En aquest article pretenc fer una crítica al nihilisme mereològic, al·ludint que les expressions «simples agrupats en-tant-que-F» tenen unes conseqüències desastroses per als seus compromisos ontològics. Primer, explicaré què és el nihilisme mereològic -que és part de l’eliminativisme- el qual pretén negar l’existència dels objectes compostos (objectes amb parts pròpies) i l’estratègia de la paràfrasi: l’ús que fan de les expressions «simples agrupats en-tant-que-F» per referir-se als objectes ordinaris sense comprometre’s amb l’existència d’objectes compostos, però posaré l’èmfasi en aquells nihilistes (...) mereològics que pretenen explicar l’existència de les propietats emergents. Seguidament, presentaré una classe de crítiques, les de Bennett i Tallant, sobre l’ús d’aquesta estratègia per part dels nihilistes, i quina és la resposta crítica que ofereix Brenner sobre aquesta classe de crítica. Finalment, presentaré la meva crítica on mostraré que el nihilisme mereològic utilitzant l’estratègia de la paràfrasi s’està comprometent amb l’existència d’objectes compostos i que la crítica de Brenner no funciona amb la meva postura. -/- In this paper I intend to critique mereological nihilism, alluding that the expression «simples arranged F-wise» has disastrous consequences for its ontological commitments. First, I will explain what mereological nihilism is -which is part of Eliminativism- which tries to deny the existence of composite objects (objects with proper parts) and the Paraphrase Strategy: the use they make of the expression «simples arranged F-wise» to refer to ordinary objects without committing to the existence of composite objects, and I put the focus on the mereological nihilist that pretends to explain the existence of emergent properties. Second, I will present a kind of criticism, by Bennett and Tallant, of the use of this strategy by nihilism and which is the response of Brenner about this kind of criticism. Finally, I will present my criticism where I will show that nihilism by using the Paraphrase Strategy is committing itself to the existence of composite objects and that the Brenner’s critique does not work with my position. (shrink)

Quentin Meillassoux (1967) es un filósofo francés que ha ganado reconocimiento en el campo de las producciones filosóficas contemporáneas a partir de la publicación de Après la finitude. Essai sur la nécessité de la contingence (2006). La intención más notable de su filosofía, denominada por él mismo como materialismo especulativo, ha sido la de señalar los efectos lógicos y materiales producidos por el hecho de que la filosofía haya abandonado la tarea de pensar el absoluto. Para Meillassoux, las posibilidades efectivas (...) de plantearnos un nuevo futuro, es decir, un porvenir que no sea la repetición novedosa del pasado, se encuentra en la exploración de las tierras del absoluto que, desde Kant, han sido abandonadas por la filosofía y hoy son propiedad de fanatismos y creencias religiosas que no tienen un enlace racional con la trascendencia. Tomando como punto de partida estas consideraciones, el presente artículo aborda los siguientes interrogantes: ¿Cómo se establece el vínculo entre el absoluto y la emergencia de lo nuevo? ¿Mediante qué mecanismos formales se podría, a partir de las operaciones lógicas de la especulación, actualizar potenciales que nos habiliten formas aún desconocidas de establecer enlaces lógicos con mundos más allá de nuestro entendimiento actual? En base a textos seleccionados de Meillassoux, incluyendo Après la finitude. Essai sur la nécessité de la contingence (2006), Métaphysique et fiction des mondes hors-science (2015), Le Nombre Et La Sirene Un Dechiffrage Du Coup de Des de Mallarme (2011), “L’immanence d’outre monde” (2009), “Potentialité et virtualité” (2006), y “Soustraction et contraction. À propos d'une remarque de Deleuze sur Matière et mémoire” (2007), este artículo ensaya algunas respuestas acerca del valor del materialismo especulativo en la creación y actualización de nuevos potenciales de un inimaginable futuro humano. (shrink)

Com podem fer per individuar accions? Com determinem quines accions són diferents d'unes altres? El present treball discutirà dues teories sobre la individuaci´ó d'accions: la de Davidson i la de Goldman. Atenent a un clàssic escenari filosòfic sobre la individuació d'accions veurem les virtuds i defectes d'aquestes dues propostes.

Actualment en Filosofia, tenim dues caracteritzacions canóniques sobre la naturalesa de la Metafísica, la carnapiana i la quineana, tot i que són dues tesis diferenciades, ambdues coincideixen en que la Metafísica és reduïda a qüestions d'existència. No obstant, Kathrin Koslicki considera que aquestes caracteritzacions de la naturalesa de la Metafísica són errònies i que comporten una crítica explícita a la Metafísica o redueixen la resolució dels problemes metafísics a un pragmatisme. Per això, Koslicki considerant que els desacords metafísics són legítims (...) i profunds, tenint com a marc de referència la filosofia aristotèlica, considera que la tesi quineana i carnapiana no reflecteixen bé la naturalesa de la Metafísica, ja que, hi ha disputes metafísiques que es deuen a disputes no-existencials sobre temes de fonamentabilitat. Koslicki considera que la Metafísica no pot ésser reduïda a qüestions d'existència, sinó que ha de ser pensada com la reflexió de quines entitats són fonamentals, i quines són derivades d'aquestes. L'article està dividit en una primera part introductòria sobre els meus objectius, seguit d'una breu exposició de les tesis carnapiana i quineana de la metafísica, i per últim l'exposició de la proposta neo-aristotèlica de Koslicki. (shrink)

This piece, included in the drift special issue of continent., was created as one step in a thread of inquiry. While each of the contributions to drift stand on their own, the project was an attempt to follow a line of theoretical inquiry as it passed through time and the postal service from October 2012 until May 2013. This issue hosts two threads: between space & place and between intention & attention. The editors recommend that to experience the drifiting thought (...) that attention be paid to the contributions as they entered into conversation one after another. This particular piece is from the BETWEEN SPACE & PLACE thread: April Vannini, Those Between the Common * Laura Dean & Jesse McClelland, Ballard: A Portrait of Placemaking * Amara Hark Weber, Crossroad * Isaac Linder & Berit Soli-Holt, The Call of the Wild: Terror Modulations * Ashley D. Hairston, Momma taught us to keep a clean house * Sean Smith, The Garage * * * * Instead of beginning with radical doubt, we start from naiveté. —Graham Harman, The Quadruple Object Deep in the forest a call was sounding, and as often as he heard this call, mysteriously thrilling and luring, he felt compelled to turn his back upon the fire and the beaten earth around it, and to plunge into the forest, and on and on, he knew not where or why; nor did he wonder where or why, the call sounding imperiously, deep in the forest. —Jack London, The Call of the Wild The figure of the feral remains a perpetual enigma, but the parameters remain relatively consistent. A person, usually a child, enters civilization after having been raised by wolves or kept in some kind of cruel captivity. The outsider perspective on domestication ensuing in an edge of a culture's self-recognition of its clumsier attributes, what has been taken for granted becomes apparent, is brought to the foreground with the stranger and made questionable. Amusement follows naïve questions or observations such as Kaspar Hauser in the Herzog film, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, when Kaspar notes that while in his room he is engulfed by it, but when he looks at the tower he can turn away and it disappears. Ergo, the room is larger than the tower. How entertaining. The aberrant one destabilizes the comforting cultural normative. Places become seen as mere impressions out of space, a patterning, a rut that not everyone lives in like us. This is one figure of the feral. The naiveté that begs all the questions. As a figure for a certain philosophical disposition, the rapidity of one’s saccade scans the environment, intuits it’s space, not from an initial thaumazein or a Critchlean sense of disappointment, but from a child-like naiveté bent on survival. To serve the naïve is merely one form of critique, and it is not nearly used enough in lieu of the critique that provides answers. How dull. It is not necessary to be an outsider to entrench a critique with naiveté. After having forced to suffer in the most parched and rocky terror, itself for so long rooted upwards of fifty feet into the ground upon which it grows, even a grapevine can spontaneously produce a white grape on a red vine. The curious feral can arise from within, and like pinot grigio, it adds variety without admonishing its roots. There is also the feral dog. Not raised by wolves, but humans. Founded in place the figure of this feral denies this place. The trajectory of this feral roves from the cultivated to uncultivated, or in speaking of plants from controlled to volunteer, finding the necessary nutrients and survival patterns on its own. Finding other places, reaching out into space testing its fertility. And when introduced into a foreign environment, it withers or flourishes. We would like to attempt a thesis at this juncture and to accept neither feral figure in its entirety, but to argue for the intimate conjunction between a cultivated place and its resonance with the space it procures for its nest and kin. I'm not a biter, I'm a writer for myself and others. —Jay-Z, What More Can I Say? I am writing for myself and strangers. This is the only way that I can do it. Everybody is a real one to me, everybody is like some one else too to me. No one of them that I know can want to know it and so I write for myself and strangers. —Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans There is no subjective disposition outlining an unambiguous individual of the para-academy. There is no para-academic. We all have day jobs. 'Para-academic' seeped through the cracks as an adjective in the call to frame publishing dedicated to the critical rigor expected by academic publishing, but to deny the limitations of guarded legitimation through capital means. Open-access holds hands with this parasitic descriptor. Para-academic publishing's refusal to adhere to the valuation of locked access of a site, the site “of a desperate initiation to the empty form of value,” 1 seeks to recognize not merely an inclusive interpretation of significance, but the significance of thinking practice. The practice inside the paywalls of academic 'education' is held in a deathgrip by its infatuation with value and information, both empty without the apprehension of human experience, the barbaric yawp. “I can't breathe in here.” It is not that a para-academic practice leads one to the childish wonder of Kaspar Hauser who wonders about the spatiality of his room. It is the academic legitimation that distorts that one can hold the understanding of both in a constellation of place and space. Led to believe there is only a place for things, we are led to disillusionment. It is also not that a para-academic practice relinquishes itself to the invasive growth outside of careful cultivation, an abandonment of pleasantries for the toothy growl of a predator. It is the academy's fear that thought does not require capital to signify value. Some of the most nutritious meals can be foraged. Defining a para-academic practice is not outlining a place of accreditation of the practice, it is the recognition that any place is subject to modulation by the space it inhabits as well as creates. The para-academic practice keeps an eye of the creation of spaces, follows those paths that eat themselves in the name of academia. This is not unlike Red Peter's report to the academy, only successful if we report in idle idiosyncratic banalities that we have once again become victorious in our acculturation and nullification within the confines of accredited mush and our trajectory of wild rigor is defeated in our desire for recognition as recognizable in this place. Weeds are integral to the functioning of a large ecosystem. The manicured garden is entirely reliant on its keeper. The pansy can also go wild once neglected, the daisy definitely does.... a universe comes into being when a space is severed or taken apart. The skin of a living organism cuts off an outside from an inside. So does the circumference of a circle in a plane. By tracing the way we represent such a severance, we can begin to reconstruct, with an accuracy and coverage that appear almost uncanny, the basic forms underlying linguistic, mathematical, physical, and biological science, and can begin to see how the familiar laws of our own experience follow from the original act of severance. The act is itself already remembered, even if unconsciously, as our first attempt to distinguish different things in a world where, in the first place, the boundaries can be drawn anywhere we please. At this stage the universe cannot be distinguished from how we act upon it, and the world may seem like shifting sand beneath our feet. —George Spencer-Brown, Laws of Form Two edges are created: an obedient, conformist, plagiarizing edge, and another edge, mobile, blank, which is never anything but the site of its effect: the place where the death of language is glimpsed. These two edges, the compromise they bring about, are necessary. —Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text Between these two epigraphs, interminable questions of where and questions of happening, gesture, and interface. To stay buoyed between a site of visible happening and haptic perspicacity. Bounded by one or the other leads to a desiccation of potential knowledge. The tumbleweed tumbles until met with mud, a bare structure moving but not movement. A tumbleweed tumbleweeds, propagates only at a place. It becomes significant again, continues. Significance, the site where meaning is made known through kinesthetic apprehension. 2 The feral founds a gestural horizon; an outsider’s scrawl-becoming-law; Deleuze teaching Meno’s dog geometry. Place as marked, outlined, recognized, territorialized. The academies marked by their peculiar disciplines, outlined by their rigid boundaries, recognized as factories of value. This far from ensures complete purchase on the space of thought, but it has made an undeniably elaborate means of making work significant. The academy is a muddy spot, it is fertile, but its gates are high and its dogs are barking. The coordinates of concept and experience. Already claimed by a stabilizing suspension, the terms enter specificity of ‘this is this’. Another correlation: activity and the individual. The individual, a placeholder in the crosshairs of juridical identification. Activity, what expands and surrounds this location, but utterly indebted to the node of “one who”. What's happening in this oscillation of nature and nurture is practice. Practice, as Stengers tells us “is not the activity of an individual or the product of that activity. It is the ingredient without which neither that activity nor this product would exist as such.” 3 Moving outward from our own honing, we're curious about the ingredient creating the place for holding conceptual and experiential engagements in each hand. And we'd like to argue that this place is not a limiting specification, but a practice undulating daily, by the minute. And we call this practice the para-academic practice. I repeat: there was no attraction for me in imitating human beings; I imitated them because I needed a way out, and for no other reason. —Franz Kafka, A Report to an Academy In order to exist, man must rebel, but rebellion must respect the limit it discovers in itself—a limit where minds meet and, in meeting, begin to exist. — Albert Camus, The Rebel Anyone is a para-academic or practicer of such means. The academic can, and we argue should, be active para-academically, to escape the bounds, recognizing no site specific place as a place to rest on or the place to grab the Kafka's top and wonder at its disobedience not to continue. Yet, the para-academic practice must maintain the desire for rigor in scholarship. Indeed desiring past itself to claim a more naïve rigor, one that does not take its form for granted. Without a para-academic practice, the scholar spends half the time merely working on behalf of a hierarchy, to maintain it, and the other measly amounts of time are in the name of thinking, but only in name. Not to mention the amount of debt it takes to attend the halls of higher education. Not to mention the snoring tenures. Not to mention the barely scraping by adjuncts. Not to mention the materials that shake the very force of producible theory. Not to mention when swimming in texts becomes slogging through data. Academia is a barbaric food chain and it is our claim that there is, as always, an imperative for thought to move, with Heidegger, beyond the logics of calculation and planning, to a time of its own. The path, into the panic of the dark wood of this space can be followed by any; any who let the silence and the rigor enter the play. Where the little theater is larger when inhabited ; where the data of the tutor asymptotically refutes; and where, as much as one wouldn’t expect it here, ballet may turn out to be the most feral of forms… NOTES Jean Baudrillard, “Value's Last Tango” Simulacra and Simulation trans. Sheila Faria Glaser,. “What is significance? It is meaning, insofar as it is sensually produced.” Roland Barthes in The Pleasure of the Text. Isabelle Stengers, “The Science Wars” Cosmopolitics I trans. Robert Bononno, 47. (shrink)

Com podem fer per individuar accions? Com determinem quines accions són diferents d'unes altres? El present treball discutirà dues teories sobre la individuació d'accions: la de Davidson i la de Goldman. Atenent a un clàssic escenari filosòfic sobre la individuació d'accions veurem les virtuds i defectes d'aquestes dues propostes.

Pindar's Dithyramb 2opens with a reference to the historical development of the genre it exemplifies, the celebrated circular chorus of classical Greece. The first two lines were long known from various citations, notably in Athenaeus, whose sources included the fourth-century authors Heraclides of Pontus and Aristotle's pupil Clearchus of Soli. The third line appears, only partly legible, on a papyrus fragment published in 1919, which preserves some thirty lines of the dithyramb including most of the first antistrophe.

This piece, included in the drift special issue of continent. , was created as one step in a thread of inquiry. While each of the contributions to drift stand on their own, the project was an attempt to follow a line of theoretical inquiry as it passed through time and the postal service(s) from October 2012 until May 2013. This issue hosts two threads: between space & place and between intention & attention . The editors recommend that to experience the (...) drifiting thought that attention be paid to the contributions as they entered into conversation one after another. This particular piece is from the BETWEEN SPACE & PLACE thread: April Vannini, Those Between the Common * Laura Dean & Jesse McClelland, Ballard: A Portrait of Placemaking * Amara Hark Weber, Crossroad * Isaac Linder & Berit Soli-Holt, The Call of the Wild: Terro(i)r Modulations * Ashley D. Hairston, Momma taught us to keep a clean house * Sean Smith, The Garage (Take One) * * * * Momma taught us to keep a clean house. Dust the wood furniture every two weeks. Clean the bathrooms once a week. Wipe down the baseboards once a season (Those damn baseboards. I still got bruises on my knees from scrubbing those things). Sweep away the cobwebs—and pray that those spiders are either dead or delirious (Livin in the country don’t mean you like bugs, especially the ones with too many legs ). Didn’t matter that the house was full of stuff: Great-Grandma’s heirloom dresser, that weird Mammy salt shaker and matching Uncle Tom pepper grinder (Where the hell did Momma get those P.O.S.’s?), the outdated drapes from Belks, Dad’s favorite wooden TV tray, and that uuuuugly love seat that some crazy uncle thought was a glorious find from the Salvation Army (Momma tried to make it pretty with some pillows, but no amount of love could help that seat). Spring Cleaning meant pullin all that furniture away from the walls and holdin your breath to see what time collected in the crevices. Then you gotta be careful not to breathe out too heavy cause the dust would go flying fore you got a chance to catch it. If you didn’t, you’d quickly find out if you’re allergic to dust. Quarter cup of lemon Lysol in a bucket of steaming water and an old wash rag. Maybe two. A dust towel and citrus-scent Pledge. Me and my brothers would fight over who cleaned what. Somehow the twins always got the easy stuff: vacuuming or moving dirt around with the feather-duster. Finishing in enough time to fly down the street on their bikes with the neighborhood kids. Older sister never got off that easy. Each of my stubby fingers morphed into plump, lemon-fresh golden raisins by the time that whole damn house was done. I would finish just in time to sit with Nadine on the porch, counting the seconds til the sun turned off and the fireflies fluttered on. The craziest thing: despite all that cleaning, the house still smelled like Momma’s cookin. That Old House. Might have been some of Grandma’s and Great-Grandma’s cookin mixed in there too. Pork chops. Ham hock soaked in collards. Pinto beans and mustard greens. Corn bread and my Auntie’s famous macaroni and cheese. Didn’t matter if the oven was cold and the valve of the gas stove had been shut for days. A stranger woulda thought someone’d been slavin away in that kitchen for a week straight. No Sweet Citrus & Zest Fabreze back then. Lysol would mask the odors for a little while. Not long enough to overpower the 50 years of goodness marinated in buttermilk, kneaded with lard, and fried in Crisco that’d been embedded in the wallpaper and window treatments. All that grime—dead skin, hair follicles, Carolina clay, carpet lint, yippee-little-dog fur—was evidence of life. We were a socially-awkward newly-minted teenager, two rowdy twin boys, a multi-tasking mother, and a road-warrior father. Eventually a strangely-feline Yorkie was added to the mix. And don’t forget about the stray distant relative stopping by unannounced. No corner of that damn house was unmarked. Hand-sewn pillows in the living room that we were forbidden to breathe on somehow had tiny burnt orange paw prints on them (sneaky little dog). It drove Momma crazy. And tore up my fingernails. They still won’t grow back right. Wipe all that shit off just for it to build up again. But that house was inherited and fully paid for. No reason to move. I did move. I was ready to move on. Move up. Move out. Over that small town. Into the big city. Here the streets take on the smells of Momma’s house. Plus piss, shit, and unbathed skin. A hot day means everything cooks and stews in its own juices, making the stench 10x more intense. The apartment is another story. 11 floors up. Big, east-facing windows. Great view of the skyline dotted with some green foliage. And the great lake. Immaculate. Odorless. Not even a trace of tobacco from the previous tenant’s bad habits. No lingering scent of lemon Lysol. No street stench seeping through the window panes. No stray cat hairs. Or dog fur. Not a speck of dust. Futon. Throw pillows. Photos. Knickknacks. Bowls of fresh citrus. Cursedly-assembled desk set from IKEA. Yet the void is too big to fill. Too clean. (shrink)

New genomic techniques (NGTs) are powerful technologies with the potential to change how we relate to our food, food producers, and natural environment. Their use may affect the practices and values our societies are built on. Like many countries, the EU is currently revisiting its GMO legislation to accommodate the emergence of NGTs. We argue that assessing such technologies according to whether they are ‘safe enough’ will not create the public trust necessary for societal acceptance. To avoid past mistakes of (...) under- or miscommunication about possible impacts, we need open, transparent, and inclusive societal debate on the nature of the science of gene (editing) technologies, on how to use them, and whether they contribute to sustainable solutions to societal and environmental challenges. To be trustworthy, GMO regulation must demonstrate the authorities’ ability to manage the scientific, socio-economic, environmental, and ethical complexities and uncertainties associated with NGTs. Regulators and authorities should give equal attention to the reflexive and the emotional aspects of trust and make room for honest public and stakeholder inclusion processes. The European Group of Ethics in Science and Technology’s recent report on the Ethics of Genome Editing (2021) is important in calling attention to a series of fundamental issues that ought to be included in debates on the regulation and use of NGTs to ensure public trust in these technologies and in regulating authorities. With the great power of NGTs comes great responsibility, and the way forward must be grounded in responsible research, innovation, and regulation. (shrink)

El presente texto busca reflexionar en torno al mundo de las prácticas del cuerpo y su vínculo con cierto tipo de culturas juveniles que poseen como forma de vida la alteración corporal, y donde en la actualidad se puede observar –en nuestro país– una explosión de la experimentación con el tatuaje y con el piercing, y de manera más incipiente –pero también significativa– con los implantes, las escarificaciones, los branding, las expansiones y la variante de las suspensiones humanas; práctica sobre (...) la cual el artículo profundiza intentando dar cuenta del contexto social y cultural donde surge la suspensión humana; los procesos de apropiación que experimenta esta práctica a partir de la irrupción de culturas juveniles en las sociedades contemporáneas; los significados y procedimientos asociados a este ritual; y los nexos entre política, estética y modificación corporal. (shrink)

La búsqueda de una educación ambiental basada en los principios de la sustentabilidad, está en el centro de la reflexión de la autora. El arte de educar implica, por parte de educadores y educandos, consiste en asumirse como seres sociales y complejos; inmersos en una realidad que exige un compromiso constante con el medioambiente. La libertad que podemos alcanzar en el mundo exterior -el cual habitamos en tanto cuerpos interrelacionados entre sí y respecto de su medio- tiene como requisito previo (...) el desarrollo de nuestra libertad interna. La propuesta implica una educación ambiental como proceso crítico de comunicación y reelaboración constante del conocimiento, donde se construyen realidades sobre la base de la paz y de un futuro compartido. (shrink)

Este artículo reflexiona sobre algunas facetas de la descalificación al pensamiento libre, en paralelo a las inequidades de género. Se ejemplifica con la persecución a mujeres en distintas épocas a las que el poder destruyó, de un modo análogo a como la codicia del poder destruye la naturaleza. Realza el artículo la existencia de una diversidad de saberes, para los que se requieren puertas abiertas, superando los cerrojos excluyentes, cruzando los muros de la inequidad de género, de las injusticias sociales (...) y de los atropellos por razones étnicas y otras, y las actitudes destructoras de la naturaleza y de las culturas. (shrink)

A substantial guide providing an overview of both physicalism and metaphysical naturalism, reviewing both questions of formulation and justification for both doctrines. Includes a diagnostic strategy for understanding talk of naturalism as a metaphysical thesis.

The thought of François Jullien has made valuable contributions to contemporary philosophy, primarily by enriching the interpretation of certain classic themes through the uniqueness of ancient Chinese wisdom. This approach has revealed aspects that Western philosophy, with its metaphysics focused on being, has overlooked. Among these aspects, Jullien has drawn attention to how a series of resources of what could be called ‘Christian thought’ have remained unthought-of, at least from a philosophical perspective. The central question of this research is whether (...) this Christian logic represents just another resource, among several, that Jullien has utilized in his intellectual work, or if it also constitutes one of the fundamental sources of his own work and the beginnings of possible de-coincidence from the philosophy of being. The conclusions indicate a notable and indispensable presence of these Christian notions in his argumentative proposal, albeit without resorting to faith. This study will begin by reviewing the main theses of the French philosopher and, at the same time, will describe how he has been relating and discussing them with Christian doctrine. (shrink)

Home care is one of the fastest‐growing industries in the United States, providing valuable opportunities for millions of older adults and people with disabilities to live at home rather than in institutional settings. Home care workers assist clients with essential activities of daily living, but their wages and working conditions generally fail to reflect the importance of their work. Drawing on the work of Eva Feder Kittay and other care ethicists, we argue that good care involves attending to the needs (...) of another out of a concern for their well‐being. Such care should be standard in the home care system. Yet, because of the pervasive racial, gender, and economic inequalities that the home care industry perpetuates, home care workers and their clients cannot reasonably be expected to care about each other. We endorse reforms aimed at enabling home care workers and their clients to form and maintain professional relationships that cultivate care.. (shrink)

Some believe that it is immoral to harm animals, but it is not immoral to kill humanely raised domesticated animals. Implicit in this is the assumption that it is possible to raise and slaughter animals without harming them significantly. In recent years, a number of philosophers – DeGrazia, Harman, Bradley, and others – have claimed that slaughter harms an animal in proportion to the amount of valuable future life that an animal loses in dying, which seems to challenge this assumption. (...) But a question remains: how much are domesticated animals, particularly humanely raised ones, harmed by their slaughter? Here, I take up this question. My answer may be surprising: in ordinary circumstances, slaughter hardly deprives humanely raised animals of any good life, and so is not very harmful to them. This result may strengthen the case for humane slaughter – or it may give us reason to revise our understanding of the harmfulness of death. (shrink)

La percepción de la vida se vincula a la actitud ante la muerte para abrirse a la experiencia estética en torno al Poema de Mio Cid y a las Coplas de Manrique. Los horizontes simbólicos que brotan de la épica y de la lírica acentúan la figura trágica del héroe, del caballero.

Recently mereological hylomorphism, the theory in which form and matter are considered to be proper parts of objects, has become very important among contemporary metaphysicians. The present work aims to analyse and dismantle Bennett’s criticism regarding the existence of formal proper parts. To do this, I will start by presenting Koslicki’s mereological hylomorphism. Next, I will focus on Bennett’s critique which seeks to deny the existence of formal proper parts. Finally, I will analyse critically the Bennett’s criticism focusing on the (...) scenario of lump of clay and statue. I will show Bennett’s proposal is not explanatorily better than Koslicki’s hylomorphism because she needs to accept a counter-intuitive thesis. Therefore, we should prefer Koslicki’s mereological hylomorphism. (shrink)

We perceive smells as perduring complex entities within a distal array that might be conceived of as smellscapes. However, the philosophical orthodoxy of Odor Theories has been to deny that smells are perceived as having a distal location. Recent challenges have been mounted to Odor Theories’ veracity in handling the timescale of olfactory perception, how it individuates odors as a distal entities, and their claim that olfactory perception is not spatial. The paper does not aim to dispute these criticisms. Rather, (...) what will be shown is that Molecular Structure Theory, a refinement of Odor Theory, can be further developed to handle these challenges. The theory is further refined by focusing on distal perception that requires considering the perceptual object as mereologically complex persisting odor against a background scene conceived of as a smellscape. What will be offered is an expansion of Molecular Structure Theory to account for distal smell perception within natural environments. (shrink)

I argue that central to Aristotle’s account of vice is a distinction between two varieties of vicious person: those for whom character change is possible (the curable), and those for whom it is not (the incurable). Recognizing this distinction and drawing out the ideas which ground it shows why Aristotle’s discussions of vice in EN vii and ix 4 are not inconsistent.

In a recent paper in this Journal, one of us argued against placing He above Be in Mendeleiev’s system of the elements. In it the goal was to dispute the notion that in Mendeleiev’s system of the elements the location of He should in fact lie above Be, which has a very similar electronic configuration, rather than above the noble gas column. That paper was based on rather old, Hartree–Fock limit studies on the strikingly limited non-additive contributions in the He3 (...) and He4 systems in contrast with the much larger non-additivity obtained for the Be3, Be4 and Be5 oligomers. In a recent benchmark multireference Averaged Quadratic Coupled Cluster results on Be2 and Be3 we showed that the delocalized non-additive contribution comprises 94 % of the binding energy of Be3. Here we use this and other pertinent information (drawn from the same paper) to conclude that He may not be associated with Be in Mendeleiev’s Table, despite their quite similar spectroscopic ground states. Furthermore, we use the new results to show that the large non-additivity implies that less than 2 % of the Be3 binding is located in each Be pair contained within the Be trimer. The rest of the interaction energy is necessarily delocalized over all three Be atoms. This might actually announce the bulk properties (i.e. “the electron gas”) that in solid-state physics explain the large electric and heat conduction for the solid Be metal. Thus, in the case of beryllium the metallic characteristics are already evident in Be3, a far cry from the monoatomic helium gas. (shrink)

Inside What Would Plato Do?, you'll find the basics of philosophy, written in an easy, digestible way we can all understand, along with questions to help you apply these important theories to your own life. So, after you've learned about a philosophical concept, you'll then be challenged to test yourself and see how the results can impact your daily life. For instance, after learning about Kant's theory of morality and the importance of intention you're challenged with questions like: Can good (...) people do bad things? Was there a time when you intended to do something helpful that ended up being hurtful? Does that make you a good person (because you intended to do good) or a bad person (because the results were bad)? What Would Plato Do? will not only help you better understand some of the greatest thinkers ever but will also help you think of the world around you in a whole new way! (shrink)