La figura de Orfeo, el poeta mítico, ha trascendido a través de la tradición poética e influido en ella de diversas maneras: el personaje está ligado a géneros poéticos, y a tópicos, motivos y temas literarios. Además, es el prototipo del poeta y el origen de la idealización de sus facultades. Esto último es en sí un tópico, como se puede observar en dos poemas, “Introito” de Ramón López Velarde y “Arte poética” de Alfonso Reyes.

Este artículo reseña: Carlos Ramón Fernández Liesa, Juan Daniel Oliva Martínez, y Oscar Pérez de la Fuente (eds.), Soberanía, Colección Gregorio Peces-Barba, Dykinson, Madrid, 2022, 172 pp.

Arguments analogous to those found in the late medieval theory of the king’s two bodies, popularized by Ernst Kantorowicz, were resurrected in early nineteenth-century constitutional theories of the moderating powers of monarchy. Post-revolutionary French liberal thought, echoed by its Portuguese counterpart, rediscovered the virtues of the institution of royalty, notably the immaterial and immortal body of the king. This rediscovery was prompted by the uncertainties of different national political contexts which made many contemporaries believe it desirable to integrate restored monarchies (...) within modern constitutional models for state stability. This first occurred with the Bourbons’ return to post-Napoleonic France and the restoration of the monarchy in 1814, and then with the Braganza royal family’s return to Portugal in 1821 after thirteen years of rule from Brazil. Using arguments similar to those previously made in late medieval European political and legal thought, French and Portuguese liberals developed a theory of the king’s two powers, according to which the monarch at once exercised a moderating power, defined by the abstract institutional nature of the king’s person, and an executive power, embodied within his physical person. This conceptualization of royal duality was intended to make it possible to delegate executive power to ministers, leaving the king only the attributes of a largely symbolic power. Liberals thereby hoped to confine the monarch to his purely institutional body in a de-politicized constitutional role. (shrink)

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)

Following Post program, we will propose a linguistic and empirical interpretation of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem and related ones on unsolvability by Church and Turing. All these theorems use the diagonal argument by Cantor in order to find limitations in finitary systems, as human language, which can make “infinite use of finite means”. The linguistic version of the incompleteness theorem says that every Turing complete language is Gödel incomplete. We conclude that the incompleteness and unsolvability theorems find limitations in our finitary (...) tool, which is our complete language. (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)

Reconstruction is a central notion in Dewey’s account of inquiry and in his metaphilosophical commitments. In his work, Dewey made a call for reconstruction of philosophy, in the reconstruction of central notions of the discipline, like knowledge, logic, truth, the good, reason, and experience. Inquiry itself is reconstructive, according to Dewey, involving the transformation of an indeterminate situation into one which is determinate and understood. Dewey’s philosophical views should therefore be of interest to those taking part in the recent turn (...) towards revisionary philosophical methodologies, like conceptual engineering, explication, and amelioration. In light of the recent developments in revisionary methodologies, I aim to explore Dewey’s conception of concepts in relation to the conceptual engineering literature, suggesting that it provides a useful conception of concepts for conceptual engineering, and to suggest a Deweyan model of philosophical inquiry where concepts are the objects of inquiry. In both cases, I hope to show a productive interaction between Dewey’s ideas and contemporary discussions of conceptual engineering. (shrink)

An individual's health, genetic, or environmental-exposure data, placed in an online repository, creates a valuable shared resource that can accelerate biomedical research and even open opportunities for crowd-sourcing discoveries by members of the public. But these data become “immortalized” in ways that may create lasting risk as well as benefit. Once shared on the Internet, the data are difficult or impossible to redact, and identities may be revealed by a process called data linkage, in which online data sets are matched (...) to each other. Reidentification, the process of associating an individual's name with data that were considered deidentified, poses risks such as insurance or employment discrimination, social stigma, and breach of the promises often made in informed-consent documents. At the same time, re-ID poses risks to researchers and indeed to the future of science, should re-ID end up undermining the trust and participation of potential research participants. The ethical challenges of online data sharing are heightened as so-called big data becomes an increasingly important research tool and driver of new research structures. Big data is shifting research to include large numbers of researchers and institutions as well as large numbers of participants providing diverse types of data, so the participants’ consent relationship is no longer with a person or even a research institution. In addition, consent is further transformed because big data analysis often begins with descriptive inquiry and generation of a hypothesis, and the research questions cannot be clearly defined at the outset and may be unforeseeable over the long term. In this article, we consider how expanded data sharing poses new challenges, illustrated by genomics and the transition to new models of consent. We draw on the experiences of participants in an open data platform—the Personal Genome Project—to allow study participants to contribute their voices to inform ethical consent practices and protocol reviews for big-data research. (shrink)

In spite of the considerable literature nowadays existing on the issue of the moral exclusion of nonhuman animals, there is still work to be done concerning the characterization of the conceptual framework with which this question can be appraised. This paper intends to tackle this task. It starts by defining speciesism as the unjustified disadvantageous consideration or treatment of those who are not classified as belonging to a certain species. It then clarifies some common misunderstandings concerning what this means. Next, (...) it rejects the idea that there are different kinds of speciesism. Such an idea may result from confusion because there are (1) different ways in which speciesism can be defended; and (2) different speciesist positions, that is, different positions that assume speciesism among their premises. Depending on whether or not these views assume other criteria for moral consideration apart from speciesism, they can be combined or simple speciesist positions. But speciesism remains in all cases the same idea. Finally, the paper examines the concept of anthropocentrism, the disadvantageous treatment or consideration of those who are not members of the human species. This notion must be conceptually distinguished from speciesism and from misothery (aversion to nonhuman animals). Anthropocentrism is shown to be refuted because it either commits a petitio principia fallacy or it falls prey to two arguments: the argument from species overlap (widely but misleadingly known as “argument from marginal cases”) and the argument from relevance. This rebuttal identifies anthropocentrism as a speciesist view. (shrink)

I argue that a standard formulation of hinge epistemology is host to epistemic relativism and show that two leading hinge approaches (Coliva’s acceptance account and Pritchard’s nondoxastic account) are vulnerable to a form of incommensurability that leads to relativism. Building on both accounts, I introduce a new, minimally epistemic conception of hinges that avoids epistemic relativism and rationally resolves hinge disagreements. According to my proposed account, putative cases of epistemic incommensurability are rationally resolvable: hinges are propositions that are the objects (...) of our belief-like attitudes and are rationally revisable in virtue of our overarching commitment to avoid systematic deception in our epistemic practices. (shrink)

Las tesis que aquí se presentan han sido elaboradas a partir del análisis del ensayo de Jan Mukarovsky: “Función, norma y valor estético como hechos sociales”. (Cfr. Jan Mukarovsky. Escritos de estética y semiótica del arte, pp. 44-121). Las mismas han sido enriquecidas como resultado del debate que, generación tras generación, sobre ellas hemos sostenido con los estudiantes —la mayoría de ellos hoy egresados del posgrado en Estética y Arte de la BUAP—. Es un trabajo que lleva su huella y (...) ningún marco mejor para incluirlo que el de este libro de la serie Academia y Egresados de la Colección La Fuente. Sirva su publicación, entonces, como reconocimiento a la participación activa y creativa de todos ellos en esos siempre gratificantes cursos de Estética y Teoría del Arte III. (shrink)

This paper presents some of the most promising ways wild animals are currently being helped, as well as other ways of helping that may be implemented easily in the near future. They include measures to save animals affected by harmful weather events, wild animal vaccination programs, and projects aimed at reducing suffering among synanthropic animals. The paper then presents other ways of helping wild animals that, while noncontroversial, may reduce aggregate suffering at the ecosystem level. The paper argues that impracticability (...) and normative objections against reducing wild animal suffering fail against these ways of helping wild animals. (shrink)

In attempting to debunk moral realism through an appeal to evolutionary facts, debunkers face a series of problems, which we label the problems of scope, corrosiveness, and post‐hoc justification. To overcome these problems, debunkers must assume certain metaphysical or epistemological positions, or otherwise pre‐establish them. In doing so, they must assume or pre‐establish the very conclusion they seek in advancing the argument. This means that such debunking arguments either beg the question against the moral realist or are undermined as standalone (...) metaethical arguments. (shrink)

Experimental studies show that some corvids, apes, and rodents possess a common long-term memory system that allows them to take goal-directed actions on the basis of absent spatiotemporal contexts. In other words, evidence supports the hypothesis that Episodic Memory —far from being uniquely human— has evolved as a cross-species meaning making system. However, within this zoosemiotic breakthrough, neurocognitive studies now struggle characterizing the relations between teleological factors and phenomenological factors that would account for the episodic behavior displayed by these living (...) beings. Within such field, this paper identifies four epistemological gaps —the ‘Nagelian’, ‘de Waalian’, ‘Chomskyan’, and ‘semiotic’ gaps—, making a case for the need of a future biosemiotic model of Alloanimal Episodic Memory to come into the equation. As a whole, I conclude that experimental developments in AEM research, and philosophical advancements in biosemiotics could converge through the concept of semiosis. Introducing the latter would account for animal episodic agency as a causal influence and continuity between the above relations, outclassing the reductionist and Cartesian separation between ‘external’ bodily behavior and ‘internal’ computational operations. (shrink)

Considering the case of Juan de Vilanova y Piera, often celebrated as the first scientist to accept the prehistoric antiquity of palaeolithic paintings, we explore some of the problems related to the concept of ‘precursor’ in the field of the history of science. In the first section, we propose a brief history of this notion focusing on those authors who have reflected critically on the meaning of predecessors. In the second section, the example of Vilanova illustrates the ways in which (...) historians of science have created precursors. From the vantage of modern science, precursors have traditionally been defined as those who first indicated or announced ideas or theories later accepted by the scientific community. As a result, they have been represented as ‘heroes’ struggling hard to defeat the ignorance of their time. As the case of Juan de Vilanova illustrates, this traditional view is unsatisfactory in many ways. For this reason we consider in the third section a number of methodological strategies to promote a more adequate approach to pioneers. In particular, we suggest that the best way to surmount hagiographical approaches to past scientists is to put them in their own intellectual and historical contexts. (shrink)

Este texto introduz a tradução do discurso de intitulado "Sobre os números transfinitos" ("Über transfinite Zahlen"), proferido por Henri Poincaré em 27 de abril de 1909, na Universidade de Göttingen. Após uma breve apresentação do pensamento do autor acerca dos fundamentos da aritmética, procura-se citar os aspectos mais relevantes da chamada crise dos fundamentos da matemática, para então introduzir a reformulação do conceito de predicatividade aventada no referido discurso sobre números transfinitos, contribuição compreendida como um recurso teórico necessário para a (...) superação dos paradoxos relativos à teoria dos conjuntos. Com isso, pretende-se evidenciar o papel central do texto publicado nesta edição para o desenvolvimento da concepção matemática de Henri Poincaré. This article provides an introduction to the translation of the lecture entitled "On transfinite numbers" ("Über transfinite Zahlen"), given by Henri Poincaré at the University of Göttingen on April 27, 1909. Following a short presentation of Poincaré's views on the foundations of arithmetic, it identifies the aspects of the so-called crisis of the foundations of mathematics that are most relevant for understanding his reconstruction of the concept of predicativity, which is intended to be a theoretical resource that may overcome the paradoxes of set theory. In doing so, the article highlights the central role of this text in the process of maturation of Poincaré's views on the foundations of mathematics. (shrink)

El presente artículo pretende dar a conocer de manera general pero completa el pensamiento del filósofo y crítico italiano Giorgio Colli acerca del origen de la filosofía griega. Poniendo especial atención al paradigma nietzscheano de lo apolíneo, Colli considera el origendel logos racional en los sabios de la época arcaica a partir de la interpretación del oráculo de Apolo que seresenta a los hombres como un enigma. De este origen nacerán las dos características básicas del pensar arcaico que después se (...) plasmarán en la filosofía:su carácter polémico y su carácter destructivo. (shrink)

Scientists strive to understand the world. Traditionally, philosophers of science have thought that this is a matter of constructing explanations, based on theories and laws, thereby gaining understanding of phenomena by explaining them. This thesis takes a radically different approach, instead relating the notion of understanding to the activities that scientists perform. Scientific understanding is not just a matter of representing or explaining the world, but a matter of practical and intelligent doing. Philosophers of science have continued to sell short (...) the project of making sense of scientific understanding, limiting their views to the articulated and well-formed products of inquiry, like theory and explanation. In taking a pragmatist approach to the epistemology of understanding, I reorientate our theorising about understanding from products to processes, and from explanations to methods and concepts. I thereby provide an ecumenical account of scientific understanding that can accommodate the dynamics and heterogeneity of scientific practice. In Chapter 1, I argue against the dominant focus on explanatory understanding in philosophy of science, thereby making room for my own account of operational understanding. Chapter 2 provides an account of how concepts are essential constituents of understanding. Concepts frame entities so that scientists can think and talk about and interact with them intelligently. Chapter 3 gives an account of understanding-how, through my notion of operational understanding, which relates to the methods that structure and guide successful performances of activities. In Chapter 4, I take up the task of describing the psychology of understanding, the kind of state that understanding is, which I argue is accounted for in terms of skill. In Chapter 5, I develop an account of how cognitive devices — tools for thinking, like models and thought-experiments — facilitate and produce understanding. (shrink)

The argument from relevance expresses an intuition that, although shared by many applied ethicists, has not been analyzed and systematized in the form of a clear argument thus far. This paper does this by introducing the concept of value relevance, which has been used before in economy but not in the philosophical literature. The paper explains how value relevance is different from moral relevance, and distinguishes between direct and indirect ways in which the latter can depend on the former. These (...) clarifications allow the argument to explain in detail how we can make two claims. The first one is that being a recipient of value should be the only criterion for full moral considerability. This follows if we accept that value relevance should determine, directly or indirectly, moral relevance. The second claim is that, given what the main theories of wellbeing imply regarding what entities can be recipients of value, sentience is both a sufficient and a necessary criterion for full moral considerability. The paper argues that this conclusion stands even if we hold views that consider other values different from sentience. (shrink)

The dating of Hero of Alexandria has been linked with the lunar eclipse of March 13, ad 62, since Otto Neugebauer discovered that this eclipse is the only one that can fit the one described in Hero’s Dioptra 35. Although only a number of scholars claim that Hero himself observed the eclipse, almost all of them take Neugebauer’s identification for granted. We use statistical and linguistic methods to criticize this assumption: all indices we have found point to the fact that (...) the eclipse was merely invented as an example and, for that reason, that it cannot be used to determine Hero’s life span. (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.

ABSTRACTColin Hay's constructivist institutionalism and Vivien A. Schmidt's discursive institutionalism are two recent attempts to theorize ideas as potential explanations of institutional change. This new attention to the causal role of ideas is welcome, but Hay and Schmidt do not take into consideration the constitutive and structural aspects of ideas. Instead they reduce ideas to properties of individual conscious minds, scanting the respects in which ideas are intersubjectively baked into the practices shared by individuals. This aspect of ideas—arguably, the institutional (...) side of ideas—is developed in post-structuralist thought, which therefore demands a place in ideational research. (shrink)

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.

One of the main tools in the study of nonmonotonic consequence relations is the representation of such relations in terms of preferential models. In this paper we give an unified and simpler framework to obtain such representation theorems.

The use of the concept of moral status is commonplace today in debates about the moral consideration of entities lacking certain special capacities, such as nonhuman animals. This concept has been typically used to defend the view that adult human beings have a status higher than all those entities. However, even those who disagree with this claim have often accepted the idea of moral status as if it were part of an undisputed received way of thinking in ethics. This paper (...) argues that the use of this concept, however common, distorts our understanding of how to behave towards different individuals in different circumstances. When moral status is identified with the interest in living or the capacity for well-being, it becomes an arbitrary and irrelevant criterion. When it is used as a synonym of moral consideration or considerability, in a way that is compatible with the principle of equal consideration, it becomes trivial and confusing. When used, instead, to defend the unequal moral consideration of interests of equal weight, it has several implausible implications. In particular, the claim that unequal status is justified because of the value of cognitive capacities implausibly entails that our exercising those capacities should have priority over the promotion of our wellbeing. The idea of full moral status is also problematic as it implies the possibility of status monsters. In addition, its use is based in a misconceived way of what it would really entail to have a full status by virtue of having rational capacities. The paper concludes that we have strong reasons to abandon the concept of moral status altogether. (shrink)

The best known algebraizable logics with a conjunction and an implication have the property that the conjunction defines a meet semi-lattice in the algebras of their algebraic counterpart. This property makes it possible to associate with them a semi-lattice based deductive system as a companion. Moreover, the order of the semi-lattice is also definable using the implication. This makes that the connection between the properties of the logic and the properties of its semi-lattice based companion is strong. We introduce a (...) class of algebraizable deductive systems that includes those systems, and study some of their properties and of their semi-lattice based companions. We also study conditions which, when satisfied by a deductive system in the class, imply that it is strongly algebraizable. This brings some information on the open area of research of Abstract Algebraic Logic which consists in finding interesting characterizations of classes of algebraizable logics that are strongly algebraizable. (shrink)

Biblical ethics -- The insights of history.

A logic in a finite language is said to be finitely presentable if it is axiomatized by finitely many finite rules. It is proved that binary non-indexed products of logics that are both finitely presentable and finitely equivalential are essentially finitely presentable. This result does not extend to binary non-indexed products of arbitrary finitely presentable logics, as shown by a counterexample. Finitely presentable logics are then exploited to introduce finitely presentable Leibniz classes, and to draw a parallel between the Leibniz (...) and the Maltsev hierarchies. (shrink)

Leibniz filters play a prominent role in the theory of protoalgebraic logics. In [3] the problem of the definability of Leibniz filters is considered. Here we study the definability of Leibniz filters with parameters. The main result of the paper says that a protoalgebraic logic S has its strong version weakly algebraizable iff it has its Leibniz filters explicitly definable with parameters.

ABSTRACT The technocratic dimension of government—its reliance upon knowledge claims, usually in scientific guise—is of great importance if we wish to understand modern power and governance. In Power Without Knowledge: A Critique of Technocracy, Jeffrey Friedman investigates the often-overlooked question of the relationship between technocratic knowledge/power and ideas. Friedman’s contribution to our understanding of technocracy can therefore be read as a contribution to governmentality studies, one that introduces the possibility of adding normative solutions to this critical tradition.

A logic is selfextensional if its interderivability (or mutual consequence) relation is a congruence relation on the algebra of formulas. In the paper we characterize the selfextensional logics with a conjunction as the logics that can be defined using the semilattice order induced by the interpretation of the conjunction in the algebras of their algebraic counterpart. Using the charactrization we provide simpler proofs of several results on selfextensional logics with a conjunction obtained in [13] using Gentzen systems. We also obtain (...) some results on Fregean logics with conjunction. (shrink)