Este libro ofrece una introducción al análisis de la historia del pensamiento conservador y derechista en América Latina y en la Península Ibérica a través de estudios enfocados en diversas épocas, regiones y temas. Describe cómo este pensamiento se desarrolló desde los comienzos del siglo XIX hasta finales del siglo XX, y cómo legitimaba las acciones y el poder de los conservadores y de la derecha. Asimismo subraya la ambigüedad y heterogeneidad del pensamiento conservador y derechista, a la vez que (...) examina las múltiples conexiones, relaciones y similitudes entre sus diferentes corrientes. (shrink)

In his (several times reprinted) article How Wide Is the Gap Between Facts and Values? N. Rescher aspires to clarify the long-lasting discussion on the ‘is-ought’ (‘fact-value’) gap by providing a framework in which the related arguments can be perspicuously articulated. He then argues that even if the logical gap may bereal, the transition from factual premises to value conclusions is smoothly mediated by trivially true value statements. We scrutinize Rescher’s argumentation and show defects in the presented lines of reasoning. (...) In particular, we argue that his tripartite division of statements (factual, evaluative, hybrid), as well as his emphasis on the role of evaluative truisms, introduce serious problems that escape Rescher’s attention. We thus conclude that he failed to achieve his goals. (shrink)

Descartes's concept of the mind, as distinct from the body with which it forms a union, set the agenda for much of Western philosophy's subsequent reflection on human nature and thought. This is the first book to give an analysis of Descartes's pivotal concept that deals with all the functions of the mind, cognitive as well as volitional, theoretical as well as practical and moral. Focusing on Descartes's view of the mind as intimately united to and intermingled with the body, (...) and exploring its implications for his philosophy of mind and moral psychology, Lilli Alanen argues that the epistemological and methodological consequences of this view have been largely misconstrued in the modern debate. Informed by both the French tradition of Descartes scholarship and recent Anglo-American research, Alanen's book combines historical-contextual analysis with a philosophical problem-oriented approach. It seeks to relate Descartes's views on mind and intentionality both to contemporary debates and to the problems Descartes confronted in their historical context. By drawing out the historical antecedents and the intellectual evolution of Descartes's thinking about the mind, the book shows how his emphasis on the embodiment of the mind has implications far more complex and interesting than the usual dualist account suggests. (shrink)

This is the first book to give an analysis of Descartes's pivotal concept that deals with all the functions of the mind, cognitive as well as volitional, ...

Reflections on moral discourse and its contexts are provided and the authors discuss the nature and tasks of moral philosophy. The collection creates a dialogue between different philosophical views.

Mentoring Away the Glass Ceiling in Academia: A Cultured Critique describes how women of diverse backgrounds perceive their mentoring experiences or the lack of mentoring experiences in the academy. This book provides a space for envisioning strategies and practices to improve mentoring practices and the collegiate environment.

Este volumen recoge las ponencias, comunicaciones y coloquios que se ofrecieron en la última reunión organizada por la Asociación Interdisciplinar “José de Acosta” (ASINJA). El tema vertebrador, como indica el título, es el sentido del hombre en el Universo. La toma de conciencia de sí mismo y del Universo en el que se encuentra inmerso, hacen platearse al hombre una serie de preguntas sobre el sentido de las cosas, o sobre el por qué y el para qué de la propia (...) exitencia humana. Estas misma preguntas centran los estudios contenidos en este libro. (shrink)

Today the halls of Technology, Entertainment, and Design and Davos reverberate with optimism that hacking, brainstorming, and crowdsourcing can transform citizenship, development, and education alike. This article examines these claims ethnographically and historically with an eye toward the kinds of social orders such practices produce. This article focuses on a hackathon, one emblematic site of social practice where techniques from information technology production become ways of remaking culture. Hackathons sometimes produce technologies, and they always, however, produce subjects. This article argues (...) that the hackathon rehearses an entrepreneurial citizenship celebrated in transnational cultures that orient toward Silicon Valley for models of social change. Such optimistic, high-velocity practice aligns, in India, with middle-class politics that favor quick and forceful action with socially similar collaborators over the contestations of mass democracy or the slow construction of coalition across difference. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Introductory Remarks The Cartesian Background Impressions and Ideas Passions as Reflective Impressions Direct and Indirect Passions Association and the Individuation of Passions Perception and Perceiving Passions and Moral Sentiments Notes References Further reading.

Hume is famous for his criticism of substantial minds, free will, and self-consciousness—central elements in traditional philosophical accounts of persons. His empiricism dissolves self-inspecting minds into heaps of distinct perceptions and turns cognitive faculties into successions of causally related, discrete impressions and ideas. Whatever regularities the complex ideas and their bundles or heaps display are explained by laws of association of ideas, which are supposed to play the same role in the mental world as Newton’s laws of gravitation play in (...) physical nature. This paper explores some strands of the new science of man proposed in Hume’s Treatise, in particular his account of personal identity.. (shrink)

The quality of early childhood education and care (ECEC) is important for children’s development. One instrument that was developed to assess an aspect of ECEC quality is the Classroom Assessment Scoring System for pre-kindergarten children (CLASS Pre-K). We examined the factorial validity of the instrument using data from 177 German preschool classrooms. The three-factor teaching through interaction model (Hamre et al., 2013) was contrasted to a one-factor, a two-factor, and a bifactor model as proposed by Hamre et al. (2014). Our (...) results indicated that the three-factor structure with the domains of emotional support, classroom organization, and instructional support fit the data best. The fit of the teaching through interaction model was satisfying after adding a cross-loading of the dimension language modeling on emotional support, and two correlated residuals. Evidence of convergent and discriminant validity are provided. In terms of factor structure and pattern score comparisons, the results were similar to previous U.S. and German studies. The discussion concerns the justifiability of the factor model revisions and draws directions for further research. We concluded that our study offers further evidence of the applicability of the CLASS Pre-K for the assessment of teacher-child interaction quality in the German context. (shrink)

A recent French reform has revised the legal definition of the corporation. In essence, the law stipulates that the corporation must be run with due regard to the social and environmental impacts of its activity. It also introduces the notion of raison d’être and affords the possibility for any corporation to assign social or environmental purposes to itself, defined in its by-laws. This reform is similar to recent reforms in the UK and the US, but is based on an original (...) and distinctive theoretical argument. The aim of our article is to analyze the fundamental tenets of this reform and their implications for the theory of the corporation. It shows that the new law is based on a new positive definition of the enterprise as not only an economic organization or a productive entity, but more fundamentally a space for innovative collective action. We argue that this view of the enterprise challenges our conceptualization of the corporation in two important ways. First, it shows that the traditional theories overlook the activities of the enterprise and their related impacts, and that the corporation is not necessarily the appropriate legal vehicle for the innovative enterprise. Second, it suggests that the stipulation of the enterprise’s purpose or raison d’être in the corporate by-laws can provide new promising legal foundations for corporate responsibility. (shrink)

La théorie de la quaternalité, telle que Piaget et Gottschalk l'ont appliquée aux connectifs binaires du calcul bivalent, appelle quelques précisions et compléments.Les seize connectifs ne comportent que deux quaternes complets: celui des jonctions et celui des implications. Leurs similitudes formelles ne doivent pas dissimuler une différence dans leur mode de construction. Elle apparaît sur leurs diagrammes (inspirés du “carré logique” traditionnel) par la place de la cellule initiale et par celles des signes barrés du trait vertical de la négation:En (...) effet, la dualité qui se combine avec celle de la négation contradictoire (DN, flèche diagonale) est, pour les jonctions, la dualité “morganienne” (DM, flèche verticale) et pour les implications, la dualité des réciproques (DR, flèche horizontale). Car dans les jonctions, liaisons symétriques, il n'y a point de vraies réciproques; inversement, les implications ne comportent pas (pourvu, bien sûr, qu'on ne les traduise pas en termes de jonctions) de dualité morganienne. Le quatrième terme, obtenu par la combinaison des deux relations génératrices, sera donc, pour les jonctions, une contreduale (DM× DN) et, pour les implications, une contreréciproque (DR× DN). (shrink)

This paper reflects on the status of Descartes' notion of the mind-body union as an object of knowledge in the framework of his new philosophy of nature, and argues that it should be taken seriously as representing a third kind of real thing or reality—that of human nature. Because it does not meet the criteria of distinctness that the two natures composing it—those of thinking minds and extended bodies— meet, the phenomena referred to it, which are objects of psychology as (...) traditionally understood, fall outside the scope of clear and distinct perception required for knowledge. The prospects for rationalist psychology are bleak, since because of the mind-body union so little of the contents of the human mind are accessible to rational inspection or introspection. Mechanistic natural philosophy on the other hand gives us knowledge only of the physiological and corporeal aspects of the phenomena Descartes classifies as mental. What pertains to the mind-body union can only be known through the senses, moreover, we learn to conceive the mind-body union only through daily experience (“usant seulement de la vie et des conversations ordinaries”, AT 3, 695). I discuss the nature of this experience, and the sense in which Cartesian psychology without being part of his philosophy of nature in the strict sense of the term, can still be seen as a naturalist undertaking in a more traditional sense of nature where life, sentience, reasoning and rational action are all seen as natural phenomena. (shrink)

This paper explores Spinoza’s therapy of passions and method of salvation through knowledge and love of God. His optimism about this method is perplexing: it is not even clear how his God, who is unlike any traditional notion of divinity, can be loved. Sorting out Spinoza’s view involves distinguishing an ethics of bondage from another of freedom, and two corresponding notions of love of God. The paper argues that the highest kind of love—‘pure intellectual love of God’—should not be understood (...) as an affect at all, but instead as unimpeded intellectual activity. This suggestion requires reconsidering Spinoza’s account of cognition, particularly his use of the Cartesian notions of objective and formal reality which are not only central to his theory of ideas but constitute the foundations of his salvation project. (shrink)

This paper examines Descartes's third primary notion and the distinction between different kinds of knowledge based on different and mutually irreducible primary notions. It discusses the application of the notions of clearness and distinctness to the domain of knowledge based on that of mind-body union. It argues that the consequences of the distinctions Descartes is making with regard to our knowledge of the human mind and nature are rather different from those that have been attributed to Descartes due to the (...) influential Rylean picture of Cartesian mind-body dualism. (shrink)

There are two main strands in the afterlife of Descartes’s famous redefinition of mind in terms of thinking likely to color one’s reading of his notion of mind or self. The one stressed most by his posterity and developed from early on in the empiricist tradition sees consciousness as its main characteristic. The other focuses on reason and rationality. This paper discusses the textual support for the first reading promoted by Ryle and his followers and aligns itself with the second (...) arguing that it is the exercise of its rational, cognitive capacities that are essential to the Cartesian mind and not consciousness, which is merely a presupposition for its rational activity. It examines the interrelation and respective roles of awareness on the one hand, and reason on the other in Descartes’s account of mind or self. But it also suggests that the role given by Descartes to the will in judgment and his separation of will and intellect into two distinct powers may be seen as contributing to a transformation of the very notion of reason and of self as a cognitive and moral agent. (shrink)

This paper discusses the interrelations between three aspects of human emotions: their intentionality, their expressivity and their moral significance. It distinguishes three kinds of philosophical views of emotions: the cognitivist (classically held by the Stoics), the emotivist which reduces emotions to non-intentional bodily sensations and physiological states, and the moral phenomenologist, the latter being held by Annette Baier, whose work is the focus of the discussion. Her view, which represents an original development of ideas found in Descartes and Hume, avoids (...) the reductionism of congitivist and emotivist accounts. The paper gives special attention to her notion of 'deep' objects of emotions and to her account of the expressivity of emotions, arguing that while the first is problematic, the second is a significant contribution to our understanding of the role of emotions in our moral lives. (shrink)

Descartes's conception of matter changed the account of physical nature in terms of extension and related quantitative terms. Plants and animals were turned into species of machines, whose natural functions can be explained mechanistically. This article reflects on the consequences of this transformation for the psychology of human soul. In so far the soul is rational it lacks extension, yet it is also united with the body and affected by it, and so it is able to act on extended matter. (...) The article examines Descartes's concept of scientia and his different uses of nature, and argues that there is much more continuity between Aristotelian and Cartesian psychology than is usually recognized when it comes to an explanation of the functions of the embodied human soul. If this makes psychology unfit for inclusion in the new science of nature, its object is still a natural phenomenon and has an important place within scientia as Descartes conceived of it. (shrink)

This paper examines and reflects on Princess Elisabeth’s of Bohemia exchange with Descartes concerning the notorious difficulties of his doctrine of human nature as a union of two independent and mutually exclusive substances mind and body. The aim is to situate her questions in the context of the debate Descartes’s doctrine spurred among his contemporaries and to show the philosophical interest of her own contribution to the understanding of and clarification of the issues confronting Descartes.

Descartes's view of modality is analyzed by contrast to two earlier models: the ancient realist one, defended by Boethius, where possibility and necessity are connected to natural potency, and the modern intensionalist one, which dissociates necessary and possible truths from any ontological foundation, treating them as conceptual, a priori given preconditions for any intellect. The emergence of this view is traced from Gilbert of Poitiers to duns Scotus, Ockham and Suarez. The Cartesian theory of the creation of eternal truths, it (...) is argued, involves a rejection of this idea of absolute conceivability and can be seen as a constructivist view of intelligibility and rationality. (shrink)