CADERNOS DE FILOSOFIA EXTRAVAGANTE - ANTÓNIO TELMO Vários Autores Um dos sinais do Quinto Império é que ainda há andorinhas O provérbio diz que uma andorinha não faz a Primavera Mas eu acho que faz Enquanto houver um homem onde resida a espiritualidade há sempre um princípio do Quinto Império António Telmo Este terceiro volume dos Cadernos de Filosofia Extravagante é o primeiro que se publica após a partida de António Telmo, que os imaginou, (...) concebeu e fundou Constitui por isso, na íntegra, um preito de homenagem ao autor da História Secreta de Portugal, nele se inserindo, bem a propósito, as actas do Colóquio A Obra e o Pensamento de António Telmo, realizado em 14 e 15 de Fevereiro de 2011, no Palácio da Independência, em Lisboa, por iniciativa do Instituto de Filosofia Luso-Brasileira, documento a que acrescem alguns testemunhos de amigos que, por uma ou outra razão, não puderam participar naquela comemoração, e duas entrevistas, uma das quais se encontrava por publicar, pelo filósofo concedidas na última década Por outro lado, nestas páginas o leitor poderá ainda encontrar dois escritos do autor de O Bateleur – um poema e um conto – nunca antes dados ao papel em letra de forma E, o que talvez seja mais, uma série significativa de correspondência epistolar até agora mantida inédita, tendo o filósofo por destinatário São missivas de Álvaro Ribeiro, José Marinho, Agostinho da Silva, Dalila Pereira da Costa e António Quadros, definindo um arco temporal que vai da publicação de Arte Poética, em 1963, à de Filosofia e Kabbalah, em 1990 Quase trinta anos de uma vida filosófica singular em que, a cada passo, são bem notórias a admiração e a amizade que mestres e condiscípulos lhe dedicam Autores- António Telmo, Pedro Martins, Renato Epifânio, Américo Rodrigues, Helena Estriga, António Braz Teixeira, Joaquim Domingues, Abel de Lacerda Botelho, Roque N Brás de Oliveira, M N Vieira, Luís Paixão, António Carlos Carvalho, Cynthia Guimarães Taveira, Rui Lopo, António Quadros Ferro, Carlos Aurélio, António Cândido Franco, Rodrigo Sobral Cunha, Carlos Vargas, Manuel Ferreira Patrício, Pedro Sinde, Paulo Santos, Pedro Paquim Ribeiro, Maurícia Teles da Silva, J Pinharanda Gomes, António Quadros, Avelino de Sousa, Elísio Gala, José Paulo Ribeiro Albuquerque, Helder Cortes, Eduardo Aroso, Isabel Xavier, Jesus Carlos, Álvaro Ribeiro, José Marinho, Agostinho da Silva, Dalila Pereira da Costa. (shrink)

O artigo pretende analisar como a Cáritas Brasileira, uma instituição social do campo religioso católico, vem rompendo com um modelo assistencialista de ação social. Que fatores têm estimulado esse processo de ruptura criando condições para a instauração de uma proposta hegemónica de formação para a cidadania, consagrando gradativamente um modelo organizativo-participativo com opção pela transformação social? Num primeiro momento, situaremos historicamente o surgimento da Cáritas no contexto dos anos 50, quando se definiam os primeiros passos da estruturação do Serviço Social (...) no Brasil. Em seguida, buscaremos demonstrar como se deu a passagem de uma visão de ajustamento social, para uma perspectiva de transformação social; e como essa nova proposta levou as instâncias da Cáritas a priorizar a participação em instrumentos de luta por políticas públicas construtoras de cidadania. (shrink)

Inhaltsverzeichnis/Table of Contents:IntroductionAntónio ZILHÃO: Folk-Psychology, Rationality and Human ActionJoão BRANQUINHO: The Problem of Cognitive DynamicsJ.P. MONTEIRO: Hume, Induction and Single ExperimentsMarco RUFFINO: The Primacy of Concepts and the Priority of Judgments in Frege's LogicJoão Vergílio Gallerani CUTER: Die unanwendbare Arithmetik des TractatusSílvio PINTO: Wittgenstein's Anti-PlatonismFernando FERREIRA: A Substitutional Framework for Arithmetical ValidityJ.R. CROCA & R.N. MOREIRA: Indeterminism Versus CausalismLuíz MONIZ PEREIRA: The Logical Impingement of Artifical Intelligence.

INCONTINENCE, HONOURING SUNK COSTS AND RATIONALITY According to a basic principle of rationality, the decision to engage in a course of action should be determined solely by the analysis of its consequences. Thus, considerations associated with previous use of resources should have no bearing on an agent’s decision-making process. Frequently, however, agents persist carrying on an activity they themselves judge to be nonoptimal under the circumstances because they have already allocated resources to that activity. When this is the case, agents (...) are said to be honouring sunk costs. Honouring sunk costs is thus typically viewed as irrational economic behaviour. Two striking findings of the psychological literature on the sunk cost effect are that it is, in general, not lessened by having taken previously courses in economics, and that agents who did take such courses and that do honour sunk costs seem to be frequently aware of a cognitive dissonance in their behaviour. Davidson’s account of the possibility conditions of incontinent action renders continent action materially unfeasible. The very idea of incontinent action becomes thus a hollow one. I’ll present an alternative description of these possibility conditions that renders continent action materially feasible, and both, continent and incontinent action, cognitively plausible. In a nutshell, my proposal rests upon the drawing of an essential cognitive contrast between explicit processes of deliberative reasoning and lower level heuristic procedures. I conclude the paper arguing that my redescription of incontinent action accounts for the above mentioned cognitive dissonance effect better than the alternatives and that viewing at least an important subset of behaviours of honouring sunk costs as incontinent actions will enable us to consider them as peculiar manifestations of a more general and meaningful pattern in human behaviour. (shrink)

O presente artigo, de natureza bibliográfica, objetiva discutir alguns desafios políticos e epistemológicos postos aos movimentos sociais e à educação popular no contexto das sociedades complexas. Parte-se do reconhecimento que estamos vivendo, nas últimas décadas, transformações profundas que impactam em todas as dimensões da vida tanto individual quanto social. Esses processos ocorrem em espaços locais, mas impactam globalmente, assim como existem tendências globalizantes que impactam nos espaços locais, na subjetividade e nas relações intersubjetivas. O incremento de tecnologias acelera esses processos, (...) trazendo implicações políticas, pedagógicas, sociais e culturais. Um conjunto de mudanças em curso ainda são de difícil avaliação dado que são movimentos em curso, mas, nem por isso, deixam de colocar novas exigências epistêmicas e políticas, ou seja, as realidades emergentes sempre desafiam a construção de novos referenciais e novas práticas. Os movimentos sociais e a educação popular não estão imunes a essas influências. Daí o desafio para pensar o emergente atentando para o residual e o dominante, conforme propõe Raymond Williams, visto que estão profundamente imbricados. Nesse contexto, questiona-se a respeito das contribuições de referenciais clássicos, tanto das ciências sociais quanto pedagógicas, na análise da realidade e na fundamentação de projetos emancipatórios. Buscando dar conta dessas questões, o texto inicia contextualizando algumas tendências no âmbito do eixo temático “educação popular e movimentos sociais” tendo como base as dez edições da Anpedsul e segue com um diagnóstico das transformações em curso que tornam as sociedades complexas. Na sequência, são analisados alguns desafios políticos e epistemológicos visando a dar conta de uma compreensão mais ampla dos complexos fenômenos emergentes e, para concluir, uma reflexão sobre o papel dos clássicos nas investigações e pesquisas relativas aos movimentos sociais e a educação popular. Palavras-chave: Movimentos sociais. Educação popular. Política. Epistemologia. Sociedades complexas. (shrink)

Many studies about organizational experiences and theories converge today in the idea that the economic factor, most competitive now in the production of value, is the de-materialization of the economical and organizational processes. Immaterial factors (like knowledge, services, information, relationships, virtual transactions, etc.) are the competitive and crucial innovations for future competition and, at the same time, the most important criteria to rethinking and understanding the future organization. If this is true, we can realize that every person in organizations, every (...) personal history in organizations, or better the evolutionary uniqueness of every person in organizations, is the real depositary and bearer of this de-materialization. (shrink)

Recentemente, sulla rivista «Nature», i progressi empirici della teoria dell’evoluzione sono stati descritti nei termini di un confronto tra «riformisti», i quali auspicano una revisione dell’approccio neodarwiniano standard attraverso l’inclusione di fattori e processi fino ad ora trascurati, e «conservatori», secondo i quali l’attuale programma di ricerca evoluzionistico, basato sulla variazione genetica e sulla selezione naturale, «va bene così». Il dissidio, che concerne principalmente il problema del riduzionismo genetico, sembra non portare a nessun risultato. I riformisti mettono in luce dei (...) fattori molto importanti, ma paiono non portare ancora nessuna proposta coerente quanto alla struttura di questa versione estesa della teoria evoluzionistica a venire. I conservatori si mettono sulla difensiva, facendo affidamento soltanto su quelle aggiunte che non modificano il nucleo neodarwiniano quanto ai suoi tratti essenziali, mantenendolo ben saldo nei vecchi connotati. Analizziamo qui il suddetto dibattito, proponendone un’interpretazione. La biologia evoluzionistica è un campo di ricerche in rapida espansione. L’oggetto del contendere è la modalità di estendere e aggiornare il nucleo centrale dell’eredità darwiniana. La nostra ipotesi è che, nel campo della biologia evoluzionistica attuale, si stia producendo un avanzamento del programma di ricerca, la cui struttura è composta da una serie di pattern evolutivi integrabili e compatibili tra di loro. Nel corso della sua storia la biologia evoluzionistica si è infatti accresciuta tramite l’inclusione progressiva di modelli diversi, senza che questo significasse una revisione del nucleo della teoria. La «teoria gerarchica» di Niles Eldredge è un esempio di struttura globale che si propone come fine quello di incorporare e unificare i pattern evoluzionistici attualmente accettati. (shrink)

Since formulating the theory of punctuated equilibria in 1972, a group of prominent evolutionary biologists, geneticists, and paleontologists have contributed towards a significant reinterpretation of the neo-Darwinian image of evolution that had consolidated during the second half of the twentieth century. We believe a research program, which we might define as "evolutionary pluralism" or "post-Darwinism," has been outlined, one that is centered on the discovery of the complexity and multiplicity of elements that work together to produce changes in our evolutionary (...) systems. We are talking about a three-dimensional multiplicity: a multiplicity of rhythms in evolution (i.e., the theory of punctuated equilibria); a multiplicity of evolutionary units and levels (i.e., the hierarchical theory of evolution); and a multiplicity of factors and causes in evolution (i.e., the concept of exaptation). Although the reductionistic and deterministic view of natural history interprets the intelligence of evolution as a panoptic and executory rationality, evolutionary pluralism, going back to the original flexibility of the Darwinian opus, sees in the intelligence of evolution an ingenious m tis, an imperfect but very creative, craftsmanlike cleverness. The new metaphors of change introduced by evolutionary pluralism and the consequent criticism of the adaptational paradigm offer some very interesting spin-offs for the study of evolutionary systems in widely differing fields, from theoretical economics to the cognitive sciences. I propose a particular hypothesis concerning the possibility and usefulness of expanding the concept of exaptation into a general theory of developmental processes, both in biology as well as in the cognitive sciences. (shrink)

The article reconstructs the main lines of three hypotheses in the current literature concerning the evolutionary pace which characterized the natural history of human language: the “continuist” and gradualist perspective, the “discontinuist” and evolution-free perspective, and the “punctuationist” view. This current debate appears to have a long history, which starts at least from Darwin’s time. The article highlights the similarities between the old and the modern debates in terms of history of ideas, and it shows the current limits of each (...) of these perspectives. In the final part, we present an alternative approach which considers human language not as a single trait, but as the result of a mosaic of different elements, some of which recently evolved, and some others gradually evolved and phylogenetically ancient. When matched with a tree thinking and comparative perspective, this view suggests that expressions of symbolic and linguistic behaviors in other human species could have preceded the more complex and systematic behaviors showed by Homo sapiens. (shrink)

In this commentary, as philosophers of evolutionary biology, we will consider the evolutionary framework used in the Target Article by: (i) emphasising the fruitfulness of the interdisciplinary approach employed; (ii) highlighting some potentially controversial aspects of the proposal; and finally (iii) outlining some ideas for further integration within the UAL framework. The critical analysis will focus on the relationship between learning and consciousness, on the assumed need for a function for consciousness, and on the type of phylogenetic demarcation introduced by (...) UAL. (shrink)

Antonio Negri wrote the two essays that comprise Time for Revolution while serving a prison sentence for alleged involvement with radical left-wing groups. Although the essays were written two decades apart, their concerns are the same: is there a place for resistance in a society utterly subsumed by capitalism? In the wake of the global crisis of capitalism heralded by the 2008 crash, the question has never been more relevant and Negri remains an insightful and passionate guide to any attempt (...) to answer it. (shrink)

The history of life on Earth has been shaken in the last half billion years by five mass extinctions that have killed at least three-quarters of biodiversity in a geologically short time. These five extinctions were due to major ecological upheavals, with endogenous or exogenous drivers (volcanic eruptions, impact of asteroids, etc.). Today, many data show that the current extinction rate is comparable to or even worse than that of the Big Five mass extinctions of the past. The difference is (...) that this time the asteroid is one species: Homo sapiens. There are good reasons to include the Sixth Mass Extinction in the definition of the Anthropocene. This drastic reduction in biodiversity will leave an irreversible geological and paleontological mark. It interacts with climate change, with a multiplicative effect. It contributes to the environmental crisis that reduces ecosystem services and threatens human health (i.e., likelihood of spillovers). (shrink)

The scenario of Homo sapiens origin/s within Africa has become increasingly complex, with a pan-African perspective currently challenging the long-established single-origin hypothesis. In this paper, we review the lines of evidence employed in support of each model, highlighting inferential limitations and possible terminological misunderstandings. We argue that the metapopulation scenario envisaged by pan-African proponents well describes a mosaic diversification among late Middle Pleistocene groups. However, this does not rule out a major contribution that emerged from a single population where crucial (...) derived features—notably, a globular braincase—appeared as the result of a punctuated, cladogenetic event. Thus, we suggest that a synthesis is possible and propose a scenario that, in our view, better reconciles with consolidated expectations in evolutionary theory. These indicate cladogenesis in allopatry as an ordinary pattern for the origin of a new species, particularly during phases of marked climatic and environmental instability. (shrink)

Caro leitor! Em busca de sempre mais apresentar reflexões consistentes e relevantes para o pensar teológico, em conexão com o mundo e às urgências da Igreja, a presente edição trás importantes temas que ajudam refletir a realidade humana à luz do mistério de Deus. Por isso, os artigos oferecidos nas mais variadas áreas, a saber: bíblico-teológica, dogmática, moral, pastoral, antropologia teológica, filosofia e eclesiologia, dão suporte científico e metodológico para a reflexão teológica. Antes de conferir as novidades desta edição, gostaria (...) de comunicar que esta Revista Eletrônica conquistou um espaço ainda maior de publicação, ao tornar-se indexada na base de dados do Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). (shrink)

Climate change has historically been an evolutionary determinant for our species, affecting both hominin evolutionary innovations and extinction rates, and the early waves of migration and expansion outside Africa. Today Homo sapiens has turned itself into a major geological force, able to cause a biodiversity crisis comparable to previous mass extinction events, shaping the Earth surface and impacting biogeochemical cycles and the climate at a global level. We argue that anthropogenically-driven climate change must be understood in terms of a monumental (...) niche construction process, generating long-term ecological inheritance and eco-evolutionary feedbacks that are putting our health and well-being and those of future generations at risk. We then list five major sources of climate change counter-intuitiveness, highlighting how evolved cognitive biases and heuristics may stand in the way of providing effective responses within tight deadlines. Drawing on our framing of the climate breakdown, we finally call for an evolutionary perspective in approaching the adaptive challenge posed by climate change: we argue that putting the brakes on a genuine self-endangering evolutionary trap ultimately depends on our counteractive niche constructing abilities, played at the level of our institutional and innovation capacity. (shrink)

This article aims to propose some connections between the conceptions of poetry of the Mexican poet Octavio Paz and the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. Both see in poetry the element of recognition of the original condition of the human being, not as an interpretation, but as a perception and affectation of the existential reality of human beings. So that the event of the "poetic saying" is configured as a call to the possibility of glimpsing the being of each entity, inhabiting (...) oneself and, thus, learning to be with others, establishing the poetic field as the clearing of perception and of existential affectation. Poetic speech goes beyond the limits of language, creating and establishing meanings and representations to the affectations that poetry provides. Thus, through poetry man recognizes himself in his worldliness, in search of his own being and in his relationship with other beings. (shrink)

Columbia University Press's multivolume _Prison Notebooks_ is the only complete critical edition of Antonio Gramsci's seminal writings in English. Based on the authoritative Italian edition of Gramsci's work, _Quaderni del Carcere_, this comprehensive translation presents the intellectual as he ought to be read and understood, with critical notes that clarify Gramsci's history, culture, and sources; an index of names; and a contextualization of the thinker's ideas against his earlier writings and letters. This set includes notebooks 1 through 8 with all (...) attendant notes and materials and is an indispensible resource for scholars in the humanities and social sciences. (shrink)

This article addresses the power of human technologies to wreak destruction on a planetary scale, such as genetic manipulation and weapons of mass destruction. It proposes the need for a new ethic that would be planetary in scale. Its central aim would be to include the great historical and contemporary diversity of human cognitive and epistemological experience. An "ethic of complexity" can weave together the threads of our common heritage. Although humanity's evolutionary past has been shown to be quite diverse, (...) recent genetic and anthropological research has shown it also to be surprisingly unified. New images and metaphors are providing humanity with a vision that transcends familiar ethnic hatreds and so-called clashes of civilizations. The new planetary culture can be a shining example of unity-in-diversity, or unitas multiplex. It will be robustly diverse, intermixed to the core, and filled with awe at the rich lineages of our common past. (shrink)

This article looks at the prevalent view of time in the history of Western philosophy and science and then contrasts it with the emerging new vision of time as ontologically constructive. Throughout Western history, philosophers and scientists attempted to marginalize and anesthetize the role of time by prioritizing being over becoming. But beginning with the Darwinian revolution in biology, the West could no longer deny the constructive role of time in bringing forth new ontological orders. While the 20th century witnessed (...) the split between the reversible time of physics and the developmental time of biology, the time has now come for this divide to be reconciled. Twenty-first century science is already revealing the constructive role of time in cosmology with the likelihood of multiple universes. In conclusion, the authors speculate that our moment in human cultural development is ripe for a complex, multidimensional, and transdisciplinary understanding of time. (shrink)

Book Description (Blurb): Cognitive Design for Artificial Minds explains the crucial role that human cognition research plays in the design and realization of artificial intelligence systems, illustrating the steps necessary for the design of artificial models of cognition. It bridges the gap between the theoretical, experimental and technological issues addressed in the context of AI of cognitive inspiration and computational cognitive science. -/- Beginning with an overview of the historical, methodological and technical issues in the field of Cognitively-Inspired Artificial Intelligence, (...) Lieto illustrates how the cognitive design approach has an important role to play in the development of intelligent AI technologies and plausible computational models of cognition. Introducing a unique perspective that draws upon Cybernetics and early AI principles, Lieto emphasizes the need for an equivalence between cognitive processes and implemented AI procedures, in order to realise biologically and cognitively inspired artificial minds. He also introduces the Minimal Cognitive Grid, a pragmatic method to rank the different degrees of biologically and cognitive accuracy of artificial systems in order project and predict their explanatory power with respect to the natural systems taken as source of inspiration. -/- Providing a comprehensive overview of cognitive design principles in constructing artificial minds, this text will be essential reading for students and researchers of artificial intelligence and cognitive science. (shrink)

In this paper we identify and characterize an analysis of two problematic aspects affecting the representational level of cognitive architectures (CAs), namely: the limited size and the homogeneous typology of the encoded and processed knowledge. We argue that such aspects may constitute not only a technological problem that, in our opinion, should be addressed in order to build arti cial agents able to exhibit intelligent behaviours in general scenarios, but also an epistemological one, since they limit the plausibility of the (...) comparison of the CAs' knowledge representation and processing mechanisms with those executed by humans in their everyday activities. In the fi nal part of the paper further directions of research will be explored, trying to address current limitations and future challenges. (shrink)

In actuarial parlance, the price of an insurance policy is considered fair if customers bearing the same risk are charged the same price. The estimate of this fair amount hinges on the expected value obtained by weighting the different claims by their probability. We argue that, historically, this concept of actuarial fairness originates in an Aristotelian principle of justice in exchange (equality in risk). We will examine how this principle was formalized in the 16th century and shaped in life insurance (...) during the following two hundred years, in two different interpretations. The Domatian account of actuarial fairness relied on subjective uncertainty: An agreement on risk was fair if both parties were equally ignorant about the chances of an uncertain event. The objectivist version grounded any agreement on an objective risk estimate drawn from a mortality table. We will show how the objectivist approach collapsed in the market for life annuities during the 18th century, leaving open the question of why we still speak of actuarial fairness as if it were an objective expected value. (shrink)

This paper provides a detailed analysis of how, according to Kant, the moral badness of some third parties’ actions can be established with certainty (by anyone, not only by the agent’s own conscience or by God). This account helps clarify why Kant affirms that some forms of wrongdoing (of which there are a “multitude of woeful examples”) can be demonstrated to be immoral, while excluding the possibility of proving the moral goodness of any action. The paper concludes by arguing that (...) the possible certainty of judgements imputing immorality to actions of others is not rational but rather moral. (shrink)

In this article we present an advanced version of Dual-PECCS, a cognitively-inspired knowledge representation and reasoning system aimed at extending the capabilities of artificial systems in conceptual categorization tasks. It combines different sorts of common-sense categorization (prototypical and exemplars-based categorization) with standard monotonic categorization procedures. These different types of inferential procedures are reconciled according to the tenets coming from the dual process theory of reasoning. On the other hand, from a representational perspective, the system relies on the hypothesis of conceptual (...) structures represented as heterogeneous proxytypes. Dual-PECCS has been experimentally assessed in a task of conceptual categorization where a target concept illustrated by a simple common-sense linguistic description had to be identified by resorting to a mix of categorization strategies, and its output has been compared to human responses. The obtained results suggest that our approach can be beneficial to improve the representational and reasoning conceptual capabilities of standard cognitive artificial systems, and –in addition– that it may be plausibly applied to different general computational models of cognition. The current version of the system, in fact, extends our previous work, in that Dual-PECCS is now integrated and tested into two cognitive architectures, ACT-R and CLARION, implementing different assumptions on the underlying invariant structures governing human cognition. Such integration allowed us to extend our previous evaluation. (shrink)

The literatures on bounded and ecological rationality are built on adaptationism—and its associated modular, cognitivist and computational paradigm—that does not address or explain the evolutionary origins of rationality. We argue that the adaptive mechanisms of evolution are not sufficient for explaining human rationality, and we posit that human rationality presents exaptive origins, where exaptations are traits evolved for other functions or no function at all, and later co-opted for new uses. We propose an embodied reconceptualization of rationality—embodied rationality—based on the (...) reuse of the perception-action system, where many neural processes involved in the control of the sensory-motor system, salient in ancestral environments have been later co-opted to create—by tinkering—high-level reasoning processes, employed in civilized niches. (shrink)

No presente artigo tenho o intento de demonstrar o motivo de Schopenhauer ser um crítico ferrenho da doutrina do direito de Kant, e para tal empreendimento, além das investigações na Metafísica dos costumes, obra capital onde se encontram os conteúdos sobre a doutrina do direito de Kant, restrinjo minhas explicações em relação aos textos de Schopenhauer, principalmente em Sobre o fundamento da moral (para nesse caso, expor a crítica da ética na forma legislativa-imperativa), ao § 62 do primeiro tomo de (...) O mundo como vontade e representação, como também ao Apêndice deste mesmo livro, intitulado de Crítica à filosofia kantiana, (para nesse caso expor a concessão feita por Schopenhauer para compreender o direito como positivo tendo em vista o direito de coação) e por fim, também em Sobre a liberdade da vontade, para expor os conceitos de liberdade física e moral, essenciais para compreender à crítica de Schopenhauer à doutrina do direito kantiana. (shrink)

We propose a nonmonotonic Description Logic of typicality able to account for the phenomenon of the combination of prototypical concepts. The proposed logic relies on the logic of typicality ALC + TR, whose semantics is based on the notion of rational closure, as well as on the distributed semantics of probabilistic Description Logics, and is equipped with a cognitive heuristic used by humans for concept composition. We first extend the logic of typicality ALC + TR by typicality inclusions of the (...) form p :: T(C) v D, whose intuitive meaning is that “we believe with degree p about the fact that typical Cs are Ds”. As in the distributed semantics, we define different scenarios containing only some typicality inclusions, each one having a suitable probability. We then exploit such scenarios in order to ascribe typical properties to a concept C obtained as the combination of two prototypical concepts. We also show that reasoning in the proposed Description Logic is EXPTIME-complete as for the underlying standard Description Logic ALC. (shrink)

El artículo pone en escena la propuesta del Derecho Comunitario en el ámbito de los países de América Latina. Para el autor, el proceso de integración entre las naciones latinoamericanas plantea el reto de su estructuración y viabilidad, por lo que resulta imperioso encontrar fórmulas de conciliación entre un Derecho de integración y un cierto tipo de nacionalismo económico no ortodoxo, así como la redefinición del concepto clásico de soberanía absoluta en el sentido de su operacionalidad flexible y plural dentro (...) de una soberanía compartida. No obstante las dificultades, los esfuerzos en defensa del comunitarismo latinoamericano, pasan también por la democratización radical de las instituciones estatales nacionales y por la consolidación de un nuevo concepto de ciudadanía (ciudadanía comunitaria). (shrink)

The study of sleep and wakefulness can inform debates about the nature of consciousness. We argue that sleep and wakefulness fall along a multidimensional continuum and that inconsistencies and paradoxes with the accounts put forth by Merker et al. and Tononi can be understood in terms of a pervasive false dichotomy between these two states.

The ‘bat and ball’ is one of the problems most frequently employed as a testbed for research on the dual-system hypothesis of reasoning. Frederick (J Econ Perspect 19:25–42, 2005) is the first to envisage the possibility that different numerical arrangements of the ‘bat and ball’ problem could lead to different dynamics of activation of the dual-system, and so to different performances of subjects in task accomplishment. This possibility has triggered a strand of research oriented to accomplish ‘sensitivity analyses’ of the (...) ‘bat and ball’ problem. The scope of this paper is to test experimentally the specific hypothesis that numerals are responsible for the selective activation of the two systems of reasoning in this task. In particular, we argue that their role goes beyond and cannot be reduced to that of numbers conceived as magnitudes. To test our hypothesis, we devise an experimental setting in which the role of numbers (as magnitudes) is rendered irrelevant. We find experimental results consistent with our hypothesis. We further provide a link between the literature on mathematical problem-solving and that on mathematical cognition research, in particular that branch labeled embodied mathematical cognition. (shrink)