A systematic effort to rethink Freud's theory of the unconscious, aiming to separate out the different forms of unconsciousness.

RESUMEN La neurociencia ha proporcionado valiosas herramientas para analizar problemas filosóficos; sin embargo, el debate sobre el papel de las evidencias neurocientíficas en la explicación de determinados fenómenos mentales sigue abierto. La discusión se centra en la experiencia mística y sus bases neuronales, lo que permite efectuar consideraciones más genéricas acerca de la legitimidad y el alcance de los razonamientos neurocientíficos cuando versan sobre algunos de los más conspicuos productos de la cultura. ABSTRACT Neuroscience has provided valuable tools for the (...) analysis of philosophical problems; however, there is an ongoing debate over the role of neuroscientific evidence in the explanation of certain mental phenomena. The discussion focuses on the mystical experience and its neuronal bases, which makes it possible to carry out more generic considerations regarding the legitimacy and scope of neuroscientific arguments when they involve some of the principal cultural products. (shrink)

En el presente artículo se estudia la crítica que ha formulado al liberalismo el filósofo canadiense Charles Taylor. Se plantea en el trabajo la hipótesis de que dicha crítica se sustenta en una filosofía de carácter comunitarista, la que puede servir de base a un proyecto de convivencia social distinto al liberal. Como parte de ese planteamiento, se expone la posición de Taylor frente al debate que durante los últimos veinte años, aproximadamente, se ha venido desarrollando entre filósofos liberales y (...) comunitarios, especialmente en el mundo anglosajón. A partir de una visión general sobre esa discusión, se analizan aspectos centrales del pensamiento tayloriano. (shrink)

This paper presents the design, simulation, and experimental verification of the fractional-order multiscroll Lü chaotic system. We base them on op-amp-based approximations of fractional-order integrators and saturated series of nonlinear functions. The integrators are first-order active realizations tuned to reduce the inaccuracy of the frequency response. By an exponential curve fitting, we got a convenient design equation for realizing fractional-order integrators of orders from 0.1 to 0.95. The results include simulations in SPICE of the mathematical description and the electronic implementation (...) and experimental measurements that confirm them. Monte Carlo and sensitivity tests revealed a robust realization. Contrary to its passive counterparts, the suggested realizations significantly reduce design and implementation efforts by favoring resistors and capacitors with commercial values and reducing hardware requirements. (shrink)

Language and facticity in Heidegger’s lecture of Saint Augustine. The phenomenological analysis of the Confessions of Saint Augustine gave to Heidegger the opportunity to radicalize the deconstruction of the theoretical path do God and to discover the factical life under the “formal indication” of “the historical”. In Book X of the Confessions Heidegger found an authentic experience of temporality, breaking down with the cosmological concept of time characteristic of Greek philosophy and of metaphysical tradition. The confrontation with such an experience (...) is inscribed in Heidegger’s interpretation of the augustinian concept “cura’‘, that Heidegger will incorporate in Sein und Zeit, as an “existential” accountable for the whole Daseins’s existential structure. So, the phenomenological description of “care”, in the double modality of authenticity or unauthenticity in the Freiburger Vorlesung de 1921 will also lead the heideggerian’s investigation in Sein und Zeit in the direction of the ambiguity of both Daseins’s existence, which moves back and forward, and of Dasein’s language, which swings between Rede und Gerede. (shrink)

In Sein und Zeit, the Dasein, thrown in the world by Geworfenheit and relaunched by Entwurf (projection) into the future, experiences itself as a “Self”. This exercise of existence cannot escape the critique of solipsism. However, paragraph 29 — about the existentiale of Befindlichkeit — opens an access way to the Other, which later will be ceaselessly explored by Heidegger, after having found the Stimmungen of the Greek beginning in Holderlin’s poetry and the Grund Stimmungen of “the night of the (...) gods” and of the forgetfulness of being of our time. Not until the fifties and the mystical experience of the fourfold (das Geviert) will Heidegger find the possibility of transmuting the experience of the Other from a πόλεμος into a being-in-harmony (stimmen). This unique path of affectivity, asserted in paragraph 29 of Sein und Zeit, will enable Heidegger to reach an essential way of working out the question of Otherness, that only right now we may be starting to understand. (shrink)

One of the distinctive features of Anna Julia Cooper’s political philosophy and philosophy of education is the frequency with which she uses corporeal and organicist imagery to support her analyses...

Talking about the possibility or impossibility annihilation of nature by man, is in the end an endless polemic for the unsustainable use of natural resources implies the annihilation of humanity itself, and also, insofar every individual imaginary, as an ideal, contains the notion of self-preservation.However, the fact is that in our day such possibility achieved a high degree of probability. Therefore, we ask ourselves: how did that happen? In this work, we shall discuss this problem through Schelling’s notion of self-positing (...) of the Geist as uncon ditional freedom. Firstly seeking to clarify the reasons why we have come to an impasse in our day, we will present the difficulty Schelling faced in considering the I as the principle in the System of Transcendental Idealism. Then we show the passage to his philosophy of identity as an attempt to show how the individual of empirical consciousness can be free and at the same time establishes an universal-historical relationship, valid for the whole diversity of finite consciousnesses. In a third moment, we will present his notion of Abfall (“Philosophy and Religion”) through which the author demonstrates how the particular intuits the universal. Finally, taking into account the dialectic of the imagination implicit in the notion of Abfall, we will attempt to point a guiding direction on the issue of preservation of nature and therefore of man. (shrink)

In the 2nd half of the XVIlth century the Pósito of Murcia was a resource of credit used by the Town Council to help finance their own chronic detlcit or sorne other property more endangered. However, it was not only the main institution of the town who profit from the resources which were available to buy wheat: Sorne of the Councillors (Regidores), the Administrator or several people related to the Pósito got somehow a treatmenl of advanlage under lhe form of (...) credit. In other ocasions, as in the fluctuation in the raising of the wheat price, il was the Pósito the recipient of loans from Councillors, the oligarchy or private citizens. (shrink)

Eighteenth-century scientist-turned-theologian Emanuel Swedenborg had a deep understanding of the nature of reality that resonates both with mystical traditions and with artists and poets. In this volume, philosopher José Antonio Antón-Pacheco explores Swedenborg's views on heaven, angels, primordial language, and the spiritual history of humanity, in the process linking Swedenborg's thought to that of Jorge Luis Borges, Soren Kirkegaard, Henry Corbin, and Ibn 'Arabi, among others.

Are intelligent machines really intelligent? Is the underlying philosoph- ical concept of intelligence satisfactory for describing how the present systems work? Is understanding a necessary and sufficient condition for intelligence? If a machine could understand, should we attribute subjectivity to it? This paper addresses the problem of deciding whether the so-called ”intelligent machines” are capable of understanding, instead of merely processing signs. It deals with the relationship between syntax and semantics. The main thesis concerns the inevitability of semantics for any (...) discussion about the possibility of building conscious machines, condensed into the following two tenets: ”If a machine is capable of understanding (in the strong sense), then it must be capable of combining rules and intuitions”; “If semantics cannot be reduced to syntax, then a machine cannot understand.” Our conclusion states that it is not necessary to attribute understanding to a machine in order to explain its exhibited “intelligent” behavior; a merely syntactic and mechanistic approach to intelligence as a task-solving tool suffices to justify the range of operations that it can display in the current state of technological development. (shrink)

In this paper I propose to conceive of forgiveness as a process of eliminating punitive reactive attitudes, which makes up part of the offended person’s willingness to reestablish a certain type of reciprocal relationship with the offender. Distinguishing among types of reciprocity allows us to realize that forgiveness is a more varied phenomenon than is usually assumed in the philosophical literature, as well as to understand why the dispute concerning the gratuitousnessconditionality of forgiveness is meaningless.

Se presenta en este trabajo la encrucijada actual de la interpretación de la novela más célebre de Gabriel García Márquez dando cuenta, por un lado, de una tradición interpretativa que desde una cierta idea de “lo nacional” relaciona el sentido de la obra con un agotamiento de la historia y, por otro lado, postulando las condiciones de posibilidad de otra interpretación, vale decir, otra tradición interpretativa desde donde leer la novela para hallar en ella otro sentido con relación a la (...) historia. La argumentación se apoya en postulados de la hermenéutica de Hans-Georg Gadamer y de Paul Ricoeur. (shrink)

En este trabajo se ofrece un acercamiento desde el derecho a los análisis promovidos por las teorías institucionalistas, y conecta esos análisis con una concepción esencial de democracia y dos problemas de las democracias latinoamericanas: la subrepresentación de las mujeres en los parlamentos y el clientelismo político en el marco de la distribución de planes sociales. Para ello, se comienza con una aproximación al concepto de instituciones informales, que es central en los análisis institucionalistas, y se reconocen dos diferentes tipos (...) de instituciones informales con distintas características. Luego de ofrecida una concepción esencial de democracia y sus condiciones y condicionantes, se realiza un análisis de cómo las instituciones informales han afectado la eficacia y efectividad de las normas jurídicas dictadas para promover las cuotas de género en las elecciones parlamentarias y, como contracara, se muestra cómo un diseño adecuado de los programas de distribución de planes sociales ha logrado neutralizar instituciones informales tales como el clientelismo y la pequeña corrupción, que afectaban de manera directa a las democracias latinoamericanas. Finalmente se proponen ciertas ideas sobre la relevancia del buen diseño legislativo y su vinculación con las instituciones informales. (shrink)

The current study analyzed the relationship between Coronavirus Awareness, mental health, and willingness to seek professional psychological help. This was made through a quantitative approach, using online questionnaires to collect data from 855 subjects. The questionnaires included the Brief Symptom Inventory to measure mental health indicators, the Attitudes Toward Seeking Professional Psychological Help Scale–Short Form, and the Coronavirus Awareness Scale-10. An Exploratory Factor Analysis suggests that three factors underlie the CAS-10: Coronavirus Concern, Exaggerated Perception, and Immunity Perception. Results indicate a (...) significant positive correlation between Coronavirus Concern and both general anxiety and phobic anxiety symptoms. Immunity Perception is positively related to paranoid ideation and psychotic symptoms. A Mediation Analysis determined that Coronavirus Concern has a significant positive direct effect on Openness to Seeking Psychological Treatment, while Exaggerated Perception and Immunity Perception scores have significant direct negative effects on the Value and Need in Seeking Treatment scores. Indirectly, the relationship between Coronavirus Concern and OPST is significantly mediated by anxiety symptoms. Similar results were found for the VNST subscale. There is a negative significant effect of Immunity Perception over OSPT mediated by Paranoid Ideation. However, the overall model only achieved small r2 coefficients for the OSPT and VNST scores. Comparisons in Coronavirus Awareness between sex, age, and the presence of children and older adults at home were also made. These results are discussed regarding their practical implications for mental health providers and policymakers. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hispanic Utopian Studies and Activism as a PromptJulia Ramírez-Blanco (bio)In the last few years I have come to the Utopian Studies Societýs yearly conference as part of a smaller group, one that has its own parallel history in the left corner of the South of Europe and is networked mostly with Latin America. I am referring to the interdisciplinary research group Histopia, which has its base in Madrid́s (...) Autónoma University, is comprised of twenty-seven researchers from different institutions, and is coordinated by historian Juan Pro. As the name Histopia suggests, it was founded by historians. From the beginning there have been people from other fields, such as political science, architecture, cultural studies, and art history. The aim was always understanding utopianism beyond the study of texts, and centering research in everything that utopianism produces, such as social movements, political programs, and urban programs. In this sense, a premise was to understand utopias not as a footnote in history or a series of eccentric events, but as a guiding force that drives a [End Page 510] history. This placing of utopianism in history was clearly announced in the grouṕs website:Histopia seeks to go beyond the philological approach that predominates in Utopian Studies and to historicize the study of contemporary utopias and dystopias, showing how they respond to the contexts in which they arise, since they reflect the problems and frustrations of a society as well as the aspirations for change it contains, and the conditions of possibility that a particular cultural and emotional framework offers for developing them.1Together with this focus on history, which departs from the more text-centered traditions of an important part of utopian studies, the other main particularity of Histopia is its decentralizing of utopian studies towards the Spanish-speaking world. And to this end, the group also founded the Transatlantic Network for the Study of Utopias, which was created in 2015 to put in communication over 250 researchers, most of them from Latin America, but also from other places such as Australia or Japan.2The Spanish statés research funding programs have provided the bureaucratic framework and the material resources for the research group since 2015. Together with seminars, conferences, or workshops, the resulting publications have been linked with utopian literature, with dystopia, and with a focus on viewing history through the lens of utopia. One of the most recent endeavors has been a radically collective one, articulating a Dictionary of Utopian Places written by a multitude of authors.3 Histopia has also initiated several projects with schools, for the most part ongoing, and there have been many attempts to disseminate its work through radio and video projects. And since its founding, Histopia has tried reaching out beyond the Academy—an effort that is finally gaining success. In 2021 the international conference Intentional Communities: Concrete Utopias in History was extremely fruitful: we saw involved participation both in various interventions, and through activities such as streaming. Participants included people and organizations from social movements and from intentional communities.I want to argue here that the very formation of Histopia was a logical development from certain political triggers—and in particular, the so-called 15M Movement, a series of anti-austerity protests and direct-democracy initiatives that ignited antigovernment activism throughout Spain from 2011 on, culminating in the occupation of urban spaces (“encampments”) and in very large political assemblies. It is not just that the forces of activism were [End Page 511] reignited after 2011, and that its inheritors came together with the Histopia research group; the very existence of Histopia, I am arguing, can be read as a consequence of the 15M encampment and its aftermath.Prefigurative PracticesIn May 2011, following the example of the Arab world, Madrid’s Puerta del Sol was populated by a crowd armed with posters, slogans, and self-made banners. On the inhospitable ground of the square, anonymous persons erected an encampment so complex that it functioned as a miniature city, with spaces for preparing food, for nursery care, for rest, for legal consultation, for anti-racist and/or feminist activity. All work was voluntary, and materials were... (shrink)

Uterus transplantation (UTx) research has been introduced in several countries, with trials in Sweden and the United States producing successful outcomes. The growing interest in developing UTx trials in other countries, such as Spain, the Netherlands, Japan, and Australia, raises important questions regarding the ethics of surgical innovation research in the field of UTx. This paper examines the current state of UTx in the context of the surgical innovation paradigm and IDEAL framework and discusses the ethical challenges faced by those (...) considering the introduction of new trials. We argue that UTx remains an experimental procedure at a relatively early stage of the IDEAL framework, especially in the context of de novo trials, where protocols are likely to deviate from those used previously and where researchers are likely to have limited experience of UTx. We conclude that countries considering the introduction of UTx trials should build on the strengths of the reported outcomes to consolidate the evidence base and shed light on the uncertainties of the procedure. Authorities responsible for the ethical governance of UTx trials are advised to draw on the ethical framework used in the oversight of surgical innovation. (shrink)

Abstract:In this work, we consider the essence of human freedom as a living link among the forces of the individuation process thought aesthetically; that is, because human understanding is synthetic, imagination can elaborate a whole world that is not linked to conceptual knowledge. Precisely because of that, we can find a way of relationship between ourselves and the environment that is not binary, such as when we ask ourselves whether the emission of carbon gas resulting from our human intervention is (...) harmful to the environment or not. To do so, we will initially outline the meaning of the symbolic (Sinnbild) in Schelling. Then, we will see how Schelling reaches the material conditions of objectification for an extra-theoretical synthesis by which, in a single move, the universe is immediately given. Finally, we turn to the specificity of human freedom and the dual nature of the I, which allows us to understand that the possibility of our human freedom does not consist in being able to choose between good and evil; rather, its possibility consists in a capacity (Vermögen) for good and evil. (shrink)