Antonio Rubio, autor de la Logica mexicana, usó la noción de instrumento para elaborar una teoría de la ciencia, un análisis de las relaciones entre la lógica y las ciencias. Las obras lógicas de Aristóteles fueron apodadas el “instrumento” de la filosofía, y para Rubio la lógica entrega los “instrumentos-de-saber” a las demás ciencias. La expresión se remonta al “método de adquirir una ciencia” de Aristóteles, el cual, dijo, tiene que ser adquirido antes de abordar la ciencia misma. Rubio interpretó (...) este instrumental como la técnica de definir y clasificar los entes investigados en la ciencia, formar proposiciones en torno a ella y organizarlas en un sistema. Además, elaboró una explicación de la índole ontológica de los instrumentos. Expondré esta hermenéutica científica de Rubio, parcialmente original, desde la filosofía y lógica actuales. (shrink)

Gran parte de la filosofía más interesante y original los escolásticos la hacían en la teología. Un buen ejemplo es el dilema en el Siglo de Oro sobre el libre albedrío: ¿cómo podemos actuar libremente si Dios causa y conoce nuestros actos? La discusión incluye varios temas fundamentales como la antinomia entre la libertad y la determinación, la semántica modal, la lógica temporal y la lógica de los estados de cosas contrafácticos. Los jesuitas mexicanos Matías Blanco y Antonio Peralta escribieron (...) libros sobre la cuestión. Se describirá aquí la solución “disyuntiva” que Blanco propuso en su Funiculus triplex, publicado póstumamente en México en 1746. Cuando alguien ha de eligir entre las alternativas B y C, barrunta Blanco, Dios no actualiza ni B ni C, sino su disyunción B-o-C. Blanco propone una tregua en la “guerra” entre las escuelas contrincantes para que consideren su solución– pues cree podría ser aceptable para todos. (shrink)

This introduction to a special issue of Thesis Eleven devoted to science fiction begins by exploring the way the genre has been handled by German and French critical theory and their Anglophone equivalents. It proceeds to a discussion of the historical sociology of the genre and, thence, to an account of what it terms the dialectic of science fiction endangerment. Finally, it concludes with a brief overview of the various contributions to the issue.

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)

I describe a “logic of creating” inspired by the “existential” argument of the existence of God in St. Thomas Aquinas’s De Ente et Essentia. suggest a modal reading of his reasoning based upon states-of-affairs said to be actual, contingent, necessary and the like. I take “creating” as teasing actuality out of possibility. After explaining the modal logic that I am assuming and relating it to Christian understandings of meaning and being, I present my modal interpretation, contrasting it with the views (...) of three modern philosophers. In an appendix I will analyze the text of St. Thomas’s existential proof. (shrink)

St. Thomas Aquinas has been considered a kairos in intellectual history for seeing God’s essence as being. Martin Heidegger criticized philosophers forrepresenting being as a be-ing and identifying it with God, and Jean-Luc Marion speaks of “God without being.” In her Potency and Act Edith Stein introduced thecategory of being without essence, but such being is not God but “the opposite.” For St. Augustine sin was an approach to nonbeing, and Stein saw it leading to a“displacement into nonbeing,” to an (...) “annihilation” where only a “null being” is retained. This eschatological reflection is an intriguing aspect of her “fusion” ofscholasticism and phenomenology. (shrink)

I wish to reflect briefly on what logic “is” and what the “is” is founded upon. Logic has traditionally been linked with argumentation. I shall examine a simple argument relative to a “miniworld”, and with the help of current logic and traditional ontology, extract from it a modest theory of logical entities and relations. “Current logic” involves modal semantics and the “traditional ontology” is that of Plato, Bonaventure and Thomas Aquinas, and some later philosophers.

En este texto el A. se propone mostrar que es posible emplear algunas técnicas de la lógica modal para reflexionar en torno al problema de la existencia de Dios. En la primera parte se presenta la estructura general de la lógica modal,su simbología y los diversos sistemas que recientemente han sido propuestos. En la segunda parte, el A. sugiere la posibilidad de formular en términos modales la prueba ontológica de San Anselmo. El texto culmina extrayendo algunas consecuencias de esta formulación.

En el presente artículo reflexionamos en torno a qué significa, a partir de un modelo, generar hipótesis sobre los fenómenos. Swoyer define esto último como razonamiento sustituto (1991, p. 449) y creemos que presenta desafíos que es necesario confrontar. En nuestro artículo nos detendremos en uno que creemos de la mayor relevancia: el carácter inferencial de la _sustitución_ que opera entre el modelo y su sistema objetivo.

St. Thomas Aquinas has been considered a kairos in intellectual history for seeing God’s essence as being. Martin Heidegger criticized philosophers forrepresenting being as a be-ing and identifying it with God, and Jean-Luc Marion speaks of “God without being.” In her Potency and Act Edith Stein introduced thecategory of being without essence, but such being is not God but “the opposite.” For St. Augustine sin was an approach to nonbeing, and Stein saw it leading to a“displacement into nonbeing,” to an (...) “annihilation” where only a “null being” is retained. This eschatological reflection is an intriguing aspect of her “fusion” ofscholasticism and phenomenology. (shrink)

El autor, empeñado desde hace algún tiempo en recuperar la enseñanza de la filosofía en Latín, pone frente a frente en este estudio la teoría evolucionista de Darwin y la "quinta vía" tomística. Ello es ocasión para unas disquisiciones sobre la finalidad teleológica del mundo, la admiración aristotélica como principio del filosofar, y la verosimilitud.Palabras llave: Evolucionismo; teleología; verosimilitud.The author, who has made efforts over time to recover the teaching of philosophy in Latin, confronts in this paper Darwin’s Evolutionist Theory (...) and the Tomistic "Fifth Way". This confrontation lends itself to the rendering of some elaborations on the teleological finality of the world, Aristotilian admiration of the beginning of the philosophical task, and verisimilitude.Palabras llave: Evolutionism; teleology; verisimilitude. (shrink)

Probabilism is a Scholastic discussion of conscience beginning in the sixteenth century and lasting over four hundred years. To tackle historical issues in normative ethics, the participants had to work out a general "metaethical" theory relating epistemic and deontic logics, the logics of knowledge and virtue. May I act if I am unsure that I may? How, when I am in doubt, can I acquire the critical mass of rationality that virtue demands? The normative aspect of the controversy has been (...) studied in its historical setting, but its interesting and original metaethics has been largely ignored outside the Scholastic circle itself. The discussion is obviously relevant, even practical, today; in fact, any treatment of conscience and relativism already includes the material of probabilist analyses. (shrink)

Edith Stein, an outstanding representative of the Catholic intellectual renaissance of the first half of the last century, was a “charter” member of the phenomenological school around Edmund Husserl and made key contributions to the renewed study of St. Thomas Aquinas. From a Jewish background, she entered the Catholic church and then the Carmelite order; when asked why she became a Catholic she would reply in Latin “secretum meum mihi”. I suggest, using her characteristic concepts such as “being objective” and (...) “undergoing”, why she wished to “fuse” phenomenology and Thomism as well as how she defined the moral “weight” of daily circumstances and how she combined epistemology with Carmelite mysticism. Then with the help of St. John of the Cross, I offer an explanation of her “secret”. Finally I describe her history of recent philosophy. (shrink)

I present two logical systems to show the “analogy of proportionality„ common to several interpretations: modality (necessity and possibility), quantification, truth-functional relations, moral attitudes (deontic logic), states of knowledge (epistemic logic), and states of belief (doxastic logic). To display the two underlying analogical relations, I call upon the originally Scholastic convention, recently put to use again, of using squares, hexagons, and octagons “of opposition„. A combined epistemic–deontic logic happens to be found in the traditional “probabilist„ theory of the “good conscience„, (...) and I shall then briefly explain how this is so. (shrink)

The development of philosophical ideas throughout history has sometimes been assisted by the use of handcrafted instruments. Some paradigmatic cases, such as the invention of the telescope or the microscope, show that many philosophical approaches have been the result of the intervention of such instruments. The aim of this article is to show the determining role that stringed musical instruments with frets had in the crisis and generation of philosophical paradigms. In fact, just as the observations of the moon with (...) the telescope broke more than a thousand years of Aristotelian hegemony, the fretted string instruments, predecessors of the guitar, played a central role in the collapse of one of the most influential approaches in the history of Philosophy: Pythagorism. We focus on the fundamental hallmarks of Pythagorism and on how, during the 16th century and from the fretted string instruments, the mathematical-musical notion of equal temperament emerged, which from the middle of the 19th century will be established as the prevailing philosophical-musical paradigm of the West. (shrink)

The development of philosophical ideas throughout history has sometimes been assisted by the use of handcrafted instruments. Some paradigmatic cases, such as the invention of the telescope or the microscope, show that many philosophical approaches have been the result of the intervention of such instruments. The aim of this article is to show the determining role that stringed musical instruments with frets had in the crisis and generation of philosophical paradigms. In fact, just as the observations of the moon with (...) the telescope broke more than a thousand years of Aristotelian hegemony, the fretted string instruments, predecessors of the guitar, played a central role in the collapse of one of the most influential approaches in the history of Philosophy: Pythagorism. We focus on the fundamental hallmarks of Pythagorism and on how, during the 16th century and from the fretted string instruments, the mathematical-musical notion of equal temperament emerged, which from the middle of the 19th century will be established as the prevailing philosophical-musical paradigm of the West. (shrink)

Nuestro objetivo es analizar críticamente el enfoque de la noción de modelo de Alfred Tarski que Patrick Suppes integra en su concepción semanticista de las teorías científicas. En efecto, mostraremos cómo esta noción se configura en Suppes (1969; 1970) desde una revisión formal de la noción de modelo en Tarski (1936), focalizando nuestro análisis en tres ejes principales: i) una crítica a la perspectiva estática del semanticismo; ii) un análisis de las condiciones restrictivas y el lenguaje para la axiomatización de (...) teorías; y iii) la revisión de las nociones de ‘sistema axiomático’, ‘sistema formal’ y ‘método axiomático’. (shrink)

This article aims to present a Free Dialogic Logic [FDL] as a general framework for hypothesis generation in the practice of modelling in science. Our proposal is based on the idea that the inferential function that models fulfil during the modelling process (surrogate reasoning) should be carried out without ontological commitments. The starting point to achieve our objective is that the scientific consideration of models without a target is a symptom that, on the one hand, the Applicability of Logic should (...) be considered among the conditions of adequacy that should take into account all modeling process and, on the other, that the inferential apparatus at the base of the surrogate reasoning process must be rid of realistic assumptions that lead to erroneous conclusions. In this sense, we propose as an alternative an ontologically neutral inferential system in the perspective of dialogical pragmatism. (shrink)

En este artículo delineamos una propuesta para elaborar una lógica de las ficciones desde el enfoque lúdico del pragmatismo dialógico. En efecto, centrados en una de las críticas mayores al enfoque clásico de la lógica: la esquizofrenia estructural de su semántica, recorremos los compromisos ontológicos de las dos tradiciones mayores de la lógica para establecer sus posibilidades y límites en el análisis del discurso ficcional, y la superación desde una perspectiva lúdico pragmática.

This paper aims to propose an inferential and dynamic approach to understanding with models in biology. Understanding plays a central role in the practice of modeling. From its links with the other two central elements of scientific research, experimentation, and explanation, we show its epistemic relevance to the case of explanation in biology. Furthermore, by including the notion of understanding, we propose a non-referentialist perspective on scientific models, which is determined by their use.