This paper is concerned with formal aspects of the logic of theory change, and in particular with the process of shrinking or contracting a theory to eliminate a proposition. It continues work in the area by the authors and Peter Gärdenfors. The paper defines a notion of safe contraction of a set of propositions, shows that it satisfies the Gärdenfors postulates for contraction and thus can be represented as a partial meet contraction, and studies its properties both in general and (...) under various natural constraints. (shrink)

Investigates the resolution of contradictions and ambiguous derogations in a code, by means of the imposition of partial orderings.

Minding Time: A Philosophical and Theoretical Approach to the Psychology of Time offers an innovative philosophical account of the most fundamental kinds of time representation.

In a context of pervasive digitalization of the social world, both before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, the field of education has undergone major changes with the development of digital practices and settings. However, the physical presence of the subjects and the body remain something primordial and irreplaceable in traditional educational processes. Thus, it is often assumed that virtuality is opposed to the corporeal reality of the subjects involved in teaching, learning and studying. In this paper we aim to critically (...) challenge this assumption by addressing the phenomenon of virtuality in a more original sense: as a fundamental dimension of corporeality itself. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological insights, we argue that the experience of the virtual is inherently embodied and fully real. We understand corporeality and virtuality as entangled and multidimensional phenomena. At the same time, this leads us to rethink the digital as only one possible medium in which virtuality can appear as inherent to embodied experience. We develop our phenomenological approach in three instances. First, we question and bracket two common assumptions about corporeality. From our critical perspective, assumptions about a disembodied digitality and a devirtualized corporeality represent extremes within which educational discourses currently move. Second, we address the inherent virtuality of embodied experience. We outline the heuristic concept of the virtual body to describe corporeality and virtuality as entangled and multidimensional phenomena that encompass extension, intercorporeality and intermediality. Finally, we make some remarks on the relationships of corporeality and virtuality considering the challenges of digital education. (shrink)

La presente obra constituye el esfuerzo por rastrear la historia del pensamiento cosmovisional y filosófico latinoamericano, desde las cosmovisiones pre-colombinas hasta las corrientes filosóficas más actuales: las filosofías de la liberación, la postmodernidad y la postcolonialidad. Aunque el autor ha procurado en su voluminosa obra hacer referencia a todas las numerosas corrientes de pensamiento que se han ido dando en el amplio panorama cultural latinoamericano, se ha centrado sobre todo en rastrear la denominada filosofía americanista.

A descriptive-exploratory analysis of assurance practices is presented in this paper, by analysing the patterns of sustainability assurance reporting in two national contexts with different levels of assurance activity over a period of 11 years. The study is based on theoretical insights drawn from institutional sociology and normativity production. It is framed both in the Italian situation, where assurance statements consistently include a narrow set of formal and procedural communications, and in an unsettled situation in the U.S., where assurance activity (...) is more incipient, but where experimentation in substantial assurance disclosure practices has more room to develop. Its main implication is that the diffusion of sustainability assurance and the creation of sustainability assurance disclosure norms are not without its cost: information quality does not increase with patterned practice. The results also point towards the noteworthy role of specific professionals in the earlier and later stages of assurance practice norms. They reveal a significant influence of non-Big4 firms in the diffusion of sustainability assurance disclosure norms. In contrast, the Big4 firms appear to be positively associated with the narrowing down of the assurance focus to a selected subset of this activity in later stages of the development of the assurance norm. In this regard, this study provides insight into the circumstantial—but relevant—carrier role of the Big4 firms in determining what “assurance” means. (shrink)

O presente artigo aborda as concessões feitas por Husserl no texto de Prolegômenos, na segunda edição de Investigações Lógicas. O artigo mostra que a concessão mais difícil estaria exatamente na manutenção da ideia de “verdade em si”. Por um lado, Husserl afirma que a “verdade em si” não poderia depender da constituição da natureza humana, pois tal dependência abalaria o próprio sentido da ideia de “verdade”. Por outro lado, não deixaria de reconhecer a insuficiência da ideia de “verdade em si”, (...) na medida em que tal ideia encobriria o importante problema da relação entre o real e o ideal. (shrink)

Many experts have warned that environmental degradation is increasing the likelihood of future pandemics like COVID-19, as habitat loss and poaching increase close contact between wildlife and people. This fact has been framed as a reason to increase wildlife conservation efforts. We have many good reasons to step up conservation efforts, but arguments for doing so on the basis of pandemic prevention are rhetorically, ethically, and empricially flawed.

IN THE DISCUSSION on education in the Republic, Socrates lays down the principles which those who speak about the gods must follow if they want to avoid the errors of traditional mythology. The first typos of this rational theology is this: "God is the cause, not of all things, but only of the good." For "God, being good, cannot be responsible for everything happening in our life, as is commonly believed, but only for a small part. For we have a (...) far smaller share of good than of evil, and while God must be held to be the sole cause of good, we must look for some other factors than God as cause of the evil." Rightly celebrated, this passage has set the agenda for ages of reflection in Western thought on the cause of evil. In contrast to traditional mythology where the gods are seen as the origin of both good and evil--as Homer says, "Zeus has two jars standing on the floor of his palace, full of fates, good in one and evil in the other"--the divinity is now freed of all responsibility for evil. God, who is entirely good, can only be the cause of well-being. If this answer sets God free of all responsibility for evil, it seems to be at the cost of limiting God's power: for God is no longer responsible for "most things in human life," since most of them are evil. What, then, may be the cause or causes of evil? Do bad things have a cause? Or do they just happen? Plato's formulation seems to suggest that he favours a dualistic solution to the problem of evil: God is the cause of all good, but for evil we have to find other causes. What could those causes be: matter, cosmic necessity, an evil soul? Various answers of this type were developed in later Platonism and in later mythological philosophies. Without denying that Plato often uses a dualistic discourse and uses elements of it in his cosmology, I do think that Plato had something different in mind. After all, he was not primarily interested in the problem of theodicy. For in this passage of the Republic, he is not concerned with the problem of evil in the universe as a whole, which is really the theodicy question, but with evil in "human life," that is, evil insofar as human beings experience it and suffer from it: the fact that we are not at all living well but are instead miserable and unhappy. (shrink)

This paper examines accounts of the moral wrongness of killing persons in addition to determining what conclusions, if any, can be drawn from the morality of killing persons about the equality of persons, and vice versa. I will argue that a plausible way of thinking about the moral wrongness of killing implies that the permissibility of killing innocent, nonthreatening persons depends on a person’s age. I address objections to this conclusion and discuss some potential implications of the view.

Until recently emotion and emotional processing have been largely neglected by experimental psychology and neuroscience more generally. This paper reviews the substantial psychological and neuroscientific evidence that each emotion is localized in specific neural structures, and thus that it is not necessary to invoke souls or spirits to explain emotions or emotional processing often held to be distinctive of a soul. In addition, the paper aims to demonstrate the adaptive and biological value of emotion for humans and other animals. It (...) closes by focusing on recent research on neural processing of emotions and emotional words. -/- 1. Introduction -- 2. What are Emotions and How Many Emotions Exist? -- 3. Emotions and the Body -- 4. The Neural Substrates of Emotions and How We Know Them -- 5. Fear, Sadness, and the Amygdala -- 6. Pleasure, Happiness, and the Orbitofrontal Cortex -- 7. Conclusion. (shrink)

En este trabajo, el autor analiza las contradicciones que el multiculturalismo plantea en las sociedades actuales, resaltando la importante mediación que el sistema político democrático lleva a cabo en la resolución de las mismas. A partir de los artículos de tres autores ('The Politics ofRecognition" de CH Taylor: "Struggles for Recognition in Constitutional States" de J. Habermas y "Legitimacy and Diversity: Dialectical Reflections on Analytical Distinctions" de T. McCarthy) y de la referencia final al trabajo de Rawls 'The Law of (...) the People", expone una serie de momentos teóricos que representan diferentes estadios en la discusión entre el pensamiento liberal y el comunitarismo, y que componen un proceso explicativo en el que cada uno de esos momentos supondría una superación teórica del anterior. En concreto, el autor trata de situar la discusión sobre el reconocimiento del derecho a la diferencia, en el terreno en el que del análista del modelo teórico del liberalismo más acorde con el reconocimiento de derechos a las colectividades-el republicanismo comunitarista al que se refiere Taylor-, se pase al análisis del tipo de sistema político dentro del cual se reconozca la diferencia y la existencia de otras culturas como algo que ya estaba implícito en la teoría de los derechos. Este sistema político sería la democracia deliberativa y su procedimiento discursivo para tomar decisiciones y llegar a acuerdos, propuesto por J. Habermas. El trabajo de McCarthy tratarla de resolver algunas fisuras en la democracia deliberativa que afectarían a su legitimidad por cuanto suponen un menoscabo a la idea misma de las diferencias. Finalmente, la alusión a Rawls permite al autor erigir el sistema de los derechos humanos en el estándar mínimo necesario para llegar a un acuerdo global lo suficientemente amplio y abstracto como para garantizar el máximo respeto a las diferencias. Un acuerdo que, insiste el autor, sólo puede enmarcarse en un proyecto democrático con dimensión internacional, al que llama "horizonte cosmopolitamente democrático". (shrink)

This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of socially responsible funds in Sweden by assessing fund managers' abilities and performances across different market states. These issues are analyzed at the aggregate and individual fund levels. The paper also presents several new statistical tests that allow more precise inferences about differences in performance and the variability in fund returns arising from different benchmarks. In general, SR and conventional funds perform similarly to the market. At the aggregate level, SR funds investing in Sweden (...) and Europe perform similarly to conventional funds, while those investing globally tend to underperform. This underperformance seems to be linked with poor selectivity abilities of global SR fund managers. For individual funds, the performance of both types of funds is more similar. Most funds perform similarly in crisis periods compared to non-crisis periods. Overall, our results are consistent with a mature market for SR investing and support the view that the similar performance of SR and conventional funds is associated with the mainstreaming of SR investment in Sweden. These findings encourage SR investing both by socially conscious investors, who wish to align their social values with their investment decisions, as well as by conventional investors, who will not be penalized by investing in these funds. We also call attention to the difficulties investors face when trying to identify funds with high social standards, considering that there is scarce information on the extent to which each fund holds stocks that comply with ethical and social criteria. (shrink)

Anticipating the fifth centennial of Vives’ birth in 1992, this is the first comprehensive study of two of Vives’ main works, De Anima et Vita, Book 3 and De Prima Philosophia, accompanied by the first general biography based on recent research. Juan Luis Vives was a Spanish sixteenth-century humanist who spent most of his life as an exile in England and the Low Countries. De Anima et Vita, the third book of which makes up the tract on emotions, represents the (...) culmination of Vives’ effort to understand human nature. Noreña has organized Vives and the Emotions into three parts. Part one incorporates recent research on Vives and corrects some of the inaccuracies of Noreña’s 1970 Luis Vives. He provides expanded accounts of Vives’ attitude toward Erasmus and religion, his reaction to terminist logic, his social and legal views, and his contributions to Renaissance pedagogy. The second part of the book examines in detail one of Vives’ most philosophical and forgotten tracts, a lengthy summary of his metaphysical views published in 1531 under the title De Prima Philosophia seu de Intimo Naturae Opificio, which is probably the most speculative of Vives’ works. Part three compares Vives’ thoughts on emotion to those of Aristotle, some ancient Stoic sources, Saint Thomas, Descartes, and Spinoza, while dividing the entire material under such headings as the nature, the classification, the interaction, and the therapeutic control of emotion. (shrink)

RESUMO: O presente artigo aborda um tema específico da fenomenologia de Husserl: o problema da autoconstituição do eu transcendental. O artigo se encontra dividido em duas partes. Inicialmente, investiga o eu como polo idêntico que acompanha todos os vividos. Em seguida, introduz o problema da autoconstituição: ao constituir seus objetos, o eu transcendental se autoconstitui. Por fim, retoma o referido problema, para investigar a gênese temporal da vida subjetiva e a autoconstituição do ego por meio dos seus próprios habitus. ABSTRACT: (...) The present paper approaches a specific topic in Husserl's phenomenology: the problem of the self-constitution of the transcendental ego. The article is divided into two parts. First, the ego as an identical pole that accompanies every experience is investigated. Next the problem of self-constitution is introduced: in constituting the object, the transcendental ego constitutes itself. Finally, the temporal genesis of subjective life and the self-constitution of the ego through its own habitus is discussed. (shrink)

This paper traces the concept and phenomenon of generosity from Aristotle to Emannuel Levinas and beyond. The question motivating this investigation is: must the generous act be restricted by a rational calculation of correct, or prudent, giving? Answers to this question vary. Aristotle and Kant would answer in the affirmative, while Emerson and Levinas would not. The bulk of this paper is dedicated to Levinas's characterization of excessive generosity as a condition for the fundamental ethical relation, namely, the generous welcome (...) of the Other. I end by considering the phenomenon of generosity from the point of view of the mid‐20th century Mexican philosopher, Emilio Uranga. (shrink)

Reductionism has dominated science and philosophy for centuries. Complexity has recently shown that interactions—which reductionism neglects—are relevant for understanding phenomena. When interactions are considered, reductionism becomes limited in several aspects. In this paper, I argue that interactions imply nonreductionism, non-materialism, non-predictability, non-Platonism, and non-Nihilism. As alternatives to each of these, holism, informism, adaptation, contextuality, and meaningfulness are put forward, respectively. A worldview that includes interactions not only describes better our world, but can help to solve many open scientific, philosophical, and (...) social problems caused by implications of reductionism. (shrink)

Es importante destacar que cuando en la historia de la física se hace referencia al problema de si la luz se transmite de manera instantánea o si requiere de tiempo –que se abreviará aquí como el problema de la propagación sucesiva de la luz– siempre destacan ciertos personajes: por un lado, Armand Hippolyte Louis Fizeau y Jean Bernard León Foucault, quienes en el siglo XIX lograron medir por primera vez de forma precisa la velocidad de la luz; y por otro, (...) los astrónomos Ole Christensen Roemer y James Bradley, quienes en los siglos XVII y XVIII –respectivamente– fueron los primeros en dar una respuesta derivada de trabajos observacionales de que la luz sí requiere de tiempo en su transmisión, esto es, que su propagación es sucesiva. Entre estos nombres, aparece siempre de forma algo etérea Galileo Galilei como el primero que propuso un enfoque experimental para dar respuesta a esta pregunta. (shrink)

O presente estudo pretende salientar o trânsito das grandes formulações da concepção da temporalidade na tradição hindu: do tempo (kāla) à sua compreensão como instantâneo (kṣaṇa). Num ponto preliminar, salientam-se as condições linguísticas do pensar indo-europeu e a "gramática" sanscrítica a propósito do tempo. Sublinham-se de seguida os enquadramentos rituais e míticos, tanto ligados com a ciclicidade (saṃsāra), como com o imutável e eterno (ānantya). Depois percorrem-se, de forma sintética, os vários "sistemas" filosóficos salientando respectivamente: a concepção metafísica (no Vedānta (...) e Mīmānsā), a recorrência e irrealidade já num plano gnosiológico (no Sāṃkhya e no Yoga), e a formulação psicológica (tanto no Vaiśeṣika, como no Nyāya, além disso presente no Jainismo). Enfim, na última parte, faz-se menção aos principais traços característicos da doutrina budista da instantaneidade (muito característica sobretudo das escolas "subitistas"). Valoriza-se conclusivamente esta instância de um "agora" também como lição da espiritualidade hindu em geral. (shrink)

O Comentário ao Liber De Causis pertence à última fase das obras de Santo Tomás. Foi escrito, com toda segurança, no primeiro semestre de 1272, em Paris, como testemunha uma cópia parisiense da obra. O De Causis trata das primeiras causas das coisas, que estão constituídas em três ordens, e da distinção e dependência das causas entre si. O texto de Santo Tomás segue passo a passo as proposições em que a obra se divide, que são trinta e duas. Estas (...) trinta de duas proposições são verdadeiros capítulos desenvolvidos a partir de uma tese central. Santo Tomás expõem-nas a modo de lições. (shrink)

Colombia es hoy el país con mayor área y el mayor productor de hoja de coca y cocaína en el mundo. Las políticas y los modelos de intervención a través de los cuales se ha intentado que desaparezcan estas siembras han venido cambiando, pero han optado básicamente por una de dos vías: o la realización de programas de desarrollo alternativo, dirigidos a hacer económica y socialmente posible la sustitución de los cultivos en cuestión por otras actividades, o la aplicación de (...) programas de erradicación, en especial los que hacen uso de la fumigación aérea. El presente artículo contiene algunos elementos que pueden ser útiles para un balance de las políticas y los modelos que para enfrentar los cultivos de uso ilícito han venido aplicándose en Colombia durante los últimos quince años, así como algunas consideraciones que anticipan ese balance. (shrink)

I argue that the claim that all value is conferred is incompatible with the view that the capacity to set ends is unconditionally valuable. While this objection has been made, I offer a rebuttal and then a counterexample to the rebuttal. I also argue that, if all value were conferred, then the Kantian notion that moral wrongness consists in a practical contradiction is undermined.

Modelos neurocognitivos têm sido propostos para investigar a consciência. O objetivo é responder à pergunta sobre como o cérebro é capaz de produzir estados conscientes qualitativos. Os modelos são representações teóricas baseadas em algumas pesquisas empíricas. Contudo, a questão central, aparentemente trivial para alguns autores, refere-se à representatividade e confiabilidade dos modelos, i.e., saber se são capazes de explicar como a consciência emerge de processos neurais. Esses modelos são considerados como guia no estudo científico da consciência: os modelos cognitivos de (...) Dennett e Baars, os modelos neurobiológicos de Edelman, Dehaene et al., de Damásio, e o modelo neurodinâmico proposto por Freeman. O presente texto visa a analisar a coerência e a plausibilidade dos modelos, i.e., se realmente explicam a “consciência” e suas propriedades em termos neurais ou se explicam apenas mecanismos neurobiológicos subjacentes no cérebro. O objetivo é avaliar escopo e limites dos modelos além da aplicabilidade na resolução do problema da consciência. Neurocognitive models are proposed in order to study the problem of consciousness. The models are attempts to answer the question of how the brain can generate conscious and qualitative states. Models are theoretical representations based on empirical data. Nonetheless, the central question concerns the reliability and the representativeness of the models, i.e., whether they in fact represent what they are supposed to explain, viz., how consciousness can emerge from neuronal processes. Such models are taken to be a guide for the scientific study of consciousness. Presently, there are six models: the multiple draft, the global workspace, the dynamic core, the global neuronal workspace, the somatic markers hypothesis, and the neurodynamic model. This text is a survey and a philosophical analysis of the models of consciousness, and it considers their plausibility and coherence. I will concentrate on two points: whether the neuroscientific models are able to explain ‘consciousness’ and its properties in neural terms, or whether the models only explain the neural correlates of conscious states, and the scope, limitations and applicability of the models in the attempt to solve the problem of consciousness. (shrink)

The volumes of the 'Symposium Aristotelicum' have become the obligatory reference works for all studies on Aristotle. In this eighteenth volume a distinguished group of scholars offers a chapter-by-chapter study of the first book of Aristotle's Metaphysics. Aristotle presents here his philosophical project as a search for wisdom, which is found in the knowledge of the first principles allowing us to explain whatever exists. As he shows, the earlier philosophers had been seeking such a wisdom, though they had divergent views (...) on what these first principles were. Before Aristotle sets out his own views, he offers a critical examination of his predecessors' views, ending up with a lengthy discussion of Plato's doctrine of the Forms. Book Alpha is not just a fundamental text for reconstructing the early history of Greek philosophy; it sets the agenda for Aristotle's own project of wisdom after what he had learned from his predecessors. (shrink)