Firstly we consider the new results about enzymatic capabilities in the RNA. In this framework we analyse the sequence-folding duality as a precursor of the genotype/phenotype duality. We discuss then which are the evolutive potentialities and limitations for a system with the absence and the presence of a nucleic acid to proteins translator code. We study the arise of the code in the living systems as a form of deep interlooking between the logic of the machinery and its hardware, discussing (...) some problems that abstract modelization of this process implies. Finaly we propose to redefine the informational vocabulary usually employed in Molecular Biology. (shrink)

We study the appearance of genetic information starting from a system where self-reproductive and enzymatic functions are supported by the same sort of molecules. In a first phase, the information must have arisen in the form of rate independent sequences as records of enzymatic functions. Although this stage must have played an important role in evolution, it will be shown how its evolutive capacities were blocked by the impossibility of appearance of geno/phenotype duality. Finally, a logical scheme is proposed for (...) a transition process toward a system with a code offering a simplification of the conditions required from the assumption of a maximum use of the double RNA capacity, both reproductive and enzymatic. (shrink)

En el trabajo reconstruimos la trayectoria seguida en España por los agentes económicos extranjeros a lo largo del período 1936-1959. El primer estudio fue de Muñoz, Roldán y Serrano en 1978. En nuestros días hay más aportaciones, pues el tema es crucial para cualquier país. Analizamos los problemas con los nuevos "arreglos" legales y el liderazgo final de los Estados Unidos. Los datos de EE.UU. muestran una buena evidencia y por tanto una muy buena prueba del gran impacto de la (...) inversión directa extranjera en España durante este periodo. Por otro lado, cuestionamos la percepción convencional sobre la escasez de inversión extranjera en el país entre 1936 y 1959. Eso fue debido a dos aspectos claves, uno la necesidad y por el otro lado, la red de inversiones antes de 1936 que lo hicieron posible. (shrink)

(1991). Life as emergence: The roots of a new paradigm in theoretical biology. World Futures: Vol. 32, Creative Evolution in Nature, Mind, and Society, pp. 133-149.

Firstly we consider the new results about enzymatic capabilities in the RNA. In this framework we analyse the sequence-folding duality as a precursor of the genotype/phenotype duality. We discuss then which are the evolutive potentialities and limitations for a system with the absence and the presence of a nucleic acid to proteins translator code. We study the arise of the code in the living systems as a form of deep interlooking between the logic of the machinery and its hardware, discussing (...) some problems that abstract modelization of this process implies. Finaly we propose to redefine the informational vocabulary usually employed in Molecular Biology. (shrink)

Este artículo analiza la presencia simbólica del amor, la belleza y el ‘eterno femenino’ en la tragedia Fausto de Johann Wolfgang von Goethe a través de la hermenéutica comparativa con dos textos fundamentales del Renacimiento, De los heroicos furores de Giordano Bruno y la Hypnerotomachia Poliphili de Colonna. La tesis de partida es que los tres amores de Fausto, Margarita, Helena y la Mater Gloriosa, son en realidad una representación simbólica de los tres aspectos fundamentales del alma que (...) también podemos encontrar en estos dos textos por su conexión con la tradición neoplatónica. (shrink)

La entrevista al doctor Camilo Fernández Cozman se realizó el 19 de julio de 2021, a 9 días del 28 de julio, fecha en la que se conmemora la Independencia del Perú.

This book evaluates how the pragmatist notion of habit can influence current debates at the crossroads between philosophy, cognitive sciences, neurosciences, and social theory. It deals with the different aspects of the pragmatic turn involved in 4E cognitive science and traces back the roots of such a pragmatic turn to both classical and contemporary pragmatism. Written by renowned philosophers, cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, and social theorists, this volume fills the need for an interdisciplinary account of the role of 'habit'. Researchers interested (...) in the philosophy of mind, cognitive science, neuroscience, psychology, social theory, and social ontology will need this book to fully understand the pragmatist turn in current research on mind, action and society. (shrink)

Our memories elicit, in us, both beliefs about what the external world was like in the past, and beliefs about what our own past experience of it was like in the past. What explains the power of memories to do that? I tackle this question by offering an account of the content of our memories. According to this account, our memories are ‘token-reflexives’, in that they represent their own causal origin. My main contention will be that our memories are able (...) to provide us with evidence for the two types of beliefs due to the self-referential nature of their content. First, I will put forward a series of thought-experiments intended to raise several intuitions about the veridicality of memories. Next, I will introduce the view that memories are token-reflexives, and I will motivate it by pointing out that the view accommodates the relevant intuitions. And, then, I will return to the two types of beliefs prompted by our memories, and argue that conceiving memories as token-reflexives allows us to explain why memory has the power to elicit the two types of beliefs in us. (shrink)

The favorable reception that was received for the book Per salvare la democrazia in Italia (Rubbettino, 2019) did not prevent some demanding readers from raising objections to some passages included in part five of the book, containing proposals to improve the functioning of our democratic system. It was therefore decided to take advantage of the period of forced domicile imposed by the pandemic to write this new book, whose primary objective is to clarify the passages in question while explaining the (...) proposed innovative solutions in a simpler manner, starting with the description of his own career path and ending with a suggestion for changing the way of doing politics in Italy. The second objective is to make readers aware of the enormous impact exerted by European legislation on the Italian legal system--Translated from back cover. (shrink)

Preface de Jocelyn Benoist La complexite est devenue desormais le trait essentiel de la plupart des approches scientifiques contemporaines. Cependant, elle n'a pas encore recu d'approche philosophique qui l'inscrit dans un discours de fondation ou de fixation ontologique. Pour cela, il faut s'adresser a la discipline qui fait de la description de la phenomenalite sa tache principale et constitutive: la phenomenologie. Quel rapport subsiste entre la phenomenologie et la complexite? Comment la phenomenologie, en tant que discipline d'interrogation de la phenomenalite (...) comme telle, peut repondre aux problemes et aux questions souleves par la theorie de la complexite et, par consequent, au changement radical de paradigme dans les sciences? De telles questions s'averent etre essentielles, surtout parce que, au XXe siecle, l'importance de la phenomenologie pour la philosophie va de pair avec l'importance de la theorie de la complexite pour toutes sortes de disciplines scientifiques. En depit de cette specularite, la phenomenologie et la theorie de la complexite ne se sont jamais rencontrees, leurs parcours d'interrogation ne se sont jamais croises: elles n'ont jamais recu une thematisation commune, systematique, elles n'ont jamais ete interrogees ni problematisees dans leurs relations structurelles, et, si parva licet componore magnis, necessaires. Ce livre propose une approche systematique de la complexite du point de vue phenomenologique et s'oriente vers une nouvelle interaction entre les savoirs positifs et la philosophie. (shrink)

Memories are mental states with a number of interesting features. One of those features seems to be their having an intentional object. After all, we commonly say that memories are about things, and that a subject represents the world in a certain way by virtue of remembering something. It is unclear, however, what sorts of entities constitute the intentional objects of memory. In particular, it is not clear whether those are mind-independent entities in the world or whether they are mental (...) entities of some kind. The purpose of this chapter is to map the different positions on this issue, and to highlight the virtues and difficulties for each of the options. In Section 2, I will specify the question of what the intentional objects of memory are by clarifying the relevant notions of memory and intentional object. In Section 3, I will motivate the significance of identifying the intentional objects of memory by exploring the relations between, on the one hand, the intentionality of memory and, on the other hand, the phenomenology and the epistemology of memory. In Section 4, I will consider two natural candidates for being the intentional objects of memory, namely, worldly entities and mental entities, and I will raise some concerns for each of the two candidates. A promising alternative will emerge, in Section 5, as preserving the virtues of the two original candidates while avoiding their difficulties. The alternative will concern a certain combination of worldly and mental entities; a combination that involves both causal and truth-making relations. I will conclude by sketching how the alternative candidate can shed some light on the phenomenological and epistemological issues raised in the third section. (shrink)

A dichotomy result of Sevenster (2014) [29] completely classified the quantifier prefixes of regular Independence-Friendly (IF) logic according to the patterns of quantifier dependence they contain. On one hand, prefixes that contain “Henkin” or “signalling” patterns were shown to characterize fragments of IF logic that capture NP-complete problems; all the remaining prefixes were shown instead to be essentially first-order. In the present paper we develop the machinery which is needed in order to extend the results of Sevenster to non-prenex, regular (...) IF sentences. This involves shifting attention from quantifier prefixes to a (rather general) class of syntactical tree prefixes. We partially classify the fragments of regular IF logic that are thus determined by syntactical trees; in particular, a) we identify four classes of tree prefixes that are neither signaling nor Henkin, and yet express NP-complete problems and other second-order concepts; and b) we give more general criteria for checking the first-orderness of an IF sentence. (shrink)

Team semantics is a highly general framework for logics which describe dependencies and independencies among variables. Typically, the dependencies considered in this context are properties of sets of configurations or data records. We show how team semantics can be further generalized to support languages for the discussion of interventionist counterfactuals and causal dependencies, such as those that arise in manipulationist theories of causation. We show that the “causal teams” we introduce in the present paper can be used for modelling some (...) classical counterfactual scenarios which are not captured by the usual causal models. We then analyse the basic properties of our counterfactual languages and discuss extensively the differences with respect to the Lewisian tradition. (shrink)

We analyze the causal-observational languages that were introduced in Barbero and Sandu (2018), which allow discussing interventionist counterfactuals and functional dependencies in a unified framework. In particular, we systematically investigate the expressive power of these languages in causal team semantics, and we provide complete natural deduction calculi for each language. Furthermore, we introduce a generalized semantics which allows representing uncertainty about the causal laws, and we analyze the expressive power and proof theory of the causal-observational languages over this enriched semantics.

This chapter provides an overview of how existential phenomenology has influenced qualitative research methods across a range of disciplines across the social, health, educational, and psychological sciences. It focuses specifically on how the concepts of “existential structures,” or “existentials”—such as selfhood, temporality, spatiality, affectivity, and embodiment—have been used in qualitative research. After providing a brief introduction to what qualitative research is and why philosophers should be interested in it, the chapter provides clear, straightforward examples of how qualitative researchers have used (...) existentials to analyze qualitative data and design qualitative studies. The chapter is intended to introduce philosophers to existential approaches to phenomenological qualitative research, with the aim of facilitating interdisciplinary dialogue and collaboration. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 7, July 2022.

We analyze the expressive resources of \ logic that do not stem from Henkin quantification. When one restricts attention to regular \ sentences, this amounts to the study of the fragment of \ logic which is individuated by the game-theoretical property of action recall. We prove that the fragment of prenex AR sentences can express all existential second-order properties. We then show that the same can be achieved in the non-prenex fragment of AR, by using “signalling by disjunction” instead of (...) Henkin or signalling patterns. We also study irregular IF logic and analyze its correspondence to regular IF logic. By using new methods, we prove that the game-theoretical property of knowledge memory is a first-order syntactical constraint also for irregular sentences, and we identify another new first-order fragment. Finally we discover that irregular prefixes behave quite differently in finite and infinite models. In particular, we show that, over infinite structures, every irregular prefix is equivalent to a regular one; and we present an irregular prefix which is second order on finite models but collapses to a first-order prefix on infinite models. (shrink)

We analyze the behaviour of declarations of independence between existential quantifiers in quantifier prefixes of Independence-Friendly (IF) sentences; we give a syntactical criterion to decide whether a sentence beginning with such prefix exists, such that its truth values may be affected by removal of the declaration of independence. We extend the result also to equilibrium semantics values for undetermined IF sentences.

A uniform carbon tax with equal per capita dividends is usually advocated as a cost-effective way of reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions without increasing, and in many cases even reducing, economic inequality, in particular because of the positive balance between the carbon taxes paid by the worse off and the carbon dividends they receive back. In this article, I argue that a uniform carbon tax reform is unjust regardless of how the revenue is used, because it does not discourage the (...) rich from indulging in wasteful emissions. This is at odds with a normative account of the distribution of the GHG budget that I define as emissions limitarianism, which is a climate derivative of economic limitarianism. Emissions limitarianism holds that, under low GHG budget conditions, emissions permits should not be used to achieve functionings that over-consume the GHG budget without producing significant welfare gains relative to the achievement of alternative functionings. Accordingly, I argue that a uniform carbon tax should be complemented by a limitarian carbon tax, which restricts the capabilities of the rich to achieve wasteful emission-generating functionings. The article adopts a methodological multi-level perspective on capabilities as a measure of welfare, distinguishing between basic, secondary and tertiary capabilities. (shrink)