Optimization is about finding the best available object with respect to an objective function. Mathematics and quantitative sciences have been highly successful in formulating problems as optimization problems, and constructing clever processes that find optimal objects from sets of objects. As computers have become readily available to most people, optimization and optimized processes play a very broad role in societies. It is not obvious, however, that the optimization processes that work for mathematics and abstract objects should be readily applied to (...) complex and open social systems. In this paper we set forth a framework to understand when optimization is limited, particularly for complex and open social systems. (shrink)

Philosophers have long struggled to reconcile Martin Heidegger's involvement in Nazism with his status as one of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century. The recent publication of his Black Notebooks has reignited fierce debate on the subject. These thousand-odd pages of jotted observations profoundly challenge our image of the quiet philosopher's exile in the Black Forest, revealing the shocking extent of his anti-Semitism for the first time. For much of the philosophical community, the Black Notebooks have been either used (...) to discredit Heidegger or seen as a bibliographical detail irrelevant to his thought. Yet, in this new book, renowned philosopher Donatella Di Cesare argues that Heidegger's "metaphysical anti-Semitism" was a central part of his philosophical project. Within the context of the Nuremberg race laws, Heidegger felt compelled to define Jewishness and its relationship to his concept of Being. Di Cesare shows that Heidegger saw the Jews as the agents of a modernity that had disfigured the spirit of the West. In a deeply disturbing extrapolation, he presented the Holocaust as both a means for the purification of Being and the Jews' own "self-destruction": a process of death on an industrialized scale that was the logical conclusion of the acceleration in technology they themselves had brought about. Situating Heidegger's anti-Semitism firmly within the context of his thought, this groundbreaking work will be essential reading for students and scholars of philosophy and history as well as the many readers interested in Heidegger's life, work, and legacy. (shrink)

In 1939, the influential psychophysicist S. S. Stevens proposed definitional distinctions between the terms ‘number,’ ‘numerosity,’ and ‘numerousness.’ Although the definitions he proposed were adopted by syeveral psychophysicists and experimental psychologists in the 1940s and 1950s, they were almost forgotten in the subsequent decades, making room for what has been described as a “terminological chaos” in the field of numerical cognition. In this paper, I review Stevens’s distinctions to help bring order to this alleged chaos and to shed light on (...) two closely related questions: whether it is adequate to speak of a number sense and how philosophers can make sense of the claim by cognitive scientists that numbers are perceptual entities. Moreover, I offer further support to Stevens’s distinction between numerosity and numerousness by showing that they are relational properties that emerge through different relationships between agents and their environments. The final conclusion is that, by adopting Stevens’s distinctions, numbers do not need to be seen as perceptual entities, since the so-called number sense is better described as a sense of numerousness. (shrink)

This paper offers a reinterpretation of Eduard Bernstein’s theory of evolutionary socialism. It does so by examining the leading role that he envisioned for unions of skilled workers in the socialist movement. During his time in London in the 1890s, Bernstein’s engagement with English Fabianism led him to emphasize the proletariat’s differentiated nature. He claimed skilled workers most readily organized and became the first proletarians to develop class consciousness. Unskilled workers, on the other hand, remained largely unorganized and estranged from (...) the socialist movement. Bernstein opposed the socialist political strategy of nationalization because it would subordinate unskilled workers to party revolutionaries rather than realize cooperative self-government in industry. This focus on promoting industrial self-government made Bernstein stress the importance of workers’ further unionization and adoption of skilled unionists’ method of collective bargaining. This would produce socialist cooperation because it facilitated cooperative wage determination. In Bernstein’s view, skilled unionists influenced the socialist party to take political action to organize and elevate more proletarians to class consciousness. In contrast to those who claim Bernstein prioritized the party’s autonomous ethical appeals and legislation, I emphasize his focus on union-party interactions and defense of unions as central for the advance into socialism’s cooperative society. (shrink)

For risk and crisis communication in health emergencies and for the management of infodemics, now is the time to intervene. A time that precedes the arrival of the next health emergency and a time...

The great ideological cliché of our time, César Rendueles argues in Sociophobia, is the idea that communication technologies can support positive social dynamics and improve economic and political conditions. We would like to believe that the Internet has given us the tools to overcome modernity's practical dilemmas and bring us into closer relation, but recent events show how technology has in fact driven us farther apart. Named one of the ten best books of the year by Babelia El País, Sociophobia (...) looks at the root causes of neoliberal utopia's modern collapse. It begins by questioning the cyber-fetishist dogma that lulls us into thinking our passive relationship with technology plays a positive role in resolving longstanding differences. Rendueles claims that the World Wide Web has produced a diminished rather than augmented social reality. In other words, it has lowered our expectations with respect to political interventions and personal relations. In an effort to correct this trend, Rendueles embarks on an ambitious reassessment of our antagonistic political traditions to prove that post-capitalism is not only a feasible, intimate, and friendly system to strive for but also essential for moving past consumerism and political malaise. (shrink)

En los escritos esotéricos o privados de los años treinta y cuarenta, el concepto de un estilo del Da-sein puede resultar sorprendente. Sorprendente, en gran medida, porque en los escritos de ese período Heidegger desarrolla una crítica radical de la Modernidad, la cual acaba tomando la forma de una historia del ser. En esta historia, el estilo, figura moderna, artística y cultural por excelencia, difícilmente encuentra su sitio. El objetivo de este artículo es reconstruir este concepto, aparentemente secundario y menor, (...) para así desentrañar los sentidos filosóficos que contiene. Trataremos de mostrar cómo el estilo del Da-sein, al formar parte de la metafísica de la subjetividad moderna, tanto en la historia del arte como en la confrontación con Nietzsche, exhibe el proyecto filosófico de la Kehre. Sin embargo, si, en última instancia, el estilo del Da-sein concierne a nuestra relación con el ser, la de Heidegger podría no ser la única aproximación fenomenológica relevante al problema. (shrink)

Aristotle normally used historical notations to support his arguments. This is somewhat true for all the works of the corpus, but above all for Politics: the nature, objectives, and methodology of the investigations in this treatise present the strongest links with actual and concrete data, and therefore with historia. Obviously even the Aristotle of Politics is not a historian who wants to report known historiographical traditions; however, regardless of his intentions, there is no doubt that the work in question contains (...) precious ‘fragments’ of history which, in general, confirm or supplement our knowledge. There are, however, cases in which the Aristotelian exempla end up filling in the omissions and gaps of the available sources, such as the cursory reference to the nomos of the Aphytaians, which appears in the section of book 6 dedicated to the so-called agricultural democracy. (shrink)

The model and framework presented in the target article by Thelen et al. is an interesting effort that is able to account for the contextual variability in the A-not-B performance of 7–12-month-old infants. In the process of developing their framework, the authors discounted the concept of object as a useful notion in discussions of A-not-B performance. For Piaget and other developmentalists, the main evidence for the acquisition of the concept of object was the disappearance of A-not-B errors after age 12 (...) months. However, the Thelen et al. model makes predictions of A-not-B outcomes over a much shorter, trial-to-trial time scale. Given the mismatch in the time scales over which analyses in the two approaches have been based, we wonder if the challenge to the concept of object has been misplaced. (shrink)

Al esbozar su proyecto de una fenomenología dialéctica, el joven Herbert Marcuse dirigió a Heidegger una crítica, la cual consistía en que, a pesar de sus genuinos aportes a una tematización de la facticidad y la historicidad, terminaba por recaer en una falta de concreción. Este artículo busca evaluar si dicha crítica es pertinente. Se propondrá que tal señalamiento es acertado ontológicamente, pero no metodológicamente. De las conclusiones derivadas de ello, se sugieren algunas posibles líneas de reinterpretación del pensamiento heideggeriano, (...) la fenomenología y el pensamiento crítico. En última instancia, se aborda la posibilidad que la idea de habitar (Wohnen) sea una respuesta de Heidegger al planteamiento de la mera praxis, considerado por él como insuficiente. (shrink)

I defend impact-based accounts of institutional racism against the criticism that they are over-inclusive. If having a negative impact on non-whites suffices to make an institution racist, too many institutions (including institutions whose affirmative action policies inadvertently harm its intended beneficiaries) would count as racist. To address this challenge, I consider a further necessary condition for these institutions to count as racist—they must stand in a particular relation to racist ideology. I argue that, on the impact-based model, institutions are racist (...) if they have a negative racial impact AND this impact is legitimized by racist ideology. Racist ideologies limit social criticism of and collective action against institutions that have a negative racial impact, and in so doing, lend stability to systems of racial domination. (shrink)

This book seeks to redefine the purpose of philosophy for our times. Faced with the saturated immanence of the world, philosophy is summoned to return to its original vocation and, after a long absence in which it lost its voice, it is called on to reawaken the community and protect the life we share in common.

In the first part of this paper I contend that Michael Dummett’s works contain a distinction between analytic and synthetic (logical) deductions. Dummett does not use Kant’s terminology. Nevertheless, based on general considerations about theories of meaning, Dummett shows how one can distinguish between deductions whose validity is recognised by merely grasping the concepts and deductions whose validity can be recognised only by “going beyond the concepts”, as Kant wrote. The latter are synthetic deductions, through which we can increase our (...) knowledge. A special merit of Dummett’s distinction is its theoretical flexibility and generality. He does not propose a single clear-cut distinction between analytic and synthetic deductions; rather in his works we find an indication of how to draw a distinction once a theory of meaning is adopted. In the second part of the paper I consider possible developments within an inferentialist theory of meaning and draw some conclusions concerning the fallibility of deductions. (shrink)

El presente trabajo tiene como objetivo fundamental analizar una disciplina reciente denominada teoría de la organización. Para tal efecto se muestran diversos hechos históricos, los cuales al inicio eran tan sólo una pretensión teórico-metodológica univoca y simplificada para el estudio de las organizaciones, como ocurrió con las ciencias naturales. Sin embargo, en la actualidad han eclosionado en una amplia gama de perspectivas fenomenológicas en torno a las organizaciones. Por lo anterior se propone como explicación el anarquismo epistemológico acuñado por Paul (...) K. Feyerabend, por considerarlo una herramienta poderosa para entender a las teorías de la organización. También se sostiene como hipótesis la presencia de un robustecimiento de esta teoría al abrevar de distintas fuentes para la explicación de sus fenómenos.The fundamental aim of this paper is to analyze a recent discipline called organization theory. For this purpose, diverse historic events are shown. These facts initiated a theoretical-methodological univocal and simplified pretension for the study of the organizations, like the one occurred with the natural sciences. Nevertheless, currently they have emerged in an extensive range of phenomenological perspectives around organizations. Therefore, it is proposed as an explanation the “anarchism epistemology” minted by Paul K. Feyerabend by considering it a powerful tool to understand the theories of the organization. Also it maintains as hypothesis that the study of several sources to find out a possible explanation for its phenomena, strengthens the organization theory or theories. (shrink)