This paper offers a critical analysis of the logical structure of principles proposed by Robert Alexy and, in particular, of their structure as optimisation commands. Its first part dwells on the question whether the optimisation element in the logical structure should be understood as part of modalisation, as part of the consequent, or as an independent element. In the second part, the author analyses possible forms of inter-definability of deontic operators. Finally, some questions are raised on the conditional structure proposed (...) by Alexy for principles. (shrink)

In this paper we will discuss the active part played by certain diagonal arguments in the genesis of computability theory. 1?In some cases it is enough to assume the enumerability of Y while in others the effective enumerability is a substantial demand. These enigmatical words by Kleene were our point of departure: When Church proposed this thesis, I sat down to disprove it by diagonalizing out of the class of the ??definable functions. But, quickly realizing that the diagonalization cannot be (...) done effectively, I became overnight a supporter of the thesis. (1981, p. 59) The title of our paper alludes to this very work, a task on which Kleene claims to have set out after hearing such a remarkable statement from Church, who was his teacher at the time. There are quite a few points made in this extract that may be surprising. First, it talks about a proof by diagonalization in order to test?in fact to try to falsify?a hypothesis that is not strictly formal. Second, it states that such a proof or diagonal construction fails. Third, it seems to use the failure as a support for the thesis. Finally, the episode we have just described took place at a time, autumn 1933, in which many of the results that characterize Computability Theory had not yet materialized. The aim of this paper is to show that Church and Kleene discovered a way to block a very particular instance of a diagonal construction: one that is closely related to the content of Church's thesis. We will start by analysing the logical structure of a diagonal construction. Then we will introduce the historical context in order to analyse the reasons that might have led Kleene to think that the failure of this very specific diagonal proof could support the thesis. This is a joint paper. We have both attempted to add a small piece to an amazing historical jigsaw puzzle at a juncture we feel to be appropiate. In the paper by Manzano 1997 the aforementioned words by Kleene were quoted, and since then several logicians, Enrique Alonso first and foremost, have questioned her on this issue. Here we both submit our reply. (1999, pp. 249--273). (shrink)

Since 2008 I have been closely following the conceptual/performance/video work of Daniel Peltz. Gently rendered through media installation, ethnographic, and performance strategies, Peltz’s work reverently and warmly engages the inner workings of social systems, leaving elegant rips and tears in any given socio/cultural quilt. He engages readymades (of social and media constructions) and uses what are identified as interruptionist/interventionist strategies to disrupt parts of an existing social system, thus allowing for something other to emerge. Like the stereoscope that requires two (...) identical images to create an illusion of a three-dimensional image, Peltz sometimes visualizes two separate elements to create an object or moment that requires space and depth to focus on its varied layers. They say your brain has to process and make meaningful sense out of all that visual information before it can accept the illusion. I say your brain has to do a similar thing when looking and seeing the divine, magical, and faithful (social) art making of Daniel Peltz. Daniel Peltz is Associate Professor of Film/Animation/Video at RISD. He divides his time between Rhode Island and Sweden and is currently at work on an exhibition at Botkyrka Konsthall, Stockholm opening February 2013 and a new project to be included in the IASKA: Spaced Biennial (Australia) in 2014. This interview took place on Skype and is part one of a two-part interview. Feliz Lucia Molina: Are you in Providence, RI? Daniel Peltz: I’m at my house in Providence. I’ve been back for six days teaching winter session at RISD and doing this workshop series—these investors’ drum circles with a group of wealth managers. a client of the firm, 2013, photo Shirin Adhami FLM: The wealth managers were all drumming together? DP: They were all drumming in response to the performance of their retirement portfolios. FLM: Is this part of the “Unrealized Gain/Loss” piece? DP: Yes, it’s part of a show I’m working on in Sweden. I can show you because it was just today. I’ll show you some of this. Lets see—share screen [click, click, click]. This is the room. I’ve been using the camera system that’s already installed in the conference rooms to record them. So the video is being recorded directly by the wealth management office’s tech staff. These are the people I worked with in the last workshop. This conference table is less wondrous. They’ve been learning to drum in response to their retirement portfolios. I started by bringing in my little bit of wealth for them to propose a management strategy, I came to the follow-up meeting with a counter proposal, which was this workshop. So they agreed to do this series of workshops instead of managing my wealth. FLM: Does everybody in the room manage your wealth? That’s kind of a lot of people. DP: That woman in the back there and Craig —they handle new client business. So when you come there with your wealth, they sit down with you and suggest to you how they would manage it. They’re very nice, responsible people. FLM: And where is this? DP: This is in Providence and the one I was showing you is in Waltham, where I was today. Then I’m going to Newport for the last one on Friday. So I will have done four of them. This is the group in Waltham that I just played with today. I played directly with the two groups in Providence and I’m working with an ethnomusicologist at Brown, Asha Tamarisa, who is facilitating the last two. She’s helped develop the workshop in terms of figuring out how to train a group to do this and thinking about the compositional challenges of working in response to retirement portfolio data. FLM: Screensharing helps me to figure out tiny bits here and there about the project. DP: I might even be able to play you a little of the audio I’ve also been working with a group of professional percussionists on what will become a quarterly public investors’ drum circle event. Their stuff was really nice, but I want you to hear what we sounded like in the workshops. They’ve all been recorded by the a/v system in the offices. We use a simple structure where the drummer investors interpret the sensation of gain or loss as embellishments to a base heartbeat rhythm. The group holds the heartbeat and, as each person experiences gain or loss, they embellish that rhythm. "Screensharing helps me to figure out tiny bits here and there about the project" FLM: Is the process all very spontaneous? DP: Its actually quite structured. We produce a custom stock ticker that shows the performance of their collective portfolios. In advance of the workshop each participant submits assets in their retirement portfolio. Then we make a stock ticker that shows the real-time performance of their assets so that they can respond to almost live data. FLM: Are they reading the stock ticker projected up on the screen in the room? Do people drum in correspondence to the visual live data of the performance of their assets? DP: Exactly. They’re looking at the stock ticker as opposed to each other, so it’s a slightly shifted drum circle. They’re looking at the ticker but they’re listening to each other—that’s what we’re practicing. For example, NVO—the price is 172.08 but it’s down -1.16 and as that moves across the screen, the person who’s retirement is invested in that asset starts to embellish when that arrow first appears, based on their experience of loss. They stop when it exits the screen and return to the heartbeat. You could have one ticker for each retirement portfolio, but the way the workshop is constructed is that we just isolate one asset from each person’s portfolio so that everyone in the group is represented in a single ticker. So they’re drumming and looking at the ticker, but they’re hearing each other experience gain and loss. We’ve removed direct visual engagement from the social structure of a drum circle but the oral engagement is still there. FLM: So they had their own sound interpretation of gain and loss? DP: Yeah and that part is quite spontaneous as you were saying. In some of the preparatory exercises we’ve been working to give the participants more strategies for interpreting the sensations of gain and loss. We’re trying to develop their capacity to embellish a heartbeat or base rhythm but I’m not invested in having a melodious result. I’m quite curious about what this kind of structure will result in without any desire for a particular result. FLM: For context, can you talk about the project you did a couple years ago in Bali, “Unrealized Gain/Loss” in relation to this current wealth management project? DP: The workshops I’ve been doing use a similar strategy to the other components in this project. It started in Indonesia on my sabbatical and I was really trying to understand where I was physically and where I was being on sabbatical—this kind of strange jubilee structure where every seventh year you’re supposed to renew your self. And it was around the time of the global financial crisis. I was on sabbatical for the global financial crisis. I remember watching my father, in particular, respond to the financial crisis by monitoring his retirement portfolio and trying to make sense of it. I realized on a visit to their home that he checked his retirement portfolio every single day and I was really struck by that because in some way our parents are mysteries to us as children, especially their moods. We know how important their moods are but we don’t know what governs them. And somehow it was like I’d figured it out, it’s the performance of the DOW! So I think there was something in that. Then I was in Indonesia and I had been drawn there by an interest in their highly ritualized Hindu culture, where so much of life is driven by a ceremonial calendar. I was interested in Bali as this predominantly Hindu pocket within a predominantly Islamic country and life there being organized by this ritual calendar functioning as a kind of resistance to the dominant global religion of free-market capitalism. So I started to explore that correlation between the ways in which this culture that I was living in was sort of “living for the afterlife” and this idea within certain segments of American society of “living for the afterwork life”. The idea that your wellbeing in the “afterwork life” is tied to forces that are unseen and largely beyond your control has strong similarities to many religious understandings of the universe. So I started to explore that and the crafts and materials that were around me were primarily Batik and percussion. Percussion is a huge part of daily life in Bali. These gamelan troupes were everywhere. And I also happened to be there for Nyepi, the day of silence, which is preceded by a very elaborate procession and construction of demonic statues. These were the things that were around me and I started studying Batik with one of the Batik artists there and also started a conversation with two master Batik artists, one who is American and her Indonesian husband. I developed these patterns that were based on symbols from the performance of my retirement portfolio and worked with the batik artists to produce two sarongs. d. peltz - 2012 In producing the designs, I treated the performance of my retirement portfolio since my arrival at RISD [7 years] as a significant interval and then I looked at the ways in which decisions are made within retirement portfolios as having an extension outwards from the individual assets that underlie the retirement portfolio, which are kind of like the base elements of the retirement world. Then there’s the allocation of your assets, which is a global way of understanding an individual according to typologies, which are often referred to in terms of risk—this notion of a ‘risk profile’. What type of ‘person’ you are is determined by your attitude towards risk, or potentiality, and I found that to be a really fascinating way of understanding the universe. I remember looking at the tabs in my retirement portfolio and finding this one for viewing ‘Unrealized Gain/Loss’ and that’s often how I work—is just going through the Cambridge Parking Code, for example, and finding this section of the code that was called ‘Crossing Non-Signalized Locations’ and just feeling “I can’t do any better than that,” you know? That’s what I was talking about in terms of ready-mades that exist in the social sphere. So I found that tab, actually, a long time ago, and I pulled it out of a journal when I was there [in Bali] working on these pieces and I wound up making these two sarongs and later on a series of porcelain vessels for holding one’s unrealized gains and losses. At the time, I knew that I wanted a performance to come out of them, but I wasn’t sure what it was. I was inspired very much by this sort of thing: Pulls out a TIAA-CREF brochure with a man in a suit seated at a table. This guy is probably an actor, and [the brochure] says “TIAA-Cref announces “Individual counseling sessions at the Rhode Island School of Design. Individual counseling sessions at no additional cost to you. You can discuss your personal financial situation with an experienced TIAA consultant on a confidential basis. We are available to help you discuss how to achieve your financial goals by investing in financial solutions such as mutual funds, brokerage, life insurance, and annuities...etc....What retirement benefits best fits your situation?” Often I encounter this and I think O.K., this is one way to prepare for the after-work life and it seems inadequate to me. But, I also find it really inspiring. I really like the visual language of it. I kind of want to be that man. I’d like to see if I could maybe buy his clothes. FLM: What it is about the man on the brochure that interests you? DP: He’s offering personalized objective advice and a detailed evaluation of everything you need to know and do. Who wouldn’t want that? But he’s also something of a contemporary priest or priestess, mediating between the unseen all-powerful universe of global capitalism and the common worker. So I started off developing Unrealized Gain/Loss directly from the charts that represent the performance of my retirement portfolio. Then I came home and I wanted to use those. I had this word in my journal “unrealized gain/loss vessel.” I had this notion of vessels that would contain unrealized gains and losses. That felt really important to me that they would have somewhere to go. I had been thinking a lot about altars and making offerings—that somehow this really fickle, massive, difficult-to-comprehend-universe of the financial world—that somehow it might be nice if you could making an offering to it. [In Bali] they made such beautiful elaborate offerings. So I studied offering making as well with one of the women there and she taught me some of the standard forms created by folding leaves and the significance of the floral arrangements. I started working in clay and then moved to porcelain and I made these unrealized gain/loss vessels. I made a few of them, they have holes on either side that you can’t get your fingers in. But something can go in there and something can go out of there. It’s a nice size for putting on an altar. Then I got this commission from Artists in Context who was interested in my doing something for this project “Artists Perspectives for the Nation” project. I proposed initiating these investors’ drum circles as a new public performance form. I’m interested in bringing together those two symbols—the symbol of the djembe and the drum circle. unrealized gain/loss vessel - d.peltz - 2012 FLM: I can imagine the public digital stock ticker performing like a soft fleeting stream of information, a kind of (meaningless) illusory comfort blanket. DP: In some way you have to understand its relevance outside of the obvious, right? Because the obvious is illogical. Nobody is actually using that data to day trade, for example. People aren’t sitting there with their computers watching the market data in Times Square or setting up an outdoor office and being like “OK it’s up 3 points or it’s up 1.56, trade! Ok now buy, Ok now sell!” That would be a kind of a nice performance, actually. But actual day traders would want more up to date data than that. To understand what that data is doing is really important. And that’s something I’ve realized—that I’m interested in a particular kind of data visualization, which is not about what data can tell people, but what data can tell people who are visualizing it. For example, in the Cambridge Project “Crossing Non-Signalized Locations” I was interested in the 10,000 excuses archive of data recording five years worth of excuses for why people thought they shouldn’t have received their parking ticket. I was not interested in making that excuse wall so that the public could see and understand this data. Inevitably the data will be seen by others but I was really interested in what the action of visualizing the data told those who were visualizing it. The parking attendants themselves were writing those excuses on the wall—I was interested in what that kind action of writing the excuses on the wall told them about the data. Similarly, I’m interested in designing a way to allow people to pass this data from the unseen universe of the market, through their own bodies, which happens through the merging of the drum and the stock ticker. I’m interested in those two also as symbols; the drum as this symbol of the earth, the body and a pagan counterculture, and the stock ticker referring to the ethereal world of global markets—bringing those two together and making them dependent. I’m often drawn to conceptual propositions that I become invested in testing in a sincere way—at first they often they sound humorous to others, but I have to remember that there is humor in them. I don’t sit around and laugh about these things. I stop finding them funny at all. I’m interested in the proposition that we could know something about the after-work life by drumming in response to our retirement portfolio. So then I become really interested in how to craft that into a viable performance form for myself and others. FLM: The aspect of using sound in “Unrealized Gain/Loss” as a way of embodying the information to the asset holder is really intriguing—using sound as a means of embodying the asset data. Was sound a medium that made sense to use immediately or were you considering other means of attempting to embody it? DP: Well I do use other mediums within the project like textile, ceramic, and batik patterns. I was first drawn to the history of Batik patterns as a socio-economic stratification system and the vessels as a way of embodying or manifesting this data of unrealized gain and loss. My first approach was to work with meditation actually—a meditation workshop with my colleagues. I was going to offer this “Unrealized Gain/Loss” workshop where you would explore the sensations of gain and loss by adapting the way yogi-nidra brings you into contact with your physical surroundings and stretches your perception. FLM: At Naropa University there are/were business & compassion workshops—a sort of mash-up of business and compassion and how compassion could be incorporated into a business model. This process and engagement of “embodying data” also has to do with “Participatory Democracy and the Future of Karaoke” you created at the DNC in Denver in 2008. DP: That kind of appropriation and instrumentalization of spiritual practice could be disturbing and thus compelling as a strategy. For various reasons, I’ve come to be drawn to both the form of a quarterly public performance and the established performance form of a drum circle. Its something I’ve seen myself do before, that is to mess up a really good functional social system like a drum circle or karaoke. I remember I was developing language for the karaoke project and started calling it “Participatory Democracy and the Future of Karaoke” and one of my assistants on the project, who’s an incredible artist, said, “but don’t you think the future of karaoke is guitar hero?” and I realized that maybe he thought I was trying to improve the form. I’m just trying to get people to have this shifted embodied experience, I need to craft the performance context so that they can do that. In the case of the karaoke project, for example, what did I need in order to be able to do this [a person to stand up in front of a bar and deliver a karaoke speech]? I realized that the body is very vulnerable so I built a podium so that the speaker can feel secure enough to do this, otherwise you couldn’t get to this state achieved by passing these speeches through the body. Then I was, like, well you need to be able to practice the lyrics because you don’t know all the “songs” by heart, which became an insert to the massive track books carried by most karaoke VJs. And then sometimes the crowd in the bar isn’t there with me, so I needed to extract the voice of the crowd cheering from the original venue and I needed the local audience to cheer if they wanted to. I’m interested in both where the form succeeds and fails. In particular, one of the most interesting things is this auditory gap between the space where you are, the reduced scale of applause in your own little bar, and this grand scale of applause at the convention center where the speech was originally delivered. FLM: How did the concept of “Participatory Democracy Karaoke” come about and why did you use karaoke as a means of engaging what was happening at the DNC in 2008? DP: I was looking at a lot of different readymade media infrastructures within the city at the time. I was interested in the emergency broadcast systems and I developed a proposal to repurpose that system and karaoke became an important symbol because it was this populist form that was already engaged in exploring the sensation of celebrity but also visualizing the gap between ourselves and those with more power and influence. So it had this readymade capacity to play with power and celebrity and I felt like the Obama presidential campaign, the first one in particular, had some very curious overlaps with this culture of celebrity. Obama of course rose to power partly based on his oratory abilities and I was interested in how karaoke as a vehicle was so adept at offering people all that was left of authentic expression in a political speech. Managing a politician and constructing their identity is such a developed practice that it becomes, kind of automatically, a metaphor for the way that our own identities are constructed. Of course the Obama campaign was very hip and savvy and deploying this notion of grassroots. It was really pioneering in its use of social media and this deployment of notions of populism. I was interested at that time in the capacity of karaoke to track speech patterns, precise tempos of anyone’s delivery, and that to me was a way of thinking about what might be left of the authentic self. I was interested in karaoke’s capacity to extract that authentic component and offer it to others. So not just to stand up and be them, but to [literally] pass their speech patterns through your own body. A long time ago, it started to strike me as odd that one would make media at all. It struck me as a kind of un-contemporary way of going about making art in an age of media overflow. That logic extended into my thinking on delivery devices and installation as well. Why would one buy a screen or even set one up when there are so many out there? And the way in which these media displays function in karaoke bars and bars in general is very interesting to me. I’m drawn to this passive consumption of media where your primary social interaction is with the bartender or a few other individuals but these screens are around you and your attention is shifting back and forth between these spaces. So much political rhetoric is spoken to a half-listening audience. I was interested in what was happening in the slippage and that karaoke was a kind of slippage amplifier. So if you put people in a bar and they are delivering a Kucinich speech and Kucinich comes up on a screen then your getting a sound bite of Kucinich and an image of Kucinich and your friend is talking to you— FLM: A kind of magic takes place in that incongruency between sound and image and the karaoke participant who’s relaying the speech-text at the same time. DP: Exactly and there’s some kind of truth in that experience of reality. FLM: Yeah, there’s something uncanny about seeing the body close-up like that as though it can’t lie to you in that moment or context. It’s a weird moment of luminous clarity. The work you’ve done and all of what you’re saying about karaoke is so very interesting to me. Growing up, my dad and uncles sang karaoke a lot (and still do) and being first-generation Filipino American is a different cultural subtext entirely. I’m also seeing it from the position of witnessing family members who are carriers of these stories and songs. And seeing them cherish these Tony Bennett, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley songs so much, I also see how their bodies are literal vessels of popular music that signifies something greater—it signifies their cultural and socioeconomic place in the world. The way that they cherish these American 1950s and 1960s pop songs is similar to having a certain kind of reverence for their spiritual faith or Catholicism. It’s a similar kind of care, focus, and attention exerted in karaoke and Catholicism—that these two structures and systems give something to focus on. Setsuko, Seiji and Hitoshi in Obama, Japan as Obama in Indiana — d. peltz — 2008 DP: Sure there something about the relationship we have to our candidate or the way we go about choosing a candidate, which is very similar to a deity or idol. I learned a lot about karaoke culture through this project. I’d never done karaoke. I’d never been interested in it as a form and then I travelled to Japan as part of the project when I made “Setsuko, Seiji and Hitoshi in Obama, Japan as Barack Obama in Indiana” and it was quite fascinating because my image of karaoke had always been this very public forum in a karaoke bar and then I discovered there’s this whole other world of karaoke where people even go on their own, they go and rent a room or cubicle and sing, or they go on a date—just the two of them go and sit in a room and do karaoke together. FLM: I’m interested in issues that take place within or as a result of specific karaoke culture(s). In the Philippines within the last several years there’s been occurring the “My Way Killings” phenomenon. Apparently baklas or gay men are employed by karaoke establishments to help “smooth over conflicts over karaoke singing”—these social forms of conduct, or lack thereof that arise out of the infrastructures of this social sport. In this one rural part of the Philippines there’s a village karaoke machine that the whole village shares—the Aeta indigenous people have an appointed “keeper” of the karaoke machine. I also see karaoke as a proxy to the confessional box in Catholicism where one goes to pour out their sins (minus the penance and redemption). The karaoke machine enables one to literally sing out whatever’s going on internally, but through highly saturated popular song lyrics. While karaoke is a public and social sport, it can also be a private one. Karaoke is a means of communion with each other. DP: Right, this preference for this kind of mediated communication. In Japan I was trying to organize people to work on this project and I was talking about throwing a party and they were like, well, we have to rent a karaoke machine because what else are we going to do? And I think its kind of serving that function of surrogacy—emotional surrogacy. FLM: And karaoke tools can be read as ritual tools—the magic mic that holds everything. There’s got to be some overlap at some point—between religious ceremony and devotion to the karaoke machine. DP: The way I designed the piece was so that it could slip right on top of the ready-made karaoke infrastructure. There was a flat-packed podium and it was made of a single sheet of plywood with no fasteners that slotted into itself. Those were sent out to a network of karaoke bars that I invited to become “karaoke convention centers.” The local VJs downloaded our custom-made, speech-extracted tracks that were designed to play on their existing equipment. In this sense the piece is a permanent installation. If you go to Denver today, some of the VJs still have the tracks in their library of offerings, the Ramones and Romney. It was this notion of re-purposing readymade infrastructure to create a distributable populist form. Obama was coming and the convention was in the Pepsi Center and 30,000 people were coming including 10,000 journalists. The impetus behind the larger art project that commissioned international artists to make works in Denver, was that local people weren’t going to have much access to this convention. It was like an invasion, the city was being descended upon, but if you lived a block away from the site, you had the same access as people in Zimbabwe&mash;30 second media bits excerpted from the speeches. So it seemed to me that the fundamental gesture was how do I take that signal, which was travelling out of the convention center, and create a local interruption? FLM: Is that what you mean by ‘intervention’? The term is frequently used to help describe your work. DP: It depends on the day. Around that karaoke project I had a conversation with Krzysztof Wodiczko and he was proposing that maybe rather than intervention, we should consider the word interruption. Because intervention is kind of an overused term in the field of art and it has militaristic and therapeutic associations outside of the art context. Fundamentally, the idea of intervening speaks to the readymade social world as your primary material. So it’s basically suggesting a kind of subtractive process, which gets back to this question: what is the role of the contemporary media artist in a world that’s so saturated with media? You can’t work additively in a saturated field. If you want to make a visible mark you have to work subtractively. That’s what intervention is about to me, just another way of saying “to work subtractively.” FLM: So the interventions or interruptions aren’t necessarily adding or subtracting, but are they putting orange cones there? What are they doing exactly? DP: I think you’re right about that, they’re not really subtracting. They’re adding to the scope of possibility. I’ve been thinking (with this exhibition I’m mounting next month) about the work as explorations and expansions of social possibility. Maybe it’s more insertion. I started calling the pieces ‘insertions’ that I was making in Rejmyre—a small town in Sweden where I’ve been working for six years now. My favorite site to install there is the tourist bureau. I started calling the video pieces that I made for the tourist bureau, video insertions. This idea that you’re inserting something into the readymade media infrastructure of the world resonates with me. Insertion leverages a context, creating a possibility that the inserted object might be naturalized in the process — that someone can encounter my video in Rejmyre as tourist information. And then all of a sudden tourist information can include some American guy prostrating through town and it can include really bad relationship advice. Maybe insertion is a better word. tourist information – d. peltz 2009-present  . (shrink)

En su Teoría postmetafísica del conocimiento, Antonio M. López Molina muestra detallada y rigurosamente que el vaciamiento sustantivo de la razón y, junto con él, el desmoronamiento de la vieja pretensión filosófica de acceder de manera privilegiada a la verdad (como al Bien o a Dios), no comportan su definitiva quiebra, sino más bien la urgencia de reelaborarla en términos falibilistas y procedimentales; con tal fin –y, a su vez, para asignarle a la filosofía el papel que le ha (...) de corresponder tras el ocaso de todas y cada una de las ilusiones metafísicas– analiza López Molina el concepto de acción comunicativa, capaz de imbricar a las ciencias positivas con el mundo de la vida y proveer el fin –ni utópico ni teológico– de una intersubjetividad no falseada, apoyada en relaciones simétricas de libre reconocimiento recíproco. (shrink)

El presente trabajo aborda el tema acerca del conocimiento divino de los actos libres del hombre. El problema se relaciona con el tratamiento de Aristóteles acerca de los enunciados sobre futuros contingentes. Si Dios conoce los actos futuros libres, etos es, antes de su realización, y los conoce con verdad determinada, deberían estar predeterminados, y en tal caso no podrían ser libres. Se da cuenta en especial el tratamiento del tema por parte de los autores ibéricos de los siglos inmediatamente (...) posteriores al Descubrimiento de América, esto es, Domingo Báñez, Luis de Molina, Francisco Suá-rez; a su vez se da cuenta de estos planteamientos en base al pensamiento del escotista chileno Alonso Briceño. This paper addresses the divine knowledge of man's free acts. The problem is related to Aristotle's approach to utterances about future contingencies. If God knows of free future acts, that is, befare their realization, and knows them with determined truth, these acts should be predetermined and, in that case, they could not be free. The approaches to this subject taken by Spanish authors from the period after the Discovery of America, such as Domingo Báñez, Luis de Molina, Francisco Suárez as well as the approach adopted by Chilean Scotist Alonso Briceño are especially discussed. (shrink)

The thesis that I wish to discuss in this paper is the next: Human Sciences (Cultural Sciences according to Dilthey, Historic-Hermeneutic sciences according to Habermas) are possible as far as the method that should make all of them possible can be epistemologically justified, this method is the hermeneutic understanding of meaning, whose central point is, in fact, the hermeneutic circle. The matter is to try to justify epistemologically the hermeneutic as understanding the meaning of the own and the other ones (...) life experiences within reflexivity and reciprocity that impregnates the structure of ordinary language. In the dialogue Habermas to Dilthey, in Knowledge and Human Interests appear many arguments to this foundation. Our text will make special emphasis in the next items: distinction between natural sciences and cultural sciences, hermeneutic understanding of meaning, ordinary language and reflexivity, specificity of the hermeneutic circle, science an vital context, and, finally, we are going to make an account of the Habermas interpretation of the Dilthey start point in bases to the relationships between Historic-hermeneutic sciences and the practice interest of the knowledge. (shrink)

Shared agency is of central importance in our lives in many ways. We enjoy engaging in certain joint activities with others. We also engage in joint activities to achieve complex goals. Current approaches propose that we understand shared agency in terms of the more basic phenomenon of shared intention. However, they have presented two antagonistic views about the nature of this phenomenon. Some have argued that shared intention should be understood as being primarily a structure of attitudes of individual participants (...) and their interrelations (Bratman, Searle, Tuomela and Miller). Others have claimed that shared intention should be regarded as being primarily a normative transaction which gives rise to interpersonal obligations (Gilbert). In contrast to these approaches, I propose a compromise view. I argue that shared intention involves a complex socio-psychological structure which ensures, in the absence of special circumstances, the existence of relevant moral obligations. My argument involves two main steps. First, I show that shared intention includes important relations of mutual reliance between the participants. Then, I argue that the existence of these relations of mutual reliance in shared intention helps us explain why, failing special circumstances, shared intention generates those obligations. This provides, in my view, a solution to the vexed question of the relation between shared intention and interpersonal obligations. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the evolution of the notion of completeness in contemporary logic. We discuss the differences between the notions of completeness of a theory, the completeness of a calculus, and the completeness of a logic in the light of Gödel's and Tarski's crucial contributions.We place special emphasis on understanding the differences in how these concepts were used then and now, as well as on the role they play in logic. Nevertheless, we can still observe a certain ambiguity in (...) the use of the close notions of completeness of a calculus and completeness of a logic. We analyze the state of the art under which Gödel's proof of completeness was developed, particularly when dealing with the decision problem for first-order logic. We believe that Gödel had to face the following dilemma: either semantics is decidable, in which case the completeness of the logic is trivial or, completeness is a critical property but in this case it cannot be obtained as a corollary of a previous decidability result. As far as first-order logic is concerned, our thesis is that the contemporary understanding of completeness of a calculus was born as a generalization of the concept of completeness of a theory. The last part of this study is devoted to Henkin's work concerning the generalization of his completeness proof to any logic from his initial work in type theory. (shrink)

The growth of niche markets in rural industries has been one response to the restructuring of established agricultural industries in developed countries. In some cases entry into niche markets is part of a diversification of activities from other areas of farm-based production or services. In other cases, operators have sought to diversify from niche market production into other areas, such as on-site selling and agritourism. This paper outlines the findings of an exploratory qualitative study of the factors that olive farmers (...) in Western Australia take into account when considering diversification, with a special focus on diversification into servicing visitors in the form of on-site selling and agritourism. Face-to-face and telephone interviews were conducted among 23 small olive growing operations located in the main olive growing region of Western Australia. Decision-making is shown to involve an assessment of risk, which is shaped by their appraisal of economic conditions, market opportunities, access to resources (including labor), and lifestyle factors. The argument is made that a fuller understanding of diversification is gained by studying both those who seek to diversify and those who do not, in contrast to most previous research that has only focussed on those who diversify. Also argued is that diversification is best seen as a continuum of adjustment strategies, which is guided by a combination of economic need, risk assessment (based largely on resource access), market potential, and lifestyle factors. (shrink)

Offering the most comprehensive book-length study to-date of reparation programs, this handbook contains an innovative blend of case-study analysis, thematic papers, and national legislation documents from leading scholars and practitioners. This landmark work will make a genuine contribution to the theory and practice of reparations.

Alireza Bagheri supports a policy on organ procurement where individuals could choose their own definition of death between two or more socially accepted alternatives. First, we claim that such a policy, without any criterion to distinguish accepted from acceptable definitions, easily leads to the slippery slope that Bagheri tries to avoid. Second, we suggest that a public discussion about the circumstances under which the dead donor rule could be violated is more productive of social trust than constantly moving the line (...) between life and death. (shrink)

The European project European and Latin American Systems of Ethics Regulation of Biomedical Research Project (EULABOR) has carried out the first comparative analysis of ethics regulation systems for biomedical research in seven countries in Europe and Latin America, evaluating their roles in the protection of human subjects. We developed a conceptual and methodological framework defining ‘ethics regulation system for biomedical research’ as a set of actors, institutions, codes and laws involved in overseeing the ethics of biomedical research on humans. This (...) framework allowed us to develop comprehensive national reports by conducting semi-structured interviews to key informants. These reports were summarised and analysed in a comparative analysis. The study showed that the regulatory framework for clinical research in these countries differ in scope. It showed that despite the different political contexts, actors involved and motivations for creating the regulation, in most of the studied countries it was the government who took the lead in setting up the system. The study also showed that Europe and Latin America are similar regarding national bodies and research ethics committees, but the Brazilian system has strong and noteworthy specificities. (shrink)

Explicit and implicit learning have been attributed to different learning processes that create different types of knowledge structures. Consistent with that claim, our study provides evidence that people integrate stimulus events differently when consciously aware versus unaware of the relationship between the events. In a first, acquisition phase participants sorted words into two categories , which were fully predicted by task-irrelevant primes—the labels of two other, semantically unrelated categories . In a second, test phase participants performed a lexical decision task, (...) in which all word stimuli stemmed from the previous prime categories and the primes were the labels of the previous target categories . Reliable priming effects in the second phase demonstrated that bidirectional associations between the respective categories had been formed in the acquisition phase , but these effects were found only in participants that were unaware of the relationship between the categories! We suggest that unconscious, implicit learning of event relationships results in the rather unsophisticated integration of the underlying event representations, whereas explicit learning takes the meaning of the order of the events into account, and thus creates unidirectional associations. (shrink)

New concepts may prove necessary to profit from the avalanche of sequence data on the genome, transcriptome, proteome and interactome and to relate this information to cell physiology. Here, we focus on the concept of large activity-based structures, or hyperstructures, in which a variety of types of molecules are brought together to perform a function. We review the evidence for the existence of hyperstructures responsible for the initiation of DNA replication, the sequestration of newly replicated origins of replication, cell division (...) and for metabolism. The processes responsible for hyperstructure formation include changes in enzyme affinities due to metabolite-induction, lipid-protein affinities, elevated local concentrations of proteins and their binding sites on DNA and RNA, and transertion. Experimental techniques exist that can be used to study hyperstructures and we review some of the ones less familiar to biologists. Finally, we speculate on how a variety of in silico approaches involving cellular automata and multi-agent systems could be combined to develop new concepts in the form of an Integrated cell (I-cell) which would undergo selection for growth and survival in a world of artificial microbiology. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to explore the concept of Philosophy within the works written by Wittgenstein if we take into account the ambivalent sense of the term phármakon. Thus, it will be outlined a contest of paradoxes between, on the one hand, healthiness, sanity, and the adaptable confidence produced by western rationality materialized into objective science, and, on the other hand, sickness, insanity, the world of perplexities, and the realm of desire and death, essential to philosophical thought. Bearing (...) in mind last Wittgenstein’s approaches, we will understand the Tractatus both critical to the deficiencies of western Reason and imprisoned within them. But the “enchanting” power of western Reason, conducting to identify rationality and scientificity in that work, will be conjured in the last Wittgenstein through the opening of plural realms of rationality and of discourses. In this way, philosophical questions will be rescued from silence and absurdity. (shrink)

The article re-addresses the question of the relation between Darwinism and the biological sciences, taking as its starting-point the precise chronology of the successive inquiries carried out by Darwin into the question of races, in connection with the various aspects of his theory of natural selection. It argues that the writings of Darwin do not share any uniform aim, nor do they come under a single epistemological category. Darwin adopts a number of divergent approaches, as he addresses a series of (...) issues : the debate between monogenesis and polygenesis ; the characterisation of human races, as practised since Kant ; the question of craniometrics, so important in physical anthropology in his day ; the classification of mental faculties ; the role of selection for reproductive purposes in the differences between the sexes ; the universality of the expression of emotions, and so on. What emerges from the inquiry is a more complex portrait than is customary in the controversies about the scientist’s « social Darwinism », real or imaginary. Darwin is neither the purveyor of a Hitlerian racism nor the protagonist of a natural antiracism directly stemming from this theory. (shrink)

La tesis que deseo discutir en este trabajo es la siguiente: las ciencias humanas (ciencias del espíritu según Dilthey, ciencias histórico-hermenéuticas según Habermas) son posibles en la medida en que pueda ser epistemológicamente justificado el método que las hace posibles, a saber, la comprensión hermenéutica del sentido cuyo núcleo central lo constituye el círculo hermenéutico. Se trata, pues, de justificar epistemológicamente la hermenéutica como comprensión del sentido de las vivencias propias y ajenas, para lo cual es preciso analizar la reflexividad (...) y reciprocidad que impregna la estructura del lenguaje ordinario. En el diálogo que Habermas establece con Dilthey en Conocimiento e interés aparecen los suficientes argumentos para dicha fundamentación. Nuestro texto hará especial hincapié en los siguientes tópicos: distinción entre ciencias de la naturaleza y ciencias del espíritu, comprensión hermenéutica del sentido, lenguaje ordinario y reflexividad, especificidad del círculo hermenéutico, ciencia y contexto vital, y, finalmente, haremos un balance de la interpretación habermasiana de Dilthey a partir de las relaciones entre ciencias histórico-hermenéuticas e interés práctico del conocimiento. (shrink)

Este trabajo constituye una revisión de los contenidos, orientación y objetivos de una parte significativa de los manuales de lógica elemental de las décadas de 1960 y 1970 redactados por autores españoles. En concreto, analizamos los prólogos, los rudimentos prerios, y la presentación de los distintos cálculos gue aparecen en tales obras. EI estudio de la semántica, los contenidos metatcóricos o las extensiones de Ia lógica elemental quedan para una segunda etapa de esta investigacion.This work is a critical examination of (...) contents, orientation, and goals of a significative portion of elementary spanish logic textbooks in the 60’s and 70’s. It is centered on an analysis ofprefaces, preliminaries and the different kinds of calculi appearing in these books. Topics, like semantics, metatheory or extensiones of elementary logic, are left for futrher analysis. (shrink)

La Teoría de la Computación es un campo especialmente rico para la indagación filosófica. EI debate sobre el mecanicismo y la discusión en torno a los fundamentos de la matemática son tópicos que estan directamente asociados a la Teoria de la Computación desde su misma creación como disciplina independiente. La Tesis de Turing-Church constituye uno de los resultados mas característicos en este campo estando, además, lleno de consecuencias filosóficas. En este ensayo se ofrece una guía de referencia útil a aquellos (...) que desean prestar alguna atención a estos asuntos y carecen de la base técnica o histórica que se precisa. En primer lugar se ofrece un resurnen de los principales problemas relacionados con la Tesis de Turing-Church para ofrecer a continuación información sobre sus aspectos más controvertidos. Se proponen algunos problemas no resueltos y se analiza su relevancia filosófica.Computer Science is a field specially rich for philosophical inquiry. Mechanism and the discussion around foundations of mathematics are topics directly asociated to Computer Science for its very constitution as an independent discipline. Church-Turing Thesis is one of the most characteristic results in this field and is plenty of philosophical consequences. In this article I offer a referenee guide useful for those who are willing to pay some attention to these matters and ignore the technical and historical basis needed for this task. I resume the main topics related to Church-Turing Thesis and give some informationabout the most controversial aspects of this subject. Some open questions are settled for further investigation paying special attention to their philosophical importance. (shrink)

continent. 1.2 (2011): 70-75. cartography of ghosts . . . And as a way to talk . . . of temporality the topography of imagination, this body whose dirty entry into the articulation of history as rapturous becoming & unbecoming, greeted with violence, i take permission to extend this grace —Akilah Oliver from “An Arriving Guard of Angels Thusly Coming To Greet” Our disappearance is already here. —Jacques Derrida, 117 I wrestled with death as a threshold, an aporia, a bandit, (...) a part of life. —Akilah Oliver Moraine in geological lingo is that which is left behind. Moraine- a euphemism for the de-stabilizing referent of the writer-ly body as a “troubled and troubling landscape marked by cultural and historical signifiers, the body as flesh memory [...] the body as transitory” (Oliver, Author Statement). Moraine— a geological metaphor of the poet as a holder of memory, as an accumulation of rocks and debris carried along the edge, terminal, dropped at the foot of language (in language). “Flesh Memory” according to Akilah Oliver is "that which my body recalls [...] everything has to do with the task of remembrance and its narrative reinvention [...] I was always translating an idea of the world as it presented itself at any given time. To write was a choice about how to be seen, how to enter the world as translator, actor, participant, in the dialogues that apparently made the real 'real'" (Levitsky). Flesh. Memory. The stuff some poems are made from. The stuff that gets abandoned, gleaned, and picked up by more flesh and memory. "My body, my life has always felt like a kaleidoscopic rip in the dominant fabric [...] has always been a dialogue with the impossible and the apparent” (Levitsky). The impossible-body or poet's body anticipates and performs (through language) an irretrievable death. IN APORIA I realized everything I must have been doing must have been Death. It was Christmas or Labor Day—a holiday—and every time you turned on the radio they said something like ‘four million’ or ‘going to die’.” — Andy Warhol I’m trying on egos, [a justification for the planet’s continuance]. Oh hello transgressor, you’ve come to collect utilitarian debts, humbling narrative space. Give me condition and wheatgrass, I his body disintegrating. I his body is ossification. Death my habit radius, yeah yeah. I his body can’t refuse this summons. I can’t get out this fucking room. Tell me something different about torture dear Trickster. Tell me about the lightness my mother told me to pick the one i love the best how it signals everything I ever wish to believe true just holy on my ship. I jump all over this house. this is it [what I thought is thought only, nothing more deceptive than]: I his body keeps thinking someone will come along, touch me. As like human or lima bean. I’m cradling you to my breast, you are looking out. A little wooden lion you & Peter carve on Bluff Street is quieting across your cheekbone. Not at all like the kind of terror found in sleep, on trembling grounds. It is yesterday now. I have not had a chance to dance in this century. Tonight I shall kill someone, a condition to remember Sunday morning. To think of lives as repetitions [rather than singular serial incarnations]. To understand your death is as exacerbating as trying to figure out why as schoolchildren in mid-nineteen-sixties Southern California we performed reflexive motions: cutting out lace snowflakes, reading Dick and Jane search for their missing mittens, imagining snow. Disintegrat ing . The -ing gerund catapults from the non-finite verb into past, present, future. The -ing as a tail pinned to death, a dog spinning to bite and never fully reaching itself, always shy of the end, circumreferential; a double copulative: deathing. Possessively AO calls it “habit radius” (a virtual fetish attribute) or an inescapable death presence that “confronts us with the paradox of an unattainable object [...] through it’s being unattainable” (Agamben, 27). A flirtation or dialogue with an unknowable thing and aporia utilized as investigative instrument to engage (death) while (in Southern California) we “perform reflexive motions,” cut lace snowflakes, imagine snow, and pay rent like “yeah, yeah” what else is new. And this too, fiction. The book I wish to right. The restored fallen, heroic. Did you expect a different grace from the world? Or upon exit? I’m working on “tough.” They think I am already. All ready. Who is the dead person? Is "I'm sorry" real to a dead person? Browning grass. My hands on this table. A contentious century. A place to pay rent. Redemptive moments. Am I now the dead person? Dead person, dead person, will you partake in my persimmon feast? The body inside the body astounds, confesses sins of the funhouse. I too have admired the people of this planet. Their frilly, orderly intellects. The use they’ve made of cardamom, radiation as well. How they’ve pasteurized milk, loaned surnames to stars, captured tribes, diseases, streets, and ideas too. The living-body as archive: is it possible to experience the living-body as archive without a (kind of) death? Sifting the rubble, rummaging through hoarded debris, skin sheds, memory-napping, and re-awoken (in flesh and) on terrain. “An investigative poetics seeks to unravel staid communities of thought and grasp at what might always be just beyond reach; a poetics of inquiry that lies between language as meaning, and language as rapturous entry into the world of posited ideas and idealism”( Levitsky). Something snaps. Lights blow out prior to embarking upon an investigative poetics. It begins with a question (often a sexy aporia) that leads to openings. "Every politics of memory [...] implies an intervention of the state. It's a state that legislates and acts with regard to the nonfinite mass of materials to be stored, materials which must be collected, preserved” (Derrida & Stiegler, 62). It seems poetic investigation already contains the potentiality of an (invisible) archive if the writer is “always writing” especially when not. Here’s my stupid digital romantic inclination: the living-body (of a poet) is a self-sustaining archive of non-finite memories. But not even I really believe that. AO innovated and sculpted an investigative poetic praxis. In a conversation with poet Rachel Levitsky, poetic-voice is viewed not as a precious identifier, but as a means to think through/about form, concluding that form is linked to framing. While poetic-voice may have tendency to precede form, it also erupts as a result of framing techniques. “They are frames that hold the shape of thinking (which is also to say of imagining) [...].”7 This reminds me of my rabbit who symmetrically chewed the corners of his hutch, which makes me wonder if it’s an expression of the shape of some animal anxiety tick I won’t ever have access to. Beyond the form/frame, death is an unoriginal yet unique limit; death is a damn deathless thing. It functions as a source of poetic investigation; that thing always “just beyond reach.” And how is death not a fetish (in this case an obsessive reverence for something non-material)? “Insofar as it [death] is a presence, a fetish [...] it is in fact something concrete and tangible; but insofar as it is the presence of an absence, it is, at the same time, immaterial and intangible, because it alludes continuously beyond itself to something that can never really be possessed [...] The fetish is [...] a sign of an absence, it is not an unrepeatable unique object; on the contrary, it is something infinitely capable of substitution, without any successive incarnations ever succeeding in exhausting the nullity of which it is the symbol” (Agamben, 33). AO utilized absence (the absent body [catapulted by the death of a beloved]) as an apparatus to investigate. In the process of conversing with absence or that which is absent, the absent body is affectionately objectified, incessantly summonsed back to a place of recognition, of objects, a desire for the absent body to remain intact while exiting the structural limits of grammar and syntax by moving into chant forms “to say what cannot be said” (Levitsky). from AN ARRIVING GUARD OF ANGELS THUSLY COMING TO GREET dear oluchi- the light is blinking rapidly on the black boxy machine. your room seems bigger than before and i am still planning to read some of those robert jordan books of yours. yesterday at the used bookstore where i was browsing the mysteries to “stall reality” (they are really not mysteries at all, they just employ death as the plot mistress but are unable to grasp its mystery at all)—well the point is, things were calm down here for a while and the world was little. i want to be big like you. or i want you not vast, not dead, not gone, but human small and here. i am so selfish. that is what i really want. to see you again. to oil your scalp. to hear you walk in the door, say ma i’m home . give me a chance to say welcome home son. or when leaving, don’t forget your hat . what do you wear out there? i wish you could have taken your new shoes with you. i’m so proud of you. i’m sorry for the way you died. i miss you all the time. even before, i missed you. out there, one time, some different men said: “shake for me girl, i wanna be your backdoor man.” who dat you love. 5/18/03 A letter-poem in sixteen lines “dear oluchi-” is safe-housed in epistolary form. Poetic voice is rendered as internal thought meanderings, a not-so-much confession, private/(pillow?) talk in the desire to be heard/witnessed by the referent and reader with an intent to absolve. The diminutive “i” bears a relation to poet Fanny Howe’s “little g God” in that “One of the (many) things I like about little g God is that you can have a vodka tonic while you talk to little g God, sing along to Bowie’s “I’m Afraid Of Americans,” and hum Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme,” though maybe not all at the same time” (Oliver, 2009). Towards the middle of the poem AO is at a used bookstore and remarks on the funny employment of death as a ‘plot mistress’ that ‘they’ (the dubious employed mystery authors) are ‘unable to grasp’, thereby giving death a mouthpiece, a modeling job, something to do to pass the time. from THE VISIBLE UNSEEN When I first saw graffiti, I recognized in it an ugly aesthetic, a dialectics of violence, a distortion of limbs, a hieroglyph. It was only later when I read the names of the dead that I then saw the path of ghosts charted there; its narrative of loss for the visible unseen whose place in history has been fictionalized and rendered unseen under the totalizing glare of history. Inscriptions, traces, specters. Graffiti begs a public face just as ghosts require non-ghosts (humans) to sense them. The “visible unseen” is a game of hide-and-seek between public viewer and graffiti-inscriber, an ephemeral-violent aesthetic on an ephemeral-policed canvas. Graffiti-inscribers already submit to being forgotten, expect to be washed away; perhaps it’s a holy urban mandala created by gangster-type monks without Buddhism. [...] in its refusal to disappear it forces a discourse in the public imagination we are forced to see what we would rather not, to make sense of an encoded language that we cannot read on the level of meaning. it irritates, forces its agency on us, speaks outside and beyond semiotic reach. An epic font-size pervading the public’s imagination, illegible, I could just close my eyes, remain passive, drive past, abandon it beyond reach, push it further away beyond death walls. In Barcelona I watched a clean up crew wash walls with an awesome water hose but I was more intrigued by their bodies; not a distortion of limbs, not hieroglyph but also not entirely legible; the laboring body permanently erasing specters of the city, and of course they knew it was also an invitation for the ghosts to return. Graffiti is death’s little sister, is also an aporia. [...] Graffiti (fr GK -graph(os), something drawn or written, to diagram or chart) attempts to stage the impossible: to erase the essence of its own subjectivity. Graffiti is a cartography of ghosts, a mapping of elegiac rapture (the transporting of a person from one place to another, as in heaven) and rupture (the state of being broken open.) Dwelling is a fiction stasis. [...] The notion of the past as being something done with, a look-back event, inhibits the possibility of reading graffiti as rapture, as rupture. If graffiti posits history as always in the process of becoming undone. [...] Because what is the body, if not also a complex temple, an unstable site through which to negotiate subjects, materiality, economies, gods, and modes of representations? The site where we are all already belated. Graphein meaning “to write.” “Derrida says every archive makes a law, and the law of genre is its own rupture” (Bloch, 39). However, graffiti is an (non/anti)-archive of erasure due to (the politics of) washing out its subjectivity, which only adds onto (or is symptomatic of) its character. The inhibition of “reading graffiti as rapture, as rupture” is partly due to it being a “look-back” event in that it’s process involves scratching through layers to reveal previous specters underneath. Graffiti (as an ancient genre) has always been a thing of ‘becoming undone’, and therefore ‘belated and always in arrival’ (Levitsky). It’s a Dionysian activity done at night with it’s back turned toward us. "The specter [...] is of the visible, but of the invisible visible, it is the visibility of a body which is not present in flesh and blood [...] appearing for vision, to the brightness of day [...] something becomes almost visible which is visible only insofar as it is not visible in flesh and blood. It is a night visibility. As soon as there is a technology of the image, visibility brings night. It incarnates in a night body, it radiates in a night light" (Derrida & Stiegler, 115). (shrink)

The tensorial relativistic quantum mechanics in (1+1) dimensions is considered. Its kinematical and dynamical features are reviewed as well as the problem of finding the Dirac spinor for given finite multivectors. For stationary states, the dynamical tensorial equations, equivalent to the Dirac equation, are solved for a free particle, for a particle inside a box, and for a particle in a step potential.

Knowledge and true relations represent the principal task of Theory of Knowledge. This paper argues about various solutions to the justification of knowledge, given by William James, Richard Rorty and Jürgen Habermas. For classic Pragmatism Knowledge and Truth converge with the idea of a guideline, direction and orientation with an effective value for men. The Newpragmatism represented by Rorty tries out the way of the widest possible widening of justification contexts, taking as last referent the features of a western liberal (...) culture. Habermas pleads for a strong idealization in his discussion with Rorty up to the ideal speech situation. (shrink)

In this article I defend that Floridi’s Theory of Strongly Semantic Information – TSSI – is correct while encompassing the Veracity Thesis, which guides the semantic information definition as “p is information if and only if p is constituted by meaningful, truth well-formed data”. I argue that the theory is not arbitrary because it deals with important philosophical conundrums, mainly by avoiding the Bar-Hillel and Carnap paradox (1953) generated from the classical theory of semantic information. First, one of the classic (...) theory’s main result is discussed: the production of “too much informative sentences to be true”. Then the motivations to elaborate a “logic of being informed” are summarized and it is shown how the KTB-IL system is built and modelled keeping the veracity axiom among its axioms – K or A4. Finally the TSSI is examined and defended by showing that it aletically restricts the extension of the classic concept of information, avoiding problems with tautologies and contradictions. The TSSI offers an original solution by capturing our modal intuitions concerning informativeness as a basic notion. (shrink)

In this work we study the behavior of a time discrete multiregional stochastic model for a population structured in age classes and spread out in different spatial patches between which individuals can migrate. The dynamics of the population is controlled both by reproduction-survival and by migration. These processes take place at different time scales in the sense of the latter being much faster than the former. We incorporate the effect of demographic stochasticity into the population, which results in both dynamics (...) being modelled by multitype Bienaymé–Galton–Watson branching processes. We present a multitype global model that incorporates the effect of both processes and, making use of the existence of different time scales for demography and migration, build a reduced model in which the variables correspond to the total population in each age class. We extend previous results that relate the behavior of the original and the reduced model showing that, given a large enough separation of time scales between demography and migration, we can obtain information about the behavior of the multitype global model through the study of the simpler reduced model. We concentrate on the case where the two systems are supercritical and therefore the expected number of individuals grows to infinity, and show that we can approximate the asymptotic structure of the population vector and the asymptotic population size of the original system through the study of the reduced model. (shrink)

This is both an illuminating and penetrating study of the history of casuistry, and a persuasive argument for its relevance in contemporary ethics. The authors seek to revitalize "case argument as a fruitful method of practical moral reasoning". In so doing, they hope to steer safely between a rigid morality which holds to certain eternal and invariable principles, and a relativistic morality which repudiates the notion of an inflexible body of dogmatic principles. To support their contention, they provide a historical (...) account of the practice of casuistry, identify its shortcomings and past abuses, and try to reconstruct it to make it appetizing to a modern audience. (shrink)

The nature of the relationship between language and thought has been quite elusive. We believe that its understanding is crucially dependent on the available notions of language and thought. Foundations of Language offers an unusually clear and complete account of both, providing a fruitful and much needed framework for future research. No doubt it will help us think better about these elusive complexities.

L a distribució n parlamentari a qu e ha n a r rojad o lo s resultado s d e la s pasada s elecciones generale s de l dí a 2 0 d e n o viembre , d e 2011 , h a ocasionado , sobr e tod o po r pa r t e d e la s fo r - macione s política s má s s e v erament e afectadas , tod a un a (...) cascad a d e crítica s a nuestr o sistema electoral , y pa r ticula r ment e sobr e l a fó r mul a idead a po r e l matemátic o belg a Vícto r D’Hont. Lo s distinto s pa r tido s tiende n a un a v aloració n sesgad a e n vi r tu d de l bene f ici o obtenido d e l a fó r mul a el e gid a po r e l L e gislado r e n un a etap a históric a dete r minada . ¿Cóm o afecta l a l e y D’Hon t a l a calida d d e l a democraci a española ? ¿E l pro b lem a resid e e n l a fó r mula D’Hont ? Co n l a f inalida d d e contribui r a l debat e abie r t o sobr e nuestr o sistem a electoral, m e centrar é e n alguna s modi f cacione s d e l a LORE G qu e todo s podría n acepta r , junt o a l a propuest a d e do s modelo s electorales , a cost e cero , d e do b l e pro r rate o y d e aplicación inmediata. (shrink)