The aim of this research was to delimit the predictive and mediational model of resilience between character strengths to predict flourishing, in a sample of undergraduate students. After signing their informed consent, 642 university students completed three validated scales. Using an ex post facto design, regression, structural modeling, and mediation analyses were carried out, in order to construct a multi-causal predictive model. Results indicated a consistent predictive direct effect of character strengths on resilience and flourishing and of resilience on flourishing. (...) As hypothesized, resilience also showed a mediating effect on the relationship between character strengths and flourishing. Additionally, results also revealed that the reactive and proactive factors of resilience were explained by different character strengths, reinforcing the idea that the two directions are complementary and necessary. Finally, several implications were established for the practice of positive psychology. (shrink)

This paper develops a novel version of anti-platonism, called semantic fictionalism. The view is a response to the platonist argument that we need to countenance propositions to account for the truth of sentences containing `that'-clause singular terms, e.g., sentences of the form `x believes that p' and `σ means that p'. Briefly, the view is that (a) platonists are right that `that'-clauses purport to refer to propositions, but (b) there are no such things as propositions, and hence, (c) `that'-clause-containing sentences (...) of the above sort are not true-they are useful fictions. Semantic fictionalism is an extension of Hartry Field's mathematical fictionalism, but my defense of the view is not analogous to his. One of the many virtues of my defense is its generality: it explains how we can adopt a fictionalist stance towards all abstract singular terms, e.g., mathematical singular terms and `that'-clauses. (shrink)

This paper develops a novel version of anti-platonism, called semantic fictionalism. The view is a response to the platonist argument that we need to countenance propositions to account for the truth of sentences containing ‘that’-clause singular terms, e.g., sentences of the form ‘x believes that p’ and ‘σ means that p’. Briefly, the view is that (a) platonists are right that ‘that’-clauses purport to refer to propositions, but (b) there are no such things as propositions, and hence, (c) ‘that’-clause-containing sentences (...) of the above sort are not true---they are useful fictions. Semantic fictionalism is an extension of Hartry Field’s mathematical fictionalism, but my defense of the view is not analogous to his. One of the many virtues of my defense is its generality: it explains how we can adopt a fictionalist stance towards all abstract singular terms, e.g., mathematical singular terms and ‘that’-clauses. (shrink)

Federico Monjeau. La invención musical. Ideas de historia, forma y representación, segunda edición. Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2023, 151 páginas. Pablo Palomino. La invención de la música latinoamericana. Una historia transnacional, traducción de Laura Palomino e Ignacio de Cousandier. Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2021, 287 páginas.

In this paper I respond to Marcus William Hunt’s argument that vegan parents have pro tanto reasons for not raising their children on a vegan diet because such a diet is potentially harmful to children’s physical and social well-being. In my rebuttal, first I show that in practice all vegan diets, with the exception of wacky diets, are beneficial to children’s well-being ; and that all animal-based diets are potentially unhealthful. Second, I show that vegan children are no more socially (...) outcast than any other group. In other words, veganism does not harm the lives of children. Having considered several studies, I show that the moral reasons that vegan parents may have for raising their children on a vegan diet significantly outweigh the reasons for raising their children on an animal-based diet. Thus, I conclude that parents have a moral obligation to raise their children on a vegan diet. (shrink)

In this largely antimetaphysical treatment of free will and determinism, Mark Balaguer argues that the philosophical problem of free will boils down to an open scientific question about the causal histories of certain kinds of neural events. In the course of his argument, Balaguer provides a naturalistic defense of the libertarian view of free will. The metaphysical component of the problem of free will, Balaguer argues, essentially boils down to the question of whether humans possess libertarian free (...) will. Furthermore, he argues that, contrary to the traditional wisdom, the libertarian question reduces to a question about indeterminacy--in particular, to a straightforward empirical question about whether certain neural events in our heads are causally undetermined in a certain specific way; in other words, Balaguer argues that the right kind of indeterminacy would bring with it all of the other requirements for libertarian free will. Finally, he argues that because there is no good evidence as to whether or not the relevant neural events are undetermined in the way that's required, the question of whether human beings possess libertarian free will is a wide-open empirical question. (shrink)

Since Darwin, Biology has been framed on the idea of evolution by natural selection, which has profoundly influenced the scientific and philosophical comprehension of biological phenomena and of our place in Nature. This book argues that contemporary biology should progress towards and revolve around an even more fundamental idea, that of autonomy. Biological autonomy describes living organisms as organised systems, which are able to self-produce and self-maintain as integrated entities, to establish their own goals and norms, and to promote the (...) conditions of their existence through their interactions with the environment. Topics covered in this book include organisation and biological emergence, organisms, agency, levels of autonomy, cognition, and a look at the historical dimension of autonomy. The current development of scientific investigations on autonomous organisation calls for a theoretical and philosophical analysis. This can contribute to the elaboration of an original understanding of life - including human life - on Earth, opening new perspectives and enabling fecund interactions with other existing theories and approaches. This book takes up the challenge. (shrink)

In this book, Balaguer demonstrates that there are no good arguments for or against mathematical platonism. He does this by establishing that both platonism and anti-platonism are defensible views. Introducing a form of platonism ("full-blooded platonism") that solves all problems traditionally associated with the view, he proceeds to defend anti-platonism (in particular, mathematical fictionalism) against various attacks, most notably the Quine-Putnam indispensability attack. He concludes by arguing that it is not simply that we do not currently have any good (...) argument for or against platonism, but that we could never have such an argument and, indeed, that there is no fact of the matter as to whether platonism is correct. (shrink)

? Mark BALAGUER Philosophical forum 34:3-43-4, 459-475, Blackwell, 2003.

This paper aims to enhance security in IoT device networks through a visual tool that utilizes three projection techniques, including Beta Hebbian Learning (BHL), t-distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (t-SNE) and ISOMAP, in order to facilitate the identification of network attacks by human experts. This work research begins with the creation of a testing environment with IoT devices and web clients, simulating attacks over Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) for recording all relevant traffic information. The unsupervised algorithms chosen provide a set (...) of projections that enable human experts to visually identify most attacks in real-time, making it a powerful tool that can be implemented in IoT environments easily. (shrink)

The debate over ape personhood is of great social and moral importance. For more than twenty-five years, attorney Steven Wise has been arguing that animals who have cognitive complexities similar to humans should be legally granted basic rights of au- tonomy. In my view, granting personhood status and other rights to great apes are at- tainable goals. But how should we go about it?

¿Qué es una revolución? ¿Qué fuerzas la desencadenan? ¿Por qué fases atraviesa? ¿Es un acontecimiento imprevisible, que actúa al modo de una explosión volcánica, como pensaba Joseph de Maistre, o es un fenómeno enraizado en factores observables, acumulados a lo largo del tiempo, como afirmó Tocqueville? ¿Es el resultado necesario de factores estructurales, de acuerdo con procesos deterministas de carácter inevitable, como pensaba Karl Marx, o es algo contingente, provocado y dirigido por la acción consciente de grupos sociales con propósitos (...) definidos, como demostró Ted R. Gurr? Y, de ser así, ¿están enraizados tales factores y/o responden tales propósitos a aspiraciones predominantemente materiales y económicas, o son más bien de tipo espiritual, relacionados con la dignidad y el deseo de libertad de los participantes, o incluso con percepciones transcendentes, relacionadas con la seguridad ontológica y la percepción identitaria de las sociedades y los grupos participantes? ¿Qué resultados cabe esperar de las revoluciones y qué factores inciden sobre ellos? (shrink)

The project of growing meat artificially represents for some the next best thing to humanity. If successful, it could be the solution to several problems, such as feed- ing a growing global population while reducing the environmental impact of raising animals for food and, of course, reducing the amount and degree of animal cruelty and suffering that is involved in animal farming. In this paper, I argue that the issue of the morality of such a project has been framed only (...) in terms of the best conse- quences for the environment, animals, and humans, or in terms of deontic princi- ples. I argue that to appreciate how deep and difficult this issue is, it is necessary to consider it in terms of a virtue-oriented approach. Such an approach will reveal aspects that are not apparent, not contemplated by typical approaches, but are essen- tial to our understanding of the morality of lab-grown meat. As I argue, evaluating the issue from a virtue-oriented perspective suggests that the project of in vitro meat should not be supported because it stems from unvirtuous motivations. (shrink)

This book does two things. First, it introduces a novel kind of non-factualist view, and it argues that we should endorse views of this kind in connection with a wide class of metaphysical questions, most notably, the abstract-object question and the composite-object question (so, more specifically, the book argues that there’s no fact of the matter whether there are any such things as abstract objects or composite objects—or material objects of any other kind). Second, the book explains how these non-factualist (...) views fit into a general anti-metaphysical view called neo-positivism, and it explains how we could argue that neo-positivism is true. Neo-positivism is (roughly) the view is that every metaphysical question decomposes into some subquestions—call them Q1, Q2, Q3, etc.—such that, for each of these subquestions, one of the following three anti-metaphysical views is true of it: non-factualism, or scientism, or metaphysically innocent modal-truth-ism. These three views can be defined (very roughly) as follows. Non-factualism about a question Q is the view that there’s no fact of the matter about the answer to Q. Scientism about Q is the view that Q is an ordinary empirical-scientific question about some contingent aspect of physical reality, and Q can’t be settled with an a priori philosophical argument. And metaphysically innocent modal-truth-ism about Q is the view that Q asks about the truth value of a modal sentence that’s metaphysically innocent in the sense that it doesn’t say anything about reality and, if it’s true, isn’t made true by reality. (shrink)

This paper argues that at Cicero, De re publica 6.17 the manuscript text unum globum should be kept instead of the conjecture summum globum. This conjecture is unanimously attributed to Fr. Boll (1910), but it was proposed already in 1790 by G. W. Maier. The use of unus in this context, in which the set of harmonic spheres of our cosmos is described, can be explained as an alternative to primus when referring to the first element of a sequence; further (...) instances in Cicero’s works support this interpretation. (shrink)

This book does three main things. First, it defends mathematical platonism against the main objections to that view (most notably, the epistemological objection and the multiple-reductions objection). Second, it defends anti-platonism (in particular, fictionalism) against the main objections to that view (most notably, the Quine-Putnam indispensability objection and the objection from objectivity). Third, it argues that there is no fact of the matter whether abstract mathematical objects exist and, hence, no fact of the matter whether platonism or anti-platonism is true.

Mathematical fictionalism (or as I'll call it, fictionalism) is best thought of as a reaction to mathematical platonism. Platonism is the view that (a) there exist abstract mathematical objects (i.e., nonspatiotemporal mathematical objects), and (b) our mathematical sentences and theories provide true descriptions of such objects. So, for instance, on the platonist view, the sentence ‘3 is prime’ provides a straightforward description of a certain object—namely, the number 3—in much the same way that the sentence ‘Mars is red’ provides a (...) description of Mars. But whereas Mars is a physical object, the number 3 is (according to platonism) an abstract object. And abstract objects, platonists tell us, are wholly nonphysical, nonmental, nonspatial, nontemporal, and noncausal. Thus, on this view, the number 3 exists independently of us and our thinking, but it does not exist in space or time, it is not a physical or mental object, and it does not enter into causal relations with other objects. This view has been endorsed by Plato, Frege (1884, 1893-1903, 1919), Gödel (1964), and in some of their writings, Russell (1912) and Quine (1948, 1951), not to mention numerous more recent philosophers of mathematics, e.g., Putnam (1971), Parsons (1971), Steiner (1975), Resnik (1997), Shapiro (1997), Hale (1987), Wright (1983), Katz (1998), Zalta (1988), and Colyvan (2001). (shrink)

Platonism is the view that there exist such things as abstract objects — where an abstract object is an object that does not exist in space or time and which is therefore entirely non-physical and nonmental. Platonism in this sense is a contemporary view. It is obviously related to the views of Plato in important ways, but it is not entirely clear that Plato endorsed this view, as it is defined here. In order to remain neutral on this question, the (...) term ‘platonism’ is spelled with a lower-case ‘p’. (See entry on Plato.) The most important figure in the development of modern platonism is Gottlob Frege (1884, 1892, 1893-1903, 1919). The view has also been endorsed by many others, including Kurt Gödel (1964), Bertrand Russell (1912), and W.V.O. Quine (1948, 1951). (shrink)

En este artículo se pretende realizar un análisis del origen filosófico de uno de los puntos clave que cambiaron los cimientos de la metafísica moderna a partir de la aportación de la noción de filosofía de naturaleza de Schelling, que conlleva a abrir desde el idealismo alemán una concepción alternativa de las relaciones entre la finitud y el Absoluto a las llevadas a cabo por Fichte y Hegel. Su filosofía de la naturaleza inaugurará toda una corriente de pensamiento que incluirá (...) tanto gran parte de la filosofía de Spinoza como el discurrir estético del Sturm und Drang alemán. Posteriormente, y previa enorme reflexión del tótem ineludible de la filosofía crítica kantiana y ruptura con la fichteana, la importancia de su legado filosófico no hará más que crecer, ya que de la influencia sus escritos participarán, de manera más o menos explícita, pensadores como Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud o Heidegger, e incluso llegará hasta el siglo XXI de la mano de gran parte de los autores de la denominada época posmoderna, como Deleuze o Zizek entre otros. (shrink)

The first form of the inside-outside dichotomy appears as a self-encapsulated system with an active border. These systems are based on two complementary but asymmetric processes: constructive and interactive. The former physically constitute the system as a recursive network of component production, defining an inside. The maintenance of the constructive processes implies that the internal organization also constrains certain flows of matter and energy across the border of the system, generating interactive processes. These interactive processes ensure the maintenance of the (...) constructive processes thus specifying a meaningful outside. Upon this basic form of identity formation, the evolutionary and historical domain is open for the emergence of a whole hierarchy and ecology of insides and outsides. These which mutually subsume and collaborate in the maintenance of the essential inside-outside dichotomy that defines the conditions of possibility of the subjects and the worlds they generate. (shrink)

The project of growing meat artificially represents for some the next best thing to humanity. If successful, it could be the solution to several problems, such as feeding a growing global population while reducing the environmental impact of raising animals for food and, of course, reducing the amount and degree of animal cruelty and suffering that is involved in animal farming. In this paper, I argue that the issue of the morality of such a project has been framed only in (...) terms of the best consequences for the environment, animals, and humans, or in terms of deontic principles. I argue that to appreciate how deep and difficult this issue is, it is necessary to consider it in terms of a virtue-oriented approach. Such an approach will reveal aspects that are not apparent, not contemplated by typical approaches, but are essential to our understanding of the morality of lab-grown meat. As I argue, evaluating the issue from a virtue-oriented perspective suggests that the project of in vitro meat should not be supported because it stems from unvirtuous motivations. (shrink)

We present a theory of cooperative-competitive intelligence (CCI), its measures, research program, and applications that stem from it. Within the framework of this theory, satisficing sub-optimal behavior is any behavior that does not promote a decrease in the prospective control of the functional action diversity/unpredictability (D/U) potential of the agent or team. This potential is defined as the entropy measure in multiple, context-dependent dimensions. We define the satisficing interval of behaviors as CCI. In order to manifest itself at individual or (...) team level, this capacity harnesses properties such as degeneracy, pleiotropy (pluri-potentiality), synergies, and metastability. Intelligence is embodied because intelligent behavior is deeply dependent on body functionalities, defined as entropy measures. We base our theory on three principles: (a) relativity of functional entropy/ information in agent (team)-environment systems, (b) tendency toward the satisficing level of D/U potential, and (c) tendency toward the non-decreasing D/U potential. The conjunction of these three principles provides existence of sub-optimal behaviors associated with CCI. First, we deal with the problem of how to reduce multidimensional behavior to a concept that accounts for the vast set of scenarios in which CCI is manifested. Secondly, we define and discuss the three interacting principles that underpin CCI behavior as well as providing an outline for a future CCI research program supported by agent￾based modeling and empirical research. Finally, we provide some preliminary practical issues that stem from the theory. (shrink)

This article proposes a reading of digital citizenships as these are shifting from a historical and conceptual perspective. We developed the following steps to carry it out: first, a problematization of the concept of digital citizenship from a critical-historical reading, betting on a complex understanding of it that assumes interactions between public and private spheres; second, taking into account aspects of the technology’s philosophy, we analyze the relationship between young people and politics through Twitter, and finally, a proposal of prejudices (...) configuration and modelling that can occur in this new public-private sphere based on some aspects seen in the second round of the 2018 Colombian presidential campaign. One of the conclusions we reached is that Twitter is a sociotechnical network that generates a shifting form of connection between the private and public spheres, where young people have assemblage and can generate resistance to the modelling imposed by political campaigns. (shrink)

In this article, we propose some fundamental requirements for the appearance of adaptivity. We argue that a basic metabolic organization, taken in its minimal sense, may provide the conceptual framework for naturalizing the origin of teleology and normative functionality as it appears in living systems. However, adaptivity also requires the emergence of a regulatory subsystem, which implies a certain form of dynamic decoupling within a globally integrated, autonomous system. Thus, we analyze several forms of minimal adaptivity, including the special case (...) of motility. We go on to explain how an open-ended complexity growth of motility-based adaptive agency, namely, behavior, requires the appearance of the nervous system. Finally, we discuss some implications of these ideas for embodied robotics. (shrink)

Ethical veganism is the view that raising animals for food is an immoral practice that must be stopped because of the harm it causes to the animals, the environment, and our health. Carlo Alvaro argues the only way to stop that harm is to acquire the virtues that enable us to act justly and benevolently toward animals.

Título: ¿Cómo investigar en Didáctica de las Ciencias Sociales? Fundamentos metodológicos, técnicas e instrumentos de investigación Editor: Delfín Ortega Sánchez Editorial: Octaedro Lugar de edición: Barcelona Año: 2023 ISBN: 978-84-19690-20-3 Páginas: 238.

A response is given here to Benacerraf's 1973 argument that mathematical platonism is incompatible with a naturalistic epistemology. Unlike almost all previous platonist responses to Benacerraf, the response given here is positive rather than negative; that is, rather than trying to find a problem with Benacerraf's argument, I accept his challenge and meet it head on by constructing an epistemology of abstract (i.e., aspatial and atemporal) mathematical objects. Thus, I show that spatio-temporal creatures like ourselves can attain knowledge about mathematical (...) objects by simply explaininghow they can do this. My argument is based upon the adoption of a particular version of platonism — full-blooded platonism — which asserts that any mathematical object which possiblycould exist actuallydoes exist. (shrink)

The relationship between the neurobiology of speech and music has been investigated for more than a century. There remains no widespread agreement regarding how (or to what extent) music perception utilizes the neural circuitry that is engaged in speech processing, particularly at the cortical level. Prominent models such as Patel’s Shared Syntactic Integration Resource Hypothesis (SSIRH) and Koelsch’s neurocognitive model of music perception suggest a high degree of overlap, particularly in the frontal lobe, but also perhaps more distinct representations in (...) the temporal lobe with hemispheric asymmetries. The present meta-analysis study used activation likelihood estimate analyses to identify the brain regions consistently activated for music as compared to speech across the functional neuroimaging (fMRI and PET) literature. Eighty music and 91 speech neuroimaging studies of healthy adult control subjects were analyzed. Peak activations reported in the music and speech studies were divided into four paradigm categories: passive listening, discrimination tasks, error/anomaly detection tasks and memory-related tasks. We then compared activation likelihood estimates within each category for music versus speech, and each music condition with passive listening. We found that listening to music and to speech preferentially activate distinct temporo-parietal bilateral cortical networks. We also found music and speech to have shared resources in the left pars opercularis but speech-specific resources in the left pars triangularis. The extent to which music recruited speech-activated frontal resources was modulated by task. While there are certainly limitations to meta-analysis techniques particularly regarding sensitivity, this work suggests that the extent of shared resources between speech and music may be task-dependent and highlights the need to consider how task effects may be affecting conclusions regarding the neurobiology of speech and music. (shrink)

This paper develops a novel version of mathematical fictionalism and defends it against three objections or worries, viz., (i) an objection based on the fact that there are obvious disanalogies between mathematics and fiction; (ii) a worry about whether fictionalism is consistent with the fact that certain mathematical sentences are objectively correct whereas others are incorrect; and (iii) a recent objection due to John Burgess concerning “hermeneuticism” and “revolutionism”.

Human beings are getting fatter and sicker. As we question what we eat and why we eat it, this book argues that living well involves consuming a raw vegan diet. With eating healthfully and eating ethically being simpler said than done, this book argues that the best solution to health, environmental, and ethical problems concerning animals is raw veganism―the human diet. The human diet is what humans are naturally designed to eat, and that is, a raw vegan diet of fruit, (...) tender leafy greens, and occasionally nuts and seeds. While veganism raises challenging questions over the ethics of consuming animal products, while also considering the environmental impact of the agriculture industry, raw veganism goes a step further and argues that consuming cooked food is also detrimental to our health and the environment. Cooking foods allows us to eat food that is not otherwise fit for human consumption and in an age that promotes eating foods in ‘moderation’ and having ‘balanced’ diets, this raises the question of why we are eating foods that should only be consumed in moderation at all, as moderation clearly implies they aren’t good for us. In addition, from an environmental perspective, the use of stoves, ovens and microwaves for cooking contributes significantly to energy consumption and cooking in general generates excessive waste of food and resources. Thus, this book maintains that living well and living a noble life, that is, good physical and moral health, requires consuming a raw vegan diet. Exploring the scientific and philosophical aspects of raw veganism, this novel book is essential reading for all interested in promoting ethical, healthful, and sustainable diets. (shrink)

The scope of this article is to propose a reflection about the concept of citizenship presented by Aristotle in his work “Politics”, and which people were considered citizens then in comparison to nowadays. There is no intention to make a deep historical assessment about the particularities of each period of time, but analyse the characteristics which kept some groups inside of the political life and as well kept other groups away from it, in order to demonstrate how strong is the (...) maintenance of the estrangement between people who achieve everything is possible to, whereas other groups cannot achieve even what is deemed to be worthy by law. Keywords: citizenship; citizen; state; law; minorities; achievement. (shrink)

This paper argues that contrary to what is commonly claimed, presentism is perfectly consistent with the special theory of relativity. More precisely, this paper provides a formulation of a novel relativistic version of presentism that preserves the core “metaphysical stance” of classical presentism, and is fully compatible with special relativity. Others have tried to relativize presentism, but the view put forward here is different from the views that have been proposed in the past.

With millions of animals brought into existence and raised for food every year, their negative impact upon the environment and the staggering growth in the number of chronic diseases caused by meat and dairy diets make a global move toward ethical veganism imperative. Typi-cally, utilitarians and deontologists have led this discussion. The purpose of this paper is to pro-pose a virtuous approach to ethical veganism. Virtue ethics can be used to construct a defense of ethical veganism by relying on the (...) virtues of compassion and fairness. Exercising these values in our relations with animals involves acknowledging their moral value, thus seeing that they are not our property or our food. It is important to emphasize that this argument applies only to well-developed societies that need not rely upon animals as sources of food, clothing, and various by-products. (shrink)

En este artículo propongo explorar la cuestión ontológica en el pensamiento de Marx, poniendo el foco en los tratamientos que le dedicaron dos autores habitualmente colocados al margen de los intereses propios del marxismo: Martin Heidegger y Jacques Derrida. Desde perspectivas críticas o deconstructivas, sus interpretaciones se caracterizaron por situar a Marx dentro de la tradición metafísica a partir de la comprensión de su filosofía como una ontología del trabajo o, al decir de Werner Hamacher, como una _ergontología_. El artículo, (...) entonces, se dedica a analizar los argumentos filosóficos empleados primero por Heidegger y luego por Derrida para cuestionar, de forma diferenciada, aunque en estrecha relación de continuidad, el privilegio metafísico del trabajo en el discurso marxista, sin descuidar las implicaciones políticas de sus respectivos cuestionamientos. (shrink)