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.

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

Contra recent, inflationary views, the paper submits a deflationary approach to legal ontology. It argues, in particular, that to answer ontological questions about legal entities, we only need conceptual analysis and empirical investigation. In developing this proposal, it follows Amie Thomasson’s ‘easy ontology’ and her strategy for answering whether ordinary objects exist. The purpose of this is to advance a theory that, on the one hand, does not fall prey to sceptical views about legal reality (viz., that ontological truths about (...) legal entities are established by metaphysical principles); and, on the other, is compatible with common-sense jurisprudence (viz., that there in fact exist legal entities, and they all have important practical implications). While this methodology is common to legal philosophers interested in elucidating the ‘artifactual nature’ of law, the paper departs from their projects by taking a step forward in connecting this deflationary approach to legal ontology with an expressivist account of legal discourse, thus providing enough resources to satisfy the general ambition of jurisprudence, viz., to establish the conditions for the analysis of legal reality and its normative character. (shrink)

Following Tuomela, I argue that institutions consist in institutional activities conducive to the realisation (or “satisfaction”) of institutional activity types. Since this realisation is carried out by institutional groups, our having an answer to 'what are institutional groups?' is a necessary step towards a better understanding of what institutions are and how we create them. In this chapter, I offer an answer to this question.

How do we build up our institutional reality? What do we need in order to construct such things as universities, law firms, banks, retail stores, factories, leg.

What grounds the capacity of human agents to engage in individual, temporally extended activity (e.g. a philosopher writing a book), small-scale social interact.

In recent years, some prominent legal philosophers have argued both that law (as a legal system) is a certain kind of abstract artifact and that we can elucidate its nature by elucidating its artifactual properties (e.g., authorship, functionality, etc). In this chapter, I present an objection to their arguments and show that law is not an abstract artifact, but rather a composite, concrete entity. I do so by arguing that law is an institutional practice, the purpose of which is for (...) legal organisations to produce legal artifacts (e.g., laws, legal judgements, international treaties, etc) through the performance of legal activities. Based on this, I next provide an ontological analysis of these artifacts by elaborating on the conditions for their creation and maintenance. By distinguishing law as an institutional practice from legal artifacts as institutional objects created by legal organisations, I intend to advance a more precise ontological account of legal phenomena. (shrink)

Although there is already an important discussion regarding social ontology (a first-order investigation about social entities, e.g., social objects, social events, social relations, and social categories), not much attention has been paid to social meta-ontology (a second-order inquiry concerning what it means and how to answer whether there are any such entities). With the intention to contribute towards bringing the latter into the philosophical spotlight, I submit here a brief survey of the meta-ontological issues about two specific kinds of social (...) entities, viz., social and institutional practices. After elaborating on Thomasson’s easy approach to ontology, I argue that it can be extended to account for the existence of those social entities. (shrink)

Proxy agency is the capacity of individuals and groups to act for other individuals or groups in specific social transactions. For example, a legal team acts as a proxy for a client in a courtroom, or the Prime Minister acts as a proxy for the UK Government when attending international meetings, etc. Although a very common social phenomenon, it has not yet received enough philosophical treatment. Currently, the most developed account of this capacity is Ludwig’s proxy agency in collective action. (...) Yet, his account relies on a deflationary, we-content approach to collective intentionality (á la Bratman). In this chapter, I argue that this approach is far too weak to explain proxy agency in institutional contexts—where the individuals and groups formally authorised to perform rule-guided group activities for the principal hold a strong, non-conditional we-commitment. In order to elucidate this feature, I provide an account of proxy agency based on a more robust, we-mode approach to collective intentionality (á la Tuomela). I suggest with this that, for institutional proxy agency to operate as expected, there must be appropriate conditions of sociality in place—which ultimately coheres with the larger project developed by Tuomela on social ontology. (shrink)

In a recent contribution to legal ontology, Kenneth Ehrenberg identifies a puzzle concerning _the basic validity rule_ of legal systems: If formal institutions require a codified foundational constitutive rule, then legal systems cannot be formal institutions, since their foundational constitutive rule is necessarily an uncodified basic validity rule. To solve this puzzle, Ehrenberg suggests taking this rule as ‘a foundational and self-identifying institutional fact’. Here, I challenge his solution and the very existence of this puzzle. By arguing, contra Ehrenberg, that (...) the basic validity rule is not the foundational constitutive rule of a legal system, but only the foundational constitutive rule of legal validity; that its codification in fact contributes towards the institutionalisation of a legal system; and that the true foundational constitutive rule of a legal system is the formal group structure of the higher-constitutional organisations, I submit an alternative account of the institutional nature of legal systems. (shrink)

Raimo Tuomela (1940-2020) was a leading figure within social philosophy and a pioneer of contemporary social ontology. His main research and publications helped define the scholarly agenda of a philosophical investigation of social reality. Working first on (social) scientific realism and (social) action theory, he then developed an unprecedented account of collective intentionality—the kind of intentionality that individual agents require in order for them to perform intentional actions together, as a group.

Amie L. Thomasson, currently appointed Daniel P. Stone Professor of Intellectual and Moral Philosophy at Dartmouth College and celebrated as one of the most influential living philosophers, has gained international recognition as a leading figure in metaphysics, ontology, phenomenology, and aesthetics. Although her extensive body of work stretches far beyond the topic of this book, it is fair to say that her most notable contributions as well as controversial theses lie in her deflationary approach to ontology, which is why it (...) is the selected theme of this volume. (shrink)

Amie L. Thomasson, the Daniel P. Stone Professor of Intellectual and Moral Philosophy at Dartmouth College, has gained international recognition as a leading figure within various areas of philosophy. She has recently been celebrated as one of the most influential living philosophers for her significant contributions to metaphysics, ontology, phenomenology, and aesthetics. By engaging critically with her approach to metaphysics, modality, conceptual analysis, and the methodological issues concerning ontological questions about ordinary objects, social entities, and fictional characters, as well as (...) including a chapter from Thomasson herself where she makes explicit the internal connections which run through her body of work, this volume delivers the first thorough discussion of Thomasson’s philosophy. (shrink)

Raimo Tuomela, late Professor Emeritus at the Centre for Philosophy of Social Sciences (TINT), University of Helsinki, is widely regarded as one of the most important philosophers of our time. He published extensively on various topics within social philosophy; particularly, on social action, cooperation, group belief, group responsibility, group reasoning, social practices, and institutions. To celebrate his legacy, this volume engages with and delves deeply into his philosophy of sociality. By gathering original essays from a world-class line-up of social ontologists, (...) social action theorists, and social philosophers, this collection provides the first comprehensive and critical treatment of Tuomela's outstanding contribution to social ontology and collective intentionality. (shrink)

This volume contains the proceedings of the Social Ontology, Normativity, and Philosophy of Law conference, which took place on May 30–31, 2019 at the University of Glasgow. At the invitation of the Social Ontology Research Group, a panel of prominent scholars shed light on a range of key topics within social ontology, normativity, and philosophy of law from an interdisciplinary perspective.

Michel Henry, uno de los representantes del nuevo pensamiento, que comienza convirtiendo a todo el hombre en pura pregunta que atraviesa las capas endurecidas de la verdad tradicional, esta convencido de que la riqueza de la tradición occidental es tan grande que cree que lo esencial de lo que él descubre como lo impensado en Europa se le ha destacado gracias, en buena parte, a la labor magisterial de las figuras mas celebres de la propia filosofía europea. Y esto sucede, (...) sobre todo, con Maine de Biran y Descartes. Lo que pretende defender Henry es que la luz del mundo mismo es el verdadero soporte del videre (ver) cuando el hombre se entrega enteramente en sus manos y piensa como si nada mas hubiera que su relación al mundo. (shrink)

En el planteamiento del problema filosófico de Dios se ponen en juego todas las cuestiones decisivas de la filosofía: la metafísica, la epistemología, la antropología, la ética, etc. La situación histórica del saber filosófico influye además de manera directa en la posibilidad y el modo mismo de ese planteamiento. M. García-Baró, con la circunspección de quien conoce las enormes dificultades entrañadas en el problema, con la competencia de quien conoce de cerca la situación histórica actual de la filosofía, nos introduce (...) en las claves teóricas implicadas en el estado actual de esta espinosa y decisiva cuestión. (shrink)

El espectáculo cinematográfico Cinerama es un referente en la tecnología de la gran pantalla. Gracias a Fred Waller y Hazard Reeves, Cinerama elevó su popularidad. Este hecho derivó en la creación de pabellones móviles itinerantes. Cinesa inició en España el desarrollo del Cinerama móvil, ante la falta de salas cinematográficas. Recurrieron, en 1966, a Emilio Pérez Piñero para la realización de un pabellón móvil que imitara Cinerama Dome, obra de Welton Becket, que siguió la patente de la cúpula geodésica de (...) Richard Buckminster Fuller. Sin embargo, Piñero diseñó una patente propia conocida como cúpula reticular de directriz esférica. (shrink)

Los antiguos poetas de Grecia, hombres inspirados, describían nuestra existencia con una serie de rasgos entre los que no solían olvidar, como si éste los resumiera todos por fin, el de el ser que aguanta. No nos atribuían inteligencia, ni práctica ni teórica; tampoco nos concedías potencia para llevar a cabo nuestros planes; menos aún, vida sin fin. Pensaban, más bien, de nosotros que somos soberbios y que la soberbia nos ofusca, y que somos supersticiosos, crueles, avariciosos.

The empirical relationship between a firm’s social performance and its financial performance is still not well established in the literature. Despite more than 30 years of research and more than 100 empirical studies on the issue, the results are still mixed. We argue that the heterogeneous results found in previous studies are not due exclusively to problems related with the measurement instruments or the samples used. Instead, we posit that a more fundamental problem related with the endogeneity of social strategic (...) decisions could be driving most of the empirical findings. We show that, using a panel data of 658 firms from 1991 to 2005, how some of the results found in previous research change, and some are even reversed when endogeneity is properly taken into account. (shrink)

In recent decades, several theories have claimed to explain the teleological causality of organisms as a function of self-organising and self-producing processes. The most widely cited theories of this sort are variations of autopoiesis, originally introduced by Maturana and Varela. More recent modifications of autopoietic theory have focused on system organisation, closure of constraints and autonomy to account for organism teleology. This article argues that the treatment of teleology in autopoiesis and other organisation theories is inconclusive for three reasons: First, (...) non-living self-organising processes like autocatalysis meet the defining features of autopoiesis without being teleological; second, organisational approaches, whether defined in terms of the closure of constraints, self-determination or autonomy, are unable to specify teleological normativity, that is, the individuation of an ultimate beneficiary; third, all self-organised systems produce local order by maximising the throughput of energy and/or material (obeying the maximum entropy production (MEP) principle) and thereby are specifically organised to undermine their own critical boundary conditions. Despite these inadequacies, an alternative approach called teleodynamics accounts for teleology. This theory shows how multiple self-organising processes can be collectively linked so that they counter each other’s MEP principle tendencies to become codependent. Teleodynamics embraces – not ignoring – the difficulties of self-organisation, but reinstates teleology as a radical phase transition distinguishing systems embodying an orientation towards their own beneficial ends from those that lack normative character. (shrink)

Grounded theory, a research method born out of the social sciences field, offers a flexible technique that allows simultaneous data collection and processing. Researchers using this method immerse themselves in an area of study, focusing their observations on the data and taking into consideration not only their own interpretations, but also those of the other subjects involved, in order to strengthen their understanding of the social phenomena under examination. This text briefly describes the concept of grounded theory and uses concrete (...) examples to illustrate how data are analysed from the standpoint of the stereotype as an object of study. La teoría fundamentada, nacida al interior de las ciencias sociales, es un método de investigación que posee una técnica flexible y que realiza simultáneamente la recolección y el procesamiento de los datos. En este método, el investigador se encuentra inmerso en el campo de estudio y sus observaciones se abocan al dato, considerando tanto su interpretación como la de los otros sujetos implicados, con la finalidad de fortalecer la comprensión del fenómeno social investigado. En este texto se describe brevemente la teoría fundamentada y cómo se analizan los datos mediante ejemplos concretos, que se presentan a partir del estereotipo como objeto de estudio. (shrink)

The claim that knowledge is grounded on a basic, non-inferentially grasped set of principles, which seems to be Aristotle’s view, in contemporary epistemology can be seen as part of a wider foundationalist account. Foundationalists assume that there must be some premise-beliefs at the basis of every felicitous reasoning which cannot be themselves in need of justification and may not be challenged. They provide justification for truths based on these premises, which Aristotle unusually call principles (archái). Can Aristotle be considered a (...) foundationalist? Are his first principles necessary premises to right inferences? We will look at the issue here. (shrink)

This paper aims to analyse how the discourse of CEO letters and other factors influence community involvement and Social Licence to Operate (SLO) in the mining industry. The analysis is based on qualitative information disclosed in sustainability reports and CEO letters from 32 mining firms. Content analysis was undertaken to obtain data for the study, and then a regression analysis and a multiple correspondence analysis were used to test the hypotheses defined in the study. The results indicate that the CEO (...) discourse influences how a firm expresses the importance of gaining its SLO, the philanthropic activities in which companies become involved and the destinations of the investments in the communities in which they operate. The results also show changes in the discourse between 2011 and 2015, which are, in part, explained by the difficult situation experienced by the sector during this period. The paper contributes to the Corporate Social Responsibility literature by integrating different theories from this field into the SLO framework. The analysis carried out and the results obtained are useful for both CEOs and Sustainability Managers, especially in managing their relationships with the communities where they operate or intend to operate. (shrink)