The aim of this paper is to argue against the received view among Unamuno scholars that Miguel de Unamuno was defending a sort of pragmatic argument for religious faith and that his notion of religious faith as “querer creer” (“wanting to believe”) is to be identified with William James’s “the will to believe”. As I will show in this paper, one of the aspects that makes Unamuno’s reasoning philosophically relevant is his ability to formulate a non-pragmatist defense of religious faith (...) without a prior commitment to the truth of any religious or theological statement and grounded in our longing for an endless existence through God’s Salvation. (shrink)

Most of the existing studies on Bourdieu and the digital regards the social and class distinctions in the use of digital technologies, thus presupposing a certain transparency of technologies themselves. Our proposal is to refer to this attitude as “Bourdieu outside the digital.” Yet in this paper, another perspective called “Bourdieu inside the digital” is developed, which moves the focus on the effects of some emerging technologies on social distinctions and discrimination. The main hypothesis is that algorithms of machine learning (...) are producers and reproducers of habitus. Although their results present a greater granularity with respect to the standard techniques of the past, these algorithms still reduce individuals to categories, general trends, classes, and behaviors. Such a reduction has flattening effects on the individuals’ self-understanding, especially in terms of identity and interaction with the social world. This is the phenomenon described in the article as the “personalization without personality,” whose consequences are both existential and social-political. This idea will be illustrated through qualitative and comparative analysis between the correspondence analysis and the multiple correspondence analysis used by Bourdieu in his works and some of those techniques that are performed today in big data analytics. (shrink)

This book provides a detailed account of Julián Marías’s metaphysical anthropology with the ultimate aim of offering a coherent and systematic analysis of Marías’s argumentation for claiming that the conscious hope for Christian salvation through resurrection — and with it the hope that Jesus Christ did actually resurrect, and more generally the hope that Christian revelation is true — is justified not because the certainty or the likelihood that this salvation will, as a matter of fact, actually occur, but because (...) this hope amounts to a self-affirming exercise, a conscious endorsement of human reality, and as such a sign of authenticity. -/- . (shrink)

Cultural evolution studies are characterized by the notion that culture evolves accordingly to broadly Darwinian principles. Yet how far the analogy between cultural and genetic evolution should be pushed is open to debate. Here, we examine a recent disagreement that concerns the extent to which cultural transmission should be considered a preservative mechanism allowing selection among different variants, or a transformative process in which individuals recreate variants each time they are transmitted. The latter is associated with the notion of “cultural (...) attraction”. This issue has generated much misunderstanding and confusion. We first clarify the respective positions, noting that there is in fact no substantive incompatibility between cultural attraction and standard cultural evolution approaches, beyond a difference in focus. Whether cultural transmission should be considered a preservative or reconstructive process is ultimately an empirical question, and we examine how both preservative and reconstructive cultural transmission has been studied in recent experimental research in cultural evolution. Finally, we discuss how the relative importance of preservative and reconstructive processes may depend on the granularity of analysis and the domain being studied. (shrink)

The first half of this article follows Mario Bunge’s early realist moves, his efforts to articulate the achievements of theoretical physics as gains in the quest for objective truth and understanding, particularly in the context of the fights against the idealist and subjectivist interpretations of quantum mechanics that, at least until the mid-1970s, prevailed in physics. Bunge’s answers to the problems of quantum mechanics provide a good angle for understanding how his realist positions grew on the “battlefield.” The second half (...) discusses Bunge’s general conception of the scientific realist stance and confronts it with some current approaches to realism in the mainstream literature. (shrink)

The aim of this chapter is to analyse the concept of love —understood in the broad and Christian-inspired sense of love as agape-charis love— in relation to the animes Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z. I first comment on the character of Piccolo —and how his friendship with Son Gohan— leads to him losing all his original villainous traits. I argue that the evolution of the character of Piccolo through his friendship with Son Gohan illustrates the philosophical claim that a (...) loving and giving of oneself to the other —far from being a sign of weakness— is a courageous and self-affirming exercise. The result may move the individual to an inner transformative experience that leads to the enjoyment of a renewed and authentic life that is worth living. I then argue that Son Goku’s respectful attitude towards his opponents is ultimately a loving attitude. Last, I argue that it is the inspiring and loving example of Son Goku that ultimately explains why characters such as Vegeta —who are at first presented as villains— end up losing their villainous traits after fighting against Son Goku. (shrink)

El objetivo de este artículo es ofrecer una exposición sistemática de la propuesta filosófica de Joaquim Xirau (Figueras, 1895 – Ciudad de México, 1946), señalando así su interés filosófico al tiempo que se vinculan sus dos grandes obras ensayísticas de madurez, Amor y mundo (1940) y Lo fugaz y lo eterno (1942).

Introduction: Jai Mata Di (praise the mother goddess) -- Sutra 1: Samadhi, or yogic ecstasy -- Sutra 2: realization, or the practice of yoga -- Sutra 3: the Siddhis, or the magical powers -- Sutra 4: absolute freedom.

In this paper I will argue that Unamuno was conceiving of God (and ordinary, non-religious fictional characters more generally) in realist, though non-evidentially grounded, terms. I will point out that this way of conceiving of God allowed Unamuno to claim the actual existence of God (though as a fictional, purely humanly created character) and, with this, the possibility of there being an actual relationship between the concrete religious person and God without having to dispense with his own core claim that (...) religious faith is just a subjective, though natural and thus inevitable, human reaction. (shrink)

In Ockhamist branching-time logic [Prior 67], formulas are meant to be evaluated on a specified branch, or history, passing through the moment at hand. The linguistic counterpart of the manifoldness of future is a possibility operator which is read as `at some branch, or history (passing through the moment at hand)'. Both the bundled-trees semantics [Burgess 79] and the $\langle moment, history\rangle$ semantics [Thomason 84] for the possibility operator involve a quantification over sets of moments. The Ockhamist frames are (3-modal) (...) Kripke structures in which this second-order quantification is represented by a first-order quantification. The aim of the present paper is to investigate the notions of modal definability, validity, and axiomatizability concerning 3-modal frames which can be viewed as generalizations of Ockhamist frames. (shrink)

Contenitori neoassiri: Studi per un repertorio lessicale. By Salvatore Gaspa. Philippika, vol. 67. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2014. Pp. xix + 566, illus. €98.

Imaginary is, in Taylor's thought, a category of understanding social praxis and the reasons people give to make sense of these practices. The ultimate reason is the hypergood, which influences the strong decisions. Those strong evaluations outline the moral framework from which people address their own lives and the lives of others. We only recognize our cultural framework as an `imaginary' — challenging the supposition it is something `objective' — when others make their apparition in our lives. After the encounter (...) nobody remains the same; something in our imaginary has changed. The outcome of this process is the `best account' we have to make sense of our life. If we accept the category of `imaginary' and the process of `best account' as accurate enough to address Latin American reality, the problem we have to solve is how we can find out a Latin American social imaginary. (shrink)

The aim of this chapter is to analyze the movie Fight Club, directed by David Fincher, written by Jim Uhls, and first released in the fall of 1999. The movie is based on the homonym novel by Chuck Palahniuk, published in 1996. I will argue that Fight Club is to be understood in primarily existentialist, nonethical, and nonevidential terms, showing the struggle felt by each and every one of us to find a convincing answer to the question of what (if (...) anything) counts as an authentic life that is worth living. Moreover, I will argue that the movie does not merely illustrate the struggle and the existential angst it engenders; it also advances, if not strictly speaking a theoretical answer grounded in an indisputable philosophical reasoning, then at least a practical way to face it. It is only after positively endorsing the claim that absolutely nothing (whatever it may be) externally imposed on a person can give their life ultimate meaning that a person is free to engage in a conscious, laborious, and exhausting attempt at self-affirmation, a full and positive endorsement of one’s own authenticity. (shrink)

In _Plotinus on Love_, Alberto Bertozzi argues that love is the origin, culmination, and regulative force of the double movement that characterizes Plotinus' metaphysics: the derivation of all reality from the One and the return of the soul to it.

A completeness theorem is established for logics with congruence endowed with general semantics (in the style of general frames). As a corollary, completeness is shown to be preserved by fibring logics with congruence provided that congruence is retained in the resulting logic. The class of logics with equivalence is shown to be closed under fibring and to be included in the class of logics with congruence. Thus, completeness is shown to be preserved by fibring logics with equivalence and general semantics. (...) An example is provided showing that completeness is not always preserved by fibring ligics endowed with standard (non general) semantics. A categorial characterization of fibring is provided using coproducts and cocartesian liftings. (shrink)

This major publication is a history of the semantic tradition in philosophy from the early nineteenth century through its incarnation in the work of the Vienna Circle, the group of logical positivists that emerged in the years 1925-1935 in Vienna who were characterised by a strong commitment to empiricism, a high regard for science, and a conviction that modern logic is the primary tool of analytic philosophy. In the first part of the book, Alberto Coffa traces the roots of (...) logical positivism in a semantic tradition that arose in opposition to Kant's theory that a priori knowledge is based on pure intuition and the constitutive powers of the mind. In Part II, Coffa chronicles the development of this tradition by members and associates of the Vienna Circle. Much of Coffa's analysis draws on the unpublished notes and correspondence of many philosophers. The book, however, is not merely a history of the semantic tradition from Kant 'to the Vienna Station'. Coffa also critically reassesses the role of semantic notions in understanding the ground of a priori knowledge and its relation to empirical knowledge and questions the turn the tradition has taken since Vienna. (shrink)

People’s awareness of tactile stimuli has been investigated in far less detail than their awareness of stimuli in other sensory modalities. In an attempt to fill this gap, we provide an overview of studies that are pertinent to the topic of tactile consciousness. We discuss the results of research that has investigated phenomena such as “change blindness”, phantom limb sensations, and numerosity judgments in tactile perception, together with the results obtained from the study of patients affected by deficits that can (...) adversely affect tactile perception such as neglect, extinction, and numbsense. The similarities as well as some of the important differences that have emerged when visual and tactile conscious information processing have been compared using similar experimental procedures are highlighted. We suggest that conscious information processing in the tactile modality cannot be separated completely from the more general processing of spatial information in the brain. Finally, the importance of considering tactile consciousness within the larger framework of multisensory information processing is also discussed. (shrink)

In just the last decade, many conference proceedings have been published on Plato’s Timaeus and its influence on the history of philosophy. The present vo­lume, which is the result of a symposium held at Seoul National University in September 2011, testifies to the enduring and widespread interest the Platonic dia­logue is able to elicit. The nine studies here collected by Euree Song center on the figure of the demiurge as maker of the world and they all deal with authors who, (...) while having di... (shrink)

Contenido: Iconoclasia: Teoría, práctica y desidia -- Censura -- El final de las academias, los estilos y las instituciones -- Abolición total del arte.

Obra estructurada en cinco ponencias: la primera acerca de aspectos básicos para el posterior desarrollo de las relaciones ciencia-trascendencia; la segunda sobre la difícil consideración acerca del tiempo; la tercera sobre el papel que desempeña la neurocienca; la cuarta sobre las relaciones de la trascendencia ética con lo científico, y la quinta sobre el sentido de la religión y del cristianismo desde el punto de vista de la ciencia.

This open access book discusses individual, collective, and institutional responsibilities with regard to vaccination from the perspective of philosophy and public health ethics. It addresses the issue of what it means for a collective to be morally responsible for the realisation of herd immunity and what the implications of collective responsibility are for individual and institutional responsibilities. The first chapter introduces some key concepts in the vaccination debate, such as ‘herd immunity’, ‘public goods’, and ‘vaccine refusal’; and explains why failure (...) to vaccinate raises certain ethical issues. The second chapter analyses, from a philosophical perspective, the relationship between individual, collective, and institutional responsibilities with regard to the realisation of herd immunity. The third chapter is about the principle of least restrictive alternative in public health ethics and its implications for vaccination policies. Finally, the fourth chapter presents an ethical argument for unqualified compulsory vaccination, i.e. for compulsory vaccination that does not allow for any conscientious objection. The book will appeal to philosophers interested in public health ethics and the general public interested in the philosophical underpinning of different arguments about our moral obligations with regard to vaccination. (shrink)

O presente texto, cujo título é “O campo como nómos biopolítico da modernidade e a figura do muçulmano” tem por objetivo geral examinar a noção de campo como nómos biopolítico presente na modernidade, segundo as afirmações da obra de Giorgio Agamben, destacando a figura do muçulmano como seu habitante e como um paradigma da vida nua em oposição à forma-de-vida. Para que se possa realizar o objetivo proposto, iniciamos com a abordagem dos conceitos de vida nua e de biopolítica em (...) Agamben, indicando alguns de seus interlocutores, tais como Michel Foucault e Hannah Arendt. Em seguida, analisamos o conceito de campo, que caracteriza o Estado de exceção permanente na modernidade, e a figura do mulçumano, no interior dele. Por último, apresentamos breves considerações acerca da enigmática noção de forma-de-vida, com hífen, enquanto oposta a vida nua, na medida em que uma torna inoperante a politização da vida, a biopolítica. (shrink)

Johannes Müller von Königsberg (1436-1476), better known as Regiomontanus, is widely considered as the most influential astronomer and mathematician of 15th-century Europe. He was active as an astrologer and deemed astrology to be the queen of mathematical sciences. Despite this, Regiomontanus's astrological activity has yet to be fully explored. A brief examination of Regiomontanus's manuscripts shows that his astrological interests were accompanied by interests in the arts and in methods of prognostication. This article studies an unconventional astrological-chiromantical text, whose relevance (...) is threefold: a) it sheds new light on Regiomontanus's astrological interests; b) it enriches our knowledge of Regiomontanus's efforts to learn and understand Greek-Regiomontanus transcribed it into his own manuscript during his sojourn in Italy from 1460-1467; and c) it is the sole extant text in the Greek tradition that provides a system for prognostication from the study of a person's hand, the parts of which are considered as being under the domain of planets. The article provides an English translation of Regiomontanus's transcription, alongside a brief commentary, and studies the intellectual and historical context of that production through manuscript analysis. (shrink)