself mean to defend the position they are morally justified; instead, I wish to show that it is a moral implication of African values. (shrink)

The emergence of organic, metabolic, cognitive and cultural codes points us to the need for a new kind of explanatory causality, and a different kind of bio-logic— one dependent on, but different from, the deterministic logic derived from mechanical causality, and one which can account for the increase in semiotic freedom which is evident in the biological hierarchy. Building upon previous work (Bruni 2003), in this article I provide a stipulative definition of semiotic freedom and its relation to causality in (...) biological and cognitive systems. To do so, I will first discuss the close relation that triadic causality and semiotic freedom have to the notions of teleology and emergence, and how the latter two are interrelated in living systems. I pinpoint some of the reservations that these notions have encountered in the history of science (including evolutionary biology and cognitive science), but stress also their necessity in the study of any given biological and cognitive system. I draw a distinction between horizontal and vertical emergence in order to arrive at a notion of ‘second order emergence’ that affords us a more viable definition of semiotic freedom. I will then attempt to show that all of these concepts are of paramount importance when we come to study processes of sensing, perception andcognition at any level of a living system. Accordingly, these ideas are part of a framework-in-development to research the scale of thresholds of semiotic freedom, by assuming a top-down approach i.e., by starting from the highest levels of semiotic freedom and cognitive processes, and exploring how those processes disaggregate into lesser degrees of freedom. I thus hope to bridge the gap between those levels from above. (shrink)

El presente artículo analiza la arqueología de la máquina antropológica que Agamben desarrolla en _Lo abierto. El hombre y el animal_. Se estudia así cómo se genera la división, hacia el interior y hacia el exterior de nuestros cuerpos, entre el humano y el animal, y la consecuente creación de estas dos ficciones operativas que permiten decidir sobre la humanidad misma de quienes nos rodean y sobre la legitimidad de la violencia. Finalmente se mostrará el intento por parte de Agamben (...) de superar esa división a partir de un trabajo al interior de la filosofía heideggeriana que queda, sin embargo, aún preso de la máquina antropológica. (shrink)

The essays in this volume investigate the norms of reason--the standards which contribute to determining whether beliefs, inferences, and actions are rational. Nine philosophers and two psychologists discuss what kinds of things these norms are, how they can be situated within the natural world, and what role they play in the psychological explanation of belief and action. Current work in the theory of rationality is subject to very diverse influences ranging from experimental and theoretical psychology, through philosophy of logic and (...) language, to metaethics and the theory of practical reasoning; this range is well represented here. (shrink)

In this introductory article to the special issue on Multi-level semiosis we attempt to stage the background for qualifying the notion of “multi-levelness” when considering communication processes and semiosis in all life forms, i.e. from the cellular to the organismic level. While structures are organized hierarchically, communication processes require a kind of processual organization that may be better described as being heterarchical. Theoretically, the challenge arises in the temporal domain, that is, in the developmental and evolutionary dimension of dynamic semiotic (...) processes. We discuss the importance of this fundamental difference in order to explain how levels, domains and orders of magnitude, on the one hand, and synchronic and diachronic processes, on the other, contribute to the overall organization of every living being. To account for such multi-level organization, semiotic freedom is assumed to be a scalar property that endows living systems at different levels and domains with the capacity to ponder selectively the overall structural coherence and functional compatibility of their heterarchical processing, which is increasingly less conditioned by the underlying molecular determinism. (shrink)

The emergence of organic, metabolic, cognitive and cultural codes points us to the need for a new kind of explanatory causality, and a different kind of bio-logic— one dependent on, but different from, the deterministic logic derived from mechanical causality, and one which can account for the increase in semiotic freedom which is evident in the biological hierarchy. Building upon previous work (Bruni 2003), in this article I provide a stipulative definition of semiotic freedom and its relation to causality in (...) biological and cognitive systems. To do so, I will first discuss the close relation that triadic causality and semiotic freedom have to the notions of teleology and emergence, and how the latter two are interrelated in living systems. I pinpoint some of the reservations that these notions have encountered in the history of science (including evolutionary biology and cognitive science), but stress also their necessity in the study of any given biological and cognitive system. I draw a distinction between horizontal and vertical emergence in order to arrive at a notion of ‘second order emergence’ that affords us a more viable definition of semiotic freedom. I will then attempt to show that all of these concepts are of paramount importance when we come to study processes of sensing, perception andcognition at any level of a living system. Accordingly, these ideas are part of a framework-in-development to research the scale of thresholds of semiotic freedom, by assuming a top-down approach i.e., by starting from the highest levels of semiotic freedom and cognitive processes, and exploring how those processes disaggregate into lesser degrees of freedom. I thus hope to bridge the gap between those levels from above. (shrink)

During the 24 years of the Indonesian occupation of East Timor, to talk about its cultural individuality as a product of its history - focusing on what set it apart from Indonesia - was an act likely to raise suspicions of some kind of manipulation of history for political purposes. Naturally, the same suspicions could fall on anyone assuming an opposite view, that is a view that valued the connection uniting the two peoples and discarded what separated them. In this (...) paper, we adhere more to the first perspective. Obviously, we are not driven by the desire to prove that East Timor had to be, a priori, independent; this is by no means the task of a historian. We are simply trying to explain, a posteriori, why, in the referendum of 30 August 1999, the people of East Timor voted overwhelmingly for independence. (shrink)

This article sets out to explore the socio-linguistic situation of Goa, a small territory corresponding to the former district of Goa of the Portuguese Estado da Índia, occupied and annexed by India in 1961. Goa had to choose between local language, Konkani, and the language of the neighbouring state of Maharashtra, i. e., Marathi, which was traditionally used as a cultural language by the Hindus of Goa, who nowadays form the large majority of the population. Even if virtually every Goan (...) is able to speak Konkani, this was, according to recent statistics, the mother tongue of only 61 % of the population of the state, the rest being forms by people from other parts of India, who migrated here. This phenomenon explains the feeble proportion of Konkani speakers in the total population of the state, which favours the resort to English as a means of communication and explains why Konkani only keeps an elevated status in churches, where it is currently used for praying and preaching. Drawing upon historical facts, but also on socio-linguistic consideration, we will try to explain this paradox. (shrink)

A questão dos intelectuais do Estado Novo tem sido um dos temas ultimamente tratados pelo autor deste artigo. Todavia, no caso de Idalino da Costa Brochado, depois de ter analisado a sua personalidade, a sua acção e a sua obra publicada, entendeu que não se poderia propriamente considerá-lo um "intelectual orgânico" do Estado Novo. Jornalista, historiógrafo e político sa­lazarista ligado à União Nacional, desempenhou nestes aspectos um papel significativo ao serviço do regime que defendia. A categoria de "político funcional" pareceu (...) ao autor ser, pois, a designação mais adequada. (shrink)

This article attempts to order tentatively Koselleck´s unfinished outline of a Historik, a theory of the prelinguistic possibility of histories, dispersed in various articles. Besides, I will try to widen the scope of the meta-historical pairs, among which stand out, due to their highly abstract character, insideoutside, above-below and before-after, which are the basis of his historical anthropology. The inclusion of a new pair to the previous ones, namely unity-plurality, that moves between an abstract figure without history and another filled (...) with it, would strengthen the quasi-transcendental basis of this theory of history by means of the inclusion of the former pair, leading to a more subtil historical research of political and social concepts. (shrink)

El objetivo de este artículo es estudiar la teoría del espacio interior del cuerpo de Maine de Biran a lo largo de sus tres componentes principales que son establecidos a lo largo de un diálogo crítico con Condillac y Destutt de Tracy, y desarrollados desde el punto de vista de la teoría del esfuerzo. Esos componentes son: la durabilidad del esfuerzo primordial; la posibilidad de percibir el espacio exterior; la consistencia del tiempo furtivo de la sensibilidad.