Del 4 al 8 de Mayo la ciudad de Donostia-San Sebastián reunió a más de 170 profesores de todo el mundo con ocasión de celebrar el Tercer Congreso Internacional de Ciencia Cognitiva, organizado por el departamento de Lógica y Filosofía de la Ciencia de la UPV/ehu. El enfoque que el simposio quiso otorgar al tratamiento de la ciencia cognitiva tuvo en general un aroma procedente del estudio que permiten los procesos cognitivos inherentes al lenguaje natural. Particularmente pudieron distinguirse cuatro temas (...) que constituyeron, pese a su íntima relación y por cuestiones de forma, diferentes bloques en torno a los cuales giraron las distintas ponencias y comunicaciones. (shrink)

The focus on translational research in clinical trials has the potential to generate clinically relevant genetic data that could have importance to patients. This raises challenging questions about communicating relevant genetic research results to individual patients. An exploratory pharmacogenetic analysis was conducted in the international ovarian cancer phase III trial, AGO-OVAR 16, which found that patients with clinically important germ-line BRCA1/2 mutations had improved progression-free survival prognosis. Mechanisms to communicate BRCA results were evaluated, because these findings may be beneficial to (...) patients and their families. Communicating individual BRCA results was not anticipated during clinical trial design. Consequently, options were not available for patients to indicate their preference for receiving their individual results when they signed pharmacogenetic informed consent. Differences in local requirements, clinical practice, and opinion regarding the ethical aspects of how to convey genetic results to patients are all potential barriers to returning individual BRCA results to patients. Communicating the aggregate BRCA result from this study provided clinical investigators with a mechanism to disseminate the overall study finding to patients while taking individual circumstances, local guidelines and clinical practice into account. This study illustrates the importance of increasing the clarity and scope of informed consent and the need for patient engagement to ensure clinical trial participants can indicate their preference regarding receipt of potentially important individual pharmacogenetic results. This study was registered in the NCT Clinical Trial Registry under NCT00866697 on March 19, 2009, following approval from participating ethics committees. (shrink)

Online supplement, "Mulsow: Additions to Notes drawn from the 2002 edition of Moderne aus dem Untergrund" full versions of nearly 300 notes that were truncated in the print edition. Hosted on H. C. Erik Midelfort's website. Martin Mulsow's seismic reinterpretation of the origins of the Enlightenment in Germany won awards and renown in its original German edition, and now H. C. Erik Midelfort's translation makes this sensational book available to English-speaking readers. In Enlightenment Underground, Mulsow shows that even in (...) the late seventeenth century some thinkers in Germany ventured to express extremely dangerous ideas, but did so as part of a secret underground. Scouring manuscript collections across northern Europe, Mulsow studied the writings of countless hitherto unknown radical jurists, theologians, historians, and dissident students who pushed for the secularization of legal, political, social, and religious knowledge. Often their works circulated in manuscript, anonymously, or as clandestinely published books. Working as a philosophical microhistorian, Mulsow has discovered the identities of several covert radicals and linked them to circles of young German scholars, many of whom were connected with the vibrant radical cultures of the Netherlands, England, and Denmark. The author reveals how radical ideas and contributions to intellectual doubt came from Socinians and Jews, church historians and biblical scholars, political theorists, and unemployed university students. He shows that misreadings of humorous or ironic works sometimes gave rise to unintended skeptical thoughts or corrosively political interpretations of Christianity. This landmark book overturns stereotypical views of the early Enlightenment in Germany as cautious, conservative, and moderate, and replaces them with a new portrait that reveals a movement far more radical, unintended, and puzzling than previously suspected. (shrink)

As James Chapman has famously put it in National Identity and the British Historical Film, historical films are “as much about the present in which they are made as they are about [the] past in which they are set.” This article discusses Shekhar Kapur’s aesthetically ground-breaking Elizabeth and its sequel Elizabeth: The Golden Age focusing on two main aspects, namely national identity issues and the representation of the enemy. Kapur’s Elizabeth films will first be placed within the larger context of (...) Elizabeth’s film and television appearances. Informed by Giroux’s critical methodology guidelines, in an attempt to “historize” the films under scrutiny and so foster “sane historical sense,” a se­miotic analysis will then be offered. Largely inspired by the tenets of Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis and Kress and Leeuwen’s visual grammar, this will draw a parallel between the verbal and visual discourses in both films. Data will finally be discussed and the contention will be made that England’s religious heritage has left indelible traces which remain latent in the English imagination, for which historical evi­dence will be presented. The article’s ultimate aim will be to provide evidence suggesting that, in the English case, religious and national discourses merged from the late 16th century onwards, clearly influ­en­cing not only the perception that the English had of themselves but also and crucially the image they may still have of “Other” nations. (shrink)

La información es una dimensión de lo real que, a pesar de no tener natu-raleza física, solo existe apoyada en una base física. Y su presencia en los objetos, eventos y procesos que constituyen nuestro entorno vital humano, es lo que permite que el mundo sea inteligible. Sin información no serían posibles las definiciones, ni el pensamiento, ni el lenguaje, ni la ciencia. La importancia de la información está creciendo de manera expo-nencial en nuestros días. Aclarar su estatuto ontológico es (...) una tarea mucho más difícil de lo que a primera vista parece. Y explicar su presencia en los objetos naturales, equivaldría a explicar porqué es inteligible el universo, algo que solo parece posible si, abandonando el ámbito del pensamiento científico, penetramos en niveles más profundos, tradicionalmente reservados a la filosofía o la religión. (shrink)

El presupuesto de una eficaz transmisión de conocimientos es su adecuado almacenamiento, algo que el hombre ha conseguido de modo excelente, merced al lenguaje simbólico, íntimamente ligado a su capacidad de abstraer. La educación debe capacitar para relacionar causalmente los conocimientos dispersos e integrarlos críticamente en una visión holística del mundo. La utilización de las TIC reporta ventajas muy importantes, pero no carece de sombras y aspectos preocupantes. Por ejemplo, el control exhaustivo de todo lo que somos y hacemos. Todos (...) parecen estar de acuerdo en que los criterios por los que se rige el desarrollo humano son unilaterales e insuficientes. Pero va a ser muy difícil luchar eficazmente contra los instintos de agresividad, posesión y dominio, tan profundamente arraigados en nuestras disposiciones genéticas, ya que ello implica sacrificios personales y colectivos, difícilmente aceptables, si no se parte de valoraciones morales distintas de las comúnmente admitidas en nuestros días. (shrink)

En las actuales sociedades avanzadas cada ciudadano genera a diario una ingente cantidad de datos sobre su persona. La masiva utilización de esta información por las tecnologías Big Data suscita profundos y justificados recelos en muchas personas. Sobre todo por la incidencia que podría tener en derechos humanos como la privacidad, la libertad, la igualdad y la justicia social y porque el formidable poder que representa BD es controlado por un número cada vez más anónimo y reducido de personas. La (...) utilización de herramientas tecnológicas en todos los niveles del aprendizaje podría reportar grandes ventajas, a pesar de los recelos que suscita en algunas personas. En sí mismos, los conoci-mientos no tienen connotaciones éticas, sino que su moralidad radica en el uso que de ellos se haga. Los ángeles y los demonios no están en la técnica, sino en el corazón de quienes se sirven de ella. Será muy difícil enfrentarse a problemas como los arriba mencionados, si los principios morales de que partimos en nuestros debates no son distintos de los habituale. (shrink)

The aesthetics reflection can not carry out through the exclusive analysis of the figure produced by the artist, but demands to know the various nature factors that have intervened in the gestation of the work. For the study of the present aesthetics in the work of Michael Angel, results indispensable to know what the medieval philosophy expresses on what is beautiful. Furthermore, Michael Angel was a deep intellectual anxieties man. Therefore, the study of the theories outstanding aesthetics in his era, (...) it could give impulse to his own creativity. (shrink)

In this article, I examine the relationship between environment and political consciousness, articulating an argument that links the organic side and the economical level of environmentalist claims, and exposing some of the social movements and political positions that were coined in the Basque Country in the end of the 20 th century and beginning of the 21 st century. Some of the protests linked to environmental causes in the Basque Country fit with the narratives that give access to the new (...) century and describe the coming concepts in the form of advent with regards to notions like sustainability, organic, energy policies, post-ideologies and even the relationship between food and environment in more recent years. In this direction, environmental movements have succeeded in confusing the materialistic goals of their claims and the very materialism implicit in nature. Thus, I claim that these movements have complied from conservative positions rather than progressist positions. Therefore, there has been an asymmetry with the ideological portion of these claims and protests and the truly emancipatory goals of any progressist position. If the drive for sustainability can counter materialist and idealist proposals, we need to find a solution where “sustainable” means organic without the bodily part of the organic term itself. (shrink)

This monograph sets out from the idea of an obscure and perverted relationship between environmentalism, understood as a 21 st century green and popular movement, and pornography, understood as a traditionalist and conservative art form. Both sides seem to come together in the interest of what has been called the Anthropocene. Somehow the same groups that rely on a fierce defense of the planet and demand a collective awareness of the risk the entire humanity faces do not do it any (...) longer on behalf of an unknown future or revolutionary goal, but for the conservation of a still image of Earth: a positive conviction on how the future is going to look like. This aporia is dissolved into an oxymoron when environmentalist practices are put at work. (shrink)

No se ha advertido casi nunca que la filosofía europea es una filosofía del estado de vigilia. Este heco, que no tiene importancia para el realismo antiguo y medieval, comienza a mostrar su gravedad en la filosofía moderna que es una filosofía de la conciencia y no debe olvidar ninguno de su estados propios. Mientras dormimos, tanto en el sueño profundo como en el sueño de ensueños, seguimos teniendo conciencia, pero las formas puras a priori del conocimiento funcionan de un (...) modo muy distinto. La filosofía hindú ha estudiado durante muchos siglos estos estados de conciencia y los ha incluído en el horizonte filosófico. Este estudio es una primera reflexión sobre el impacto que la filosofía Vedanta puede producir sobre la filosofía europea. (shrink)

The article offers an analysis of Kant’ s “Third Antinomy of Pure Reason” (in which he examines the possibility of reconciling Transcendental freedom with natural Determinism), in order to show the lack of grounds of the interpretation that claims that the critical resolution of the antinomy implies a shift with respect to the cosmological terms in which the conflict was initially stated. Through a detailed analysis of the sources, we will suggest that the conflict analyzed in the Third Antinomy is (...) not exclusively cosmological, but rather that it also –and to the same degree– constitutes a practical conflict, and, secondly, that the critical solution is not developed in exclusively practical terms, but that it also involves certain aspects directly linked to the cosmological question initially formulated. (shrink)

En su obra más reciente, Crítica y sabotaje, propone Manuel Asensi un nuevo método de crítica del discurso artístico (la «crítica como sabotaje») que, gracias a una actitud desconfiada ante la obra de arte y a la utilización de una terminología propia, aspira bien a desenmascarar (y sabotear) la forma en que los discursos pretenden imponer una visión particular del mundo al receptor y llevarle así a actuar en consecuencia, o bien a explicar de qué manera ciertos discursos se presentan (...) a sí mismos de forma más o menos explícita como ambiguos y conflictivos (saboteando su propia naturaleza afirmativa y junto a ella el sistema social al que pertenecen).El presente artículo trata de rastrear las raíces que esta crítica como sabotaje tiene en la teoría literaria deconstruccionista, mediante una lectura detenida de las propuestas interpretativas de Asensi que permita relacionarlas con las ideas y estrategias desarrolladas por sus antecesores Jacques Derrida y Paul de Man, y que lleve a la identificación final de la deconstrucción como el antecedente más importante del sabotaje crítico, así como a la enumeración de las discrepancias que las separan. (shrink)

Divided into four parts, this treatise begins with well-known criticisms of nonreligious ethics and then develops an atheistic metaethics. In Part 2, Martin criticizes the Christian foundation of ethics, specifically the ’divine command theory’ and the idea of imitating the life of Jesus as the basis of Christian morality. Part 3 demonstrates that life can be meaningful in the absence of religious belief. Part 4 criticizes the theistic point of view in general terms as well as the specific Christian (...) doctrines of the atonement, salvation, and the resurrection. (publisher, edited). (shrink)

This collection of texts (originally published in German under the title Holzwege) is Heidegger's first post-war book and contains some of the major expositions of his later philosophy. Of particular note are 'The Origin of the Work of Art', perhaps the most discussed of all of Heidegger's essays, and 'Nietzsche's Word 'God is Dead',' which sums up a decade of Nietzsche research. Although translations of the essays have appeared individually in a variety of places, this is the first English translation (...) to bring them all together as Heidegger intended. The text is taken from the last edition of the work, which contains the author's final corrections together with important marginal annotations that provide considerable insight into the development of his thought. This fresh and accurate new translation will be an invaluable resource for all students of Heidegger, whether they work in philosophy, literary theory, religious studies, or intellectual history. (shrink)

Many philosophers and psychologists argue that out everyday ability to predict and explain the actions and mental states of others is grounded in out possession of a primitive 'folk' psychological theory. Recently however, this theory has come under challenge from the simulation alternative. This alternative view says that human beings are able to predict and explain each other's actions by using the resources of their own minds to simulate the psychological aetiology of the actions of the others. This book and (...) the companion volume Folk Psychology: The Theory of Mind Debate together offer a richly woven fabric of philosophical and psychological theory, which promises to yield real insights into the nature of our mental lives. (shrink)

El presente artículo trata de profundizar en la objeción de conciencia partiendo del pensamiento de Joseph Ratzinger, previo y contemporáneo a su etapa como romano pontífice (Benedicto XVI). La hipótesis de partida, que se ve refrendada en las conclusiones, es que la comprensión ratzingeriana de la conciencia, fundamentada en la verdad y en el bien, justifica la existencia de la figura de la objeción de conciencia como protección del contenido de aquella ante la imposición de cualquier norma, justa o injusta. (...) Para realizar esta investigación se ha abordado el estudio de todas las obras y discursos del autor que versan sobre la noción de conciencia, la objeción de conciencia y la verdad, y se ha consultado asimismo doctrina filosófica y jurídica en la materia. (shrink)

This paper addresses a problem about epistemic warrant. The problem is posed by philosophical arguments for externalism about the contents of thoughts, and similarly by philosophical arguments for architecturalism about thinking, when these arguments are put together with a thesis of first person authority. In each case, first personal knowledge about our thoughts plus the kind of knowledge that is provided by a philosophical argument seem, together, to open an unacceptably ‘non-empirical’ route to knowledge of empirical facts. Furthermore, this unwelcome (...) prospect of transferring a ‘non-empirical’ warrant from premises about our own mental states and about philosophical theory to a conclusion about external environment or internal architecture seems to depend upon little more than the possibility of knowledge by inference. (The use of the scare-quoted term ‘non-empirical’ is explained a couple of paragraphs further on.). (shrink)

And, as The Promise of Salvation makes clear through abundant empirical evidence, religion will not disappear as long as these promises continue to help people ...

This book traces the development of theories of the self and personal identity from the ancient Greeks to the present day. From Plato and Aristotle to Freud and Foucault, Raymond Martin and John Barresi explore the works of a wide range of thinkers and reveal the larger intellectual trends, controversies, and ideas that have revolutionized the way we think about ourselves. The authors open with ancient Greece, where the ideas of Plato, Aristotle, and the materialistic atomists laid the groundwork (...) for future theories. They then discuss the ideas of the church fathers and medieval and Renaissance philosophers, including St. Paul, Philo, Augustine, Aquinas, and Montaigne. In their coverage of the emergence of a new mechanistic conception of nature in the seventeenth century, Martin and Barresi note a shift away from religious and purely philosophical notions of self and personal identity to more scientific and social conceptions, a trend that has continued to the present day. They explore modern philosophy and psychology, including the origins of different traditions within each discipline, and explain both the theoretical relevance of feminism and gender and ethnic studies and also the ways that Derrida and other recent thinkers have challenged the very idea that a unified self or personal identity even exists. Martin and Barresi cover a number of issues broached by philosophers and psychologists, such as the existence of a fixed and unchanging self and whether the concept of the soul has a use outside of religious contexts. They address the question of whether notions of the soul and the self are still viable in today's world. Together, they reveal the fascinating ways in which great thinkers have grappled with these and other questions and the astounding impact their ideas have had on the development of self-understanding in the west. (shrink)

Of course, although this view on meaning was the prevailing one for almost a century, many of the people who initiated the enterprise of logical semantics, including people like Frege and Wittgenstein, had an open eye for all that it did not catch. However, the logical means which Frege, Wittgenstein, Russell, and the generation that succeeded them, had at their disposal were those of classical mathematical logic and set-theory, and these indeed are not very suited for an analysis of other (...) aspects of meaning than those which the slogan covers. A real change in view then had to await the emergence of other concepts, which in due course became available mainly under the influence of developments in computer science and cognate disciplines such as artificial intelligence. And this is one of the reasons why it took almost a century before any serious and successful challenge of the view that meaning equals truthconditions from within logical semantics could emerge. (shrink)

Taking issue with those who see recent social transformations as an extension of modernity, the author contends that social theory must confront an epochal change from the modern era to a new era of globality, in which human beings can conceive of forces at work on a global scale, and in which they espouse values that take the globe as their reference point. The book begins by assessing the problems of writing about modernity, showing how narratives of an endlessly self-perpetuating (...) modern age were intrinsic to the "modern project," the attempt by Enlightenment philosophers to transform the everyday world in accord with science and logic under the auspices of the nation-state. Now we are beginning to realize that the nation-state and the modern project cannot renew themselves endlessly through expansion. Instead, the author contends, the age has culminated in its own dissolution, and globality has supplanted modernity as the basis for action and social organization. In theorizing the global age, he considers the worldwide environmental consequences of aggregate human activities, the reconception of human security in the age of nuclear weapons, technological advances in communication systems, the rise of a global economy, and the growing reflexivity of global consciousness, as people and groups begin to refer to the globe as the frame for their beliefs. The book concludes by examining the consequences of the Global Age thesis for politics, identifying a new popular construction of the state that the author terms "performative citizenship." In the modern age, the nation-state was the central power and citizens were beneficiaries of that power, with rights and duties. In the global age, citizens respond to the lack of central power by creating, or performing, the state themselves. The global managerial class uses the skills learned in the bureaucracy of the nation-state to bring pressure on national governments in the interests of global economic, environmental, or human-rights issues. (shrink)

Explores the moral dimensions of the current global role of the U.S. military.

Christian Georg Martin offers an argumentative reconstruction of the whole work, reading it as a critical ontology, namely as the attempt to abstract from all presuppositions and to immanently unfold conceptual determinations characterizing ...

In this paper I propose a new solution to the problem of change: situationalism. According to this view, parts of reality fundamentally disagree about what is the case and reality as a whole is unsettled (i.e. metaphysically indeterminate). When something changes, parts of the world irreconcilably disagree about what properties it has. From this irreconcilable disagreement, indeterminacy arises. I develop this picture using situations, which are parts of possible worlds; this gives it the name situationalism. It allows a B-theory endurance (...) view on which there is genuine incompatibility when things change. There are costs to the view, which are explored, but it is a novel approach which offers a distinct explanation of what happens when things exist through change. (shrink)

In this paper, I shall defend externalism for the contents of perceptual experience. A perceptual experience has representational properties; it presents the world as being a certain way. A visual experience, for example, might present the world to a subject as containing a surface with a certain shape, lying at a certain distance, in a certain direction; perhaps a square with sides about 30 cm, lying about one metre in front of the subject, in a direction about 20 degrees to (...) the left of straight ahead. (shrink)

Philosophers of logic are particularly interested in understanding the aims, epistemology, and methodology of logic. This raises the question of how the philosophy of logic should go about these enquires. According to the practice-based approach, the most reliable method we have to investigate the methodology and epistemology of a research field is by considering in detail the activities of its practitioners. This holds just as true for logic as it does for the recognised empirical and abstract sciences. If we wish (...) to systematically understand the aims and epistemology of logic, we are best placed achieving this by looking at what logicians do, rather than reflecting upon the nature of logic itself. In this entry, we outline the motivations for a practice-based approach towards the philosophy of logic and highlight its advantages over more “top-down” approaches, which attempt to infer conclusions about the nature of logic and its methodology on the basis of traditional assumptions about knowledge, metaphysics, or logic itself. We end by addressing several prominent concerns raised against the practice-based approach. (shrink)

If the tiles of a mosaic are arranged symmetrically, then the image those tiles constitute must be symmetric as well. This paper formulates and defends the general principle at work in this case: roughly, that a symmetry cannot ground an asymmetry. It is argued that the principle supports strong objections to four metaphysical views: qualitativism, relationalism, the tenseless or ‘B’ theory of time, and comparativism. A response to these objections is developed which appeals to fragmentalism, the view that reality contains (...) facts which are incompatible with one another. But fragmentalism might be thought too bizarre to tolerate, and if it is, then the objections developed in this paper may well be fatal. (shrink)