La presencia de Platón y del pensamiento platónico se ha mantenido de manera incesante a lo largo de la historia de la cultura. En esta historia, el siglo XX refleja el rechazo y la aceptación, la recepción, en suma, de un modo inusitado tal vez porque, durante este siglo, la humanidad se vio cara a cara con los infiernos que supo crear: un mundo en ruinas hacía imposible intuir la perfecta quietud de las Formas. La recepción de Platón en el (...) siglo XX bucea en la recepción de Platón en aquel mundo contradictorio: ¿cómo se integra su pensamiento fundacionalmente metafísico con la deconstrucción de la metafísica? ¿Cuáles son los alcances de la crítica que la teoría política hace, desde la época de los totalitarismos, al autor de la República? ¿Qué valor cognoscitivo y pedagógico puede tener en mito platónico para filósofos cristianos que se ocupan del pensamiento platónico? ¿Cómo recibe la poesía hispanoamericana su voz de demiurgo? Estas preguntas, de las que se ofrecen diversas respuestas en este libro, son tratadas con rigor académico y confrontadas doblemente con las fuentes: en primer término, con Platón y luego con quienes son estudiados en el presente volumen, aunque desde ángulos muy diversos: M. Heidegger, H. G. Gadamer, K. Popper, E. Cassirer, L. Marechal. La seguridad del tratamiento metodológico y lingüístico que se refleja en esta obra hace que sea altamente recomendable para alumnos de grado y de posgrado en Filosofía, Teoría Política, Literatura y Humanidades en general. (shrink)

This article offers a philosophical account of the so-called journal of Gilleleje. I would like to argue that in this text from 1835 one can trace the early philosophical musings of Kierkegaard on the existential question of the discovery of the self and the development of selfhood, one of the main motifs in the authorship of the Dane. Additionally, I discuss the literary trends of the 1830s in Golden Age Denmark, particularly the boom of the Danish short novel and Heiberg’s (...) admiration of Goethe, analyzing in what way this local context impacted Kierkegaard’s ideas in the journal of Gilleleje. (shrink)

In this article, I explore Johan Ludvig Heiberg’s diagnosis of the crisis of his age, Golden Age Denmark, in his treatise On the Significance of Philosophy, published in 1833. Althoughin recent times there is a renewed interest in the intellectual scene of Golden Age Denmark, in part due to the current relevancy of a thinker such as Søren Kierkegaard, it is a fact that one of its most important figures, J. L. Heiberg, has been more or less ignored by contemporary (...) scholars. Thus, in this article I try to shed light on his figure and thought, especially on his attempt to use Hegelian philosophy to solve the cultural crisis of his time. (shrink)

Resumen Entre 1834 y 1835, Kierkegaard, quien todavía era un estudiante de veintiún años en la Universidad de Copenhague, se interesó en la figura mítica y folclórica conocida como el “ladrón maestro”. Decidió entonces trabajar en un drama que girara alrededor de este personaje y su lucha en contra del orden establecido. Con eso en mente, este artículo tiene dos objetivos. El primero consiste en hacer una exposición general del denominado proyecto del ladrón maestro. Las notas de Kierkegaard sobre el (...) ladrón maestro han permanecido en una relativa oscuridad, de manera que este artículo busca presentarle al lector hispanohablante este trabajo poco conocido del pensador danés. El segundo objetivo es analizar la cuestión filosófica planteada en el proyecto del ladrón maestro, es decir, la cuestión sobre la relación del individuo rebelde y marginado con el orden establecido.In the years 1834 and1835, Kierkegaard, still a 21-year-old student at the University of Copenhagen, became interested in the mythical character known as the master-thief. He then decided to work on a drama about this character and his struggle against the established order. With this in mind, the paper has two main objectives. First, to offer a complete account of the so-called master-thief project. Kierkegaard’s notes on the master-thief have remained in a relative obscurity. This paper aims at exposing this little-known work of the Danish thinker to the Spanish-speaking reader. Second, to analyze the philosophical question raised in the master thief project, that is, the issue about the relationship of the rebel and marginalized individual with the established order. (shrink)

Resumen Entre 1834 y 1835, Kierkegaard, quien todavía era un estudiante de veintiún años en la Universidad de Copenhague, se interesó en la figura mítica y folclórica conocida como el “ladrón maestro”. Decidió entonces trabajar en un drama que girara alrededor de este personaje y su lucha en contra del orden establecido. Con eso en mente, este artículo tiene dos objetivos. El primero consiste en hacer una exposición general del denominado proyecto del ladrón maestro. Las notas de Kierkegaard sobre el (...) ladrón maestro han permanecido en una relativa oscuridad, de manera que este artículo busca presentarle al lector hispanohablante este trabajo poco conocido del pensador danés. El segundo objetivo es analizar la cuestión filosófica planteada en el proyecto del ladrón maestro, es decir, la cuestión sobre la relación del individuo rebelde y marginado con el orden establecido.In the years 1834 and1835, Kierkegaard, still a 21-year-old student at the University of Copenhagen, became interested in the mythical character known as the master-thief. He then decided to work on a drama about this character and his struggle against the established order. With this in mind, the paper has two main objectives. First, to offer a complete account of the so-called master-thief project. Kierkegaard’s notes on the master-thief have remained in a relative obscurity. This paper aims at exposing this little-known work of the Danish thinker to the Spanish-speaking reader. Second, to analyze the philosophical question raised in the master thief project, that is, the issue about the relationship of the rebel and marginalized individual with the established order. (shrink)

This article offers a detailed and compact account of what might be called Kierkegaard’s Faust project, that is, the collection of notes, bibliographies and reflections on the mythical German necromancer that the young Kierkegaard registered in his various journals and notebooks from the years 1835 – 1837. As is well known, the young writer presumably intended to pen a book or essay about the universal idea represented by Faust. Additionally, I discuss Kierkegaard’s project within the context of the 1830s, the (...) reception of the Faustian myth among his Danish contemporaries such as J.L. Heiberg and H.L. Martensen, and the enthusiasm for Goethe that seized Copenhagen during those years. (shrink)

The authors of _The Modern Experience of the Religious_ explore the different ways in which religious experience is lived within the context of modernity, and how religious life responds to the challenges presented by our age.

Resumen En el siguiente artículo se ofrece un análisis del denominado “diario de Gilleleje” del filósofo danés Soren Kierkegaard. Se intenta argumentar que en este escrito temprano de 1835 y de un carácter eminentemente literario es posible encontrar las reflexiones filosóficas incipientes de un joven Kierkegaard acerca de la cuestión existencial del descubrimiento del propio Yo y la construcción de la personalidad, uno de los temas fundamentales en la obra del escritor danés. El desarrollo del texto culmina con la exposición (...) de uno de los conceptos claves del pensamiento kierkegaardiano: la verdad subjetiva.In the following article I offer an analysis of the so-called “journal of Gilleleje” by Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. I would like to argue that in this early writing of 1836, a piece with a distinct literary tone, it ispossible to observe young Kierkegaard’sfirstphilosophi- cal insights on the existential question about the discovery of the self and the development of personhood, one of the key topics in the Dane's writings. The journal concludes with the exposition of a central concept in Kierkegaard’s thought: subjective truth. (shrink)

In this paper we wish to analyze how Kierkegaard understood the art of writing novels, that is, as a way to express and develop the life-view of the author. We would like to argue that this notion, presented for the first time in From the Papers of One Still Living, was put into practice in the short novel Repetition, in which Kierkegaard used the biblical story of Job to explain the development of selfhood through the existential category of repetition. According (...) to Kierkegaard, true repetition—which is the central category of the life-view he is trying to convey—helps the individual “recollect” the past correctly so he or she can reconcile with the present and grow into the future. (shrink)

The discourse around self-driving cars has been dominated by an emphasis on their potential to reduce the number of accidents. At the same time, proponents acknowledge that self-driving cars would inevitably be involved in fatal accidents where moral algorithms would decide the fate of those involved. This is a necessary trade-off, proponents suggest, in order to reap the benefits of this new technology. In this article, I engage this argument, demonstrating how an undue optimism and enthusiasm about this technology is (...) obscuring our ability to see what is at stake and explaining how moving beyond the dominant utilitarian framings around this technology opens up a space for both ethical inquiry and innovative design. I suggest that a genuine caring concern for the many lives lost in car accidents now and in the future—a concern that transcends false binary trade-offs and that recognizes the systemic biases and power structures that make certain groups more vulnerable than others—could serve as a starting point to rethink mobility, as it connects to the design of our cities, the well-being of our communities, and the future of our planet. (shrink)

As if 2020 were not a peculiar enough year, its fifth month has seen the relatively quiet publication of a preprint describing the most powerful Natural Language Processing (NLP) system to date, GPT-3 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer-3), by Silicon Valley research firm OpenAI. Though the software implementation of GPT-3 is still in its initial Beta release phase, and its full capabilities are still unknown as of the time of this writing, it has been shown that this Artificial Intelligence can comprehend prompts (...) in natural language, on virtually any topic, and generate relevant, original text content that is indistinguishable from human writing. Moreover, access to these capabilities, in a limited yet worrisome enough extent, is available to the general public as of the time of this writing. This paper presents select examples of original content generated by the author using GPT-3. These examples illustrate some of the capabilities of GPT-3 in comprehending prompts in natural language and generating convincing content in response. We use these examples to raise specific, fundamental questions pertaining to the intellectual property of this content and the potential use of GPT-3 to facilitate plagiarism. Our goal is to instigate not just a sense of urgency, but of a present tardiness on the part of the academic community in addressing these questions. (shrink)

As if 2020 was not a peculiar enough year, its fifth month saw the relatively quiet publication of a preprint describing the most powerful natural language processing (NLP) system to date—GPT-3 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer-3)—created by the Silicon Valley research firm OpenAI. Though the software implementation of GPT-3 is still in its initial beta release phase, and its full capabilities are still unknown as of the time of this writing, it has been shown that this artificial intelligence can comprehend prompts in (...) natural language, on virtually any topic, and generate relevant original text content that is indistinguishable from human writing. Moreover, access to these capabilities, in a limited yet worrisome enough extent, is available to the general public. This paper presents examples of original content generated by the author using GPT-3. These examples illustrate some of the capabilities of GPT-3 in comprehending prompts in natural language and generating convincing content in response. I use these examples to raise specific fundamental questions pertaining to the intellectual property of this content and the potential use of GPT-3 to facilitate plagiarism. The goal is to instigate a sense of urgency, as well as a sense of present tardiness on the part of the academic community in addressing these questions. (shrink)

Science has always been tightly associated with environmental ethics in a way traditional ethics has not. However, despite this proximity, science has had a merely informational role, where it must inform ethics but not intervene in ethical judgment. Science is seen as an amoral enterprise, requiring an ethics rather than recommending one. In this paper I try to go against this common view. First, I give a critique of the naturalistic fallacy following the lines of Frankena. Then I go on (...) to describe the two possible roles science can have in ethical though, and in environmental ethics in particular. As it turns out, science does not only inform ethics, but can actually have moral import and intervene in moral judgment. Finally, from an ecocentric point of view, I try to illustrate this last point by construing the ecological notion of resilience as a moral boundary—a scientifically determined boundary between right and wrong. (shrink)

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A bold work from the author of The Black Swan that challenges many of our long-held beliefs about risk and reward, politics and religion, finance and personal responsibility In his most provocative and practical book yet, one of the foremost thinkers of our time redefines what it means to understand the world, succeed in a profession, contribute to a fair and just society, detect nonsense, and influence others. Citing examples ranging from Hammurabi to Seneca, (...) Antaeus the Giant to Donald Trump, Nassim Nicholas Taleb shows how the willingness to accept one’s own risks is an essential attribute of heroes, saints, and flourishing people in all walks of life. As always both accessible and iconoclastic, Taleb challenges long-held beliefs about the values of those who spearhead military interventions, make financial investments, and propagate religious faiths. Among his insights: • For social justice, focus on symmetry and risk sharing. You cannot make profits and transfer the risks to others, as bankers and large corporations do. You cannot get rich without owning your own risk and paying for your own losses. Forcing skin in the game corrects this asymmetry better than thousands of laws and regulations. • Ethical rules aren’t universal. You’re part of a group larger than you, but it’s still smaller than humanity in general. • Minorities, not majorities, run the world. The world is not run by consensus but by stubborn minorities imposing their tastes and ethics on others. • You can be an intellectual yet still be an idiot. “Educated philistines” have been wrong on everything from Stalinism to Iraq to low-carb diets. • Beware of complicated solutions (that someone was paid to find). A simple barbell can build muscle better than expensive new machines. • True religion is commitment, not just faith. How much you believe in something is manifested only by what you’re willing to risk for it. The phrase “skin in the game” is one we have often heard but rarely stopped to truly dissect. It is the backbone of risk management, but it’s also an astonishingly rich worldview that, as Taleb shows in this book, applies to all aspects of our lives. As Taleb says, “The symmetry of skin in the game is a simple rule that’s necessary for fairness and justice, and the ultimate BS-buster,” and “Never trust anyone who doesn’t have skin in the game. Without it, fools and crooks will benefit, and their mistakes will never come back to haunt them.”. (shrink)

Resumen: En su libro Mujeres y discursos gerenciales. Hacia la autogestión feminista, María Medina-Vicent aborda desde una perspectiva crítica feminista los discursos gerenciales dirigidos a las mujeres, desvelando el androcentrismo y la presencia —y perpetuación— de tradicionales roles y estereotipos de género en los modelos de gestión. Mi propuesta pretende incidir en dos aspectos del análisis realizado por Medina-Vicent, por un lado, remarcar los peligros de la despolitización de los discursos gerenciales dirigidos a mujeres —sobre todo en tanto que la (...) literatura gerencial acaba por informarnos a todas—. Por otro, profundizar en la crítica que la autora realiza de la cooptación del feminismo por parte de estos discursos.: In her book Mujeres y discursos gerenciales. Hacia la autogestión feminista, Medina-Vicent approaches management discourses aimed at women from a critical feminist perspective, revealing the androcentrism and the presence and perpetuation of traditional gender roles and stereotypes in management models. My proposal aims to highlight two aspects of Medina-Vicent’s analysis: on the one hand, to highlight the dangers of depoliticizing management discourses aimed at women - especially insofar as management literature ends up informing us all. On the other hand, the author’s critique of the co-optation of feminism by these discourses will be explored in greater depth. Palabras clave: discursos gerenciales, teoría feminista, antifeminismo, despolitización. Keywords: managerial discourses, feminist theory, antifeminism, depoliticization. (shrink)

We examine a contribution L. Susan Stebbing made to the understanding of critical thinking and its relation to formal logic. Stebbing took expertise in formal logic to authorise logical intervention in public debate, specifically in assessing of the validity of everyday reasoning. She held, however, that formal logic is purely the study of logical form. Given the problems of ascertaining logical form in any particular instance, and that logical form does not always track informal validity, it is difficult to see (...) how she could justify her belief in logical interventionism. Her answer to this problem is the contribution we explore here. It involves the view that although the logician’s expertise is not sufficient to assess arguments made in everyday contexts on its own, it nevertheless plays a unique role in giving systematicity and direction to the critique of such arguments, in particular, in public debate. (shrink)

Several authors assume that evaluative conditioning (EC) relies on high-level propositional thinking. In contrast, the dual-process perspective proposes two processing pathways, one associative and the other propositional, contributing to EC. Dual-process theorists argue that attitudinal ambiguity resulting from these two pathways’ conflicting evaluations demonstrate the involvement of both automatic and controlled processes in EC. Previously, we suggested that amplitude variations of error-related negativity and error-positivity, two well-researched event-related potentials of performance monitoring, allow for the detection of attitudinal ambiguity at the (...) neural level. The present study utilises self-reported evaluation, categorisation performance, and neural correlates of performance monitoring to explore associative-propositional ambiguity during social attitude formation. Our results show that compared to associative-propositional harmony, attitudinal ambiguity correlates with more neutral subjective evaluations, longer response times, increased error commission, and diminished error-related negativity amplitudes. While our findings align with dual-process models, we aim to offer a propositional interpretation. We discuss dual-process theories in the context of evolutionary psychology, suggesting that associative processes may only represent a small piece of the EC puzzle. (shrink)

We propose a new interpretation of the equation E=mc² in special relativity by generalizing ideas of ontological emergence to fundamental physics. This allows us to propose that mass, as a property, can be considered to emerge from energy, using a well-known definition of weak ontological emergence. Einstein’s famous equation gains in this way a clearer philosophical interpretation, one that avoids the problems of previous attempts, and is fully consistent with the kinematic properties of special relativity, while yielding fresh insights concerning (...) the nature of mass. (shrink)

Una profesora de secundaria narra en tres momentos distintos los sucesos que han marcado su devenir como mujer, madre y enseñante durante la pandemia por COVID-19. En un recorrido que transcurre entre la sorpresa, la incertidumbre y el desencanto, emerge la reflexión de que la escuela ya no es ni será la misma, no solo por la diferencia entre la educación presencial y a distancia, sino porque las vidas de todos y todas se han transformado, porque muchos escolares han dejado (...) la escuela, más de cinco millones de niños, niñas y jóvenes. Afirma con contundencia ¡Este bicho tiene aporofobia! en alusión a la desigualdad social y la afectación a las personas en situación de pobreza. Reflexiona en torno a las distintas respuestas del profesorado y del sistema educativo, haciendo una fuerte crítica a la viabilidad y resultados del modelo “aprende en casa”. De ninguna manera es ajena a los efectos de la pandemia en los planos económico, laboral y educativo, pero se muestra renuente a dar credibilidad y adoptar soluciones que ubican la problemática solo en el plano de la voluntad y esfuerzo personal, sin reconocer que se trata de una crisis sistémica, que abarca a las instituciones sociales en conjunto. La expresión de emociones, vivencias y aprendizajes no esperados ante la ruptura de lo cotidiano, así como la experiencia del confinamiento por más de año y medio, permiten avizorar una nueva subjetividad en los actores de la educación, que deberá ser tomada en cuenta en el eventual regreso a los planteles escolares. (shrink)

While some form of loss of control is often assumed to be a common feature of the diverse manifestations of addiction, it is far from clear how loss of control should be understood. In this paper, I put forward a concept of decrease in control in addiction that aims to fill this gap and thus provide a general framework for thinking about addictive behavior. The development of this account involves two main steps. First, I present a view of degrees of (...) control as the degree to which an agent would be responsive to potential or counterfactual sufficient reasons to do otherwise. Second, I sketch an account of the relevant control-undermining factors in addiction that is consonant with my proposed view of degrees of control. Being a high-level functional property, reasons-responsiveness is particularly well suited to frame an account of control-undermining factors that is doubly pluralistic: it encompasses the contribution of factors both internal and external to the agent, and it is consistent with various proposals as to the precise nature of the anomaly taking place in the psychology of addiction. (shrink)

En el último tercio del siglo XIX y comienzos del XX, la prensa se constituyó en el medio más eficaz de difusión y conocimiento de la moda. Las revistas dirigidas a la mujer se encargaron de divulgar la moda con el fin de orientar su participación en el consumo de la misma. Un buen ejemplo de ello nos lo ofrece la revista La mujer donde coexisten discursos paralelos y contradictorios sobre los efectos que la moda ocasiona en la mujer y (...) en la sociedad. La prensa destacó la importancia que la moda ejercía en la belleza de la mujer y al mismo tiempo se encargó de tranquilizar al patriarcado justificando que la belleza de la mujer debía ser exclusivamente para agradar al marido. Los recursos publicitarios; grabados, anuncios, figurines, láminas, etc., que utiliza la prensa de esta época, sirven para la construcción de un nuevo modelo de feminidad más acorde con determinados aspectos de la modernización. La publicidad sirve como aliciente para que la mujer burguesa adquiera mayor protagonismo en la concepción de lo moderno y dentro del contexto urbano que es donde se desarrolla el consumo de la moda. (shrink)

Abstract:Representations of the space of the village, the wilderness, and the overlapping edge of the forest between them often play a critical role in intercultural collisions between the “developing” world's spaces and pressures from the ‘developed’ world's activities within them. These collisions include land grabs and resource extraction, conversion of forest or wilderness to mechanized agriculture, uneven legal disputes over what constitutes ownership and use, and conservation efforts to reduce climate change or restore genetic biodiversity in forests. This study illuminates (...) how the physical and perceptual spaces of village, wilderness, and forest change, resist change, and are forced to change in three key domains: health (traditional medicine), food security (hunting, farming, and resource extraction in general), and use-ownership (as indigenous knowledge, occupancy, and access to land-use generally). Findings from the study disclose a need to include time (as the pace of change) whenever changed perceptions of space are proposed or occur. Recommendations include applying the criterion to strive always for the least disruptive (short-term) procedures for addressing a problem such that those outcomes achieve the most sustainable impacts over the long-term. (shrink)

Objective: To assess the knowledge of four groups of individuals regarding who is legally authorised to consent to health care or research involving older patients.Design: A provincewide postal survey.Setting: Province of Quebec, Canada.Participants: Three hundred older adults, 434 informal caregivers of cognitively impaired individuals, 98 researchers in aging and 136 members of research ethics boards .Measurements: Knowledge was assessed through a pretested postal questionnaire comprising five vignettes that describe hypothetical situations involving an older adult who requires medical care or is (...) solicited for research. The respondent had to identify the person who is legally authorised to provide consent.Results: Nearly 80% of all respondents provided the correct answer when the hypothetical scenario depicted a person who was competent to consent or incompetent but legally represented. Knowledge was worse for the scenario describing a research situation that involved an incompetent adult without a legal guardian.Conclusion: The observed lack of knowledge raises doubts about the ability of current legislation to truly protect the rights of older adults with diminished decision making capacity. It points to the need for educational programmes aimed at increasing public awareness of the legislation put in place for those requiring special protection. (shrink)

Dans un roman publié en 1983, Le Stade de Wimbledon, Daniele Del Giudice dresse le portrait d’un auteur qui n’a jamais publié. On pourrait penser que seule la fiction peut donner corps à une telle idée. Il n’en est rien, comme en témoigne, 30 ans plus tard, la parution en 2013 d’un livre du philosophe italien Marco Menin, spécialiste de Rousseau : Il libro mai scritto. La Morale sensitiva di Rousseau. Publié en italien, ce livre est traduit en français par (...) l’auteur lui-même et paraît aux édit... (shrink)

Dans un roman publié en 1983, Le Stade de Wimbledon, Daniele Del Giudice dresse le portrait d’un auteur qui n’a jamais publié. On pourrait penser que seule la fiction peut donner corps à une telle idée. Il n’en est rien, comme en témoigne, 30 ans plus tard, la parution en 2013 d’un livre du philosophe italien Marco Menin, spécialiste de Rousseau : Il libro mai scritto. La Morale sensitiva di Rousseau. Publié en italien, ce livre est traduit en français par (...) l’auteur lui-même et paraît aux édit... (shrink)

La puissance de la pensée de Rousseau ne se mesure pas seulement à la grandeur de ses livres, mais également à la fécondité des interprétations que ces derniers suscitent. Une pensée profondément philosophique ne fait pas qu’instituer un dialogue privé et privilégié entre un auteur et son lecteur, mais elle permet aussi d’ouvrir un espace discursif polyphonique qu’instaure toute une communauté de lecteurs et d’exégètes eux-mêmes en dialogue les uns avec les autres. Le livre du philosophe italien Francesco Boccolari, _Rousseau_ (...) _la voix passionnée, Force expressive et affections sociales dans_ _l’_Essai sur l’origine des langues traduit, de manière exemplaire, ce double héritage et constitue, de ce point de vue, un modèle du genre. À l’écoute des textes de Rousseau, Boccolari inscrit aussi sa réflexion dans la filiation de grands spécialistes du philosophe genevois, notamment Gabrielle Radica, dont il prolonge la réflexion (p. 123), Céline Spector (qui a co-dirigé son travail de doctorat a... (shrink)

La puissance de la pensée de Rousseau ne se mesure pas seulement à la grandeur de ses livres, mais également à la fécondité des interprétations que ces derniers suscitent. Une pensée profondément philosophique ne fait pas qu’instituer un dialogue privé et privilégié entre un auteur et son lecteur, mais elle permet aussi d’ouvrir un espace discursif polyphonique qu’instaure toute une communauté de lecteurs et d’exégètes eux-mêmes en dialogue les uns avec les autres. Le livre du philosophe ita...

La puissance de la pensée de Rousseau ne se mesure pas seulement à la grandeur de ses livres, mais également à la fécondité des interprétations que ces derniers suscitent. Une pensée profondément philosophique ne fait pas qu’instituer un dialogue privé et privilégié entre un auteur et son lecteur, mais elle permet aussi d’ouvrir un espace discursif polyphonique qu’instaure toute une communauté de lecteurs et d’exégètes eux-mêmes en dialogue les uns avec les autres. Le livre du philosophe ita...

Ex ante predicted outcomes should be interpreted as counterfactuals (potential histories), with errors as the spread between outcomes. But error rates have error rates. We reapply measurements of uncertainty about the estimation errors of the estimation errors of an estimation treated as branching counterfactuals. Such recursions of epistemic uncertainty have markedly different distributial properties from conventional sampling error, and lead to fatter tails in the projections than in past realizations. Counterfactuals of error rates always lead to fat tails, regardless of (...) the probability distribution used. A mere .01% branching error rate about the STD (itself an error rate), and .01% branching error rate about that error rate, etc. (recursing all the way) results in explosive (and infinite) moments higher than 1. Missing any degree of regress leads to the underestimation of small probabilities and concave payoffs (a standard example of which is Fukushima). The paper states the conditions under which higher order rates of uncertainty (expressed in spreads of counterfactuals) alters the shapes the of final distribution and shows which a priori beliefs about conterfactuals are needed to accept the reliability of conventional probabilistic methods (thin tails or mildly fat tails). (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Classes of Uncertainty Our Argument Predicting Other People's Action Predicting One's Own Actions Predicting Group Action The Danger of Prediction References.

In previous works, an ontology of properties for quantum mechanics has been proposed, according to which quantum systems are bundles of properties with no principle of individuality. The aim of the present article is to show that, since quasi-set theory is particularly suited for dealing with aggregates of items that do not belong to the traditional category of individual, it supplies an adequate meta-language to speak of the proposed ontology of properties and its structure.

A restrictive view of self-control identifies exercises of self-control with synchronic intrapsychic processes, and pictures diachronic and externally-scaffolded strategies not as proper instances of self-control, but as clever ways of avoiding the need to exercise that ability. In turn, defenders of an inclusive view of self-control typically argue that we should construe self-control as more than effortful inhibition, and that, on grounds of functional equivalence, all these diverse strategies might be properly described as instances of self-control. In this paper, I (...) take a fresh look at this debate by focusing on cases of addiction. I argue that addicted agents face a paradigmatic sort of self-control challenge, which makes addiction an important test case for theories of self-control. And I discuss evidence that highlights both the unreliability of synchronic intrapsychic strategies and the crucial role that is played by diachronic and externally-scaffolded strategies in successful attempts at achieving abstinence by addicted individuals. Abstaining addicts are a paradigmatic case of agents who successfully exercise self-control, and they mostly do so by relying on diachronic and externally-scaffolded strategies. This, I argue, lends further support to an inclusive view of self-control. (shrink)

Human cerebral organoids are three-dimensional biological cultures grown in the laboratory to mimic as closely as possible the cellular composition, structure, and function of the corresponding organ, the brain. For now, cerebral organoids lack blood vessels and other characteristics of the human brain, but are also capable of having coordinated electrical activity. They have been usefully employed for the study of several diseases and the development of the nervous system in unprecedented ways. Research on human cerebral organoids is proceeding at (...) a very fast pace and their complexity is bound to improve. This raises the question of whether cerebral organoids will also be able to develop the unique feature of the human brain, consciousness. If this is the case, some ethical issues would arise. In this article, we discuss the necessary neural correlates and constraints for the emergence of consciousness according to some of the most debated neuroscientific theories. Based on this, we consider what the moral status of a potentially conscious brain organoid might be, in light of ethical and ontological arguments. We conclude by proposing a precautionary principle and some leads for further investigation. In particular, we consider the outcomes of some very recent experiments as entities of a potential new kind. (shrink)

Nassim Noroozi proposes a juxtaposition of pedagogy with and a characterization of it as justice. The term pedagogical here is not limited to “the educational,” nor is pedagogy limited to the methods of teaching. At the same time, the term justice will not be framed in terms of liberal conceptual grounds. Noroozi defines pedagogy as an arrangement of meaning so that it becomes impossible not to see injustice. Noroozi argues that “pedagogy-as-justice” concerns itself with exposing injustice in transformative ways, (...) and as such it is an ethical undertaking. She explores how philosophizing for struggle is inherently pedagogical and, because of our perception of “the pedagogical,” how it is inherently transformative. Furthermore, she argues that seeing pedagogy as justice will consequentially deem “the arrangements of meanings to engage others in the issues pertaining to injustice” as equally important to writing or thinking about those struggles. To illustrate the above points, Noroozi analyzes a case of public philosophical engagement against war. By expanding on this case, she proposes some central attributes of pedagogy-as-justice, namely its preoccupation with grounding abstract and anonymous concepts in their contested historical realities; its commitment to wrestling with an “opacity of concepts” or with “dishonest reasonings” that end up promoting suffering and injustice; and its recognition of the precarities inherent in undertaking pedagogy-as-justice. Noroozi traces a genealogy of the concept of pedagogy-as-justice going back to Socratic public philosophical engagements. (shrink)

We discuss the mathematical structures that underlie quantum probabilities. More specifically, we explore possible connections between logic, geometry and probability theory. We propose an interpretation that generalizes the method developed by R. T. Cox to the quantum logical approach to physical theories. We stress the relevance of developing a geometrical interpretation of quantum mechanics.