El antropólogo social Carlos Reynoso ha planteado una serie de objeciones al llamado pensamiento complejo, cuyo principal representante es el pensador francés Edgar Morin. Reynoso toma como punto de referencia para realizar la crítica al pensamiento complejo el rigor conceptual de las ciencias de la complejidad. Sus acusaciones sobre el pensamiento complejo se fundamentan en el carácter discursivo de éste y en su falta de un método científico. Este artículo analiza y critica el concepto implícito de cientificidad en el pensamiento (...) de Reynoso y propone la necesidad de articular pensamiento filosófico y metodología empírica para comprender la complejidad y sus ciencias. (shrink)

Cybersecurity aggregates are numerical data obtained by aggregation on features along a database of cybersecurity reports. These aggregates are obtained by integration of time-stamped tables using some recent results of non-standard calculus. Time-series of aggregates are shown to contain relevant information about the concrete system dealt with. Trend time series is also forecasted using known data-driven methods. Although absolute forecasting of trend time series is not obtained, a directional forecasting of trend time series is achieved thence validated by means of (...) a rolling cross validation scheme on a public database of Scareware reports. (shrink)

El desarrollo de la tecnología y de la inteligencia artificial provocan desde hace años preguntas éticas y antropológicas. La Suma Teológica de Santo Tomás permite categorizar términos tecnológicos y establecer ontologías en clave filosófica. Con esta metodología de la Suma se va a estudiar aquí el término “metaverso” y sus implicaciones éticas. El artículo aporta además una revisión sistemática de literatura científica para elaborar un mapa de conocimiento desde un punto de vista cualitativo y cuantitativo que visibilice el impacto de (...) esta terminología emergente en la investigación. (shrink)

After compulsory secondary education; many teenagers face the process of choosing a university degree. This process involves uncertainties referred to their personal abilities, interests, social expectations and professional future. The present work is aimed at determining whether the reasons behind the selection of a particular university degree differ depending on the chosen degree. Another objective is determining whether these reasons differ significantly according to gender. The sample comprises 983 students belonging to the area of social and legal sciences at the (...) University of Seville. The obtained results reveal the existence of four main reasons behind the selection of university degrees for which significant gender-related differences were observed: easy degree, job opportunities, high wages and provision of social services. Besides, these seven reasons are observed to differ widely in six of the considered degrees. (shrink)

Patina is the word used for the green or brown film formed on the surface of old bronze, an excess of which can mask the true characteristics of the original masterpiece. Filippo Baldinucci used the word patina in a modern sense for first time in his book “Tuscan Vocabulary of the Art of Design”. Metaphors have been part of philosophical speech since the time of Plato. This figure of speech is used to attempt to provide a sensitive presence of an (...) idea to improve understanding and to make a more vivid perception of that concept. On analysing the creative process of contemporary re-search on health topics and its further dissemination, we defend the epistemological thesis that there is always some degree of patina on an original article and this may obscure the underlying scientific work. Conclusion: We consider that patina in scientific papers is very different from the concept of epidemiological bias. We think that any researcher who reads an original article acts as a restorer of knowledge. If a reader is aware of the existence of scientific patina, that reader will know how to look through it and see the masterpiece hidden underneath. (shrink)

Assessing physical fitness has emerged as a proxy of the health status of children and adolescents and therefore as relevant from a public health point of view. DAFIS is a project included in Plan Galicia Saudable of the regional government of Galicia. DAFIS consists of an on-line software devoted to record the results of a standard physical fitness protocol carried out as a part of the physical education curriculum. The aims of this study were: to obtain normative values of physical (...) fitness of the Galician school population evaluated in the DAFIS project, and to identify a reduced number of components and tests able to capture a significant amount of the variability in the physical fitness of children and adolescents. From an initial sample of 27784 records, 15287 cases were considered after filtering. Generalized Additive Models for Location, Scale and Shape were used for obtaining percentile curves and tables for each sex. Furthermore, a principal components analysis was performed, selecting the number of components by applying the Kaiser’s rule and selecting a subset of variables considering the correlation between each variable and the components. Percentile curves and normative values are reported for each test and sex. Physical fitness was better in boys than in girls throughout age groups, except for flexibility that was consistently higher in girls. Two main components were detected throughout age groups: the first one representing body composition and partially cardiorespiratory fitness and the second one muscular fitness. For boys and girls, waist to height ratio had the highest correlations with the first component in four out of six age groups. The highest correlation with the second component, was most frequently observed for the handgrip test both in boys and girls. This study provides evidence about the utility of school community actions like DAFIS aimed to track the health-related fitness of children and adolescents. The results suggest that fat mass distribution and muscular performance concentrate a high proportion physical fitness variance. (shrink)

THE OCCASION FOR THE ESSAYS RESPONDING TO MANAGING DIVERSITY IN academe follows in response to a challenge issued by Miguel De La Torre in a 2006 plenary panel regarding the invisibility of minority scholars' work in SCE publications. That 2006 panel, which included presentations by De La Torre, Melanie Harris, Gabriel Salgado, and Darryl Trimiew, stimulated discussions in both the Women's Caucus and the meeting of the Board of Directors; this set of essays from a 2008 plenary session and (...) a concurrent session held later in the meeting is the result of those earlier discussions. The two sessions both address diversity: these essays feature minority voices presenting specific proposals for how minority scholarship should and should not be used by majority and other minority scholars; the concurrent session featured a discussion by majority scholars on what whites must do to diversify the society. Our hope is that these essays and the discussions they generate will shed more light on this extremely complex and important issue for the SCE and the institutions in which members work. (shrink)

Con motivo del cincuenta aniversario de la muerte de Miguel Asín Palacios, se pasa revista a su aportación a la historia de la filosofía en el Islam, en especial a la andalusí, a través de un breve análisis de sus principales escritos.On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the death of the distinguished Aragonese arabist Miguel Asín Palacios, the autor reviews in this article the contribution of Asín to the history of Islamic philosophy, especially to the philosophy (...) of Al-Andalus, through a brief analysis of his main writings. (shrink)

La pregunta por el ser humano en Montaigne atraviesa todo el libro de Los ensayos. Una pregunta que se responde Montaigne en su proceso de pintarse y describirse, donde encuentra toda la condición humana. Al ir escribiendo se encuentra con el in-terrogante ¿Qué se yo? Que busca dar respuestas en sus fluctuantes escritos, los cuales reflejan su experiencia de vivir como un humano, orgulloso y miserable, endiosado y humilde, dualizado y unificado, en un ser que es cuerpo y alma en (...) una especie de unión marital. En la primera parte de este artículo, me adentro en lo que significa para Montaigne la comprensión del ser humano desde su condición fluctuante. En una segunda parte, me adentraré en la condición humana desde la experiencia y la humildad que permite a Montaigne desligarse del antropocentrismo. En la tercera parte, desde lo trabajado llegaré a la comprensión de la unidad del hombre en su cuerpo y alma como un matrimonio. Por último, no dejaré de lado el aspecto conversacional en la comprensión antropológica montaniana, que le permite experimentar la pluralidad, la diversidad y la tolerancia. (shrink)

Se valoran las principales ideas axiológicas de filósofo mexicano Miguel Bueno, a través de una de sus obras medulares –“Contribución a la teoría de los valores”– con el objetivo de desentrañar, su comprensión tanto de la naturaleza de los valores, como de su jerarquía de los valores, aspectos estos nodales de la concepción axiológica del autor. Sobre esta base se realiza un enjuiciamiento crítico de sus propuestas teóricas.

Traducción anotada de Rafael Ramón Guenero. Esta versión ha aparecido publicada en Averroes. Antología, introducción y selección de textos M. Cruz Hernández. Sevilla. Fundación El Monte. 1998. pp, 114-123. Como decía José Miguel Puerta en su versión de la primera parte de la Paráfrasis del Libro de la Poética, publicada en el número anterior de esta misma Revista, por el carácter divulgativo de aquella Antología, los textos fueron editados sin anotaciones ni aparato crítico. Creo conveniente, por ello, su (...) publicación con las pertinentes notas. (shrink)

Reseña sobre o libro de López Vazquez: Domingo García-Sabell e a fenomenoloxía.

¿Toda regla social es una convención aceptada por un acuerdo de voluntades? A esta pregunta, Ramón Ortega responde negativamente en su libro Compromiso mutuo y derecho: un enfoque convencionalista. Según el autor, el carácter normativo del derecho no estaría justificado por la "vaga, oscura y controvertida noción de aceptación" de Hart, sino por otra, más general: el compromiso mutuo, tomada de la metafísica social de Margaret Gilbert. Pero ¿cuál es la diferencia entre el hecho de que dos o más (...) personas acepten una convención y que exista entre ellas un compromiso mutuo? Pensemos en un famoso y sutil ejemplo tomado de la propia Gilbert: Ana y Miguel caminan uno cerca del otro al salir de un curso. (shrink)

Class, race and gender are three of the most salient factors in society. They determine to an important extent the opportunities we have, e.g. to access public.

When reasoning about dependence relations, philosophers often rely on gradualist assumptions, according to which abrupt changes in a phenomenon of interest can result only from abrupt changes in the low-level phenomena on which it depends. These assumptions, while strictly correct if the dependence relation in question can be expressed by continuous dynamical equations, should be handled with care: very often the descriptively relevant property of a dynamical system connecting high- and low-level phenomena is not its instantaneous behaviour but its stable (...) fixed points (those in the vicinity of which it spends most of the time, after comparatively short transitory periods), and stable fixed points can change abruptly as a result of infinitesimal changes of the low-level phenomenon. We illustrate this potential gradualist trap by showing that Chalmers’ fading qualia argument falls into it. (shrink)

Computer simulations have conventionally been understood to be either extensions of formal methods such as mathematical models or as special cases of empirical practices such as experiments. Here, I argue that computer simulations are best understood as instruments. Understanding them as such can better elucidate their actual role as well as their potential epistemic standing in relation to science and other scientific methods, practices and devices.

In this paper I argue that Artificial Intelligence and the many data science methods associated with it, such as machine learning and large language models, are first and foremost epistemic technologies. In order to establish this claim, I first argue that epistemic technologies can be conceptually and practically distinguished from other technologies in virtue of what they are designed for, what they do and how they do it. I then proceed to show that unlike other kinds of technology (_including_ other (...) epistemic technologies) AI can be uniquely positioned as an epistemic technology in that it is primarily designed, developed and deployed to be used in _epistemic contexts_ such as inquiry, it is specifically designed, developed and deployed to manipulate _epistemic content_ such as data, _and_ it is designed, developed and deployed to do so particularly through _epistemic operations_ such as prediction and analysis. As has been shown in recent work in the philosophy and ethics of AI (Alvarado, AI and Ethics, 2022a), understanding AI as an epistemic technology will also have significant implications for important debates regarding our relationship to AI technologies. This paper includes a brief overview of such implications, particularly those pertaining to explainability, opacity, trust and even epistemic harms related to AI technologies. (shrink)

Bioethics, Volume 36, Issue 2, Page 121-133, February 2022.

It is widely supposed that evolutionary debunking arguments against morality constitute a type of epistemological objection to our moral beliefs. In particular, the debunking force of such arguments is not supposed to depend on the metaphysical claim that moral facts do not exist. In this paper I argue that this standard epistemological construal of EDAs is highly misleading, if not mistaken. Specifically, I argue that the most widely discussed EDAs all make key and controversial metaphysical claims about the nature of (...) morality or the possibility of moral truth that belie their apparently epistemological character. I show that the debunking force of these EDAs derives largely from metaphysical claims about morality and their implications for the possibility of moral reduction, rather than from epistemological worries associated with the existence of an causal/non-moral explanation of our moral judgments. The paper briefly concludes with a dilemma that I believe confronts all EDAs such as those discussed in this paper: either such arguments are unsound, or else they prove too much, debunking our knowledge of science and the external world, as well as morality. (shrink)

A ‘companions in guilt’ strategy against moral error theory aims to show that the latter proves too much: if sound, it supports an implausible error-theoretic conclusion in other areas such as epistemic or practical reasoning. Christopher Cowie [2016 Cowie, C. 2016. Good News for Moral Error Theorists: A Master Argument Against Companions in Guilt Strategies, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 94/1: 115–30.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] [Google Scholar]] has recently produced what he claims is a ‘master argument’ against (...) all such strategies. The essence of his argument is that CG arguments cannot work because they are afflicted by internal incoherence or inconsistency. I argue, first, that Cowie's master argument does not succeed. Beyond this, I argue that there is no good reason to think that any such argument—one that purports to identify an internal incoherence in CG arguments—can succeed. Second, I argue that the main substantive area of disagreement between error theorists and CG theorists essentially concerns the conceptual profile of epistemic reasons—specifically, whether they are strongly categorical—not the ontological question of whether such reasons exist. I then develop an argument in favour of the CG theorist's position by considering the moral error theorist's arguments in support of the conceptual claim that moral reasons are strongly categorical. These include, notably, criticisms made by Joyce [2011] and Olson [2014] of Finlay's [2008] ‘end relational’ view of morality, according to which moral reasons are relative to some end or standard, hence not strongly categorical. Examining these criticisms, I argue that, based on what moral error theorists have said regarding the conceptual profile of moral reasons, there is a strong case to be made that moral reasons are strongly categorical if and only if epistemic reasons are. (shrink)

The rapid development of large language models (LLM’s) and of their associated interfaces such as ChatGPT has brought forth a wave of epistemic and moral concerns in a variety of domains of inquiry...

Em analogia com outras discriminações, como o racismo ou o sexismo, o especismo é concebido como uma forma de discriminação moral com base na espécie. Em grande medida, a discussão contemporânea sobre a importância moral dos animais surgiu e desenvolveu-se em torno da crítica e da defesa do especismo. Este artigo oferece uma visão da discussão filosófica contemporânea sobre o especismo. Após uma breve introdução, apresenta-se uma definição de especismo e caracterizam-se vários tipos de especismo, sendo o Antropocentrismo o mais (...) relevante. Depois, expõe-se um argumento proeminente contra o Antropocentrismo: o argumento dos casos marginais. Por fim, algumas posições antropocêntricas são criticamente discutidas. (shrink)

The rapid expansion of computational tools and of data science methods in healthcare has, undoubtedly, raised a whole new set of bioethical challenges. As Laacke and colleagues rightly note,...

Political thought, from Aristotle to Lefebvre, has placed importance on the control of space as an activity of political power. Extraordinary measures taken by global policy-makers since the early 2020s as part of efforts to to combat the pandemic have included mass lock-downs, closed borders, social distancing and other forms of spatial control. Importantly, spaces dedicated to religious worship (churches, etc.) were subjected to extraordinary regulation. In the exercise of this new control of space, social control has played an important (...) role (obligation to declare one’s health condition, incitement to denounce offenders...) fostered by the authorities through various means of new social education, generating new social habits in terms of the management of space. Religious freedom and the autonomy of the Church thus faced new challenges as a result of the extraordinary control of religious space by civil power and the pressure of social control. The new forms of control incorporated into our habits deserve to be critically reviewed in our search for true spaces of freedom that are not sacrificed in the name of supposed science. (shrink)

v. 1. Propedêutica filosófia. v. 2. Ontognoseologia juridica.

Representations are not only used in our folk-psychological explanations of behaviour, but are also fruitfully postulated, for example, in cognitive science. The mainstream view in cognitive science maintains that our mind is a representational system. This popular view requires an understanding of the nature of the entities they are postulating. Teleosemantic theories face this challenge, unpacking the normativity in the relation of representation by appealing to the teleological function of the representing state. It has been argued that, if intentionality is (...) to be explained in teleological terms, then the function of a state cannot depend on its phylogenetical history, given the metaphysical possibility of a duplicate of an intentional being that lacks an evolutionary history. In this paper, I present a method to produce, according to our current knowledge in genetic engineering, human-like individuals who are not the product of natural selection in the required sense. This variation will be used to shed light on the main replies that have been offered in the literature to the Swampman thought experiment. I argue that these replies are not satisfactory: representations should better not depend on natural selection. I conclude that a non-etiological notion of function is to be preferred for characterizing the relation of representation. (shrink)

Within the climate justice debate, the ‘beneficiary pays’ principle holds that those who benefit from greenhouse emissions associated with industrialization ought to pay for the costs of mitigating and adapting to their adverse effects. This principle constitutes a claim of inter-generational justice, and it is widely believed that the non-identity problem raises serious difficulties for any such claim. After briefly sketching the rationale behind ‘beneficiary pays,’ this paper offers a new way of understanding the claim that persons in developed societies (...) have benefited from industrialization. It argues that when we think of the claim in this new way, it evades the non-identity problem entirely. Some objections to this approach are then considered and rebutted. The paper concludes by comparing the present, relatively modest solution to the nonidentity problem with a much more ambitious attempt from the recent literature. (shrink)

Explaining agency is a significant challenge for those who are interested in the sciences of the mind, and non-representationalists are no exception to this. Even though both ecological psychologists and enactivists agree that agency is to be explained by focusing on the relation between the organism and the environment, they have approached it by focusing on different aspects of the organism-environment relation. In this paper, I offer a suggestion for a radical embodied account of agency that combines ecological psychology with (...) recent trends in enactive cognitive science. According to this proposal, while enactivism focuses primarily on describing how our acquired sensorimotor schemes and habits mutually equilibrate, affecting our tendency to act upon some affordances instead of others, ecological psychology focuses on studying how perceptual information contributes to the actualization of the sensorimotor schemes and habits without mediating representations, inferences, and computations. The paper concludes by briefly exploring how this ecological-enactive theory of agency can account for how socio-cultural norms shape human agency. (shrink)

Despite the emergence of computer games as a dominant cultural industry, we know little or nothing about the ethics of computer games. Considerations of the morality of computer games seldom go beyond intermittent portrayals of them in the mass media as training devices for teenage serial killers. In this first scholarly exploration of the subject, Miguel Sicart addresses broader issues about the ethics of games, the ethics of playing the games, and the ethical responsibilities of game designers. He argues (...) that computer games are ethical objects, that computer game players are ethical agents, and that the ethics of computer games should be seen as a complex network of responsibilities and moral duties. Players should not be considered passive amoral creatures; they reflect, relate, and create with ethical minds. The games they play are ethical systems, with rules that create gameworlds with values at play. Drawing on concepts from philosophy and game studies, Sicart proposes a framework for analyzing the ethics of computer games as both designed objects and player experiences. After presenting his core theoretical arguments and offering a general theory for understanding computer game ethics, Sicart offers case studies examining single-player games, multiplayer games, and online gameworlds from an ethical perspective. He explores issues raised by unethical content in computer games and its possible effect on players and offers a synthesis of design theory and ethics that could be used as both analytical tool and inspiration in the creation of ethical gameplay. (shrink)