La categoria de passivitat és tan nuclear en la filosofia d’Emmanuel Levinas com en la de Paul Ricoeur. Aquesta categoria està intrínsecament vinculada a una altra que també és crucial: la d’alteritat. Per entendre la proximitat entre aquests dos autors, alhora que per veure’n la distància que els separa, resulta molt revelador prestar atenció, primer, a la manera com cadascun d’ells concep les dues categories i, després, al motiu pel qual mentre en el cas de Levinas el lloc de la (...) passivitat és exclusivament un —la relació amb l’altre—, en el de Ricoeur és triple: la carn o el cos propi, l’altre i la consciència. (shrink)

First, this article summarizes the way Jan Patocˇka thinks and updates the classic theme of philosophy as care for the soul. Then goes on to show Jacques Derrida’s significant and unexpected interest in the Czech thinker, and the manner as sharp and respectful as he reads it. Derrida argues that the core of Patocˇka’s approach, under the term “responsibility”, coincides in some sense with that of Emmanuel Levinas; nucleus that has to do, in both authors, with the essence of “religion”.

En este artículo se defiende que el sentido esencial del habla, antes que en la enunciacióndel mundo y antes también que en el intercambio informativo, reside en su función deamparo y de acogida. Para la argumentación se atiende tanto a algunos giros del lenguajecoloquial como a reflexiones filosóficas sobre el lenguaje como la de Emmanuel Lévinas.

En la atención prestada por algunos filósofos contemporáneos a la temática clásica de la filosofía como cuidado del alma y como forma de vida, se dan afinidades diversas. Pierre Hadot tiene preferencia por los estoicos; Michel Foucault, por los cínicos; Jan Patočka, por Sócrates y Platón, etc. En este artículo sostenemos que algunos de los puntos nucleares de la forma de vida franciscana de los primeros tiempos conectan estrechamente con los del cuidado del alma de los antiguos (transformándolos o bien (...) radicalizándolos), y pueden constituir una valiosa fuente de inspiración para la encrucijada en la que se mueve nuestro presente social, y nuestro horizonte filosófico. (shrink)

Si bien es cierto que la técnica es una de las dimensiones fundamentales de la condición humana, sólo contemporáneamente ha adquirido el rango de característica “epocal” por excelencia: vivimos en la “era de la técnica”. De ahí que la mayoría de los principales filósofos de nuestro tiempo le hayan prestado una muy especial atención. Su penetrante mirada busca, detrás de lo más tópico y visible, lo más profundo. Y, por eso, lo que ellos han visto, o entrevisto, ha de sernos (...) de gran ayuda para entender mejor la encrucijada en que nos encontramos, así como para repensarnos una vez más a nosotros mismos. La oportunidad y la singularidad de esta obra consisten en sintetizar, exponer y comentar las ideas de José Ortega y Gasset, Martin Heidegger, Jan Patocka, Jacques Ellul, Hannah Arendt, Hans Jonas, Jürgen Habermas y Peter Sloterdijk sobre la configuración técnica (y tecnológica) del mundo. Como, además, la cuestión de la técnica es nuclear en todos estos autores, tenemos con ella una buena puerta de acceso a cada una de sus respectivas filosofías. (shrink)

The Intimate Resistance is a keen, deeply beautiful reflection on the human condition. The author explains howwe ourselves can warm, protect and guide those around us.

Esquirol, Josep Maria Humà, més humà: Una antropologia de la ferida infinitaBarcelona: Quaderns Crema, 171 p.ISBN 978-84-7727-644-9.

Se trata de un ensayo en el que Josep Maria Esqiurol reflexiona acerca de lo más profundo de lo humano, concluyendo que lo más característico del humano es una suerte de conmoción, un estar efectado por algo, y no algún tipo de poder o capacidad. El enfoque del libro nos presenta una antropología orientada hacia la compañía, el cuidado y el amparo.

Book review of Humano, más humano. Una antropología de la herida infinita Josep Maria Esquirol.

El misteri del mal no té un tractament específic en Martí Luter, però és a través dels seus múltiples escrits, com són les classes i comentaris bíblics, cartes i sermons, consells i respostes a qüestions que li plantejaren els seus contemporanis, que és possible de refer el seu pensament. Molt característic del seu estil és que, aquí com tots els altres temes que tracta, defuig tot tractament racional i filosòfic, amb la finalitat de posar més clarament al descobert allò que, (...) segons ell, professa una fe cristiana alimentada únicament per la Sagrada Escriptura. (shrink)

El tema del mal exige un análisis especulativo de grandes vuelos, en el que no sólo se implican cuestiones metafísicas, sino también epistemológicas. Santo Tomás hizo lo que pudo, en los tres momentos (todos en la década de los sesenta) en que abordó directamente el asunto. Su conclusión, dándole la vuelta a la formulación boeciana, fue que, “si el mal existe, es que Dios existe”. Tal salida postula que el bien es una propiedad trascendental, y que el mal no es (...) nada, es sólo privación de un bien debido. Como es sabido, el bien, entendido como trascendental, supone una relación intencional. Cuando el ser se ofrece a la mirada del intelecto, éste advierte que es verdadero. Cuando la voluntad lo advierte, descubre que es apetecible, porque es bueno. El problema sigue, sin embargo, y desemboca en la paradoja existencial, que según Carlos Cardona suena así: “el mal no es, pero existe”. Por eso, Cardona señala que el mal no es cognoscible y que sólo sabemos qué es el mal, porque Dios nos garantiza el acceso a su noción, si se puede hablar así. Sería una forma radical de reformular la solución tomasiana: si el mal existe, es que Dios existe. (shrink)

This paper contains a joint study of two sentential logics that combine a many-valued character, namely tetravalence, with a modal character; one of them is normal and the other one quasinormal. The method is to study their algebraic counterparts and their abstract models with the tools of Abstract Algebraic Logic, and particularly with those of Brown and Suszko's theory of abstract logics as recently developed by Font and Jansana in their "A General Algebraic Semantics for Sentential Logics". The logics studied (...) here arise from the algebraic and lattice-theoretical properties we review of Tetravalent Modal Algebras, a class of algebras studied mainly by Loureiro, and also by Figallo, Landini and Ziliani, at the suggestion of the late Antonio Monteiro. (shrink)

Les Critical Legal Studies et ses divers tributaires ont fortement marqué la conscience juridique contemporaine. Ces notions ne sont plus simplement le domaine d’un collectif de juristes nord-américains, mais font désormais partie du discours académique transnational et influencent la formation de divers projets et demandes politiques, malgré leur impact négligeable sur la pratique juridique traditionnelle. Les mouvements de type féministe, racial, LGBTQ+ et postcolonialiste ont profité largement de l’énergie intellectuelle et de l’engagement inhérent à ses analyses critiques. En outre, ces (...) façons d’envisager le droit et de faire de la politique trouvent leur écho en plusieurs juridictions. Des manifestations parallèles, allant au-delà des États-Unis, mettent en évidence la portée de ces idées. Cet article a pour but de décrire, de façon succincte, l’évolution du CLS allant d’une série de critiques précises sur le droit états-unien jusqu’à des discours généralisés, répandus dans divers circuits transnationaux de pensée et d’action. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that moral projectivism cannot be coherently fix the content of our moral responses. To this purpose, I develop a number of arguments against moral dispositionalism and, in this context, I challenge both David Lewis' dispositionalist account of colour and Chistine Korsgaard's procedural realism.

This is a contribution to the discussion on the role of truth degrees in manyvalued logics from the perspective of abstract algebraic logic. It starts with some thoughts on the so-called Suszko’s Thesis (that every logic is two-valued) and on the conception of semantics that underlies it, which includes the truth-preserving notion of consequence. The alternative usage of truth values in order to define logics that preserve degrees of truth is presented and discussed. Some recent works studying these in the (...) particular cases of Łukasiewicz’s many-valued logics and of logics associated with varieties of residuated lattices are also presented. Finally the extension of this paradigm to other, more general situations is discussed, highlighting the need for philosophical or applied motivations in the selection of the truth degrees, due both to the interpretation of the idea of truth degree and to some mathematical difficulties. (shrink)

The last years of the 20th Century have been somewhat contradictory with respect to values like loyalty, trust or truthfulness. On the one hand, (often implicitly, but sometimes very explicitly), self-interest narrowly defined seems to be the dominant force in the business world, both in theory and in practice. On the other hand, alliances, networks and other forms of cooperation have shown that self-interest has to be at least "enlightened".The academic literature has reflected both points of view, but frequently in (...) an ambiguous way, since the concepts of loyalty and trust are somewhat elusive and equivocal. This paper attempts to analyze the concept of loyalty in depth, examining the different conceptions about the word that can be found in the literature. We begin by going to the management classics (specifically, Follett, Barnard and Simon), and we then turn to the anthropological approach of Pérez López (1993), with its built-in ethical analysis, and show how trust and loyalty are crucial to the development of organizations. We end by suggesting in what ways loyalty and trust can be created and fostered in organizations. (shrink)

This paper reviews the development of socially responsible investment (SRI) in the Spanish financial market. The year, 1997 saw the appearance in Spain of the first SRI mutual fund, but it was not until late 1999, that major Spanish fund managers offered SRI mutual funds on the retail market. The development of SRI in the Spanish financial market has not experienced the high levels of development seen in other European countries, such as France or Italy, where interest in SRI began (...) during the same period. This paper presents an analysis of the impact of SRI mutual funds managed by Spanish fund managers comparing the evolution of managed assets and number of investors. We also analyse the investment strategies adopted by these funds, which mainly use negative screening criteria and the participation of non-governmental organisations as institutional investors. An analysis of the take up of socially responsible investment in the Spanish financial market shows majors deficits in this process. This is due to Spanish investors having limited sensitivity to social issues and knowledge of SRI, and a lack of development of SRI investment strategies, such as engagement or shareholder activism by fund managers. Furthermore, the take-up of SRI mutual funds in the Spanish financial market coincided with a fall in the stock market at the beginning of the 21st Century. We conclude with an analysis of the relationship between SRI and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). (shrink)

Engineering ethics is usually focused on engineers’ ethics, engineers acting as individuals. Certainly, these professionals play a central role in the matter, but engineers are not a singularity inside engineering ; they exist and operate as a part of a complex network of mutual relationships between many other people, organizations and groups. When engineering ethics and engineers’ ethics are taken as one and the same thing the paradigm of the ethical engineer which prevails is that of the heroic engineer, a (...) certain model of the ideal engineer: someone both quite individualistic and strong enough to deal with all the moral challenges that could arise. We argue that this is not the best approach, at least today in our interrelated world. We have achieved a high degree of independence from nature by means of technology. In exchange for this autonomy we have become increasingly tied up with very complex systems to which we constantly delegate new tasks and powers. Concerns about safety keep growing everywhere due to the fact that now we have a sensitive awareness of the huge amount of power we are both consuming and deploying, thus, new forms of dialogue and consensus have to be incorporated at different levels, in different forums and at different times. Within these democratic channels of participation not just the needs and interests, but also the responsibilities and mutual commitments of all parties should be taken into account. (shrink)

There are many theories about organizations that are mutually inconsistent with each other, which explain phenomena to very similar extents. Most of them ignore the ethical dimension completely. In this paper I put forth the basic principles for a theory of decision-making in organizations, which integrates ethics in the core of the theory. It is based on the work of Juan Antonio Pérez López [1991, Teoría de la Acción humana en las organizaciones (Ediciones Rialp, Madrid), 1993, Fundamentos de la Dirección (...) de Empresas (Ediciones Rialp, Madrid)] and is essentially a humanistic view of the interrelationships between people and its implications for organizational decision-making. I will first show that in any relationship between two people, the learning of the two is crucial for such a relationship to last; and then I will expand on the different aspects of that learning. This analysis will then be applied to the organizational context as a basis for organizational decision-making, Second, it applies the previous analysis to the organizational context as a basis for organizational decision making, showing how any decision in an organization needs to be analyzed on the basis of three criteria (short-run effectiveness, development of distinctive competence, and unity and identification with the organization) and how ethics is included in the last two. (shrink)

In this paper two deductive systems associated with relevance logic are studied from an algebraic point of view. One is defined by the familiar, Hilbert-style, formalization of R; the other one is a weak version of it, called WR, which appears as the semantic entailment of the Meyer-Routley-Fine semantics, and which has already been suggested by Wójcicki for other reasons. This weaker consequence is first defined indirectly, using R, but we prove that the first one turns out to be an (...) axiomatic extension of WR. Moreover we provide WR with a natural Gentzen calculus. It is proved that both deductive systems have the same associated class of algebras but different classes of models on these algebras. The notion of model used here is an abstract logic, that is, a closure operator on an abstract algebra; the abstract logics obtained in the case of WR are also the models, in a natural sense, of the given Gentzen calculus. (shrink)

A definition and some inaccurate cross-references in the paper A Survey of Abstract Algebraic Logic, which might confuse some readers, are clarified and corrected; a short discussion of the main one is included. We also update a dozen of bibliographic references.

Journal Name: Semiotica - Journal of the International Association for Semiotic Studies / Revue de l'Association Internationale de Sémiotique Volume: 2014 Issue: 198 Pages: 205-240.

Dirac's approach to gauge symmetries is discussed. We follow closely the steps that led him from his conjecture concerning the generators of gauge transformations {\it at a given time} ---to be contrasted with the common view of gauge transformations as maps from solutions of the equations of motion into other solutions--- to his decision to artificially modify the dynamics, substituting the extended Hamiltonian for the total Hamiltonian. We show in detail that Dirac's analysis was incomplete and, in completing it, we (...) prove that the fulfilment of Dirac's conjecture ---in the ``non-pathological" cases--- does not imply any need to modify the dynamics. We give a couple of simple but significant examples. (shrink)

The global environmental and social-economic crises of industrialized agriculture have led to the emergence of agroecology as an alternative approach aiming to increase the ecological, social and economic sustainability of agri–food systems. The ‘multi-level perspective’ is now a widely used framework to understand and promote the upscaling of local innovation niches, such as agroecology, to broader scales (e.g., regional, national, international), thus reconfiguring the dominant socio-technical regimes. Additionally, emergent ‘hybrid forums’ can provide a space between niche and regime where niche (...) innovators can become important actors in scaling up and out emergent innovations. In this paper, we examine a university training program (Postgraduate Diploma in Local Agroecological Dynamization at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona), to better understand its role as a ‘hybrid forum’. Our analysis focuses especially on how the program, as an example of a hybrid forum, worked to reconfigure practices, concepts, and tools of local development practitioners. We also assess to what extent the program contributed to transitioning local development institutions toward agroecology. An online survey (n = 46) and in-depth interviews (n = 16) were carried out to determine how the training program has impacted the student’s opinions and their respective institutions. The results show that most of the students consider that they have acquired new theoretical frameworks and useful methods to re-framing their local development projects, that new alliances with multi-actor networks have been perceived, and that some internal changes of the local development practices have taken place. We conclude that the training program, as a hybrid forum, is capable of outscaling niche innovations through linkages with different kind of actors both from the niche and the regime. Political changes in the socio-technical landscape level offer an opportunity to amplify the impact of the innovations which are being generated by those multi-actor networks, but with a limited multi-level impact as far as institutional regime-actors not aligned with agroecological transition keep the most of the competencies on agri–food systems. (shrink)

In this paper, we review the conventional analyses of management control systems, to conclude, first, that the illusion of control can mislead managers into believing that everything can be controlled and monitored, and, second, that no incentive system based only on extrinsic rewards can motivate individuals properly. Then, we investigate the philosophical foundations of the basic assumptions that, implicitly or explicitly, are made about the nature of the acting person. Based on personalist phenomenology, we show how the development of technical (...) and moral values is crucial to the long-run survival of organizations. We end by offering some guidelines as to what control systems should be like in order to be compatible with the nature of human persons. (shrink)