In this novel account of global citizenship, Luis Cabrera argues that all individuals have a global duty to contribute directly to human rights protections and to promote rights-enhancing political integration between states. The Practice of Global Citizenship blends careful moral argument with compelling narratives from field research among unauthorized immigrants, activists seeking to protect their rights, and the 'Minuteman' activists striving to keep them out. Immigrant-rights activists, especially those conducting humanitarian patrols for border-crossers stranded in the brutal Arizona desert, (...) are shown as embodying aspects of global citizenship. Unauthorized immigrants themselves are shown to be enacting a form of global 'civil' disobedience, claiming the economic rights central to the emerging global normative charter while challenging the restrictive membership regimes that are the norm in the current global system. Cabrera also examines the European Union, seeing it as a crucial laboratory for studying the challenges inherent in expanding citizen membership. (shrink)

Could global government be the answer to global poverty and starvation? Cosmopolitan thinkers challenge the widely held belief that we owe more to our co-citizens than to those in other countries. This book offers a moral argument for world government, claiming that not only do we have strong obligations to people elsewhere, but that accountable integration among nation-states will help ensure that all persons can lead a decent life. Cabrera considers both the views of those political philosophers who say we (...) have much stronger obligations to help our co-citizens than foreigners and those cosmopolitans who say our duties are equally strong to each but resist restructuring. He then outlines his own position, using the European Union as a partial model for the integrated alternative and advocating instituting EU-style supranational government, development aid, and free movement of persons in the Americas and other regions. Over time, Cabrera argues that the transformation of the global system into a cohesive network of democratic institutions would help ensure that anyone born anywhere could lead a decent life. This book will appeal to all those interested in political philosophy and the processes and potential of globalization. (shrink)

Deontological evidentialism is the claim that we ought to form and maintain our beliefs in accordance with our evidence. In this paper, I criticize two arguments in its defense. I begin by discussing Berit Broogard’s use of the distinction between narrow-scope and wide-scope requirements against W.K. Clifford’s moral defense of. I then use this very distinction against a defense of inspired by Stephen Grimm’s more recent claims about the moral source of epistemic normativity. I use this distinction once again to (...) argue that Hilary Kornblith’s criticism of Richard Feldman’s defense of is incomplete. Finally, I argue that Feldman’s defense is insensitive to the relation between normative requirements and privileged values: values that have normative authority over us. (shrink)

Aesthetic subjectivism takes the truth of aesthetic judgments to be relative to the individual making that judgment. Despite widespread suspicion, however, this does not mean that one cannot be wrong about such judgments. Accordingly, this does not mean that one cannot gain higher-order evidence of error and fallibility that bears on the rationality of the aesthetic judgment in question. In this paper, we explain and explore these issues in some detail.

Cosmopolitanism is said by many critics to be arrogant. In emphasizing universal principles and granting no fundamental moral significance to national or other group belonging, it wrongly treats those making non-universalist claims as not authorized to speak, while treating those in non-Western societies as not qualified. This book works to address such objections. It does so in part by engaging the work of B.R. Ambedkar, architect of India's 1950 Constitution and revered champion of the country's Dalits (formerly "untouchables"). Ambedkar cited (...) universal principles of equality and rights in confronting domestic exclusions and the "arrogance" of caste. He sought to advance forms of political humility, or the affirmation of equal standing within political institutions and openness to input and challenge within them. This book examines how an "institutional global citizenship" approach to cosmopolitanism could similarly advance political humility, in supporting the development of input and challenge mechanisms beyond the state. It employs a grounded normative theory method, taking insights for the model from field research among Dalit activists pressing for domestic reforms through the UN human rights regime, and from their critics in the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party. Insights also are taken from Turkish protesters challenging a rising domestic authoritarianism, and from UK Independence Party members demanding "Brexit" from the European Union-in part because of possibilities that predominantly Muslim Turkey will join. Overall, it is shown, an appropriately configured institutional cosmopolitanism should orient fundamentally to political humility rather than arrogance, while holding significant potential for advancing global rights protections and more equitable rights specifications. (shrink)

James Sterba has recently argued that the free will defense fails to explain the compossibility of a perfect God and the amount and degree of moral evil that we see. I think he is mistaken about this. I thus find myself in the awkward and unexpected position, as a non-theist myself, of defending the free will defense. In this paper, I will try to show that once we take care to focus on what the free will defense is trying to (...) accomplish, and by what means it tries to do so, we will see that Sterba’s criticism of it misses the mark. (shrink)

This is not a guide for your writing process. You should write in whatever way expressing and making sense of your ideas feels most natural and most productive to you. This is a guide for organizing your ideas, after you have captured some of them in fits and starts of prose, into a particular kind of final product: the basic philosophy paper.

The tendency to idealise artificial intelligence as independent from human manipulators, combined with the growing ontological entanglement of humans and digital machines, has created an “anthrobotic” horizon, in which data analytics, statistics and probabilities throw our agential power into question. How can we avoid the consequences of a reified definition of intelligence as universal operation becoming imposed upon our destinies? It is here argued that the fantasised autonomy of automated intelligence presents a contradistinctive opportunity for philosophical consciousness to understand itself (...) anew as holistic and co-creative, beyond the recent “analytic” moment of the history of philosophy. Here we introduce the concept of “crealectic intelligence”, a meta-analytic and meta-dialectic aspect of consciousness. Intelligent behaviour may consist in distinguishing discrete familiar parts or reproducible functions in the midst of noise via an analytic process of segmentation; intelligence may also manifest itself in the constitution of larger wholes and dynamic unities through a dialectic process of association or assemblage. But, by contrast, crealectic intelligence co-creates realities in the image of an ideal or truth, taking into account the desiring agent imbued with a sense of possibility, in a relationship not only with the Real but also with the creative sublime or “Creal”. (shrink)

This paper reviews computational models of surprise, with a specific focus on the authors’ probabilistic, contrast model. The contrast model casts surprise, and its intensity, as emerging from the difference between the probability of the surprising event and the probability of the highest expected‐event in a given situation. Strong arguments are made for the central role of surprise in creativity and learning by natural and artificial agents.

“Literature and the Right to Death” is probably the most quoted of French thinker Maurice Blanchot’s texts. For decades it has been discussed by such important figures as Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, or even the writer Paul Auster. Its importance is twofold: on the one hand, it is often considered an important gateway to Blanchot’s literary thought. On the other hand, it constitutes a substantial example of the new reception of Hegel in France after the Second World War. Although there (...) is no doubt about its Kojèvo-Hegelian inspiration and its center in what we could call “literary experience”, this article intends to explore another of its layers: its relation to the discussion around humanism and the Terror, as forgotten as it was central in France at the end of the 1940’s. We will thus try to lay the foundations for a new reading of this fundamental piece in Blanchot’s production. (shrink)

Deontological evidentialism is the claim that S ought to form or maintain S’s beliefs in accordance with S’s evidence. A promising argument for this view turns on the premise that consideration c is a normative reason for S to form or maintain a belief that p only if c is evidence that p is true. In this paper, I discuss the surprising relation between a recently influential argument for this key premise and the principle that ought implies can. I argue (...) that anyone who antecedently accepts or rejects this principle already has a reason to resist either this argument’s premises or its role in support of deontological evidentialism. (shrink)

Deontological internalism is the family of views where justification is a positive deontological appraisal of someone's epistemic agency: S is justified, that is, when S is blameless, praiseworthy, or responsible in believing that p. Brian Weatherson discusses very briefly how a plausible principle of ampliative transmission reveals a worry for versions of deontological internalism formulated in terms of epistemic blame. Weatherson denies, however, that similar principles reveal similar worries for other versions. I disagree. In this article, I argue that plausible (...) principles of ampliative transmission reveal a worry for deontological internalism in general. (shrink)

Nowadays, batteries play an important role in a lot of different applications like energy storage, electro-mobility, consumer electronic and so on. All the battery types have a common factor that is their complexity, independently of its nature. Usually, the batteries have an electrochemical nature. Several different test are accomplished to check the batteries performance, and commonly, it is predictable how they work depending of their technology. The present research describes the hybrid intelligent system created to accomplish fault detection over a (...) Lithium Iron Phosphate—LiFePO4 power cell type, commonly used in electro-mobility applications. The approach is based on the cell temperatures behaviour for voltage and current specific values. Taken into account the operating range of a real system based on a LiFePO4 cell, a large set of points of operation have been used to achieve the dataset. The different behaviour zones have been obtained by clustering as a first step. Then, different regression techniques have been used over each cluster. Polynomial regression, artificial neural networks and support vector regression were the combined techniques to develop the hybrid intelligent model proposed. The intelligent system gives very good results over the operating range, detecting all the faults tested during the validation. (shrink)

One of the few points of agreement between most theists and non-theists working on the problem of evil is that the existence of a perfect God is incompatible with the existence of pointless evil. In a series of influential papers, however, Peter van Inwagen has argued that careful attention to the reasoning behind this claim reveals fatal difficulties related to the Sorites Paradox. In this paper, I explain van Inwagen’s appeal to sorites reasoning, distinguish between two different arguments in his (...) work, and argue that they both commit the same so-far-unnoticed mistake. (shrink)

My starting point is what I call the Normative Authority Conception of justification, where S is justified in their belief that p at t (to some degree n) if and only if their believing that p at t is not ruled out by epistemic norms that have normative authority over S at t. With this in mind, this paper develops an account of doxastic justification by first developing an account of the normative authority of epistemic norms. Drawing from work in (...) political philosophy, I argue that (a) the cognitive and evaluative commitments and concerns behind our actual practices of holding each other and ourselves accountable for our beliefs reveal which epistemic norms we have consented to be under, and that (b) it is because we have consented to be under the authority of these norms – by actually holding ourselves and others accountable to them – that they in turn have normative authority over us. By connecting the authority of epistemic norms to the authority we have over ourselves in this way, the resulting account of doxastic justification (i) explains why it can be appropriate to criticize, resent, or sanction someone for having unjustified beliefs, (ii) avoids the phenomena of normative alienation and normative parochialism, and (iii) respects the social and collective nature of epistemic justification. (shrink)

In this comprehensive collection of essays, most of which appear for the first time, eminent scholars from many disciplines—philosophy, economics, sociology, political science, demography, theology, history, and social psychology—examine the causes, nature, and consequences of present-day consumption patterns in the United States and throughout the world.

We point out the need to clarify some of the ideas related to the connection between development and sustainability in the Report of the Open Working Group of the General Assembly on Sustainable Development. In particular, the meaning of ‘sustainable’ is not clear when applied to specific areas of human activity. A more detailed explanation of the kind of equality sought for in the proposal is also needed. Because of potential conflicts between goals, we miss some considerations on the impact (...) of population increase both on development and on sustainability. A distinction is made here between two kinds of goals included in the Report. Some of the proposed 17 goals can then be seen as ends in themselves, whereas others seem to be means for the first set. The two sets thereby established should be seen in theory and dealt with in practice in a differentiated manner. (shrink)

What I call the Doxastic Puzzle, is the impression that while each of these claims seems true, at least one of them must be false: (a) Claims of the form ‘S ought to have doxastic attitude D towards p at t’ are sometimes true at t, (b) If Φ-ing at t is not within S’s effective control at t, then it is false, at t, that ‘S ought to Φ at t’, (c) For all S, p, and t, having doxastic (...) attitude D towards p at t is not within S’s effective control at t. All three natural replies to the puzzle have been pursued. Some have claimed that doxastic attitudes like believing that p are, in fact, within our effective control, or sufficiently so. Others have claimed that doxastic ought-claims, strictly speaking, are always false. And some have denied that effective control is required for the adequacy of doxastic ought-claims in general. I here pursue and examine a different strategy. In the first part of this paper, I argue that these claims are not only each true but actually not in tension with each other in the first place. Instead of attempting to dispel the puzzle, this solution proposes to evade it instead: to solve it by properly understanding, and by thereby accepting without contradiction, all of its constitutive claims. In the second part of the paper, I argue that the evasive strategy forces us to re-think our understanding of the place of normative reasons in epistemology. More exactly, it seems to come at the cost of one central way of thinking about our reasons for having doxastic attitudes, one where such reasons are good-standing exemplars of normative reasons in general. The evasive strategy, that is, threatens to lead us very quickly to a deflationary picture of epistemic normativity: it rescues normative talk, but sacrifices normative substance. I conclude by explaining why I think this is more consequential than some have made it out to be, and by suggesting that these consequences are welcome nonetheless. (shrink)

This article explores Bernard Stiegler’s philosophical approach to culture in dialogue with Oliver Marchart’s postfoundational framework and conflictual aesthetics. Through the exposition of two different cases of gestural devices, it exposes Stiegler’s potential postfoundational aesthetics as an attempt to establish the necessary conditions for re-thinking the grounded-ungrounded existing relationship between humans, technical objects, and the composition of potential realities to grasp from an autopoietic relationship. These artistic and cultural examples are considered critical concepts that enhance and interrupt the philosophical discourse. (...) The article argues that Stiegler’s aesthetics is committed to the capacity that art, as a technology of the spirit, can contribute as agency in shaping public power, even when these agents are not directly in conflict and develop lesser and fragile performative technics through which a memory becomes present again. (shrink)

This paper explores some of the areas where neuroscientific and philosophical issues intersect in the study of self-consciousness. Taking as point of departure a paradox (the paradox of self-consciousness) that appears to block philosophical elucidation of self-consciousness, the paper illustrates how the highly conceptual forms of self-consciousness emerge from a rich foundation of nonconceptual forms of self-awareness. Attention is paid in particular to the primitive forms of nonconceptual self-consciousness manifested in visual perception, somatic proprioception, spatial reasoning and interpersonal psychological interactions. (...) The study of these primitive forms of self-consciousness is an interdisciplinary enterprise and the paper considers a range of points of contact where philosophical work can illuminate work in the cognitive sciences, and vice versa. (shrink)

This paper studies the possible influences on Boole's logic of the writings related to the controversy over the quantification of the predicate between the philosopher William Hamilton and the mathematician Augustus De Morgan. As Boole himself testified in the introduction to his book The mathematical analysis of logic , this controversy was the external agent that stimulated him into writing up his earlier thoughts about a new conception of logic. But in addition to the external role that was played by (...) the controversy, it seems that other kinds of influences on Boole of Hamilton's and De Morgan's ideas about logic, which were made explicit in writings related to the controversy, can also be traced. (shrink)

Mary Everest, Boole's wife, claimed after the death of her husband that his logic had a psychological, pedagogical, and religious origin and aim rather than the mathematico-logical ones assigned to it by critics and scientists. It is the purpose of this paper to examine the validity of such a claim. The first section consists of an exposition of the claim without discussing its truthfulness; the discussion is left for the sections 2?4, in which some arguments provided by the examination of (...) the inner consistency of Mary Everest's writings, Boole's own writings, and other sources, lead to the conclusion that there are sound reasons to accept Mary Everest's viewpoint. (shrink)

W.K. Clifford’s famous 1876 essay The Ethics of Belief contains one of the most memorable lines in the history of philosophy: "it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence." The challenge to religious belief stemming from this moralized version of evidentialism is still widely discussed today.

We deal with situations incongruent with our automatic response tendencies much better right after having done so on a previous trial than after having reacted to a congruent trial. The nature of the mechanisms responsible for these sequential congruency effects is currently a hot topic of debate. According to the conflict monitoring model these effects depend on the adjustment of control triggered by the detection of conflict on the preceding situation. We tested whether these conflict monitoring processes can operate implicitly (...) in an implicit learning procedure, modulating the expression of knowledge of which participants are not aware. We reanalyze recently published data, and present an experiment with a probabilistic sequence learning procedure, both showing consistent effects of implicit sequence learning. Despite being implicit, the expression of learning was reduced or completely eliminated right after trials incongruent with the learned sequence, thus showing that sequential congruency effects can be obtained even when the source of congruency itself remains implicit. (shrink)

The claim that ordinary ethical discourse is typically true and that ethical facts are typically knowable seems in tension with the claim that ordinary ethical discourse is about features of reality friendly to a scientific worldview. Cornell Realism attempts to dispel this tension by claiming that ordinary ethical discourse is, in fact, discourse about the same kinds of things that scientific discourse is about: natural properties. We offer two novel arguments in reply. First, we identify a key assumption that we (...) find unlikely to be true. Second, we identify two features of typical natural properties that ethical properties lack. We conclude that Cornell Realism falls short of dispelling the tension between ethical conservativism and ethical naturalism. (shrink)

Abstracting away from its various particular versions, contemporary externalism about knowledge can be broadly characterized as the rejection of two central ideas: that knowledge is incompatible with reflective awareness of the possibility of error, and that knowledge is necessarily tied to the resources that are available from within the first-person perspective. In this brief introduction, I outline five distinctly externalist accounts of knowledge, and two distinctly externalist methodological approaches to knowledge, all fitting this general description.

A conception of global citizenship should not be viewed as separate from, or synonymous with, the cosmopolitan moral orientation, but as a primary component of it. Global citizenship is fundamentally concerned with individual moral requirements in the global frame. Such requirements, framed here as belonging to the category of individual cosmopolitanism, offer guidelines on right action in the context of global human community. They are complementary to the principles of moral cosmopolitanism — those to be used in assessing the justice (...) of global institutions and practices — that have been emphasised by cosmopolitan political theorists. Considering principles of individual and moral cosmopolitanism together can help to provide greater clarity concerning individual duties in the absence of fully global institutions, as well as clarity on individual obligations of justice in relation to emerging and still-developing trans-state institutions. (shrink)

This article’s assumption is that ordinary aesthetics does not necessarily imply a distancing from art and artists; rather, it can benefit from the input of creators when they use everyday scenes or objects as their theme. This approach focuses on the practice of twentieth-century Italian painter Giorgio Morandi, who depicted compositions of common objects such as bottles, jars, and vases. Through Morandi’s meditative and artistic search, these objects are given value and aesthetic elevation in his paintings. Thomas Leddy’s aesthetics of (...) everyday life will also be called upon in my analysis, insofar as the author recognizes a continuity between the ordinary and the extraordinary, through auratic experiences. If Morandi discovers the extraordinary in the trivial, this is achieved through a gradual process of selection regarding the objects he favoured, which allows for the interaction of various levels of aesthetic intensity. Morandi’s objects and models and their preparation suggest a circulation between aesthetic degrees that, in turn, suggests a timeless “language of things” fixed through the discourse of the paintings. Along these lines, it will be necessary to address the enchantment related to common things, a mesmerizing presence of which we became more aware through Morandi compositions. (shrink)

This paper deals with the influence exerted by Boole's own work on differential equations on his creation of algebraic logic. The main traits of Boole's methodology of logic, and the particular algorithms which he used in his 1847 The mathematical analysis of logic, are first pointed out. An examination of the mathematical papers which Boole wrote before the publication of the mentioned logical treatise shows that both the methodology leading to the production of his logic and the algorithms used in (...) its development were repeatedly used by him in his earlier work in analysis. (shrink)

The essay aims to illuminate the current crisis, as it has been diagnosed by important currents of contemporary European thought, from the baroque remarkably the Hispanic perspective. The author argues that one of the fundamental figures of the Baroque is what he calls an infinite aporethic difference. According to this, Baroque understands the world as a set of differences that bind aporethically tending to infinity. This figure is, at the same time, shown as a critical operator with regard to reality, (...) which has lost its pre-modern configuration as Cosmos. The author also holds that in its present projection, the figure of the infinite aporethic difference takes the form of a new normativity, namely, that of the Chaosmos, which is particularly visible in post-structuralism and in the Ibero-American Neo-baroque. By its virtue, it is possible to distinguish two ways of coping with the current crisis. The chaosmotic one would be characteristic of a compromised strong trans-modernity, which contrasts with the evasive weak postmodernity. This problem is finally investigated from the point of view of the subtle baroque heroism and its shadow in the present. (shrink)

One of the potentially most significant objections to a cosmopolitan moral approach charges an essential arrogance: cosmopolitanism disdains particularist moral insights even while – in what is said to be its most coherent form – it seeks to bind all persons within global political institutions. It is argued here that adopting a form of institutional cosmopolitanism actually helps to meet this sort of objection. An appropriately configured such approach will have a conception of equal global citizenship at its core. It (...) will seek to place individuals in relations of political humility, understood not as plain deference to competing moral claims, but as concrete recognition of the equal moral status of others. It will seek to progressively empower as actual citizen equals those whose interests are often ‘arrogantly’ neglected in the current system, and to multiply mechanisms of input and challenge for them over time. (shrink)

This paper explores the relationship between individual work values and unethical decision-making and actual behavior at work through two complementary studies. Specifically, we use a robust and comprehensive model of individual work values to predict unethical decision-making in a sample of working professionals and accounting students enrolled in ethics courses, and IT employees working in sales and customer service. Study 1 demonstrates that young professionals who rate power as a relatively important value are more likely to violate professional conduct guidelines (...) despite receiving training regarding ethical professional principles. Study 2, which examines a group of employees from an IT firm, demonstrates that those rating power as an important value are more likely to engage in non-work-related computing even when they are aware of a monitoring software that tracks their computer usage and an explicit policy prohibiting the use of these computers for personal reasons. (shrink)

Los Māsilik al-abṣār de Ibn Faḍl Allāh al-'Umarī incluyen un breve resumen de la Historia de los omeyas de al-Andalus. En este trabajo se analizan las relaciones textuales entre ese pasaje y el Muqtabis de Ibn Ḥayyān, crónica que resulta ser la fuente casi única utilizada por al-'Umarī para redactar ese capítulo.

Cosmopolitan political theorists hold that our obligations to distribute resources to others do not halt at state borders, but most do not advocate a restructuring of the global system to achieve their distributive aims. This article argues that promoting democratically accountable economic and political integration between states would be the most effective way to enable cosmopolitan, or routine, tax-financed, trans-state distributions. Movement toward a more integrated global system should encourage the view that larger sets of persons have interests in common (...) that should be protected and promoted in common. Democratically accountable integration also should enable those within less-affluent states to more vigorously press trans-state distributive claims. The still-evolving E.U. is examined as a partial model for the integrated alternative in other geographic regions, as well as, in the much longer term, for some form of democratic global government capable of ensuring that any person born anywhere would have access to adequate resources and life opportunities. (shrink)

Ortega y Gasset afirmó “[...] la fenomenología no fue una filosofía para nosotros: fue... una buena suerte”. Esto se debió a que, a través de ella, pudo encontrar una salida del neokantismo. En consecuencia, Ortega entenderá que la fenomenología busca salvar la racionalidad sin ignorar la experiencia, es decir, sin olvidar, que todo sucede en la vida de cada individuo. Sin embargo, desde el principio se da cuenta de que este individuo no es algo aislado, sino que se forma en (...) relación con el mundo, la circunstancia (“Yo soy yo y mi circunstancia y si no la salvo a ella, no me salvo yo”, dirá hacia 1914) y que la fenomenología debe recuperar el carácter ejecutivo de la vida. El presente ensayo recorrerá desde el encuentro de Ortega con la fenomenología hasta sus intuiciones acerca de la vida como realidad radical. Palabras clave: Ortega y Gasset, Fenomenología, Circunstancias, Vida, Vivencias. (shrink)

Negri, A. (2020). De la fábrica a la metrópolis. (F. Venturi, trad.). Cactus. 256 pp.

We prove that a combinatorial consequence of the negation of the PCF conjecture for intervals, involving free subsets relative to set mappings, is not implied by even the strongest known large cardinal axiom.

This article critically examines the plain exit principle of Kukathas that argues as the best system to conciliate the demands of belonging to an indigenous culture and the right to dissent from their women members. We first review the tension between feminism of equality and the situation of indigenous women with their internal cultures. Second, we explore the thesis of Kukathas for conclude that it alone is not enough. Finally, it analyses an alternative solution that overlapping the right of exit, (...) a model of multicultural jurisdictions and adequate conception of deliberative democracy. (shrink)

This article presents the thesis the weak thinking and nihilistic vocation of Gianni Vattimo's hermeneutics, unlike the criticisms and misunderstandings underwent, does not necessarily imply the assumption, defense and proposal of a philosophical and hermeneutical irrationality. Based on a hermeneutics of the Italian philosopher texts, it is evident the criticisms of irrationalism are contested by the author, however, like all philosophy, it is necessary to deepen and reflect on the implications this philosophy has for modern philosophy and hodiernal hermeneutics. The (...) concepts of thought and hermeneutic rationality are the axes upon which Gianni Vattimo's philosophy is analyzed and philosophically reflected in this article. (shrink)