I refer to the social embodiment of creative intelligence as creative democracies. Today’s world pose great challenges and serious threats to human life and cannot be faced by just having new ideas or more knowledge and thoughts. Today’s world requires the power to face the unknown, a key feature of intelligence. Hence the urgent need of societies to mutate into creative democracies. We need to begin with a strong base. We need an understanding and development of human life from its (...) foundations and the simplicity of its origin in the creative freedom of reality and its intra-active intelligence, the power of all humans in our global world to meet and share meaning and interests. This essaysuccinctly highlights their foundations, prefaced by three cautionary reflections. (shrink)

My several decades of research into artificial intelligence have given rise to two fundamental concerns. Firstly, the awareness of the unacceptable but very likely possibility that humanity will become subject to a subtle but powerful digital dictatorship. Secondly, there is a pressing need to gain a better understanding of human intelligence, which is crucial to understanding ourselves from moment to moment, from day to day and act consequently. We need to find out where actual intelligence lies and see clearly that (...) the power of domination and the corresponding submission to it or lack of actual freedom is the main obstacle to intelligence’s healthy development, the main illness that intelligence can fall prey to. In this essay intelligence is viewed as the embodied interactive agent that creates life, fulfils its needs and harmonizes its interactive diversity - in particular as to human life. (shrink)

Filosofía y política en los siglos XVII y XVIII.--Hobbes, T. El Leviatán (selección).--Locke, J. Segundo tratado de gobierno (selección).--Montesquieu. El espíritu de las leyes (selección).--Orígenes de la conciencia estética y análisis crítico de sus fundamentos.--Kant, E. Crítica del juicio (selección).--Schiller, F. La educación estética del hombre (selección).--Hegel, J. G. F. De lo bello y sus formas (selección).

Our conception of logical space is the set of distinctions we use to navigate the world. Agustn Rayo argues that this is shaped by acceptance or rejection of 'just is'-statements: e.g. 'to be composed of water just is to be composed of H2O'. He offers a novel conception of metaphysical possibility, and a new trivialist philosophy of mathematics.

The problem of absolute generality has attracted much attention in recent philosophy. Agustin Rayo and Gabriel Uzquiano have assembled a distinguished team of contributors to write new essays on the topic. They investigate the question of whether it is possible to attain absolute generality in thought and language and the ramifications of this question in the philosophy of logic and mathematics.

Information can be public among a group. Whether or not information is public matters, for example, for accounts of interdependent rational choice, of communication, and of joint intention. A standard analysis of public information identifies it with (some variant of) common belief. The latter notion is stipulatively defined as an infinite conjunction: for p to be commonly believed is for it to believed by all members of a group, for all members to believe that all members believe it, and so (...) forth. This analysis is often presupposed without much argument in philosophy. Theoretical entrenchment or intuitions about cases might give some traction on the question, but give little insight about why the identification holds, if it does. The strategy of this paper is to characterize a practical-normative role for information being public, and show that the only things that play that role are (variants of) common belief as stipulatively characterized. In more detail: a functional role for “taking a proposition for granted” in non-isolated decision making is characterized. I then present some minimal conditions under which such an attitude is correctly held. The key assumption links this attitude to beliefs about what is public. From minimal a priori principles, we can argue that a proposition being public among a group entails common commitment to believe among that group. Later sections explore partial converses to this result, the factivity of publicity and publicity from the perspective of outsiders to the group, and objections to the aprioricity of the result deriving from a posteriori existential presuppositions. (shrink)

This essay is a study of ontological commitment, focused on the special case of arithmetical discourse. It tries to get clear about what would be involved in a defense of the claim that arithmetical assertions are ontologically innocent and about why ontological innocence matters. The essay proceeds by questioning traditional assumptions about the connection between the objects that are used to specify the truth-conditions of a sentence, on the one hand, and the objects whose existence is required in order for (...) the truth-conditions thereby specified to be satisfied, on the other. This allows one to set forth an assignment of truth-conditions to arithmetical sentences whereby nothing is required of the world in order for the truth-conditions of a truth of pure arithmetic to be satisfied. The essay then argues that such an assignment can be used to account for the a priori knowability of certain arithmetical truths. (shrink)

Ned Block argues that the higher-order (HO) approach to explaining consciousness is ‘defunct’ because a prominent objection (the ‘misrepresentation objection’) exposes the view as ‘incoherent’. What’s more, a response to this objection that I’ve offered elsewhere (Weisberg 2010) fails because it ‘amounts to abusing the notion of what-it’s-like-ness’ (xxx).1 In this response, I wish to plead guilty as charged. Indeed, I will continue herein to abuse Block’s notion of what-it’s-like-ness. After doing so, I will argue that the HO approach accounts (...) for the sense of what-it’s-like-ness that matters in a theory of consciousness. I will also argue that the only incoherence present in the HO theory is that generated by embracing Block’s controversial notion of what-it’s-like-ness, something no theorist of any stripe ought to do. Block is famous for (among other things) having introduced the notion of ‘phenomenal consciousness’ into contemporary philosophy of mind (Block 1995). This term is widely employed in the philosophical literature and it even appears in the empirical literature. But wide-speared usage has brought about divergent interpretations of the term. We can distinguish a ‘moderate’ and a ‘zealous’ reading of ‘phenomenal consciousness’. On the moderate reading, ‘phenomenal consciousness’ just means ‘experience’. Many people have embraced this sense of the term and use it to roughly pick out conscious experience involving sensory quality (states like conscious visual experiences or conscious pains, for example).2 On the zealous reading, however, phenomenal consciousness is held to be ‘distinct from any cognitive, intentional, or functional property’ (Block 1995: 234). That is, any explanation of phenomenal consciousness in exclusively cognitive, intentional, or functional terms will fail to capture, without remainder, what is really distinctive about phenomenal consciousness. Block, of course, is fully clear about embracing the zealous reading; indeed, his initial introduction of the notion is in those terms. The same ambiguity occurs with the much-used (and abused) idea of ‘what-it’s-like-ness’.. (shrink)

CHAPTER III THE FACTS OF THE CASE: FACTS AND EVIDENCE 1. The Importance of the Case THE theory and practice of law come down to the application of scientific methodology in the analysis of cases1, because the law is, in fact, ...

Lo más importante del libro es una exposición - clara y sucinta - de las posiciones de Norberto Bobbio en teoría del derecho, filosofía política y concepción de la democracia; pero también se refiere a quienes han difundido a Bobbio en América Latina y a sus seguidores y simpatizantes en varios países latinoamericanos"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 58.

Much of what we say is never said aloud. It occurs only silently, as inner speech. We chastise, congratulate, joke and cajole, all without making a sound. This distinctively human ability to create public language in the privacy of our own minds is no less remarkable for its familiarity. And yet, until recently, inner speech remained at the periphery of philosophical and psychological theorizing. This essay collection, from an interdisciplinary group of leading philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists, displays the rapidly growing (...) interest among researchers in the puzzles surrounding the nature and cognitive role of the inner voice. Questions explored include: the aids and obstacles inner speech presents to self-knowledge; the complex relation it bears to overt speech production and perception; the means by which inner speech can be identified and empirically assessed; its role in generating auditory verbal hallucinations; and its relationship to conceptual thought itself. (shrink)

Este trabajo recoge diversas claves y puntos que sustentan la base antropológica del desarrollo humano integral, con sus aspectos antropológicos constitutivos, para un buen vivir. Se exponen y profundizan apuntes o tesis sobre estas cuestiones tan importantes e imprescindibles del pensamiento social y de la ética, de la teología y de la moral, como es la Doctrina Social de la Iglesia (DSI). Contiene también referencias y aportes del magisterio de los papas contemporáneos hasta llegar al papa Francisco.

Telling a patient that the outcome of his illness is not good, or even hopeless, requires sensitivity and the ability to communicate with him in the setting of a hospital which is an unnatural environment divorced from family and friends. It is a task which must be taught and learned by doctors and nurses.

«Així doncs, qualsevol activitat que emprenem, la nostra acció més quotidiana, ens demana un esforç de la voluntat. En la consagració de les nostres forces a véncer totes les dificultats que se’ns presenten a diari ens determinen a nosaltres mateixos. Solament hem de vigilar de no cedir en el nostre afany de superació. Perquè si el treball que tenim per davant al llarg d’una existència el deixàvem de colp algun dia per algun motiu sobtat, això seria com una mort en (...) vida, com una rendició. Però no podem renunciar a ser nosaltres mateixos, sinó que ens hem de guanyar pas a pas, dia a dia». (shrink)

Based on interviews with twenty leading scholars, Conversations on Human Nature probes the question of what it means to be human from evolutionary, biological, philosophical, cultural, and theological points of view.

Nos proponemos con este artículo, profundizar en uno de los personajes más sugerentes y enigmáticos de la literatura del siglo XIX: el vampiro, partiendo de una doble perspectiva de análisis. En primer lugar, definir las características literarias del arquetipo creado por Stoker, para posteriormente analizar cómo el primitivo arquetipo literario pasará al cine, adaptando y cambiando su visualización estética en la gran pantalla. Nos centraremos, concretamente, en dos producciones cinematográficas, que desde nuestro punto de vista, representan un gran cambio en (...) la concepción del subconsciente colectivo del monstruo: Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) de Coppola porque representa la humanización del personaje en la gran pantalla; y la última superproducción de Hollywood Dracula Untold (2014) de Shore, porque representa una mirada al mito antropológico fundacional del vampiro. (shrink)

Pelluchon, Corine Manifest animalista: La causa animal com a camí per a un nou humanismeBarcelona: Rosa dels Vents, 141 p.ISBN 978-84-16930-41-8.

The existential analysis -- The death of dasein -- The timeliness of dasein -- The derivation of time -- The time of being.

The achievements of the textile industry in Roman Britain are often underestimated as a result of the meagreness of our available evidence. The Edict on maximum prices issued by Diocletian in A.D. 301 shows that British capes commanded high prices on the markets of the Empire, and that in the late third century A.D. British rugs were the best in the world. In view of the competition from the traditional centres of rug manufacture in the East, this is an astonishing (...) achievement. (shrink)