This paper presents a method to compute a posteriori probability intervals when the initial conditional information is also given with probability intervals. The right way to make an exact computation is with the associated convex set of probabilities. Probability trees are used to represent these initial conditional convex sets because they greatly save the space required. This paper proposes a simulated annealing algorithm, which uses probability trees to represent the convex sets in order to compute the a posteriori intervals.

Se realiza un recorrido por las fuentes, tanto de la tradición directa de Lucrecio como de la tradición indirecta. Se establece una relación jerárquica de las fuentes y la dependencia entre sí.

Este artículo trata de la teoría de la percepción en el De Sensibus de Teofrasto y en el De Rerum Natura de Lucrecio. Teofrasto realiza una exposición de las opiniones de Empédocles, Clidemo, Diógenes de Apolonia, Demócrito, Anaxágoras y Platón; pero también realiza una amplia crítica de las opiniones de dichos autores. Por otra parte, el poema de Lucrecio, en su libro cuarto, expone la teoría de los simulacra (D. R. N., TV, 50-360), donde se ocupa de la percepción, y (...) más especialmente de la visión, pero también del problema del conocimiento. (shrink)

En la constitución de la historia de la filosofía como disciplina autónoma se puso el acento en que la filosofía escolástica manipuló la filosofía aristotélica, recibida a través de los árabes, para ponerla al servicio de intereses religiosos, desvirtuando y entrando en ruptura con las exigencias del espíritu filosófico. Atendiendo, sin embargo, tanto al significado histórico como a la significación filosófica del devenir de la Escuela de traductores de Toledo como centro básico, aunque no exclusivo, de la transmisión de la (...) filosofía y de la ciencia greco-arábigas al Occidente medieval, se pone de manifiesto la tendencia continuista que da sentido a la historia de la filosofía como disciplina.---In the constitution of the history of philosophy as an autonomous discipline, it was stressed that Scholastic philosophy manipulated Aristotelian philosophy inherited through the Arabs, to put it to the service of religious interests, thus disrupting the demands of the philosophical spirit. However, considering both the historical and the philosophical meanings of the translator’s School of Toledo, as a basic though not exclusive centre for the transmission of Greek-Arabic philosophy and science to Medieval Europe, the A. points out the continuity that gives sense to the history of philosophy as a discipline. (shrink)

The author argues that behind the apparent randomness of interactions between cabdrivers and their fares in Warsaw is a temporal structure. To capture this temporal structure, the author introduces the notion of a linking ecology. He argues that the Warsaw taxi market is a linking ecology, which is structured by religious time, state time, and family time. The author then focuses on waiting time, arguing that it too structures the interactions between cabdrivers and their fares. The author makes a processual (...) argument that waiting time has been restructured by the postsocialist transformation, but only because this transformation has been continually encoded through the defensive and adaptive strategies of cabdrivers responding to the repetitive and unique events located across the social space. The author concludes with the claim that linking ecologies are a recurring structure of the social process and that they form the backbone of globalization, financialization, and mediatization. (shrink)

Advances in analytical understanding of the biosphere’s biogeochemical cycles have spawned concepts of Gaia and noosphere. Earlier in this century, in concert with the Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the natural scientist Vladimir Vernadsky developed the notion of noosphere-an evolving collective human consciousness on Earth exerting an ever increasing intluence on biogeochemical processes. More recently, the chemist James Lovelock postulated the Earth to be a self-regulating system made up of biota and their environment with the capacity to maintain a (...) planetary steady state favorable to life. This is the Gaia hypothesis. To many, Gaia and noosphere represent contradictory interpretations of humanity’s relation to planetary ecology. Noosphere emphasizes a free will and obligation to shape the destiny of humanity on Earth through technology and new kinds of social relations. In contrast, Gaia invokes mysterious mechanisms of planetary evolution that lie beyond human control and understanding. I argue that if brought together, noosphere and Gaia can provide a useful symbol for guiding human interventions in global ecology because the contradictions of a nature-centered view of Gaia and a human-centered view of noosphere are coming to be irrelevant with the emergence of an analytical science of the biosphere. (shrink)

La influencia del pensamiento analítico tradicional ha sido un factor determinante de que un amplio sector del filósofo acabara por desentenderse de la historia de la filosofia. Las vicisitudes sufridas en nuestros dias por la filosofía analítica han conducido al movimiento postanalítico a acercarse a los problemas de la historia de la filosofía. La muestra mas característica de ello acaso pueda ser el peculiar replanteamiento neohistoricista llevado a cabo, desde posiciones diferentes, por Mccintyre y por Rorty. Este neohistoricismo se revela, (...) sin embargo, insuficiente para solucionar el viejo problema de las relaciones entre la filosofía y su historia, incluyendo aquí la configuración de "historiador" que debe acompañar el "filosofo" cuando trata de adentrarse en el terreno de la historia de la filosofía. (shrink)

El proyecto de traducir al latín el Shifâ-de Avicena es el reusltado directo del interés de la cultura cristiana medieval por incorporar la herencia islámica más avanzada de aquel tiempo. Así lo pone de manifiesto el prólogo en el que Avendeuth dedica la traducción del De anima al Arzobispo de Toledo. En la transmisión medieval de la filosofía se concreta la significación que la transmisión del saber en general tiene para la historia de la filosofía del Occidente medieval como búsqueda (...) de una cultura cristiana que pudiera estar de acuerdo con los progresos de la razón humana. (shrink)

Se realiza un recorrido crítico con respecto a las ideas sobre la narrativa histórica de lo filosófico y lo político en diversos autores contemporáneos. Temas y problemas como el del contextualismo y el convencionalismo, así como el del neointencionalismo en la historia de las ideas son analizados.

Las. actuales visiones discontinuistas de la Historia de la filosofía no toman frecuentemente en la suficiente consideración la interdependencia entre el significado histórico y la significación filosófica en lo concerniente al devenir histórico de la filosofía. La necesidad de una interdependencia tal se pone de manifiesto cuando el historiador de la filosofía trata de afrontar el alcance de las diferentes revisiones que han sido propuestas en relación con la Escuela de traductores de Toledo por los especialistas que se han ocupado (...) de esta cuestión, a partir de la obra de A. Jourdain. (shrink)

Heidegger’s thinking, according to his own testimony, is rooted in two traditions of philosophy: Platonic-Aristotelian ontology and Husserl’s phe­nomenology. Heidegger’s claim that the original understanding of Being is lost and has to be rediscovered conjoins the phenomenological claim that there is a certain mode of seeing that enables a revelatory philosophical insight. I would like to show how Heidegger combines both these claims in his supposition that the original philosophical conceptuality, as developed by Plato and Aristotle, was lost but can (...) be retrieved by means of applying the phenomenological method to the interpretation of texts. Furthermore, I would like to interpret this retrieval in the context of Heidegger’s project of “overcoming metaphysics” and Nietzsche’s suggestion that “Plato was essentially a pantheist, yet in the guise of a dualist”. (shrink)

The design of translating into Latin the Avicenna's Shifa' is the immediate consequence of the mediaeval Christian culture concern to include the most advanced islamic inheritance of the age. This is stated in the preface in which Avendeuth dedicates the De anima translation to the Arschbishop of Toledo. Mediaeval transmission of philosophy specifies the significance that the transmission of the knowledge in general has for the history of the mediaeval West philosophy as a search for a Christian culture in accordance (...) with the development of human reason. (shrink)

This book offers an overview of the emerging SID research, discussing theories, methods, and practices, with a focus on the multisensory aspects of sonic experience.

Recently, companions in guilt strategies have garnered significant philosophical attention as a response to arguments for moral error theory, the view that there are no moral facts and that our moral beliefs are thus systematically mistaken. According to Cuneo (The normative web: an argument for moral realism, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2007), Das (Philos Q 66:152–160, 2016; Australas J Philos 95(1):58–69, 2017), Rowland (J Ethics Soc Philos 7(1):1–24, 2012; Philos Q 66:161–171, 2016) and others, epistemic facts (...) would be just as metaphysically problematic (or ‘guilty’) as moral facts. But since epistemic error theory is implausible, arguments for moral error theory prove too much and should be rejected. My aim is to argue that the success of this strategy is limited. In particular, the companions in guilt response fails against error-theoretic arguments motivated by concerns about explanatory dispensability, as recently developed by Joyce (The evolution of morality, MIT press, Bradford, 2005) and Olson (Moral error theory: history, critique, defence, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2014: Ch. 7). To succeed, the response would require a prima facie plausible argument to the effect that epistemic facts are metaphysically dubious because they, too, are explanatorily dispensable. But, as I show, any such argument proves self-effacing: its premise commits us to believing in epistemic facts, while its conclusion forces us to deny their existence. Consequently, companions in guilt strategies don’t offer a panacea against arguments for moral error theory. (shrink)

El artículo se enfocará en la cuestión del estatus actual de los derechos reproductivos de las mujeres en Polonia. La autora tratará de determinar qué tipo de cambios legales y políticos relacionados con la salud reproductiva de las mujeres en Polonia provocaron tan fuerte reacción de la sociedad polaca y cómo esta huelga general se convirtió en una revolución social y cultural, muy a menudo llamada por la prensa internacional «la revolución de los paraguas negros y de los relámpagos rojos». (...) Al mismo tiempo, se enfatizarán las relaciones entre las protestas contra la prohibición del aborto y el triste atardecer de la democracia en Polonia. (shrink)

There are many alleged problems with trusting another person’s moral testimony, perhaps the most prominent of which is that it fails to deliver moral understanding. Without moral understanding, one cannot do the right thing for the right reason, and so acting on trusted moral testimony lacks moral worth. This chapter, however, argues that moral advice differs from moral testimony, differs from it in a way that enables a defender of moral advice to (...) parry this worry about moral worth. The basic idea is that an advisor and an advisee can together constitute a joint agent, and that this joint agent’s action can indeed have moral worth. So while the advisee himself might not do the right thing for the right reason (this because all alone he lacks the right reason), and while the advisor herself might not do the right thing for the right reason (this because all alone she does not do the right thing), they together do the right for the right reason. (shrink)

This paper investigates the effect of the countervailing forces within organizations of formal systems that direct employees toward ethical acts and informal systems that direct employees toward fraudulent behavior. We study the effect of these forces on deception, a key component of fraud. The results provide support for an interactive effect of these formal and informal systems. The effectiveness of formal systems is greater when there is a strong informal “push” to do wrong; conversely, in the absence of a strong (...) push to do wrong, the strength of formal systems has little impact on fraudulent behavior. These results help to explain why the implementation of formal systems within organizations has been met with mixed results and identifies when formal systems designed to promote ethical behavior will be most efficacious. (shrink)

In this paper, we explore how a conversational theory of moral responsibility can provide illuminating resources for building a theory about the nature and norms of moral forgiveness.

How do we know right from wrong? Do we even have moral knowledge? Moral epistemology studies these and related questions about our understanding of virtue and vice. It is one of philosophy’s perennial problems, reaching back to Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Locke, Hume and Kant, and has recently been the subject of intense debate as a result of findings in developmental and social psychology. Throughout the book Zimmerman argues that our belief in moral knowledge can survive sceptical challenges. (...) He also draws on a rich range of examples from Plato’s Meno and Dickens’ David Copperfield to Bernard Madoff and Saddam Hussein. (shrink)

This book is a systematic and constructive treatment of a number of traditional issues at the foundation of ethics, the possibility and nature of moral knowledge, the relationship between the moral point of view and a scientific or naturalistic world view, the nature of moral value and obligation, and the role of morality in a person's rational life plan. In striking contrast to many traditional authors and to other recent writers in the field, David Brink offers an (...) integrated defense of the objectivity of ethics. (shrink)

‘Virtue signaling’ is the practice of using moral talk in order to enhance one’s moral reputation. Many find this kind of behavior irritating. However, some philosophers have gone further, arguing that virtue signaling actively undermines the proper functioning of public moral discourse and impedes moral progress. Against this view, I argue that widespread virtue signaling is not a social ill, and that it can actually serve as an invaluable instrument for moral change, especially in cases (...) where moral argument alone does not suffice. Specifically, virtue signaling can change the broader public’s social expectations, which can in turn motivate the adoption of new, positive social norms. I also argue that the reputation-seeking motives underlying virtue signaling impose important constraints on virtue signalers’ behavior, which serve to keep the worst excesses of virtue signaling in check. (shrink)

Work on representing women's voices in ethics has produced a vision of moral understanding profoundly subversive of the traditional philosophical conception of moral knowledge. 1 explicate this alternative moral “epistemology,” identify how it challenges the prevailing view, and indicate some of its resources for a liberatory feminist critique of philosophical ethics.