Estamos inmersos en un contexto de utilidad donde no se le encuentra un sentido funcional al saber filosófico, motivo por el cual se ha intentado desplazar de la formación educativa. Es ahora cuando es más urgente defender la importancia que la filosofía sigue teniendo en la vida diaria, demostrar a las personas el papel tan relevante que desempeña en sus vidas, que estén convencidos de que no es una materia prescindible en la actualidad, sino que ante los problemas que se (...) nos presentan, filosofar se hace cada vez más necesario.La presente investigación tiene como hipótesis que la filosofía es un saber esencial que el ser humano tiene que seguir cultivando a pesar de los cambios que la ciencia y la tecnología han traído a nuestra cotidianidad. Se centra en analizar cuáles han sido las barreras que le han impedido al saber filosófico dar a conocer a la sociedad en general su objetivo y relevancia de ser estudiada. (shrink)

In Against Purity, Alexis Shotwell proposes a powerful new conception of social movements as custodians for the past and incubators for liberated futures. Against Purity undertakes an analysis that draws on theories of race, disability, gender, and animal ethics as a foundation for an innovative approach to the politics and ethics of responding to systemic problems.

In 1966 the Brazilian physicist Klaus Tausk (b. 1927) circulated a preprint from the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy, criticizing Adriana Daneri, Angelo Loinger, and Giovanni Maria Prosperi`s theory of 1962 on the measurement problem in quantum mechanics. A heated controversy ensued between two opposing camps within the orthodox interpretation of quantum theory, represented by Leon Rosenfeld and Eugene P. Wigner. The controversy went well beyond the strictly scientific issues, however, reflecting philosophical and political commitments within the (...) context of the Cold War, the relationship between science in developed and Third World countries, the importance of social skills, and personal idiosyncrasies. (shrink)

Aggression, violence, and cruelty are symptoms of psychiatric illness. They reflect abnormalities in the regulation of the stress and emotion circuitries. The functioning of these circuitries depends upon the interaction between genetics and environment. Abuse and neglect during infancy, as well as maternal stress and poor quality of maternal care, are some of the causes that produce these types of abnormal behavior. Research on the neurobiological bases of emotion regulation will allow the detection of the population at risk.

This volume reflects the breadth of Alexy's philosophy, identifies new areas of inquiry and offers a new impetus to the discourse theory of law.

This book reimagines the compositional semantics of comparative sentences using words such as more, as, too, and others. The book's central thesis entails a rejection of a fundamental assumption of degree semantic frameworks: that gradable adjectives like tall lexicalize functions from individuals to degrees, i.e., measure functions. I argue that comparative expressions in English themselves introduce “measure functions”; this is the case whether that morphology targets adjectives, as in *taller* or *more intelligent*; nouns, as in *more coffee*, *more coffees*; verbs, (...) such as *run more*, *jump more*; or expressions of other categories. Furthermore, she suggests that expressions that comfortably and meaningfully appear in the comparative form should be distinguished from those that do not in terms of a general notion of "measurability": a measurable predicate has a domain of application with non-trivial structure. This notion unifies the independently motivated distinctions between, for example, gradable and non-gradable adjectives, mass and count nouns, singular and plural noun phrases, and telic and atelic verb phrases. Based on careful examination of the distribution of dimensions for comparison within the class of measurable predicates, I tie the selection of measure functions to the specific nature and structure of the domain entities targeted for measurement. The book ultimately explores how, precisely, we should understand semantic theories that invoke the "nature" of domain entities: does the theory depend for its explanation on features of metaphysical reality, or something else? Such questions are especially pertinent in light of a growing body of research in cognitive science exploring the understanding and acquisition of comparative sentences. (shrink)

Conceptual engineering and conceptual ethics are branches of philosophy concerned with questions about how to assess and ameliorate our representational devices (such as concepts and words). It's a part of philosophy concerned with questions about which concepts we should use (and why), how concepts can be improved, when concepts should be abandoned, and how proposals for amelioration can be implemented. Central parts of the history of philosophy have engaged with these issues, but the focus of this volume is on applications (...) to work in contemporary philosophy of language and mind, epistemology, gender and race theory, ethics, philosophy of science, and philosophical logic. This is the first volume devoted entirely to conceptual engineering and conceptual ethics. The volume explores the possibilities, benefits, problems, and applications of conceptual engineering and conceptual ethics. It consists of twenty chapters written by leading philosophers. (shrink)

Alexis de Samos impute à des prostituées athéniennes accompagnatrices de Périclès l’installation d’un culte d’Aphrodite à Samos en 439 av. J.-C. Après analyse du passage et de son contexte, il est proposé qu’Alexis a écrit une œuvre nationaliste, partisane et critique de Périclès et d’Aspasie, et que le sanctuaire a été fondé, sans l’intervention de prostituées, après une victoire navale, en remerciement à Aphrodite, déesse de la navigation en mer.Alexis, the Prostitutes and Aphrodite in Samos. According to (...) Alexis of Samos, Athenian prostitutes founded a cult of Aphrodite in Samos in 439 BC. A reappraisal of the information and its context leads to the hypothesis that Alexis wrote his Samian Chronicles criticising Perikles and Aspasia, and, therefore, that prostitutes were not involved in founding the cult, which was established after a naval victory and in honor of Aphrodite, goddess of seafaring. (shrink)

Cet article esquisse un rapprochement entre un courant de pensée politique, le néoréalisme, et une méthode en sciences humaines, le structuralisme. Ce courant et cette méthode ont suivi des trajectoires séparées, de l’après-guerre à la fin des années soixante-dix, jusqu’à ce que Kenneth Waltz croise ces deux problématiques. Après avoir défini respectivement réalisme et structuralisme, cet article établit leur connexion et tente d’éclairer les raisons pour lesquelles ce rapprochement n’avait pas été conduit jusqu’alors.

En este artículo se plantea una lectura de la historia de la verdad en Foucault a partir de la importancia progresiva que le concedió el autor en sus últimas producciones a la relación entre los procesos de veridicción y el estudio de la ética. El estatuto y el rol de la ética en la obra de Foucault, dependiente de un cierto análisis de la parrhesía, hace posible una interpretación de esa historia de la verdad de un modo que se escapa (...) a la noción de poder atribuida generalmente a Foucault: aquella que no permite pensar positivamente la autonomía de los sujetos. (shrink)

El texto presenta un estudio sobre Juán Amós Comenio (1592-1670) como clásico del pensamiento educativo, el hilo conductor ha consistido en tener presente el carácter sociocultural de la educación, es decir, en no perder de vista una verdad elemental: las aportaciones en el ámbito educativo, trátese de discursos, de prácticas, o bien de ambos, aún cuando pudieran presentarse ante nuestros ojos con cierto grado de abstracción, son elaboraciones que proceden de personas concretas que viven coordenadas de tiempo y espacio precisas (...) y que por ende, se vuelven comprensibles con mayor profundidad y plenitud en la medida que uno se aproxima a la forma en que vivió esta persona. Este libro constituye un proyecto de investigación más amplio, pero prioritariamente aborda aspectos de las atmósferas del siglo XVII propias de la Europa protestante que marcan la vida de Comenio b) algunas tradiciones y legados que sustentan su proyecto educativo. (shrink)

This paper explores the hypothesis that all comparative sentences— nominal, verbal, and adjectival—contain instances of a single morpheme that compositionally introduces degrees. This morpheme, sometimes pronounced much, semantically contributes a structure-preserving map from entities, events, or states, to their measures along various dimensions. A major goal of the paper is to argue that the differences in dimensionality observed across domains are a consequence of what is measured, as opposed to which expression introduces the measurement. The resulting theory has a number (...) of interesting properties. It characterizes the notion of ‘measurement’ uniformly across comparative constructions, in terms of non-trivial structure preservation. It unifies the distinctions between mass/count nouns and atelic/telic verb phrases with that between gradable and non-gradable adjectives. Finally, it affords a uniform characterization of semantically anomalous comparisons across categories. (shrink)

Robert Alexy develops his influential theory of legal reasoning exploring the nature of legal argumentation and its relation to practical reasoning. In doing so he sheds light on fundamental questions of law and rationality, which are as crucial to practising lawyers and law students as they are to scholars of legal theory.

Various emerging technologies, from social robotics to social media, appeal to our desire for social interactions, while avoiding some of the risks and costs of face-to-face human interaction. But can they offer us real friendship? In this book, Alexis Elder outlines a theory of friendship drawing on Aristotle and contemporary work on social ontology, and then uses it to evaluate the real value of social robotics and emerging social technologies. In the first part of the book Elder develops a (...) robust and rigorous ontology of friendship: what it is, how it functions, what harms it, and how it relates to familiar ethical and philosophical questions about character, value, and well-being. In Part II she applies this ontology to emerging trends in social robotics and human-robot interaction, including robotic companions for lonely seniors, therapeutic robots used to teach social skills to children on the autism spectrum, and companionate robots currently being developed for consumer markets. Elder articulates the moral hazards presented by these robots, while at the same time acknowledging their real and measurable benefits. In the final section she shifts her focus to connections between real people, especially those enabled by social media. Arguing against critics who have charged that these new communication technologies are weakening our social connections, Elder explores ways in which text messaging, video chats, Facebook, and Snapchat are enabling us to develop, sustain, and enrich our friendship in new and meaningful ways. (shrink)

Reconstructing the philosophical project of William James, Alexis Dianda deploys a concept of experience that avoids both foundationalist epistemology and an account of the subject rooted in immediately given objects of consciousness. In doing so, Dianda rethinks the role of experience as well as the aims and resources of pragmatic philosophy.

Which concepts should we use to think and talk about the world and to do all of the other things that mental and linguistic representation facilitates? This is the guiding question of the field that we call ‘conceptual ethics’. Conceptual ethics is not often discussed as its own systematic branch of normative theory. A case can nevertheless be made that the field is already quite active, with contributions coming in from areas as diverse as fundamental metaphysics and social/political philosophy. In (...) this pair of papers, we try to unify the field, reflecting on its basic nature, structure, and methodology. (shrink)

En el presente artículo se ofrece un panorama de los estudios educativos que se ocupan de la conciencia histórica. El recorrido que se propone es uno entre varios posibles y se centra específicamente en los aportes a las investigaciones en Didáctica de la Historia de las últimas décadas. En esta selección de trabajos europeos y americanos (vista desde América del Sur) destaca la preocupación por clarificar los factores que influyen en la conciencia histórica y los mecanismos para su construcción. También (...) el rol que todavía puede cumplir la escuela en la elaboración de narrativas que vinculen pasado – presente – futuro, sin olvidar algunos problemas y obstáculos en contextos concretos. Las últimas investigaciones suponen además que las personas deben asumirse como actores que pueden modificar su realidad, por lo que la relación entre lo individual y lo colectivo es un aspecto a tener en cuenta en los procesos de enseñanza y aprendizaje. (shrink)

In The Order of Things, Foucault shows that the main function of heterotopia is to impede the reference of words to things. A contradiction is evident in the inclusion of the libraryin the heterotopia in “Other Spaces”: there is no better place to investigate and produce knowledge than a library. We analyze Borges’ “The Library of Babel” from the concept of heterotopy, in order to resolve the exact relationship between library, space, and knowledge, and its link with Foucault’s archive concept. (...) Finally, we return to Foucault’s “Language to Infinity,” whose commentary on “The Library of Babel” exposes an effective heterotopy formed by a mise in abyme of language. (shrink)

Resumen: En muchas lenguas las cláusulas adverbiales iniciales presentan una repetición del predicado de la oración anterior, lo que se conoce como enlace tail-head. Este trabajo busca describir las construcciones de eth del quichua santiagueño de acuerdo con dos parámetros: a) el grado de solapamiento semántico entre los predicados de la construcción de eth, y b) el grado de integración eventiva de la adverbial inicial con la cláusula principal. El primer parámetro permite identificar construcciones verbatim -con repetición exacta del verbo (...) anterior- y no verbatim -sin repetición exacta-. El segundo parámetro se manifiesta en la forma que adopta la cláusula “cabeza”. Así, se identificaron, por un lado, una forma converbal y, por el otro, cláusulas con los sufijos del sistema de conmutación de la referencia. La interacción entre estos dos parámetros muestra que las diferentes construcciones de eth poseen diversas funciones discursivas, en particular para la coherencia temática.: In many languages preposed adverbial clauses repeat the previous verb or predicate, which phenomenon has been termed tail-head linkage. This paper aims to describe THL constructions in Santiagueño Quichua according to two parameters: a) the degree of semantic overlap between the predicates of the THL constructions, and b) the degree of event integration of the preposed adverbial with its main clause. The first parameter allows the identification of verbatim constructions -with exact repetition of the previous predicate- and non verbatim constructions -without exact repetition-. The second parameter manifests itself in the form the head clause might adopt, where it is a converb or it takes switch reference suffixes. The interplay of both parameters shows that the different THL constructions possess diverse discourse functions, particularly regarding thematic coherence. (shrink)

The nineteenth-century French writer examines the development of democratic government in the United States and the state of political and social life.

I defend social media’s potential to support Aristotelian virtue friendship against a variety of objections. I begin with Aristotle’s claim that the foundation of the best friendships is a shared life. Friends share the distinctively human and valuable components of their lives, especially reasoning together by sharing conversation and thoughts, and communal engagement in valued activities. Although some have charged that shared living is not possible between friends who interact through digital social media, I argue that social media preserves the (...) relevantly human and valuable portions of life, especially reasoning, play, and exchange of ideas. I then consider several criticisms of social media’s potential to host friendships, and refute or weaken the force of these objections, using this conception of a distinctively human shared life. I conclude that we should use the shared life to evaluate features of specific social media and norms for users’ conduct. (shrink)

Which concepts should we use to think and talk about the world and to do all of the other things that mental and linguistic representation facilitates? This is the guiding question of the field that we call ‘conceptual ethics’. Conceptual ethics is not often discussed as its own systematic branch of normative theory. A case can nevertheless be made that the field is already quite active, with contributions coming in from areas as diverse as fundamental metaphysics and social/political philosophy. In (...) this pair of papers, we try to unify the field, reflecting on its basic nature, structure, and methodology. (shrink)

D'aucuns, parmi de grands poètes, l'ont aussi nomme l'Idole, l'Oeillet, et, argotiques ou non, les mots ne manquent pas pour évoquer l'anus. L'Astre noir est l'une de ses intrigantes appellations, mystérieuse boutonnière siégeant en un pudique mais néanmoins central repli de notre corps, plus prosaïquement appelé trou dm cul ou trou d'balle dans l'imaginaire populaire. Lieu de fonction et d'évacuation, mais aussi lieu de l'interdit et de la transgression fantasmatique et orgastique, abîme sans fond dont Alexis Legalret, professeur de (...) philosophie en lycée, s'emploie dans cet ouvrage, tout autant heuristique que cocasse, à faire une "anal-yse" réjouissante de l'insondable... (shrink)

The status and functioning of shame is contested in moral psychology. In much of anglophone philosophy and psychology, it is presumed to be largely destructive, while in Confucian philosophy and many East Asian communities, it is positively associated with moral development. Recent work in human-robot interaction offers a unique opportunity to investigate how shame functions while controlling for confounding variables of interpersonal interaction. One research program suggests a Confucian strategy for using robots to rebuke participants, but results from experiments with (...) educational technologies imply a different and potentially opposing account of shame’s role in personal development. By digging deeper into the details of Confucian theorizing about shame, I identify a unifying explanation for these apparently conflicting results. I conclude by offering suggestions for future empirical research in human-robot interactions to further investigate shame’s role in moral development. (shrink)

Digital records, from chat transcripts to social media posts, are being used to create chatbots that recreate the conversational style of deceased individuals. Some maintain that this is merely a new form of digital memorial, while others argue that they pose a variety of moral hazards. To resolve this, I turn to classical Chinese philosophy to make use of a debate over the ethics of funerals and mourning. This ancient argument includes much of interest for the contemporary issue at hand, (...) including the use of impersonators of the dead to help the bereaved to deal well with their grief. I connect this historical discussion with a modern trend in clinical psychology that reframes therapeutic interventions with bereaved individuals. The trend directs practitioners away from facilitating detachment and toward affirming continuing bonds. I conclude that these chatbots can offer an important source of support to mourners, but also discuss parameters and features of social context that will be important to avoid the moral hazards identified by sceptics. (shrink)

Philosophical and sociological approaches in technology have increasingly shifted toward describing AI (artificial intelligence) systems as ‘(moral) agents,’ while also attributing ‘agency’ to them. It is only in this way – so their principal argument goes – that the effects of technological components in a complex human-computer interaction can be understood sufficiently in phenomenological-descriptive and ethical-normative respects. By contrast, this article aims to demonstrate that an explanatory model only achieves a descriptively and normatively satisfactory result if the concepts of ‘(moral) (...) agent’ and ‘(moral) agency’ are exclusively related to human agents. Initially, the division between symbolic and sub-symbolic AI, the black box character of (deep) machine learning, and the complex relationship network in the provision and application of machine learning are outlined. Next, the ontological and action-theoretical basic assumptions of an ‘agency’ attribution regarding both the current teleology-naturalism debate and the explanatory model of actor network theory are examined. On this basis, the technical-philosophical approaches of Luciano Floridi, Deborah G. Johnson, and Peter-Paul Verbeek will all be critically discussed. Despite their different approaches, they tend to fully integrate computational behavior into their concept of ‘(moral) agency.’ By contrast, this essay recommends distinguishing conceptually between the different entities, causalities, and relationships in a human-computer interaction, arguing that this is the only way to do justice to both human responsibility and the moral significance and causality of computational behavior. (shrink)

Which concepts should we use to think and talk about the world, and to do all of the other things that mental and linguistic representation facilitates? This is the guiding question of the field that we call ‘conceptual ethics’. Conceptual ethics is not often discussed as its own systematic branch of normative theory. A case can nevertheless be made that the field is already quite active, with contributions coming in from areas as diverse as fundamental metaphysics and social/political philosophy. In (...) this pair of papers, we try to unify the field, reflecting on its basic nature, structure, and methodology. (shrink)

Metasemantics comprises new work on the philosophical foundations of linguistic semantics, by a diverse group of established and emerging experts in the philosophy of language, metaphysics, and the theory of content. The science of semantics aspires to systematically specify the meanings of linguistic expressions in context. The paradigmatic metasemantic question is accordingly: what more basic or fundamental features of the world metaphysically determine these semantic facts? Efforts to answer this question inevitably raise others, including: where are the boundaries of semantics?; (...) what is the essence of the meaning relation?; which framework should we use for semantic theorizing?; and what are the intrinsic natures of semantic values? Metasemantic inquiry has long been recognized as a central part of the philosophy of language, but recent developments in metaphysics and semantics itself now allow us to approach these classic questions with an unprecedented degree of precision. The essays collected here provide promising new perspectives on old problems, pose questions that suggest novel research projects, and taken together, greatly sharpen our understanding of linguistic representation. (shrink)

Which concepts should we use to think and talk about the world, and to do all of the other things that mental and linguistic representation facilitates? This is the guiding question of the field that we call ‘conceptual ethics’. Conceptual ethics is not often discussed as its own systematic branch of normative theory. A case can nevertheless be made that the field is already quite active, with contributions coming in from areas as diverse as fundamental metaphysics and social/political philosophy. In (...) this pair of papers, we try to unify the field, reflecting on its basic nature, structure, and methodology. (shrink)

En este texto discutiremos dos elementos de la propuestas de Habermas sobre el rol de la religión en la esfera pública: la naturaleza especial del lenguaje religioso y las posibilidades de la traducción entre un lenguaje religioso y uno secular. Esto lo haremos a partir de las reflexiones de Wittgenstein sobre la naturaleza del lenguaje y sobre los diferentes sentidos de la comprensión. Mostraremos que estas últimas pueden ser valiosas para justificar por qué el lenguaje religioso necesita un análisis diferenciado (...) y para explicar por qué y cómo, a pesar de lo anterior, la traducción es posible. (shrink)