Modern ethical perspectives toward the environment often emphasize the connection of humans to a broader biotic community. The full intimacy of this connectedness, however, is only now being revealed as scientific findings in developmental biology and genetics provide new insights into the importance of environmental interaction for the development of organisms. These insights are reshaping our understanding of how organism-environment interaction contributes to both consistency and variation in organism development, and leading to a new perspective whereby an “organism” is not (...) solely viewed as the adaptive product of evolutionary selection to an external environment over generations, but as continuously being constructed through systems of interactions that link an organism’s characteristics developmentally to the physical and social influences it experiences during life. This newfound emphasis on “interaction” leads to an interdependency whereby any change to an “environment” impacts the interacting “organism,” and an alteration to the “organism” eventually affects its “environment.” The causal reciprocity embedded within this organism-environment interdependency holds implications for our moral obligations to environments, given their compulsory role in shaping all organisms including ourselves. (shrink)

If few authors have paid much attention to the feminine concerns in new reproductive technologies, actually it is mainly some feminist authors, who, to a great extent, have allowed these concerns to enter into public debate. On the other hand, the preoccupation about women's interests and points of view is a feature in common of all feminist approaches, independently of their other philosophical concepts. Nevertheless, another feature of feminist discourses is their plurality and heterogeneity. So, we have not find back (...) answers to the questions we have analysed in this paper, because there is not only one answer. This is not an inconvenience but an incentive to continue the democratic debate within the framework of plurality and tolerance. We must incorporate to this debate the, often forgotten, women's own interests, and a critical view of the underlying assumptions and biases. These two points of view are common to the majority of feminist approaches, and should be seriously considered as worthy to be incorporated to our discourses when debating the issues linked to the new reproductive technologies. (shrink)

Baruch Spinoza uses the notion of vita to explore the range of creatures existing in time. This book studies the diversity of the figures embodied by life in the work of the author of the Ethics.

“Probably Peirce’s best-known works are the first two articles in a series of six that originally were collectively entitled Illustrations of the Logic of Science and published in Popular Science Monthly from November 1877 through August 1878. The first is entitled ‘The Fixation of Belief’ and the second is entitled ‘How to Make Our Ideas Clear.’ In the first of these papers Peirce defended, in a manner consistent with not accepting naive realism, the superiority of the scientific method over other (...) methods of overcoming doubt and ‘fixing belief.’” — Robert Burch, “Charles Sanders Peirce,” entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2021 revision) -/- “Pragmatist epistemologies often explore how we can carry out inquiries in a self-controlled and fruitful way. (Where much analytic epistemology centres around the concept of knowledge, considered as an idealised end-point of human thought, pragmatist epistemology centres around the concept of inquiry, considered as the process of knowledge-seeking and how we can improve it.) So pragmatists often provide rich accounts of the capacities or virtues that we must possess in order to inquire well, and the rules or guiding principles that we should adopt. A canonical account is Peirce’s classic early paper ‘The Fixation of Belief‘. Here Peirce states that inquiry is a struggle to replace doubt with “settled belief“, and that the only method of inquiry that can make sense of the fact that at least some of us are disturbed by inconsistent beliefs, and will subsequently reflect upon which methods of fixing belief are correct is the Method of Science, which draws on the Pragmatic Maxim described above. This contrasts with three other methods of fixing belief: i) refusing to consider evidence contrary to one’s favored beliefs (the Method of Tenacity), ii) accepting an institution’s dictates (the Method of Authority), iii) developing the most rationally coherent or elegant-seeming belief-set (the A Priori Method).“ — Catherine Legg, “Pragmatism,” entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2021 revision). (shrink)

According to most accounts of trust, you can only trust other people (or groups of people). To trust is to think that another has goodwill, or something to that effect. I sketch a different form of trust: the unquestioning attitude. What it is to trust, in this sense, is to settle one’s mind about something, to stop questioning it. To trust is to rely on a resource while suspending deliberation over its reliability. Trust lowers the barrier of monitoring, challenging, checking, (...) and questioning. Trust sets up open pipelines between yourself and parts of the external world. Trust permits external resources to have a similar relationship to one as one’s internal cognitive faculties. This creates efficiency, but at the price of exquisite vulnerability. We must trust in this way because we are cognitively limited beings in a cognitively overwhelming world. Crucially, we can hold the unquestioning attitude towards objects and technologies. When I trust my climbing rope, I stop worrying about its reliability. When I trust my online calendaring system, I simply go to the events indicated, without question. But, one might worry, how could one ever hold such a normatively loaded attitude as trust towards mere objects? How could it ever make sense to feel betrayed by an object? Trust is our engine for expanding and outsourcing our agency — for binding external processes into our practical selves. Thus, we can be betrayed by our smartphones in the same way that we can be betrayed by our memory. When we trust, we try to make something a part of our agency, and we are betrayed when our part lets us down. To unquestioningly trust something is to let it in—to attempt to bring it inside one’s practical functioning. This suggests a new form of gullibility: agential gullibility, which occurs when agents too hastily and carelessly integrate external resources into their own agency. (shrink)

Value capture occurs when an agent’s values are rich and subtle; they enter a social environment that presents simplified — typically quantified — versions of those values; and those simplified articulations come to dominate their practical reasoning. Examples include becoming motivated by FitBit’s step counts, Twitter Likes and Re-tweets, citation rates, ranked lists of best schools, and Grade Point Averages. We are vulnerable to value capture because of the competitive advantage that such crisp and clear expressions of value have in (...) our private reasoning and our public justification. There is, however, a price. In value capture, we take a central component of our autonomy — our ongoing deliberation over the exact articulation of our values — and we outsource it. And the metrics to which we outsource usually engineered for the interests of some external force, like a large-scale institution’s interest in cross-contextual comprehensibility and quick aggregability. That outsourcing cuts off one of the key benefits to personal deliberation. In value capture, we no longer adjust our values and their articulations in light of own rich experience of the world. Our values should often be carefully tailored to our particular selves or our small-scale communities, but in value capture, we buy our values off the rack. In some cases – like decreasing CO2 emissions – the costs of non-tailored values are outweighed by the benefit of precise collective coordination. In other cases, like in our aesthetic lives, they are not. This suggests that we should want different values suited to different scales. We should want value federalism. Some values are perhaps best pursued at the largest-scale level, others at smaller scales. The problem occurs when we exhibit an excess preference for the largest-scale values – when we consistently let the universal metrics swamp our quieter interests. (shrink)

Aún no hay consenso sobre el sentido de la filosofía en la obra de Jorge Luis Borges. Los ejemplos de la crítica que doy a continuación van desde aquellos que se oponen a ver en el corpus borgesiano ideas filosóficas serias (Sábalo, Massuh) hasta quienes hablan de Borges como un verdadero filósofo de América Latina (Moulines). En el medio, hay interpretaciones moderadas y muy sugestivas. Estas últimas son las más: algunas destejen los hilos filosóficos en la obra de Borges (Ñuño, (...) Dapía), otras filosofan con Borges (Champeau, Sierra Mejía) y las últimas sitúan esa obra en la historia de la filosofía de Occidente (Rest, Mateos). (shrink)

To answer the question whether I am dreaming or awake, and whether there exists an outer correlate of my representations while awake, I consider the meaning of dreaming and wakefulness in Calderón and Descartes. Then I consider the nature, origin, limits, and function that each author gives to doubting. Before concluding, I reconstruct Calderón’s and Descartes’ arguments through which the dramaturge and the philosopher somehow recover that which they previously considered realistic certainty.

La influencia de la Teoría de la Justicia de John Rawls en el debate sobre la equidad en salud ha sido enorme. Y ello a pesar de que el tratamiento que Rawls hace de esa cuestión es escaso. Esa influencia se ha manifestado tanto en autores poco próximos a sus tesis como especialmente en quienes han intentado extender su teoría para incluir la equidad en salud. Más recientemente, el surgimiento del marco de los Determinantes Sociales de la Salud ha reactualizado (...) la vigencia de su teoría y alentado nuevos debates. (shrink)

Tanto le debo a Lelio Fernández... La enumeración incompleta de esa deuda me lleva a mis años de filosofía en Cali, Colombia, de 1985 a 1989. En sus clases, gracias al placer por la lectura en detalle, Lelio contagiaba con la emoción de querer entender; lograba conectarnos con la historia de la cultura sin desplegar ninguna ayuda “audio-visual”; transmitía su deseo de estar siempre saboreando las obras de Baruch Spinoza (1632‒1677) y de Jorge Luis Borges (1899‒1986); se limitaba a sentarse (...) detrás de un escritorio en los salones de clase, hablando bajo y con precisión y con emoción contenida; era necesario llegar casi dos horas antes a ese salón de clase en la Universidad del Valle para no estar obligado a medio-escuchar sus pensamientos en el corredor; me ayudó en la traducción de los apartes en latín, y aún no publicados en castellano, que Umberto Eco (1932‒2016) incluyó en El nombre de la rosa; y tradujo al castellano, con Jean-Paul Margot, el Breve tratado de la reforma del entendimiento también de Spinoza. (shrink)

Por una parte, la carta que Kant escribe a Marcus Herz el 2l de febrero de 1772 es famosa, pues ella es quizá el único documento de valor que informa sobre una década previa al criticismo durante la cual Kant dejo de publicar. Ésta es la década que va desde 1770, fecha de la De Mundi Sensibilis atque Intelligibilis Forma et Principiis: Dissertatio, y la primera edición de la Crítica de la razón pura (1781). La carta de algún modo es (...) un vistazo al “taller del pensador”, donde Kant narraría las preocupaciones filosóficas de su pensamiento. Por otra parte, la carta es ambigua todavía, porque la crítica aún no se pone de acuerdo sobre su sentido. Mis páginas defienden que esta carta es un ejemplo del carácter híbrido del pensamiento de Kant en ese período, un pensamiento que, sin mayor influencia del escepticismo, aún se debate entre anticipaciones críticas y meras repeticiones dogmáticas. (shrink)

There are some recurring symbols in the literature of Jorge Luis Borges, and once those symbols are understood, authors are admitted into the labyrinthine terrain of Borges’s mind and writing. The symbols are the labyrinth, the book, the mirror, the tiger, the courage of irony, words that are music, and the friend. The first four symbols are tools that the author uses to confuse the reader (the labyrinth), a curiosity that can never be satisfied (the book), the awareness of multiple (...) selves (the mirror), and the anticipation of death (the tiger). The other three symbols provide a certain palliative for the melancholic pessimism inspired by the first four symbols. The courage of irony and words that are music give room for a certain individual joy inside the Borgesian universe. Finally, for those who long to escape from isolation, the friend depicts a possible metaphysical opening to intimacy with other human beings. (shrink)

Recent conversation has blurred two very different social epistemic phenomena: echo chambers and epistemic bubbles. Members of epistemic bubbles merely lack exposure to relevant information and arguments. Members of echo chambers, on the other hand, have been brought to systematically distrust all outside sources. In epistemic bubbles, other voices are not heard; in echo chambers, other voices are actively undermined. It is crucial to keep these phenomena distinct. First, echo chambers can explain the post-truth phenomena in a way that epistemic (...) bubbles cannot. Second, each type of structure requires a distinct intervention. Mere exposure to evidence can shatter an epistemic bubble, but may actually reinforce an echo chamber. Finally, echo chambers are much harder to escape. Once in their grip, an agent may act with epistemic virtue, but social context will pervert those actions. Escape from an echo chamber may require a radical rebooting of one's belief system. (shrink)

This article further systematizes the existential body, contributing to the ethnographic model of embodied objectivity. It situates embodiment as the foundation of knowledge, demonstrating its underdevelopment in anthropological literature. The paper explores the philosophical relationship between being-in-the-world and Merleau-Ponty’s body-proper, emphasizing the central role of embodied pre-objective signification in representational ethnographic knowing. This aspect is often insufficiently addressed, particularly in light of certain ethnographic applications of the epoché. The paper concludes that, given the oscillatory apprehension of embodiment, the use of (...) terms like “systematizing” and “inter-objectivity” adequately enhances its portrayal as a pre-objective phenomenon rather than an objective one. (shrink)

Se propone una interpretación del filme La expropiación de Raúl Ruiz, realizado en 1971-1973. Se analizan los distintos dispositivos que hacen alusión al tema de la “muerte” en la cinta y, desde una perspectiva cinematográfica comparada, se proponen las principales intervenciones que Ruiz hace con esta película al género del “muerto viviente”. Se argumenta que la muerte se constituye en un aspecto que permite movilizar una serie de ideas respecto del proceso político chileno. Los muertos vivientes se constituyen en expresiones (...) acerca de la manera en que el peso de la tradición se establece como una esfera relevante que va incluso más allá de la voluntad de los actores sociales vivos. La representación no-realista de la muerte de Vidal ubica al filme, no como una obra contra el Gobierno, sino como una crítica desde el interior del proyecto de la Unidad Popular. (shrink)

La tecnología biomédica, especialmente la genética, podrá ser previsiblemente aplicable para intervenciones que no tendrán carácter terapéutico, sino de “mejora” de las capacidades o aptitudes de los seres humanos. Ante estas prácticas, que según algunos resucitan la idea de eugenesia, distintos autores han negado que sean aplicables sin más las prevenciones desarrolladas frente a la eugenesia histórica. Además, reivindican una eugenesia liberal que librada de las decisiones estatales y conf iada a las decisiones individuales pasaría a estar justif icada o (...) incluso a ser moralmente obligatoria en la medida que supusiese un benef icio para los descendientes. En este artículo se def iende que aunque las acusaciones que se le hacían a la eugenesia histórica no son, en efecto, aplicables, eso no signif ica que se trate de unas prácticas y de una teoría exenta de problemas. Particularmente se examina en qué consistiría una “mejora” y se sostiene que determinadas intervenciones, aun constituyendo mejoras en un determinado contexto, no por ello han de reputarse necesariamente como aceptables, como es el caso de las mejoras discriminatorias. Por último, como muchas mejoras lo son únicamente en términos posicionales, se cuestiona si no están más cerca del darwinismo social que de la propia eugenesia. (shrink)

The wide use of the word “cloning” in public discussion could lead to a confusion in the judgement of different situations. The variety of legal regulation of cloning in Europe shows examples of these confusions. But there are some other reasons that make difficult a complete legal regulation of scientific research on cloning.

In his celebrated masterpiece, Symposium, Plato imagines a high-society dinner-party in Athens in 416 BC at which the guests - including the comic poet Aristophanes and, of course, Plato's mentor Socrates - each deliver a short speech in praise of love. The sequence of dazzling speeches culminates in Socrates' famous account of the views of Diotima, a prophetess who taught him that love is our means of trying to attain goodness. And then into the party bursts the drunken Alcibiades, the (...) most popular and notorious Athenian of the time, who insists on praising Socrates himself rather than love, and gives us a brilliant sketch of this enigmatic character. The power, humour, and pathos of Plato's creation engages the reader on every page. This new translation is complemented by full explanatory notes and an illuminating introduction. (shrink)

"This edition, which replaces the original Loeb edition..., offers text, translation, and annotation that are fully current with modern scholarship"--Front flap of dust jacket, volume 1.

Why do moral people so often fail to act morally? Standard scientific answers point to poor moral judgment (based on deficient character development, reason, or intuition) or to situational pressure. I consider a third possibility: a relative lack of truly moral motivation and emotion. What has been taken for moral motivation is often instead a subtle form of egoism. Recent research provides considerable evidence for moral hypocrisy—motivation to appear moral while, if possible, avoid the cost of actually being moral—but very (...) little evidence for moral integrity—motivation to actually be moral. The lack of truly moral motivation may, in turn, be linked to a lack of truly moral emotion, at least in response to violation of certain moral standards. (shrink)