Arguyo en este escrito que la epistemología del primer Schelling debe interpretarse como un antirrealismo trascendental. Reconstruyo aquí los argumentos en esas obras tempranas contra el realismo de los kantianos, que son desarrollos de premisas tomadas de la Crítica de la razón pura. Muestro coherentemente que el idealismo del primer Schelling resalta los límites trascendentales del discurso sobre objetos de conocimiento y que en realidad no incurre en dogmatismo, ni siquiera en el escrito Vom Ich.

Two concepts have polarized the philosophical debates on functions since the 1970s. One is Millikan's concept of ‘proper function’, meant to capture the aetiology of biological organs and artefacts. The other is Cummins's concept of ‘dispositional function’, designed to account for the real work that functional devices perform within a system. In this paper I locate Hegel's concept of biological function in the context of those debates. Admittedly, Hegel's concept is ‘etiological’, since in his account the existence of purposive organs (...) is explained by appeal to their purpose, yet, against Millikan's concept, Hegel's does not presuppose the phenomenon of natural selection nor derives the function of tokens from the function of types. So, my aim is, first, to present Hegel's approach to biological functions as one neither purely etiological nor purely dispositional. It will appear rather as an example of an organizational account, that attributes function according to present performances and emphasizes the role of functional parts in their self-production within the system they belong to. Finally, I briefly discuss how Hegel's concept performs against common objections to organizational accounts. (shrink)

Symposium on Christopher Bennet's The Apology Ritual. A Philosophical Theory of Punishment [Cambridge University Press, 2008].

Charles Taylor claims that not only Kant, but also successors of Kant such as Fichte and Hegel, advocate a primitive concept of action, namely, a basic, irreducible, indispensable concept allegedly essential to our self-understanding. This paper shows how philosophers like Robert Brandom agree with Taylor explicitly with regard to Hegel, and attribute to him transcendental non-metaphysical arguments in support of such a concept. It then proceeds to challenge this attribution, offering a brief presentation of an alternative non-transcendental metaphysical approach to (...) the Hegelian idea of giving actuality to a concept through a productive activity. (shrink)

the article explores the putatively non-metaphysical – non-voluntarist, and even non-causal – concept of freedom outlined in Hegel’s work and discusses its influential interpretation by robert Pippin as an ‘essentially practical’ concept. I argue that Hegel’s affirmation of freedom must be distinguished from that of Kant and Fichte, since it does not rely on a prior understanding of self-consciousness as an originally teleological relation and it has not the nature of a claim ‘from a practical point of view’.

This article offers a constructive reading of the ‘Teleology’ chapter in Hegel's Science of Logic. I argue that it contains an apparently conclusive case for the abstract concepts of means and end (in the sense of ‘purpose’), which has remained unrecognized in the literature. I then show some implications of the fact that the argument is entirely abstract in Hegel's system.

¿Cómo hay que entender la tesis de Hegel en la Lógica de que "la teleología es la verdad del mecanismo"? La afirmó contra Kant, desde luego; a saber, contra la posibilidad de que lo que parece teleológico sea sólo mecánico; pero no en el sentido de un compromiso dogmático con la realidad de fines naturales y tampoco en el de una refutación del mecanicismo como la que Fichte busca con su radicalización de la filosofía trascendental. Aquí se examina qué posibilidades (...) quedan abiertas cuando se cierran aquéllas. How should one understand the claim that "Teleology is the truth of Mechanism" advanced by Hegel in the Logic? It certainly opposes Kant's position in denying the possibility that what seems to be teleological is only mechanical, but not in the sense of a dogmatic commitment to the reality of natural ends or in the sense of a refutation of mechanicism as in Fichte's radicalization of transcendental philosophy. I examine in this paper which alternatives remain open once these are discarded. (shrink)

This paper examines a fundamental supposition of Kant’s moral philosophy, namely, that, without transcendental freedom, understood as the quality of the will by which it determines itself to act without being affected by sensible motives, we could not impute to any putative agent immoral acts. I argue theoretically against the logical sense of the supposition (showing its aporetic consequence), and I also demonstrate how superfluous it is from a practical point of view. Nevertheless I acknowledge to Kant, in spite of (...) some well known Nietzschean reasons, the merit of having grasped the insurmountable human attachment to the idea that we are arbitrary or transcendentally free beings. Finally, some instances of the echo of this merit in contemporary authors (Nagel, Strawson, Dennett) are reviewed. (shrink)

El artículo explora las posibilidades de la teoría de Dennett sobre los sistemas físicos, funcionales e intencionales como punto de vista no reduccionista sobre las intenciones y las funciones. Dennett defiende que el aprecio de las ventajas predictivas y los compromisos ontológicos con ciertas pautas de las perspectivas funcional e intencional impide el reduccionismo y, por tanto, el fisicismo con respecto a funciones e intenciones. Se propone aquí que ese argumento se complemente con otro que muestre que las pautas del (...) comportamiento físico no son más objetivas que las demás. (shrink)

Arguyo en este escrito que la epistemología del primer Schelling (al menos hasta 1797) debe interpretarse como un antirrealismo trascendental. Reconstruyo aquí los argumentos en esas obras tempranas contra el realismo de los kantianos, que son desarrollos de premisas tomadas de la Crítica de la razón pura. Muestro coherentemente que el idealismo del primer Schelling resalta los límites trascendentales del discurso sobre objetos de conocimiento y que en realidad no incurre en dogmatismo, ni siquiera en el escrito Vom Ich.

This book addresses a key issue in Hegel's philosophical legacy - his account of purposiveness and teleology - that has often been wrongly criticised and misunderstood. Its re-examination of the issue has implications for the whole of Hegel's philosophical legacy.

El artículo examina las posibilidades de una lectura naturalista del Sistema del idealismo trascendental (1800) de F. W. J. Schelling. Defiende que en el rechazo de un concepto absolutista de la voluntad y la teoría del surgimiento de la conciencia por medio del reconocimiento recíproco entre seres racionales se encuentra el principio (no desarrollado por Schelling) de una filosofía de la mente materialista no eliminativista plausible. Presento esas doctrinas en el contexto de las reacciones de F. H. Jacobi y J. (...) G. Fichte a las ambiguas consecuencias para el dogmatismo de la crítica kantiana del uso teórico de la razón. (shrink)

Alan Turing is often portrayed as a materialist in secondary literature. In the present article, I suggest that Turing was instead an idealist, inspired by Cambridge scholars, Arthur Eddington, Ernest Hobson, James Jeans and John McTaggart. I outline Turing’s developing thoughts and his legacy in the USA to date. Specifically, I contrast Turing’s two notions of computability (both from 1936) and distinguish between Turing’s “machine intelligence” in the UK and the more well-known “artificial intelligence” in the USA. According to my (...) proposed historical interpretation, Turing did not view computations in the real world to be exhaustively and deterministically characterized by his automatic machines from 1936. (shrink)

In the popular imagination, the relevance of Turing's theoretical ideas to people producing actual machines was significant and appreciated by everybody involved in computing from the moment he published his 1936 paper ‘On Computable Numbers’. Careful historians are aware that this popular conception is deeply misleading. We know from previous work by Campbell-Kelly, Aspray, Akera, Olley, Priestley, Daylight, Mounier-Kuhn, Haigh, and others that several computing pioneers, including Aiken, Eckert, Mauchly, and Zuse, did not depend on Turing's 1936 universal-machine concept. Furthermore, (...) it is not clear whether any substance in von Neumann's celebrated 1945 ‘First Draft Report on the EDVAC’ is influenced in any identifiable way by Turing's work. This raises the questions: When does Turing enter the field? Why did the Association for Computing Machinery honor Turing by associating his name to ACM's most prestigious award, the Turing Award? Previous authors have.. (shrink)

I respond to Lennart Nordenfelt's analysis of dignity by questioning his attempt to establish an objective standard by which dignity can be determined. I approach this by considering the way in which claims to dignity may be contested and defended. This leads, in the cases of dignity of merit and dignity of moral status, to an apparent relativism. This relativism is checked by further consideration of dignity of identity, and in particular by consideration of the nature of the processes that (...) serve to humiliate people. It is suggested that acts of humiliation attack certain competences that human beings develop as embodied, social beings. Menschenwürde may then be articulated as an account of human nature, in terms of the human potential to develop a series of core competences. This account of human nature aspires to universality, and as such offers an objective ground to dignity. This paper is a product of the research project on Dignity and Older Europeans Programme, Contract No QLG6, 2001, 00888). (shrink)

The most outstanding feature of this book is that here, for the first time, is made available in a single volume all the important historical essays Edgar Zilsel (1891-1944) published during WWII on the emergence of modern science. This edition also contains one previously unpublished essay and an extended version of an essay published earlier. In these essays, Zilsel developed the now famous thesis, named after him, that science came into being when, in the late Middle Ages, the social (...) barriers between the intellectuals and the artisans were eroded, due to the fact that the rapidly expanding commercial classes of that period had a keen interest in improvements in technology. This class was city-based and stimulated a social environment in which men of learning came to regard the craftsmen and technicians with a new respect, in which they no longer felt any contempt for manual work and in which theory and practice were eventually combined to produce modern science. This critical edition also carries a long introduction in which much new material about Zilsel's life and work is presented. It suggests that a radical new look at Zilsel's project needs to be taken. Zilsel's essays on the history of science look like a standard case study to substantiate a particular position on the origins of modern science, but they were also an attempt to show that lawlike explanation in history and social theory is possible. It is claimed that Zilsel's historical essays were a part of another project he was working on which focused on the idea that social phenomena were open to causal explanation as much as physical phenomena. Hence the volume also contains the essays Zilsel wrote in relation to this other project. Previously there have been published a German and an Italian edition of the Zilsel essays. This edition is the first in English; compared to the other two editions this one is the first that includes unpublished material and the first to undertake a serious effort to research Zilsel's life and work. What is special about this volume is the well-articulated social perspective it takes on the origins of modern science. Audience: Students in early modern social history/history of science as well as professional philosophers, historians, and sociologists of science. (shrink)

This study analyses the attitudes of university students towards unethical behaviour in the individual and organisational environments, and relates these attitudes to tolerance of corruption in their future professional lives. The results show a positive relationship between attitudes towards unethical behaviour in both environments, as well as tolerance towards acts of corruption, based on a virtual perception survey. Despite the general rejection attitude by students of such behaviour and acts, the rejection diminishes as their degree programme progresses. This study contributes (...) to our understanding of the tolerance of university students towards corruption, and to revealing how this attitude could explain tolerance towards this phenomenon in their future professional lives. (shrink)

Time passed after the commission of a wrong can affect how we respond to its agent now. Specifically it can introduce certain forms of complexity or ambivalence into our blaming responses. This paper considers how and why time might matter in this way. I illustrate the phenomenon by looking at a recent real-life example, surveying some responses to the case and identifying the relevant forms of ambivalence. I then consider a recent account of blameworthiness and its development over time that (...) purports to account for this ambivalence. Blameworthiness, on this account, consists in a psychological flaw; time matters because it brings the possibility of change in the agent, and ambivalence arises because it is hard to know to the extent of such change. This account, I argue, mischaracterises responses to the case and misidentifies the source of their ambivalence. Drawing on recent work in the philosophy of emotion, I sketch an alternative approach. Our responses, I suggest, make sense within processes through which we address wrongdoing. Time matters because these processes take time and because time’s having passed raises the question whether and how the wrong has been addressed. Unaddressed wrongs can elicit ambivalence of a specific form. (shrink)

La pregunta por el sentido general del ser emerge, en situaciones críticas, como una indagación noética y existencial que descubre la condición finita y vulnerable del ser ahí. La pandemia Covid19 se ha convertido en el contexto social la oportunidad para pensar en la importancia del cuidado en donde, a raíz del confinamiento y el aislamiento preventivo, se ha modificado de forma infranqueable los ritmos de vida. La rapidación del mundo social de producción y consumo ha constituido el modus vivendi-operandi (...) de nuestras sociedades capitalistas. Por eso, los ritmos de vida acelerados han constituido la forma habitual del ser ahí en la carrera social hacia el éxito, consumada en una vida aparentemente feliz, sujeta a las tendencias del mercado y convirtiéndose, este imaginario colectivo, en el paradigma globalizado al cual aspira cualquier persona desde el nivel de vida o estrato social en que se encuentra. Los relegados del sistema, por su parte, quiénes no están a la altura de la competencia del capitalismo salvaje, se convierten en excedentes sociales postergados hacia el inevitable destino del desecho. Si queremos reivindicar el discurso del ser es en orden al fortalecimiento del cuidado de la vida, como un asunto primordial del ser ahí, para reconocer la raíz humana de la crisis ecológica porque, a la base de esta indagación fundamental se encuentra una deficiente cultura del cuidado que no es otra cosa que el descuido mismo del ser. El objetivo de este artículo, derivado de un proceso de investigación documental, es proponer, a la luz de los aportes de Martín Heidegger, la estructura fundamental de la cura como elemento consustancial de la vida en orden al cuidado de sí, de los otros y del ambiente natural como una respuesta oportuna a la crisis actual. (shrink)

Brian Garrett claims, in defence of Gaunilo’s Perfect Island and contra Plantinga, that ‘Properly understood, the great-making qualities of an island are maximal’. This article demonstrates that they are not, thus ‘the greatest conceivable island’ remains an incoherent concept and Gaunilo’s parody fails.

While children’s experiences of online risks and harm is a growing area of research in New Zealand, public discussion on the matter has largely been informed by mainstream media’s fixation on the dangers of technology. At best, debate on risks online has relied on overseas evidence. However, insights reflecting the New Zealand context and based on representative data are still needed to guide policy discussion, create awareness, and inform the implementation of prevention and support programmes for children. This research report (...) presents findings from a quantitative study regarding different aspects related to risks and online safety. It looks at the online experiences that children find bothersome and upsetting and explores the hurtful behaviours they encounter or engage in, both online and in person. Evidence regarding exposure to different types of potentially harmful online content is also presented. Another relevant contribution is the insights related to excessive internet use.The findings presented in this report are based on data from 2,061 New Zealand children aged 9-17. We hope the findings will contribute to the development of policies, practices and services designed to support New Zealand children to safely take advantage of the opportunities available to them online. (shrink)

In a recent comment on the HFEA’s public consultation on sex selection, Soren Holm claimed that proponents of family balancing are committed to embrace a laissez faire approach. Given that arguments in support of sex selection for family balancing also support sex selection for other social reasons, advocates of family balancing, he asserts, are simply inconsistent when calling for a limit on access to sex selection. In this paper, I argue that proponents of family balancing are in no way inconsistent. (...) Provided their advocacy of family balancing is aimed at preventing a severe distortion of the natural sex ratio, they are entirely justified in insisting on restrictions to sex selection. The real question is whether a concern for the sex ratio does indeed call for a limit on sex selection. Based on a recent survey on gender preferences and data from several Gender Clinics, I argue that a restriction on sex selection to family balancing is unwarranted. In the absence of any evidence for a pending sex ratio distortion, we are actually required to adopt a laissez faire approach to sex selection. (shrink)

Book publishers seem to have found a new niche judging by the number of review copies coming our way. This column just aims to give a line or two on some of them to help the reader decide whether to buy, borrow or leave it for now.

Discusses the nature and functions and philosophical foundations of law as well as the central problems of legal method.

To explore social media use in New Zealand, a sample of 1001 adults aged 18 and over were surveyed in November 2021. Participants were asked about the frequency of their use of different social media platforms (text message included). This report describes how often each of the nine social media sites and apps covered in the survey are used individually on a daily basis. Differences based on key demographics, i.e., age and gender, are tested for statistical significance, and findings summarised.