This work studies an artistic way of narrating an exile without having to resort to direct words such as violence or crime. Max Aub, a Spanish exile in Mexico, published his personal magazine Sala de Espera in Aztec lands. In the section called “Zarzuela,” he compiled a series of short stories entitled Crímenes, which later, for its edition in book format, he called Crímenes ejemplares. The short stories are a series of humorous confessions about various types of murders narrated by (...) the "murderers," so that they seem real testimonies. Throughout the three editions of this book, during Aub's lifetime, the author incorporated a series of "clues" in the paratexts with the aim of referring to the social phenomena of the time, especially those related to the situation with the Franco regime, the Cold War —historical context of the time of Aub's exile in Mexico— and the events that would take place in Mexico and Paris in 1968. For example, this last nod to the violent events of that summer of 68 is represented with a painting that evokes the French gang Bonnot, dedicated to bank robberies to destabilize the economy of the richest. This is an example of how the writer related the fiction of the crimes to real events, in such a way that a kind of dilution between the real and the imaginary arises. (shrink)

This essay proposes a new way to read José Martí's idea of "Nuestra América," one that focuses on the mode of the call for unity toward liberation and decoloniality. In particular, I offer the arguments for this Latin American unity that would define a collective form of resistance against our colonial past and present (Europe) and an imperialist future (USA). It can be argued that it is extremely difficult to translate the Cuban author's thought by itself to our contemporary struggles, (...) and that this notion runs the risk of being an outdated, naïve, and even detrimental reduction of a too complex racial reality. In this essay, I defend a way in which this notion is still relevant today by alluding to the mode of a decolonial return to one's own land in the works of Édouard Glissant and Gloria Anzaldúa. In these two authors I see elements of the criticism of a colonial rootedness and filiation, linking a decolonial attitude toward the land with a particular way of returning to it: one that challenges a mythical, pure territorial space, and also reimagines the temporality of the return by focusing on the present. With the help of this novel gesture of returning to the land, I argue that Martí's nuestra América voices a call for unity and independence that still has value beyond its undeniable shortcomings. (shrink)

El Hospital de la Santa Caridad de Sevilla puede ser contemplado desde múltiples perspectivas: artística, religiosa, histórica, etc. El propósito de este trabajo es abordar el estudio de este emblemático lugar sevillano desde el enfoque teológico que D. Miguel Mañara, su artífice, dejó inscrito en cada uno de sus rincones. Él quiso utilizar la via pulchritudinis como medio de evangelización, mostrando su propia concepción cristológica en un itinerario que muestra al visitante atemporal cómo alcanzar la gloria desde la humildad (...) más radical, a través de las obras de misericordia que nos llevarán al encuentro con Cristo encarnado en los más débiles y necesitados. (shrink)

In this chapter, I propose a new framework for extended epistemology, based on a second-wave approach to extended cognition. The framework is inclusive, in that it takes into account the complex interplay between the diverse embodiments of extended knowers and the salient properties of technological artifacts, as well as the environment in which they are embedded. Thus it both emphasizes and exploits the complementary roles played by these different elements. Finally, I motivate and explain this framework by applying it to (...) a case of interaction with contemporary technologies. (shrink)

The Gamer's Dilemma challenges us to find a distinction between virtual murder and virtual pedophilia. Without such a distinction, we are forced to conclude that either both are morally acceptable or that both should be morally illicit. This paper argues that the best way to solve the dilemma is, in one sense, to dissolve it. The Gamer's Dilemma rests on a misunderstanding in the sense that it does not distinguish between the form of a simulation and its surface content. A (...) greater appreciation of the way structural features of a simulation affect subject experience will help us see why only simulations of murder and pedophilia generating virtually real experiences are likely to be seen as wrong. I argue that a simulation’s structural elements powerfully affect how subjects experience simulated content and hence is an important, and previously neglected, variable necessary to dissolve the Gamer's Dilemma. Properly understood, virtually real simulations of murder and pedophilia are both likely to be treated by players as morally wrong. Similarly, virtually unreal murder and pedophilia will be less likely to be judged as wrong. Subject judgments are thus consistent once a simulation’s structural variables are accounted for. The Gamer's Dilemma dissolves as a dilemma once we acknowledge these structural features of simulations and how they affect experience and moral judgment. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:I contrast an ecological account of natural agency with the traditional Cartesian conception using recent research in bacterial cognition and cellular decision making as a test case. I argue that the Cartesian conception—namely, the view that agency presupposes cognition—generates a dilemma between mechanism, the view that bacteria are mere automata, and intellectualism, the view that they exhibit full-blown cognition. Unicellular organisms, however, occupy a middle ground between these two extremes. On the one hand, their capacities and activities are too adaptive (...) to count as mere machines. On the other hand, they lack the open-ended responsiveness of cognitive agents to rational norms. An ecological conception of agency as the gross behavioral capacity to respond to affordances, I argue, does not presuppose cognition and allows for degrees of agency along a continuum, from the simplest adaptive agents, such as unicellular organisms, to the most sophisticated cognitive agents. Bacteria, I conclude, are adaptiveagents, hence not mere automata, but notcognitiveagents. (shrink)

I argue that psychopathy undermines three common assumptions typically invoked in favor of moderate reasons responsive theories of moral responsibility. First, I propose a theory of psychopathic agency and claim that psychopathic agency suggests that the systems underlying receptivity to reason bifurcate into at least two sub-systems of receptivity. Next, I claim that the bifurcation of systems for receptivity suggests that reactivity is not “all of a piece” but that it too decomposes into at least two subsystems. Lastly, I argue (...) that prior attempts by Fischer and Ravizza to address these concerns contain an appeal to internalism. Since Fischer and Ravizza want their theory to remain agnostic about the nature of reasons for action, this appeal to internalism is problematic for their view. I close by suggesting that if we are to make sense of when and why psychopaths are responsible then a mechanism-based theory of responsibility must be able to explain how different systems of receptivity and reactivity come together to constitute a single mechanism that grounds responsibility ascriptions for action and they must do so without tacitly appealing to implausible forms of internalism about reasons for action. (shrink)

Understanding the changes in our language abilities along the lifespan is a crucial step for understanding the aging process both in normal and in abnormal circumstances. Besides controlled experimental tasks, it is equally crucial to investigate language in unconstrained conversation. I present an information-theoretical analysis of a corpus of dyadic conversations investigating how the richness of the vocabulary, the word-internal structure, and the syntax of the utterances evolves as a function of the speaker's age and sex. Although vocabulary diversity increases (...) throughout the lifetime, grammatical diversities follow a different pattern, which also differs between women and men. Women use increasingly diverse syntactic structures at least up to their late fifties, and they do not deteriorate in terms of fluency through their lifespan. However, from age 45 onward, men exhibit a decrease in the diversity of the syntactic structures they use, coupled with an increased number of speech disfluencies. (shrink)

This essay aims to show that the nations of Central America must create access to safe and legal abortion as well as promote a political dialogue on the subject that is based on reason and science, rather than religion. Not only does prohibiting abortion constitute a violation of women's human rights, but, based on international human rights law as well as the minimum duties of civil ethics, failing in to provide such access or dialogue would mean failing to meet the (...) standards of a legitimate democratic state. (shrink)

El «mundo entero» vive un gran desasosiego al estar inmiscuido en la dominación de la Naturaleza sustentada en la gran inversión económica, desde el paradigma antropocéntrico neoliberal. El objetivo del presente trabajo es reconocer y abrazar epistemologías y metodologías alternativas, entre ellas validar las contribuciones de los pueblos indígenas (PI) como protagonistas de la sustentabilidad y soberanía alimentaria. La investigación es de corte documental y la reflexión personal de más de 20 años de labor junto a los PI en Mesoamérica (...) y los Andes. Valorar dichas contribuciones, es centrarse en sus acervos y corpus cognoscitivos, antes que sea tarde. Son los sabios guardianes de la sustentabilidad biocultural de la Naturaleza y la Vida. Se concluye principalmente que son quienes conocen las claves, llaves y secretos que dan respuesta al reto de estelarizar la sustentabilidad y seguridad alimentaria global, que tanto persigue la humanidad. La sociedad en general y en particular las instancias oficiales, formativas, políticas, corporativas, industriales, de extensión y académicas, deben distinguir a estos actores sociales que soportan hoy la seguridad alimentaria mundial. El hallazgo principal cual severa advertencia, es que al «desaparecer» estaríamos ante un fenómeno descomunal de inseguridad alimentaria mundial. (shrink)

There is a long-standing discussion concerning the nature of moral discourse. Multiple views range from realism—according to which moral discourse is closer to scientific discourse than to fictional discourse—to anti-realism—according to which moral discourse is rather closer to fictional discourse. In this paper, I want to motivate a novel anti-realist account. On this view, there are no moral properties or truths, neither mind-independent nor mind-dependent ones (i.e., anti-realism). However, moral cognition results from the use of higher order cognitive abilities with (...) enough resources to grant moral discourse with all the features of a realist talk (i.e., cognitive quasi-realism). I defend this view based on empirical evidence on human moral development and by showing that the resulting account can meet the demands of robust moral realism. The paper concludes by placing the proposed view within the metaethical landscape by comparing it against other forms of anti-realism, most significantly against expressivism. (shrink)

It is often said in physics that if two models of a theory are related by a symmetry, then the two models provide (or could provide) two different representations of the very same situation, alike the case of two maps of different color for the very same city. It is also said that the situations represented by two models of a theory are indiscernible in some ways when the models in question are related by a symmetry of the theory, just (...) like the situation in the interior of the cabin of a train when the train is at rest in the station is empirically indiscernible from the situation in the interior when the train is moving uniformly (in classical mechanics, these two situations are represented by two models related by a boost). In recent years, philosophers of physics have focused a lot of attention in developing various principles that aim to elucidate these and similar remarks on symmetries, models, physical equivalence, and representation that are widespread in physics practice. The goal of the current article is to provide a critical review of these principles, and suggest a new framework for thinking about these kinds of questions. One important upshot of the paper is that questions of indiscernibility, and questions of the representational capacity of models, must be distinguished from one another. (shrink)

What is natural selection? I address this question by exploring the relation between two debates: Is natural selection a mechanism? Is natural selection a causal or a statistical theory? I argue that the first can be assessed only relative to a model and that, following the second, there are two fundamentally different and independent kinds of models, Modern-Synthesis and Darwinian models. MS-models, I argue, are not mechanistic even if they are causal. D-models, in contrast, are mechanistic. A causal-mechanistic interpretation of (...) D-models is thus compatible with a statistical interpretation of MS-models. Natural selection, I conclude, lacks a single, unifying nature. (shrink)

El artículo analiza algunos aspectos de la comunicación política tomando como referencia las elecciones generales españolas de 1996, a fin de reflexionar sobre la eficacia de la Comunicación Política aplicada y sus riesgos en una sociedad democrática. Retórica y democracia van juntas por cuanto la retórica es el arte de la palabra y la palabra es consustancial a la democracia. El problema es que la palabra ha de entenderse hoy como el resultado de un uso científicamente programado de la comunicación (...) que afecta profundamente el discurso clásico de la política. (shrink)

Las Conferencias John Dewey marcan el cambio en el pensamiento de Putnam hacia un nuevo realismo naturalista que trataba de ofrecer un camino medio al debate entre realistas y antirrealistas. Este giro vendrá fuertemente influenciado por la corriente pragmatista y, en particular, por los filósofos William James y John Dewey. Estas páginas buscan rastrear las ideas deweyanas que Putnam recoge, enfatizando esa recuperación de la filosofía como disciplina que atienda a los problemas del hombre común.

In De veritate I.2, Thomas Aquinas claims that “to every true act of understanding there must correspond some being and likewise to every being there corresponds a true act of understanding.” For Aquinas, the ratio of truth consists in a conformity between intellect and being. This account of truth, however, doesnot appear to allow for a certain class of truths, namely those that are about nonbeings. Many think that it is true that ‘no chimeras exist,’ that ‘blindness can becaused by (...) exposure to bright lights,’ and that ‘evil should be avoided.’ Yet, in each of these cases of truth, there does not appear to be a being to which the intellectconforms. In this paper, I will explore the ways in which Aquinas’s notion of truth as “conformity to being” is able to accommodate truths about nonbeings. (shrink)

Imagine that we are on a train playing with some mechanical systems. Why can’t we detect any differences in their behavior when the train is parked versus when it is moving uniformly? The standard answer is that boosts are symmetries of Newtonian systems. In this paper, I use the case of a spring to argue that this answer is problematic because symmetries are neither sufficient nor necessary for preserving its behavior. I also develop a new answer according to which boosts (...) preserve the relational properties on which the behavior of a system depends, even when they are not symmetries. (shrink)

In higher education, the conventional design of educational programs emphasises imparting knowledge and skills, in line with traditional Western epistemology. This emphasis is particularly evident in the design and implementation of many undergraduate programs in which bodies of knowledge and skills are decontextualised from the practices to which they belong. In contrast, the notion of knowledge as foundational and absolute has been extensively challenged. A transformation and pluralisation has occurred: knowledge has come to be seen as situated and localized into (...) various ‘knowledges’, and the status of the body has taken on renewed significance in epistemological debates. Rather than thinking of knowledge as transcending the body, the embodiment of knowledge has become a key factor in understanding the nature of knowledge and what it means to know. In this paper, we adopt a phenomenological perspective in exploring the notion of embodied knowing as it relates to higher education programs and, more specifically, the ways in which information and communication technologies (ICTs) are used in these programs. (shrink)

In this text, I consider two examples in the history of emancipation and manumission of enslaved, Black populations in the Caribbean and South America in order to theorize a colonial mode of conceiving of freedom at play in the first half of the nineteenth century. This mode is marked by the figure of the promise, enacting a notion of freedom as a constantly deferred, external compensation. Indeed, instead of an immediate decision deeming the practice of enslavement and trade of human (...) beings unacceptable, and an effective liberation of the enslaved Black populations in these different emancipation proclamations, the various histories of manumission in Latin America and the Caribbean show a long series of political and legal attempts to reduce and limit the extent of the slave trade that deferred the process of liberation for decades. Moreover, in many of these territories the practice did not end with the official proclamation of emancipation but was continued by illegal practices and mutations into legal forms of exploitation and oppression that are still operative today. After outlining this first trajectory, reconstructing the promise of manumission in the historical examples of Martinique (as read by Édouard Glissant) and La Gran Colombia and the Republic of Nueva Granada (contemporary Panamá, Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecuador), I analyze a second mode of investigation in examples of individual and collective strategies of liberation coming from the enslaved themselves, as reconstructed by contemporary feminist scholars in South America. These strategies appropriate liberation not as a promise, but as a negotiation and calculation that begins with the enslaved’s resistance to their oppressive conditions and that ultimately depends on the external concession by juridical authorities. In the third section of the chapter, I read these practices not as marronage, as they are sometimes approached, but as a different mode of turning back to these glimpses of freedom that more effectively challenge the narrative of emancipation and, with it, the promise of manumission in our present. -/- . (shrink)

Consensus in the contemporary philosophical literature has it that conserved quantity theories of causation such as that of Dowe [2000]—according to which causation is to be analysed in terms of the exchange of conserved quantities (e.g., energy)—face damning problems when confronted with contemporary physics, where the notion of conservation becomes delicate. In particular, in general relativity it is often claimed that there simply are no conservation laws for (say) total-stress energy. If this claim is correct, it is difficult to see (...) how conserved quantity theories of causation could survive. In this article, we resist the above consensus and defend conserved quantity theories from this conclusion, at least when focusing on the apparent problems posed by general relativity. We argue that this approach to causation can continue to be defended in general relativity, once one appreciates (a) the availability of approximate symmetries in generic general relativistic spacetimes, and (b) the role of modelling and idealisation in that theory. Given these points, conserved quantity theories of causation must stand or fall on other grounds. (shrink)

The verb “to conjure” is a complex one, for it includes in its standard definition a great range of possible actions or operations, not all of them equivalent, or even compatible. In its most common usage, “to conjure” means to perform an act of magic or to invoke a supernatural force, by casting a spell, say, or performing a particular ritual or rite. But “to conjure” is also to influence, to beg, to command or constrain, to charm, to bewitch, to (...) move or convey, to imagine, to visualize, to call to mind, or to remember. —Rachael DeLue 2012, para 1.When we create with our Brown hands, feminine energy, and full spirits, we conjure. To exist, survive, and thrive in these bodies is a continuous act of conjuring. Our walks conjure. Our smiles conjure. Our tears conjure. Our laughs conjure. Our words conjure. Our artworks are conjurings. We, a Black/Filipina-American woman, a Dominican-American, and a Black-American woman, are guided by our solidarity with one another and all other Black and Brown female identifying persons whose raced and gendered subjectivities exist both inside and outside of colonization, white supremacy, and patriarchy. We bring to life our colored imaginations and curiosities, and share them with the world. We are united by our need for safety, autonomy as beings, dissolution of trauma, and desire to ask, “What would happen if I…?” Imaginative, curious Women of Color founded the underground railroad, guided captured Africans and Tainos to the mountains, ignited the Civil Rights Movement, organized laborers and immigrants, birthed the #BlackLivesMatter Movement, conceived the #MeToo Movement, and so much more. Like our kindred counterparts, we have an unrelenting urge to examine, question, wonder, desire, speak to, lead, be curious, and “conjure.” As practicing artists and art educators, our critical arts-based practices are grounded in intersectional feminisms like Womanism, Black Feminist Theory, and Chicana Feminist Theory, which allow us to do these very things. (shrink)

Extended cognition brings with it a particular phenomenology. It has been argued that when an artifact is integrated into an agent’s cognitive system, it becomes transparent in use to the cognizing subject. In this paper, I challenge some of the assumptions underlying how the transparency of artifacts is described in extended cognition theory. To this end, I offer two arguments. First, I make room for some forms of conscious thought and attention within extended cognitive routines, and I question the close (...) association drawn between attention and effort. Second, I vindicate the importance of paying careful attention to individual differences and the diverse ways in which bodies and technologies can be experienced. I end by offering some hints toward an alternative, and more accurate, account of the phenomenology of extended cognition. (shrink)

Fodor argue that Darwinism cannot be true on the grounds that there are no laws of selection to support counterfactuals about why traits are selected-for. Darwinian explanations, according to this objection, amount to mere ‘plausible historical narratives’. I argue that the objection is predicated on two problematic assumptions: A nomic-subsumption account of causation and causal explanation, and a fine-grained view of the individuation of selected-for effects. Against the former, I argue that Darwinian explanations are a historical species of mechanistic explanation (...) and that mechanisms are causally productive and counterfactual supporting in the absence of appropriate laws. Once this mechanistic framework is in place, the demand for laws of selection vanishes and the historical cum causal coherence of Darwinism is restored. As for the second assumption, I argue that it is an artefact of the teleosemantic program with no basis in evolutionary biology and that properly understood, Darwinian evolutionary biology shows just why teleosemantics cannot succeed. (shrink)

The finding of fractal scaling (FS) in behavioral sequences has raised a debate on whether FS is a pervasive property of the cognitive system or is the result of specific processes. Inferences about the origins of properties in time sequences are causal. That is, as opposed to correlational inferences reflecting instantaneous symmetrical relations, causal inferences concern asymmetric relations lagged in time. Here, I integrate Granger-causality with inferences about FS. Four simulations illustrate that causal analyses can isolate distinct FS sources, whereas (...) correlational techniques cannot. I then analyze three simultaneous sequences of responses from a database of word-naming trials. I find that two, or perhaps three, distinct sources account for the presence of FS in these sequences, but FS is not a general property of the system. This suggests that FS arises due to the properties of a limited number of identifiable psychological and/or neural processes. Finally, I reanalyze a previously published dataset of acoustic frequency spectra using the new tools. The causality/criticality combination introduced here offers a new important perspective in the study of cognition. (shrink)

This book defines the relationship between the thought of Adam Smith and that of the ancients---Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and the Stoics. Vivenza offers a complete survey of all Smith's writings with the aim of illustrating how classical arguments shaped opinions and scholarship in the eighteenth century.

In this innovative book, Gloria Frost reconstructs and analyses Aquinas's theories on efficient causation and causal powers, focusing specifically on natural causal powers and efficient causation in nature. Frost presents each element of Aquinas's theories one by one, comparing them with other theories, as well as examining the philosophical and interpretive ambiguities in Aquinas's thought and proposing fresh solutions to conceptual difficulties. Her discussion includes explanations of Aquinas's technical scholastic terminology in jargon-free prose, as well as background on medieval (...) scientific views - including ordinary language explanations of the medieval physical theories which Aquinas assumed in formulating his views on causation and causal powers. The resulting volume is a rich exploration of a central philosophical topic in medieval philosophy and beyond, and will be valuable especially for scholars and advanced students working on Aquinas and on medieval natural philosophy. (shrink)

The recent debate about whether gauge symmetries can be empirically significant has focused on the possibility of 'Galileo's ship' types of scenarios, where the symmetries effect relational differences between a subsystem and the environment. However, it has gone largely unremarked that apart from such Galileo's ship scenarios, Greaves and Wallace (2014) proposed that gauge transformations can also be empirically significant in a 'non-relational' manner that is analogous to a Faraday-cage scenario, where the subsystem symmetry is related to a change in (...) a charged boundary state. In this paper, we investigate the question of whether such non-relational scenarios are possible for gauge theories. Remarkably, the answer to this question turns out to be closely related to a foundational puzzle that has driven a host of recent developments at the frontiers of theoretical physics. By drawing on these recent developments, we show that a very natural way of elaborating on Greaves and Wallace's claim of non-relational empirical significance for gauge symmetry is incoherent. However, we also argue that much of what they suggest is correct in spirit: one can indeed construct non-relational models of the kind they sketch, albeit ones where the empirical significance is not witnessed by a gauge symmetry but instead by a superficially similar boundary symmetry. Furthermore, the latter casts doubt on whether one really abandons Galileo's ship in such scenarios. (shrink)

Edith Stein (1891-1942) is a clear example of a philosopher, since she dedicated her entire life and effort to the conquest of Truth, of Being. The path she follows begins with her personal experience and her desire to find an answer to the existence of man. In phenomenology, she will find a means of confronting reality, free of prejudices. During her intellectual and existential journey, she meets a God that becomes living experience and quenches her thirst for Truth. She completes (...) her contemplation of the philosophical being by means of a mystic contemplation of Being. Her philosophical activity is a road that leads “from finite being to eternal being”. (shrink)