We consider a society whose members have to choose not only an outcome from a given set of outcomes but also a subset of agents that will remain members of the society. We study the extensions of approval voting, scoring methods and the Condorcet winner to our setting from the point of view of their internal stability and consistency properties.

We study how to partition a set of agents in a stable way when each coalition in the partition has to share a unit of a perfectly divisible good, and each agent has symmetric single-peaked preferences on the unit interval of his potential shares. A rule on the set of preference profiles consists of a partition function and a solution. Given a preference profile, a partition is selected and as many units of the good as the number of coalitions in (...) the partition are allocated, where each unit is shared among all agents belonging to the same coalition according to the solution. A rule is stable at a preference profile if no agent strictly prefers to leave his coalition to join another coalition and all members of the receiving coalition want to admit him. We show that the proportional solution and all sequential dictator solutions admit stable partition functions. We also show that stability is a strong requirement that becomes easily incompatible with other desirable properties like efficiency, strategy-proofness, anonymity, and non-envyness. (shrink)

The literary genesis of Einbahnstraße by Walter Benjamin represents a very special case of the use of the procedures of surrealism in the philosophical-literary production of the author. The process of evolution of thinking that ended up in the writing of this piece is unveiled throughout the present analysis. This is a sign of both waiver and restart; the opening for a new productive dimension in the career of one of the most important —and misunderstood— philosophers of the 20th century. (...) More than enlightening a small master piece of philosophy from a literary perspective, or analyzing a small master piece of literature from the philosophy, what is being problematized here is the division, cultivated or figured throughout the years, between both disciplines. This work is intended to recover what is insoluble from the philosophical-literary labor of Walter Benjamin, besides tracing a possible reconfiguration for an interdisciplinary field of work to come up and contribute in the understanding of the problem called The Retreat of Metaphor by Jacques Derrida. (shrink)

Patagonia: Land of Giants captures the wonders of the Patagonian landscape in hundreds of stunning color photographs by famed Argentine nature photographer Daniel Rivademar.

This paper deals with the question of whether uncertainty regarding model structure, especially in climate modeling, exhibits a kind of “chaos.” Do small changes in model structure, in other words, lead to large variations in ensemble predictions? More specifically, does model error destroy forecast skill faster than the ordinary or “classical” chaos inherent in the real-world attractor? In some cases, the answer to this question seems to be “yes.” But how common is this state of affairs? Are there precise mathematical (...) results that can help us answer this question? And is dependence on model structure “sensitive” in that arbitrarily small errors can destroy forecast skill? We examine some efforts in the literature to answer this last question in the affirmative and find them to be unconvincing. (shrink)

Teacher quality, its effect on students’ outcomes, and the association of these with economic growth, is the core of recent discussions in Latin America given the region’s weak results in international learning assessments. This paper investigates whether there is an effect of philosophy on the outcomes of critical reading for students in B.Ed. programs in Colombia. Relying on exact matching combined with propensity score matching with regression adjustment, we use national data from Colombia to show that students in B.Ed. in (...) philosophy outperformed students in other B.Ed. in critical reading test (0.401–0.124 SD), and, importantly, with higher effects observed for students with lower prior academic achievement (0.44 SD). This suggests that philosophy can help to narrow educational outcomes of students whose socioeconomic conditions are disadvantageous, contributing to social justice in education. (shrink)

Argumentation represents a way of reasoning over a knowledge base containing possibly incomplete and/or inconsistent information, to obtain useful conclusions. As a reasoning mechanism, the way an argumentation reasoning engine reaches these conclusions resembles the cognitive process that humans follow to analyze their beliefs; thus, unlike other computationally reasoning systems, argumentation offers an intellectually friendly alternative to other defeasible reasoning systems. LogicProgrammingisacomputationalparadigmthathasproducedcompu- tationallyattractivesystemswithremarkablesuccessinmanyapplications. Merging ideas from both areas, Defeasible Logic Programming offers a computational reasoning system that uses an argumentation engine (...) to obtain answers from a knowledge base represented using a logic programming language extended with defeasible rules. This combination of ideas brings about a computationally effective system together with a human-like reasoning model facilitating its use in applications. (shrink)

Oliver Crisp proposes “chastened theism” as a theologically realist alternative to classical theism and theistic personalism. I critique his chastened theism and propose the alternative of Christian Pure Act theism, a “chastened” version of theological nonrealism.

The object of the present essay is to establish the possibility of “theology without anathemas.” First, an argument is given for the conclusion that infallible knowledge in matters of theology is not now possible. Both the Protestant doctrine of claritas scripturae and the Roman Catholic understanding of the Magisterium of the Church are rejected. Then, an alternative, “fallibilist” ecclesiology is proposed, according to which to belong to the Church is a matter of having been claimed by Christ as His own. (...) When combined with a universal doctrine of election and a highly objective and actualized doctrine of the Atonement, such a conception of the Church makes it possible to understand theology as a collaborative and cooperative effort on the part of all to understand better this Christ to whom they all always already belong. (shrink)

Los interesantes aportes del Prof. Ramírez Gómez tratan sobre el papel que el mercado debe jugar en una sociedad democrática, y con este propósito sugiere que éste debería responder a las preferencias del gobierno y no a las preferencias individuales. Nuestra réplica amistosa plantea que este argumento debe ser ampliado para evitar interpretaciones que lo confundan con las fórmulas experimentadas por las economías de planificación total, que han mostrado su ineficiencia en la provisión de valores de uso pertinentes. En este (...) sentido, sostenemos que el mercado debe estar subordinado a las preferencias individuales facilitando la libertad de las personas en la elección de alternativas de inversión y consumo, hasta el punto en que tal ejercicio sólo pueda hacerse sobre el menoscabo de un razonable ejercicio de libertad por parte de las demás. (shrink)

The thought of Pierre Klossowski, praised by Foucault, Blanchot, Deleuze, has been scarcely addressed by the philosophical community. We argue in this article that this is largely due to the frequent difficulty of understanding his work as a whole: both his artistic and literary production and his interpretations of Nietzsche or Sade form a coherent whole, whose significance has a deeply critical political scope. The notion of unproductive spending, which occupies a central place in Bataille's work, will be rearticulated in (...) Klossowski's reflections through the concepts of drive, phantasm, simulacrum, value and consumption. In The Living Currency, the political dimension of these terms appears clearly: relying on a rereading of Fourier and Sade, the author shows the extreme degree of deformation of what we assume as a reality in modern industrial society. In this sense, his thinking takes on special relevance today, as a revelation of the excess and unhingedness of a society in which production and consumption are reproduced without limit through the infinite reflections produced by the game between drives, ghosts and simulacra. (shrink)

This paper critically explores the ethical dimensions of Behavioral Public Policy (BPP), a domain grounded in the understanding that human rationality is bounded and that this limitation often leads to behaviors deemed irrational. By applying the behavioral lens, which posits that people operate under bounded rationality, BPP aims to craft interventions that safeguard individuals against their biases. However, this approach raises significant ethical concerns, both in the scientific underpinnings of BPP and its application through policy interventions. Accordingly, this paper examines (...) two distinct ethical dimensions of BPP, both as a scientific discipline and through its intervention methodologies. The analysis of the first dimension argues that, viewing bounded rationality as only instrumental in decision-making processes, risks oversimplifying ethical complexities. Such simplification may ignore the moral and value-based rationalities underlying decisions, potentially misattributing instances of immorality and akrasia (the failure to act according to one's judgment) to mere deficiencies in rational thinking. Secondly, the paper examines the impact of BPP on moral behavior and character development, addressing ethical concerns like the evidentiary basis of BPP research, the bounded rationality of choice architects themselves, and the morality of behavior changes induced by policy. Overall, this article provides a much-needed examination of the moral considerations associated with behavioral strategies in public policy and its epistemological foundations, contributing to a more comprehensive understanding of their ethical implications . (shrink)

Citizenship regimes are institutionalized systems of formal and informal norms that define access to membership, as well as associated rights and duties. This paper studies illegalized migration as one of the major tests to assess whether citizenship regimes are fair institutions, based on a historical analysis of legislation meant to reduce illegalized migration in the United States between 1995 and 2022. We build our empirical research starting from a simple observation: despite the great number of bills introduced to reduce illegalized (...) migration to the US, most of such initiatives fail to become law. In fact, 93.5% of all immigration initiatives did not even pass the chamber of Congress in which they were originally presented. Such a high rate of failure shows that these proposals are motivated by electoral aspirations, rather than coming from a genuine wish to help migrants or grant them citizenship. Furthermore, there is also an economic interest that justifies the maintenance of low-cost disposable immigrant labor, with no right to citizenship. Our analysis is an example of how state regulation processes seem to work to formalize, rather than alleviate or eradicate, the precarious legal statuses of illegalized migrants. We conclude that a globalized phenomenon such as citizenship requires going beyond merely institutional and formal conceptions. We need to rethink the institutional notion of citizenship, as a merely status held under the authority of a state and consider it from a cosmopolitan perspective and a multilateral basis. But as long as citizenship remains under the responsibility of states, illegalized migrants will continue to experience precarious citizenship. (shrink)

Epistemic Utility Theory is often identified with the project of *axiology-first epistemology*—the project of vindicating norms of epistemic rationality purely in terms of epistemic value. One of the central goals of axiology-first epistemology is to provide a justification of the central norm of Bayesian epistemology, Probabilism. The first part of this paper presents a new challenge to axiology first epistemology: I argue that in order to justify Probabilism in purely axiological terms, proponents of axiology first epistemology need to justify a (...) claim about epistemic value—what I label ‘Downwards Propriety’—much stronger than any they have offered justification. The second part of this paper offers an argument that this challenge cannot be met: that there is no hope for providing a purely axiological justification of Downwards Propriety, at least given widely accepted assumptions about epistemic value. (shrink)

In this essay I revise, based on the notion of the ‘enlightened ruler’ or mingzhu and his critique of the literati of his time, the common belief that Han Fei was an amoralist and an advocate of tyranny. Instead, I will argue that his writings are dedicated to advising those who ought to rule in order to achieve the goal of a peaceful and stable society framed by laws in accordance with the dao.

Nudging and sludging are forms of choice architecture that shape behavior. While it is generally believed that nudging should improve well-being and sludging should decrease it, there has been debate about how to distinguish between the two. Some have suggested that the difference lies in the ease with which behaviors are facilitated or hindered, but this criterion does not consider the normative distinction (nudges have a positive connotation and sludges a negative one) or the impact on well-being. This paper proposes (...) a normative approach to defining nudging and sludging that takes into account both well-being and the principle of autonomy. According to our proposal, the concept of nudging should involve interventions that aim to increase well-being while respecting individuals’ freedom of choice, while sludging involves interventions that decrease well-being while also respecting autonomy, whether intentionally or unintentionally. (shrink)

El objetivo de este artículo es comentar las prácticas que lleva a cabo el equipo docente de la asignatura Epistemología y Metodología de la Investigación en Ciencias Jurídicas (FCEJS-UNSL) –cuya actividad inició en 2012– respecto de la enseñanza del derecho desde una perspectiva compleja. Concebir lo jurídico desde tal enfoque implica considerar la diversidad de las realidades actuales. Asimismo, si se asume que los entornos son múltiples, heterogéneos, no es posible estudiarlos desde un único campo de conocimiento. Adoptar tales miradas (...) epistemológicas necesita de una actitud pedagógica que se adapte al cambio. Por ende, este texto evidenciará las formas en que una asignatura de grado afronta desafíos cotidianos para plantear estrategias que pongan en cuestión el sentido jurídico dominante y, a partir de ello, trascender el positivismo. Por otra parte, a toda la humanidad sorprendió la situación suscitada a partir de la pandemia por COVID-19, que mostró la importancia de asumir una didáctica dinámica. Por ello, también se dará cuenta de las adaptaciones realizadas por el equipo docente para atender a ese nuevo contexto. (shrink)

This article argues that the claim of traditional Christian theology and religion to be in possession of supernatural revelation cannot be substantiated in a valid and non-circular manner in principle. It then notes the consequences for theology if the notion of supernatural revelation is abandoned. It proposes agnosticism about unknowable matters as a way of exercising faith or trust in the limits God’s providence has established for human knowledge.

Since the concept of “nudge” was introduced in 2008 by Thaler and Sunstein, proposing that small interventions based on changes in choice architectures can alter people’s behavior and make it easier for them to achieve their desired goals, the application in public policy of behavioral economics has gained significant attention. This has led to the emergence of different types of policies based on behavioral insights, which have been used in a variety of areas, including health or finance, with the goal (...) of promoting well-being and addressing social and economic issues. After providing a basic theoretical background as a frame of reference to understand gender violence, this study explores the use of tools from the field of behavioral economics as it is applied in public policy. Regulatory (paternalistic) and non-regulatory (libertarian) interventions based on behavioral insights will be considered: nudges, boosts, shoves, budges, or sludge audits, are examined as potential interventions to use in matters related to this type of violence. After evaluating these behavioral policy instruments and their potential effectiveness, the limitations of the behavioral perspective are recognized, and the need for a multifaceted approach to combating gender violence is acknowledged. The article concludes by arguing that public policies addressing gender violence should not only utilize behavioral tools but should also incorporate strategies related to education, legislation, and social norms. (shrink)

In a recent issue of the Journal of Business Ethics, Filipe M. Santos posits that social entrepreneurs maximize not on value capture, but on value creation, only satisficing on value capture to fuel operations, reinvesting in growth, whatever the specific combination of institutional means is deemed appropriate. No doubt the analytical framework of value creation and value capture casts new light on the phenomenon of social entrepreneurship, but we think Santos is asking too much by advocating a shift in focus (...) away from the organization. On the contrary, we maintain that by refocusing the theory on the organizational level and away from the system it is possible to understand that not all organizational solutions available to social entrepreneurs are able to create value and not all value capture strategies can serve a social goal. Indeed, there is only one form of organization that fulfills the criteria of maximizing on value creation, while satisficing on value capture and that is the social enterprise. (shrink)

This essay explains the role of history and ethical life (Sittlichkeit) in the first section of the chapter entitled “Spirit” in the Phenomenology of Spirit, in which Hegel interprets the meaning of Sophocles’' Antigone as the best expression of the ancient Greeks’ ethical life in its preliminary and most immediate state. It is argued, first, that Hegel’s understanding of the ethical life was developed as an alternative, based on history, to Kant’s notion of morals (Sitten) and, second, that Hegel considered (...) the ancient Greek mode of living limited by its immediacy and, therefore, never hoped to revive it during his own time. (shrink)

Jon Stewart, a cynic? Perhaps not, according to some die-hard fans. But it's not difficult to imagine that for many viewers of The Daily Show, even those who enjoy watching the host “speak truth to power,” Stewart is no more than a neatly dressed cynic. The cynics lived in the heart of ancient democracies, confronting accepted habits, unchallenged assumptions, and above all institutional corruption. Their aim wasn't just to avoid what they considered to be harmful pursuits and practices, but to (...) expose and ridicule those traditions that most people unreflectively considered moral and proper. If this chapter looks at Stewart in the context of this “dog philosophy,” it sheds light on the meaning of his role in contemporary culture. (shrink)

This book provides both an introduction to the philosophy of scientific modeling and a contribution to the discussion and clarification of two recent philosophical conceptions of models: artifactualism and fictionalism. These can be viewed as different stances concerning the standard representationalist account of scientific models. By better understanding these two alternative views, readers will gain a deeper insight into what a model is as well as how models function in different sciences. Fictionalism has been a traditional epistemological stance related to (...) antirealist construals of laws and theories, such as instrumentalism and inferentialism. By contrast, the more recent fictional view of models holds that scientific models must be conceived of as the same kind of entities as literary characters and places. This approach is essentially an answer to the ontological question concerning the nature of models, which in principle is not incompatible with a representationalist account of the function of models. The artifactual view of models is an approach according to which scientific models are epistemic artifacts, whose main function is not to represent the phenomena but rather to provide epistemic access to them. It can be conceived of as a non-representationalist and pragmatic account of modeling, which does not intend to focus on the ontology of models but rather on the ways they are built and used for different purposes. The different essays address questions such as the artifactual view of idealization, the use of information theory to elucidate the concepts of abstraction and idealization, the deidealization of models, the nature of scientific fictions, the structural account of representation and the ontological status of structures, the role of surrogative reasoning with models, and the use of models for explaining and predicting physical phenomena. (shrink)

This paper provides a philosophical critique of the principles that govern extraterritorial punishment under international law. It advocates an interest-based theory of punishment that accounts for states' right to punish offences committed on their territory or against their sovereignty, security or important governmental functions. Yet, it criticizes the states' well-established right to punish crimes committed extraterritorially on grounds of the nationality of the offender or that of the victim. Indeed, it shows that the arguments on the basis of which these (...) jurisdictional bases are commonly defended either beg the fundamental question they are meant to answer or are simply committed to much broader rules than those currently in force. The last section of this paper examines whether competing justifications for legal punishment based on other grounds have more promise in terms of being able to better explain how the international law currently regulates extraterritorial punishment. It suggests that even refined consequentialist and deontological theories ultimately do not fare as well as the argument advocated here in accounting for certain core intuitions regarding the practice of legal punishment. (shrink)

Political fact-checkers evaluate the truthfulness of politicians’ claims. This paper contributes to an emerging scholarly debate on whether fact-checkers treat political parties differently in a systematic manner depending on their ideology (bias). We first examine the available approaches to analyze bias and then present a new approach in two steps. First, we propose a logistic regression model to analyze the outcomes of fact-checks and calculate how likely each political party will obtain a truth score. We test our model with a (...) sample of fact-checks from Newtral, a major Spanish fact-checker. Our model would signal bias under two assumptions: a) all political parties are on average equally accurate in their statements; b) the verification method gives precise instructions and is implemented systematically. We investigate this second assumption with a series of interviews with Newtral fact-checkers. We show that standard verification protocols are so loosely implemented that fact-checks reflect a set of journalistic decisions, rather than a bias in the statistical sense. We call for a more rigorous definition of verification methods as a pre-requisite for an unbiased assessment of politician’s claims. (shrink)

Una larga tradición le atribuye a Sócrates la preocupación por transformar la vida de quienes dialogan con él; atribución que se opone a la imagen, rastreable en los Diálogos de Platón, de su fracaso al momento de influir en la vida de sus interlocutores más recalcitrantes. Para disminuir esta tensión y, con ello, disolver la impresión de dicho fracaso, se examinan elementos de la representación platónica del élenchos en favor de la idea de que Sócrates no busca convertir a los (...) demás. Al final, se añade una crítica al optimismo con que Pierre Hadot sí le adjudica la función de agente de conversión. (shrink)

Desde que en 2008 se introdujera el concepto de nudge en el libro Nudge, que argumentaba que las pequeñas intervenciones basadas en cambios en la arquitectura de elección pueden alterar el comportamiento de las personas y facilitarles el logro de sus objetivos deseados, el uso de la economía del comportamiento en políticas públicas ha crecido significativamente, lo que ha llevado a la aparición de diferentes intervenciones basadas en conocimientos conductuales. Estas intervenciones se han aplicado en distintas áreas de políticas públicas (...) y administrativas, incluyendo salud, finanzas, o medio ambiente, con el objetivo de promover el bienestar y abordar problemas sociales y económicos. El uso de estas aplicaciones en cuestiones relacionadas con la violencia de género ha sido con frecuencia ignorado. De este modo, el objetivo de este estudio es analizar el uso de herramientas de la economía del comportamiento en políticas públicas, como nudges, boosts o auditoría de sludges y su aplicación a asuntos relacionados con este tipo de violencia. Al mismo tiempo que se señalan los posibles beneficios de su uso, también se reconocen las limitaciones del enfoque conductual, apuntando a la necesidad de una aproximación multifacética para combatir dicha violencia. Así, las políticas públicas que traten con violencia de género debe. (shrink)

A partir de la contraposición entre filosofía y ensayismo, realizada por Th. Adorno, se cuestiona el carácter de “fundador” de la filosofía latinoamericana atribuido a A. Korn, quien comprendió la filosofía como un ejercicio de escritura sin certezas de- finitivas. Al señalar la distancia entre realidad y lenguaje, la filosofía puede habitar dicha distancia en diversas formas, y cabe preguntar por su relación con la escritura. Contra el positivismo, Korn insiste en el carácter figurativo de toda metafísica como “poema dialéctico”, (...) acercándola así al ensayo. (shrink)

RESUMEN A partir de la contraposición entre filosofía y ensayismo, realizada por Th. Adorno, se cuestiona el carácter de "fundador" de la filosofía latinoamericana atribuido a A. Korn, quien comprendió la filosofía como un ejercicio de escritura sin certezas definitivas. Al señalar la distancia entre realidad y lenguaje, la filosofía puede habitar dicha distancia en diversas formas, y cabe preguntar por su relación con la escritura. Contra el positivismo, Korn insiste en el carácter figurativo de toda metafísica como "poema dialéctico", (...) acercándola así al ensayo. ABSTRACT On the basis of Th. Adorno's differentiation between philosophy and essay writing, the article questions A. Korn's status as "founder" of Latin American philosophy, given that he understood philosophy as an exercise in writing, without definitive certainties. By pointing to the difference between reality and language, philosophy can inhabit that distance in diverse forms, thus making it possible to inquire into its relation to writing. Against positivism, Korn insists on the figurative character of all metaphysics as a "dialectical poem", thus bringing it close to the essay. (shrink)

The objective of this work is to carry out a genetic study on the Husserlian concept of noema based in the givenness of the real body in the passive experience of pain. The development focuses, either, on the delimitation of the painful body given in its physical sphere in attention to its material properties, and in the eventual integration of this passively given body in the so-called noetic-noematic structure regarding the intentional revelation that pain implies. To do this, pain will (...) first be briefly examined in light of "original" passivity. Secondly, the way in which the body is given in its real disposition and its understanding as a bodily ego in experiencing pain will be contemplated. Thirdly, considering the “original” constitution of the body in pain in a broad sense, emphasis will be placed on its correspondence with intentionality, a matter that only confirms that pain is a form of perception. Finally, the deployment of the genetically viewed noema is given on the basis of the determination of the real body as a noematic object. (shrink)