This paper aims to present some characteristics and advantages of combined and complementary use of both qualitative and qualitative approaches in social research. It is based on learnings and difficulties ecountered in the development of a research project on youth and insecurity, titled "Certaint..

The purpose of this paper is to introduce everyday aesthetics in education. First, it presents everyday aesthetics as a subdiscipline within philosophical aesthetics, that revisits sensory perception as the backdrop of all experience, claims ordinary life is a proper venue for aesthetic inquiry, and problematizes the impact aesthetic preferences have on habitual decisions. Second, the paper argues that among the diverse matters students learn in school, they learn—explicitly or implicitly—what and how to perceive, as well as the pedagogical purposes of (...) daily perception. School models the relationships that students will develop between what they perceive, what they think about it, and how they act accordingly. Next, the paper elaborates on the notions of “school aesthetic matrixes” and “space and place in school”. School aesthetic matrixes refer to perceptual patterns that allow characterizing relationships between daily perception and the pedagogical project of a school. They manifest through expressions such as prison school, home school, mall school, etc. Space and place in school allude to concomitant experiences, of corporeal basis, that allow describing how we inhabit the world. What distinguishes them is the approach each one gives to the senses and the body. The paper concludes by calling attention to the comprehension and role of perception in education, urging to mind the aesthetic-pedagogical character that students develop throughout 12 years of schooling. Ultimately, the key relationships we develop with ourselves, others, and the world, entail a basic perceptual dimension that can be educated to become more purposefully and integrally present in life. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.2 (2001) 311-312 [Access article in PDF] Hill, Claire Ortiz and Guillermo E. Rosado Haddock. Husserl or Frege? Meaning, Objectivity, and Mathematics. Chicago: Open Court, 2000. Pp. xiv + 315. Cloth, $39.95. Analytic philosophy is rooted in Frege; phenomenology, in Husserl: or so goes the old, old story. Most philosophers now recognize that Husserl has a role to play in analysis' roots, (...) and Frege in phenomenology's. Hill and Haddock try to show that Husserl's role in analysis' roots is larger than is now recognized, and to show that Husserl has much of relevance to say about matters currently central in analysis.Hill and Haddock tag-team the topic. Chapters are written now by one, now by the other. A common theme is: "Look, Husserl's bested Frege here!" One chapter is entitled "To be a Fregean or To be a Husserlian?" and the book pushes vigorously in the Husserlian direction. There are several chapters devoted to sense and reference, Fregean and Husserlian. There are chapters on logical abstraction and on the philosophy (primarily Husserlian) of mathematics. Other figures, such as Cantor and Hilbert, also put in appearances.The book's primary merit is in revealing how much of interest Husserl has to say about matters currently central in analysis—particularly in the philosophy of logic/language and in the philosophy of mathematics. There are also interesting extensions of Husserl's views, carefully kept Husserlian, that are worthy of attention: extensions of his views on the philosophy of mathematics and his Platonism. The book's primary demerit is in the often flat-footed readings of Frege that are offered. (In this respect, the book returns the disfavor of the flat-footed readings of Husserl offered by more analytically-minded philosophers.) Nowhere are the names of Warren Goldfarb, Thomas Ricketts or Cora Diamond mentioned—the philosophers who have provided a reading of Frege that makes him a much more interesting foil for Husserl. On the reading I have in mind, Frege is not a Platonist, and he does not have a truth-conditional semantics. Further, on this reading, Frege's ontological categories supervene on logical ones, and his ontology does not ground or explain objectivity. Instead of offering a sematic theory, on this reading Frege is denying that there is any coign of vantage for the offering of such. But this Frege, or this reading of Frege, makes no appearance in the book. Another noteworthy omission—related, I think, to the omission of the alternative reading of Frege—is any extended discussion of a crucial difference in the ways that Frege and Husserl thought of language: Frege thought of language as the universal medium, Husserl of language as a calculus. (Jaakko Hintikka both popularized this distinction and suggested that Husserl had the [End Page 311] calculus conception.) Conceived as the universal language, language is inescapable. Husserl's conception leads him to think that he can escape language, step behind it and survey it. If this crucial difference is not kept in mind, it is difficult, I think, to see the various disagreements between Frege and Husserl at their proper depth.For example, neglecting this difference makes it hard to see the parallel difference between Frege and Husserl over the appropriate conception of logic. Since Frege thinks of logic as universal (first and foremost), he would reject Husserl project of providing a geneology for logic as deeply confused. For Frege, there can be no grounding of logic, no justifying of logic from behind. Logical investigation is, for Frege, investigating the mind. There is no other type of investigation—no matter how transcendentally phenomenological—that can subordinate logical investigation to it, or can usurp the title of the investigation of the mind. There is no experience—no matter how pre-predicative (what would Frege make of 'pre-predicative'?)—from which logic springs. Wittgenstein's Tractarian comment is thoroughly Fregean: "Logic precedes every experience—that something is so." (5.552)Still and all, I recommend this book to anyone interested in the issues it discusses, since... (shrink)

Because rate of force development is an emerging outcome measure for the assessment of neuromuscular function in unfatigued conditions, and it represents a valid alternative/complement to the classical evaluation of pure maximal strength, this scoping review aimed to map the available evidence regarding RFD as an indicator of neuromuscular fatigue. Thus, following a general overview of the main studies published on this topic, we arbitrarily compared the amount of neuromuscular fatigue between the “gold standard” measure and peak, early and late (...) RFD. Seventy full-text articles were included in the review. The most-common fatiguing exercises were resistance exercises, endurance exercises/locomotor activities, isokinetic contractions, and simulated/real sport situations. The most widely tested tasks were knee extension and plantar flexion. The reason for evaluating RFD was lacking in 36% of the studies. On average, the amount of fatigue for MVF was comparable to late RFD but lower compared to both peak RFD and early RFD. Even if the rationale for evaluating RFD in the fatigued state was often lacking and the specificity between test task and fatiguing exercise characteristics was not always respected in the included studies, RFD seems to be a valid indicator of neuromuscular fatigue. Based on our arbitrary analyses, peak RFD and early phase RFD appear even to be more sensitive to quantify neuromuscular fatigue than MVF and late phase RFD. (shrink)

Generic statements (‘Tigers have stripes’) are pervasive and early-emerging modes of generalization with a distinctive linguistic profile. Previous experimental work found that generics display a unique asymmetry between their acceptance conditions and the implications that are typically drawn from them. This paper presents evidence against the hypothesis that only generics display an asymmetry. Correcting for limitations of previous designs, we found a generalized asymmetry effect across generics, various kinds of explicitly quantified statements (‘most’, ‘some’, ‘typically’, ‘usually’), and variations in types (...) of predicated properties (striking vs. neutral). We discuss implications of these results for our understanding of the source of asymmetry effects and whether and in which ways these effects might introduce biased beliefs into social networks. (shrink)

This paper proposes the use of an argumentation framework with recursive attacks to address a trust model in a collaborative open multi-agent system. Our approach is focused on scenarios where agents share information about the credibility (informational trust) they have assigned to their peers. We will represent informants’ credibility through credibility objects which will include not only trust information but also the informant source. This leads to a recursive setting where the reliability of certain credibility information depends on the credibility (...) of other pieces of information that should be subject to the same analysis. Credibility objects are maintained in a credibility base which can have information in conflict. In this scenario, we will formally show that our proposal will produce a partially ordered credibility relation; such relation contains the information that can be justified by an argumentation process. (shrink)

En los últimos años han aparecido publicaciones que intentan generar un marco para la aplicación de conocimientos neurocognitivos para la resolución de problemáticas sociales. Bajo el mote de “ciencias de comportamiento”, este campo de estudios que se presenta como profundamente interdisciplinario se propone aportar herramientas para resolver diversas problemáticas sociales, mediante la dilucidación de los mecanismos subyacentes a la conducta humana y su posterior operacionalización en forma de políticas públicas. Enfocamos nuestra mirada en ciertos aspectos epistemológicos e ideológicos que subyacen (...) a estas iniciativas, en particular su conceptualización de la crisis climática como un problema a resolver mediante los avances de las ciencias cognitivas. Observamos, ejemplificamos y problematizamos una serie de premisas: la conducta del individuo como expresión terminal de un proceso “interno” en el cual el ambiente y por extensión lo “social” están subordinados en cuanto a su jerarquía explicativa; la simplificación de las problemáticas a resolver en términos de sesgos y limitaciones cognitivas, de modo tal que los objetivos de la intervención sean los comportamientos y decisiones de actores individuales; la apelación a la biología como sustento explicativo de los constructos psicológicos utilizados a través de narrativas adaptacionistas sobre el desarrollo de funcionalidades cognitivas innatas. Sostenemos que la generación y aplicación de los conocimientos en este tipo de iniciativas se inscribe en una línea ideológica marcada, según la cual las causas principales de la crisis climática no se hallan en las dinámicas y contradicciones del sistema socioeconómico vigente, sino en las de los sistemas cognitivos individuales. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted medical care in many ways; previously, a patient would enter a hospital and had an approximate idea of what would happen upon his admission, the physician informed them about it, but in the last two years this scenario has changed. Therefore, our aim was to identify if bioethical principles are present in the physician–patient relationship and the effect of these in the health care provided, through an observational and descriptive study where patients answered the validated (...) ReMePaB questionnaire that measures the presence of bioethical principles in the physician–patient relationship, on the seventh day of their hospital stay and 24 h after discharge, during the period from 1 August to 5 November 2020. In autonomy, an improvement in the score was observed in the second application compared to the first measurement; in the principle of non-vulnerability, the same scenario was observed for the first and second measurements, respectively. In the principles of beneficence, dignity, and justice, no statistically significant differences were observed. Considering the presence or absence of bioethical aspects in health care in this pandemic creates an area of opportunity to know the feelings of the patient during the care received and to maintain what is done well and improve those aspects that can be improved. (shrink)

Este artículo tiene como objetivo esclarecer la relación entre juicio y deseo en el pensamiento de Gilles Deleuze y destacar la importancia de Spinoza para la resolución de este problema. La concepción negativa del deseo es la base de la cultura y el pensamiento de Occidente; sin embargo, Spinoza nos propone una concepción afirmativa e inmanente. Estos elementos son fundamentales para esclarecer el sentido teórico y práctico de la propuesta de Gilles Deleuze en su obra, donde una concepción afirmativa del (...) deseo le permite proponer la existencia de dos imágenes del pensamiento: una imagen moral, la cual crítica; y, una imagen ética, que restituye, a partir de la teoría de los afectos y la naturaleza de Spinoza, el valor afirmativo del cuerpo y los afectos. Deleuze y Spinoza, así, nos proponen una imagen del pensamiento que sostiene el valor de lo afirmativo sobre lo negativo, es decir, que relieva la producción de lo diferente y lo múltiple sobre la jerarquía de lo idéntico o lo hegemónico. (shrink)

Over the last decade, several extensions of Dung’s Abstract Argumentation Frameworks (AFs) have been introduced in the literature. Some of these extensions concern the nature of the attack relation, such as the consideration of recursive attacks, whereas others incorporate additional interactions, such as a support relation. Recently, the Attack–Support Argumentation Framework (ASAF) was proposed, which accounts for recursive attacks and supports, attacks to supports and supports to attacks, at any level, where the support relation is interpreted as necessity. Currently, to (...) determine the accepted elements of an ASAF (which may be arguments, attacks, and supports) it is required to translate such an ASAF into a Dung’s AF. In this work, we provide a formal characterization of acceptability semantics directly on the ASAF, without requiring such a translation. We prove that our characterization is sound since it satisfies different results from Dung’s argumentation theory; moreover, we formally show that the approach proposed here for addressing acceptability is equivalent to the preexisting one, in which the ASAF was translated into an AF. Also, we formalize the relationship between the ASAF and other frameworks on which it is inspired: the Argumentation Framework with Recursive Attacks (AFRA) and the Argumentation Framework with Necessities (AFN). (shrink)

En este artículo, mostramos ciertos supuestos no explicitados en la noción de individuo humano en la que se basan los enfoques teóricos de la neuroeconomía y la economía conductual para desarrollar sus programas de investigación e intervención. También abordamos los compromisos epistemológicos, ideológicos y políticos desde los cuales conciben, estudian e intervienen en la conducta humana. En lugar de un individuo producto de un proceso de socialización, lo que se presenta es un cerebro aislado con numerosas funciones cognitivas atribuidas, cuya (...) conducta puede ser alterada debido a “accidentes” en su evolución como órgano rector del comportamiento. Este enfoque permite la construcción de propuestas de políticas públicas basadas en el llamado “paternalismo libertario”. Se destaca un potencial mecanismo de control cuyo objetivo es configurar los distintos espacios de la vida cotidiana de los individuos de manera que sus conductas agregadas se alineen lo más posible con los entes racionales ideales del modelo económico neoclásico. (shrink)

Due to the difficulty in solving combinatorial optimization problems, it is necessary to improve the performance of the algorithms by improving techniques to deal with complex optimizations. This research addresses the metaheuristics of marriage in honey-bees optimization based on the behavior of bees. The current study proposes a technique for solving combinatorial optimization problems within proper computation times. The purpose of this study focuses on the travelling salesperson problem and the application of chaotic methods in important sections of the MBO (...) metaheuristic. Three experiments were conducted to measure the efficiency and quality of the solutions: MBO with chaos to generate initial solutions ; MBO with chaos in the workers ; and MBO with chaos to generate initial solutions and the workers. The application of chaotic functions in MBO was significantly better at solving the travelling salesperson problem. (shrink)

Uno de los problemas omnipresentes en la teoría política es el de qué tipo de relación debe existir entre el régimen democrático en tanto sistema de toma de decisiones colectivas y las vidas de sus ciudadanos, en tanto seres dotados de fines, metas y deseos. Ya sea desde las concepciones que estipulan que las decisiones mayoritarias pueden poner en riesgo ciertos ideales de buena vida o desde aquellas que creen que el tipo de justificación de las decisiones políticas no puede (...) dar cuenta de los procesos hermenéuticos individuales de búsqueda de significado a la propia existencia hasta aquellas concepciones que consideran que las condiciones para la búsqueda de la buena vida no pueden quedar libradas al desigual poder social o las que consideran que el bienestar individual debe quedar restringido a su compatibilidad con una autocomprensión colectiva de una buena sociedad, la cuestión reaparece incluso cuando se pretende hacerla a un lado. Los textos que componen este Dossier ofrecen diferentes aristas de estos problemas, los cuales vienen siendo tratados extensa y prolíficamente en la obra de Graciela Vidiella. En este sentido, el Dossier también representa un homenaje a su trabajo, algo que se ve reflejado no sólo en los temas tratados sino en que ellos se producen como una continuidad formal de largas conversaciones y discusiones informales que Vidiella mantuvo a lo largo de su carrera con sus amigos y amigas, discípulos y discípulas y estudiantes en general. (shrink)

Polo‐like kinase 1 (PLK1) is a serine/threonine kinase that plays multiple and essential roles during the cell division cycle. Its inhibition in cultured cells leads to severe mitotic aberrancies and cell death. Whereas previous reports suggested that Plk1 depletion in mice leads to a non‐mitotic arrest in early embryos, we show here that the bi‐allelic Plk1 depletion in mice certainly results in embryonic lethality due to extensive mitotic aberrations at the morula stage, including multi‐ and mono‐polar spindles, impaired chromosome segregation (...) and cytokinesis failure. In addition, the conditional depletion of Plk1 during mid‐gestation leads also to severe mitotic aberrancies. Our data also confirms that Plk1 is completely dispensable for mitotic entry in vivo. On the other hand, Plk1 haploinsufficient mice are viable, and Plk1‐heterozygous fibroblasts do not harbor any cell cycle alterations. Plk1 is overexpressed in many human tumors, suggesting a therapeutic benefit of inhibiting Plk1, and specific small‐molecule inhibitors for this kinase are now being evaluated in clinical trials. Therefore, the different Plk1 mouse models here presented are a valuable tool to reexamine the relevance of the mitotic kinase Plk1 during mammalian development and animal physiology. (shrink)

A través del presente ejercicio investigativo y hermenéutico se busca proponer la beneficencia como principio articulador entre la Teología Moral de la Persona, la Bioética y las Prácticas Biomédicas, con el fin de salvaguardar al ser humano de forma integral y desde el ámbito interdisciplinar, frente a la manipulación y menoscabo de la persona en su: dignidad, status antropológico, verdad ontológica y trascendente, lo cual nos lleva a proponer alternativas, dadas las nuevas circunstancias por las que atraviesa la humanidad; y (...) es aquí donde adquiere resonancia proponer la Beneficencia como principio articulador entre estas tres ciencias, dado que ella, como principio, está en los tres saberes de forma implícita y explícita y, las cuales, por su misma esencia, tienen puntos de convergencia como son: la determinación de su carácter moral, su estatuto de servicio, la salvaguarda de la riqueza de la vida, el reconocimiento y respeto por la dignidad humana, el reconocimiento de la multidimensionalidad del ser, y el cuidado que requiere toda persona humana en su fragilidad y vulnerabilidad. Además de lo anterior se cuenta con un abordaje teórico sobre la bioética como saber interdisciplinar; los principios de la bioética y la relación de la teología moral de la persona con la bioética. El presente ejercicio investigativo fue llevado a cabo en un lapso de dos años. (shrink)

LAMAS, Marta. Acoso. ¿Denuncia legítima o victimización? México, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2018, 118 pp.

We present a mathematical approach to defeasible reasoning based on arguments. This approach integrates the notion of specificity introduced by Poole and the theory of warrant presented by Pollock. The main contribution of this paper is a precise, well-defined system which exhibits correct behavior when applied to the benchmark examples in the literature. It aims for usability rather than novelty. We prove that an order relation can be introduced among equivalence classes of arguments under the equi-specificity relation. We also prove (...) a theorem that ensures the termination of the process of finding the justified facts. Two more lemmas define a reduced search space for checking specificity. In order to implement the theoretical ideas, the language is restricted to Horn clauses for the evidential context. The language used to represent defeasible rules has been restricted in a similar way. The authors intend this work to unify the various existing approaches to argument-based defeasible reasoning. (shrink)

How are biases encoded in our representations of social categories? Philosophical and empirical discussions of implicit bias overwhelmingly focus on salient or statistical associations between target features and representations of social categories. These are the sorts of associations probed by the Implicit Association Test and various priming tasks. In this paper, we argue that these discussions systematically overlook an alternative way in which biases are encoded, that is, in the dependency networks that are part of our representations of social categories. (...) Dependency networks encode information about how features in a conceptual representation depend on each other. This information determines the degree of centrality of a feature for a conceptual representation. Importantly, centrally encoded biases systematically disassociate from those encoded in salient-statistical associations. Furthermore, the degree of centrality of a feature determines its cross-contextual stability: in general, the more central a feature is for a concept, the more likely it is to survive into a wide array of cognitive tasks involving that concept. Accordingly, implicit biases that are encoded in the central features of concepts are predicted to be more resilient across different tasks and contexts. As a result, the distinction between centrally encoded and salient-statistical biases has important theoretical and practical implications. (shrink)

The goal of this study was to introduce a model explaining how managers' attitudes, subjective norms, attributions, and the individualism-collectivism cultural dimension affect the way managers' deal with employee bribery in organizations. Twenty-six internal and external attributions related to bribery were identified through a series of structured interviews with 65 subject matter experts. These attributions, together with the other variables in the model, were evaluated by 354 Ecuadorian managers. Hierarchical regression analyses indicated that attitudes and external attributions significantly predicted managers' (...) intentions to discipline employees who accepted a bribe. In addition, external attributions mediated the relationship between individualism-collectivism and intent to discipline corrupt employees. Implications for the management of bribery in Latin American organizations are discussed. (shrink)

A surprising feature of the White Rose anti-Nazi resistance pamphlets is their appeal to a foundational classical Chinese text, the Laozi (otherwise known as the Daodejing), to buttress their critique of fascism and authoritarianism. I argue that from the perspective of a 1942 educated readership, the act of quoting the Laozi functioned as a subtle and pointed nod to anti-fascist intellectuals in pre-war Germany, many of whom had interpreted the Laozi as an anti-authoritarian and pacifist text. To a sympathetic reader, (...) the Laozi therefore constituted an apt reference point for critiquing National Socialism. I then introduce a complication for this wartime reading of the Laozi from the perspective of its ambiguous reception in ancient Chinese political thought. I more specifically discuss an ancient line of interpretation of the Laozi that points in the direction of authoritarianism — in stark tension with the White Rose message of passive resistance and popular revolt. (shrink)

La escritura. Entre la crisis logocéntrica de Occidente y la ascesis caligráfica de Oriente. La escritura japonesa como caso. Resumen de Tesis de doctorado en Filosofía de Guillermo Goicochea.

Some people will confront Alzheimer's with a measure of resignation, a determination to struggle against the progressive debilitation and to extract whatever comforts and benefits they can from their remaining existence. They are entitled to pursue that resolute path. For other people, like myself, protracted maintenance during progressive cognitive dysfunction and helplessness is an intolerably degrading prospect. The critical question for those of us seeking to avoid protracted dementia is how best to accomplish that objective.One strategy is to engineer one's (...) own death while still mentally competent to do so (even in the stage of mild dementia). If I were to use a preemptive strategy in the face of a dementia diagnosis, I would probably choose to stop eating and drinking, a process known as voluntarily stopping eating and drinking. An alternative tactic for avoiding prolonged dementia would be to allow oneself to decline into moderate dementia—thus losing capacity to perform self‐deliverance or even to make serious medical decisions—but before getting to that point to provide advance instructions rejecting prospective life‐sustaining medical interventions. These advance instructions would authorize palliative but not curative measures. My current personal instructions define the point of intolerable cognitive decline triggering medical nonintervention as “mental deterioration to a point when I can no longer read and understand written material such as a newspaper or financial records such as a checkbook.” These instructions dictate allowing my demise at a point of moderate dementia when I may not be perceptibly suffering, when I may still be getting some rudimentary satisfaction from my debilitated life, and when I no longer recall the preoccupation with personally intolerable indignity that motivated my instructions. Can I expect that my advance instructions will be implemented in those circumstances? Is it lawful, and is it moral for a surrogate decision‐maker and associated caregivers to allow an uncomprehending, ostensibly content but demented individual to die? My analysis herein contends that it is not only lawful and moral but also legally required to implement clear, considered advance instructions even at a stage of moderate dementia. (shrink)

Examining the scholarly interest of the last two decades in the origins of logical empiricism, and especially the roots of Rudolf Carnap's Der logische Aufbau der Welt, Rosado Haddock challenges the received view, according to which that book should be inserted in the empiricist tradition.

The “happy fish” passage concluding the “Autumn Floods” chapter of the Classical Chinese text known as the Zhuangzi has traditionally been seen to advance a form of relativism which precludes objectivity. My aim in this paper is to question this view with close reference to the passage itself. I further argue that the central concern of the two philosophical personae in the passage – Zhuangzi and Huizi – is not with the epistemic standards of human judgements (the established view since (...) Hansen, “The Relatively Happy Fish”), but with the more basic problem of species-specific perspectives. On my reading, Zhuangzi’s emphatic positionality in the passage – on the dam, accompanied by his friend Huizi – plausibly suggests a circumspect reflection on the limitedness of human knowledge. It is significant that Zhuangzi’s knowledge of fish happiness is avowedly from a certain place, and not absolute. But there is still a sense in which this view is objective: namely, insofar as it adequately accounts for an inherently human perspective on the world. I call this modest form of relativism ‘Species Relativism’, which, crucially, leaves room for objectivity, even though a fully objective (i.e. absolute) view of the world is not accessible to humans. (shrink)

We generalize the notion ofconsequence relationstandard in abstract treatments of logic to accommodate intuitions ofrelevance. The guiding idea follows theuse criterion, according to which in order for some premises to have some conclusion(s) as consequence(s), the premises must each beusedin some way to obtain the conclusion(s). This relevance intuition turns out to require not just a failure of monotonicity, but also a move to considering consequence relations as obtaining betweenmultisets. We motivate and state basic definitions of relevant consequence relations, both (...) in single conclusion (asymmetric) and multiple conclusion (symmetric) settings, as well as derivations and theories, guided by the use intuitions, and prove a number of results indicating that the definitions capture the desired results (at least in many cases). (shrink)

It is widely believed that the ancient Greeks thought that Thales was the first philosopher, and that they therefore maintained that philosophy had a Greek origin. This paper challenges these assumptions, arguing that most ancient Greek thinkers who expressed views about the history and development of philosophy rejected both positions. I argue that not even Aristotle presented Thales as the first philosopher, and that doing so would have undermined his philosophical commitments and interests. Beyond Aristotle, the view that Thales was (...) the first philosopher is attested almost nowhere in antiquity. In the classical, Hellenistic, and post-Hellenistic periods, we witness a marked tendency to locate the beginning of philosophy in a time going back further than Thales. Remarkably, ancient Greek thinkers most often traced the origins of philosophy to earlier non-Greek peoples. Contrary to the received view, then, I argue that (1) vanishingly few Greek writers pronounced Thales the first philosopher; and (2) most Greek thinkers did not even advocate a Greek origin of philosophy. Finally, I show that the view that philosophy originated with Thales (along with its misleading attribution to the Greeks in general) has roots in problematic, and in some cases manifestly racist, eighteenth-century historiography of philosophy. (shrink)

The logicality of language is the hypothesis that the language system has access to a ‘natural’ logic that can identify and filter out as unacceptable expressions that have trivial meanings—that is, that are true/false in all possible worlds or situations in which they are defined. This hypothesis helps explain otherwise puzzling patterns concerning the distribution of various functional terms and phrases. Despite its promise, logicality vastly over-generates unacceptability assignments. Most solutions to this problem rest on specific stipulations about the properties (...) of logical form—roughly, the level of linguistic representation which feeds into the interpretation procedures—and have substantial implications for traditional philosophical disputes about the nature of language. Specifically, contextualism and semantic minimalism, construed as competing hypotheses about the nature and degree of context-sensitivity at the level of logical form, suggest different approaches to the over-generation problem. In this paper, I explore the implications of pairing logicality with various forms of contextualism and semantic minimalism. I argue that to adequately solve the over-generation problem, logicality should be implemented in a constrained contextualist framework. (shrink)

The meaning that expressions take on particular occasions often depends on the context in ways which seem to transcend its direct effect on context-sensitive parameters. ‘Truth-conditional pragmatics’ is the project of trying to model such semantic flexibility within a compositional truth-conditional framework. Most proposals proceed by radically ‘freeing up’ the compositional operations of language. I argue, however, that the resulting theories are too unconstrained, and predict flexibility in cases where it is not observed. These accounts fall into this position because (...) they rarely, if ever, take advantage of the rich information made available by lexical items. I hold, instead, that lexical items encode both extension and non-extension determining information. Under certain conditions, the non-extension determining information of an expression e can enter into the compositional processes that determine the meaning of more complex expressions which contain e. This paper presents and motivates a set of type-driven compositional operations that can access non-extension determining information and introduce bits of it into the meaning of complex expressions. The resulting multidimensional semantics has the tools to deal with key cases of semantic flexibility in appropriately constrained ways, making it a promising framework to pursue the project of truth-conditional pragmatics. (shrink)

Kim Diaz's translation of Guillermo Hurtado's "Retratos de Luis Villoro".

En el presente trabajo examinaremos la relevancia de la categoría de decisión en el surgimiento del pensamiento impolítico contemporáneo en Italia. Con este objetivo, buscaremos elaborar una exégesis del rol de dicha noción en los desarrollos de Massimo Cacciari de finales de la década de 1970. Nuestro punto de partida se encontrará en su lectura nietzscheana sobre el diagnóstico de crisis de las categorías metafísicas y políticas tradicionales. Tal interpretación nos conducirá a estudiar su análisis de la soberanía desde una (...) “concepción criatural” del orden político. En este sentido, sostendremos que la crítica que Cacciari realiza al concepto de decisión no sólo vertebra desde sus inicios al horizonte impolítico, sino que también nos permite comprender los alcances filosóficos de su perspectiva. (shrink)

Este trabajo indaga en las raíces de la perspectiva impolítica de Roberto Esposito en Categorie dell’impolitico (1988). La hipótesis consiste en que la noción de impolítico como “más allá de Schmitt” resulta la estructura conceptual que vertebra la formulación de Esposito. A partir de esta interpretación, analizaré las implicancias filosóficas de la apropiación crítica de la posición schmittiana sobre el problema de la representación. Considero que, a partir de esta hipótesis, se comprenderá no sólo la relevancia de la categoría de (...) “oltre” (“más allá”) en la argumentación de Esposito, sino también el sentido mismo de lo impolítico entendido como ulterioridad. (shrink)

Recent work in formal semantics suggests that the language system includes not only a structure building device, as standardly assumed, but also a natural deductive system which can determine when expressions have trivial truth-conditions (e.g., are logically true/false) and mark them as unacceptable. This hypothesis, called the `logicality of language', accounts for many acceptability patterns, including systematic restrictions on the distribution of quantifiers. To deal with apparent counter-examples consisting of acceptable tautologies and contradictions, the logicality of language is often paired (...) with an additional assumption according to which logical forms are radically underspecified: i.e., the language system can see functional terms but is `blind' to open class terms to the extent that different tokens of the same term are treated as if independent. This conception of logical form has profound implications: it suggests an extreme version of the modularity of language, and can only be paired with non-classical---indeed quite exotic---kinds of deductive systems. The aim of this paper is to show that we can pair the logicality of language with a different and ultimately more traditional account of logical form. This framework accounts for the basic acceptability patterns which motivated the logicality of language, can explain why some tautologies and contradictions are acceptable, and makes better predictions in key cases. As a result, we can pursue versions of the logicality of language in frameworks compatible with the view that the language system is not radically modular vis-a-vis its open class terms and employs a deductive system that is basically classical. (shrink)

This paper is devoted to the problem of existence of saturated models for first-order many-valued logics. We consider a general notion of type as pairs of sets of formulas in one free variable that express properties that an element of a model should, respectively, satisfy and falsify. By means of an elementary chains construction, we prove that each model can be elementarily extended to a $\kappa $-saturated model, i.e. a model where as many types as possible are realized. In order (...) to prove this theorem we obtain, as by-products, some results on tableaux and their consistency and satisfiability and a generalization of the Tarski–Vaught theorem on unions of elementary chains. Finally, we provide a structural characterization of $\kappa $-saturation in terms of the completion of a diagram representing a certain configuration of models and mappings. (shrink)

In this note we study a counterpart in predicate logic of the notion of logical friendliness, introduced into propositional logic in [15]. The result is a new consequence relation for predicate languages with equality using first-order models. While compactness, interpolation and axiomatizability fail dramatically, several other properties are preserved from the propositional case. Divergence is diminished when the language does not contain equality with its standard interpretation.

Lindström’s theorem obviously fails as a characterization of first-order logic without identity ( $\mathcal {L}_{\omega \omega }^{-} $ ). In this note, we provide a fix: we show that $\mathcal {L}_{\omega \omega }^{-} $ is a maximal abstract logic satisfying a weak form of the isomorphism property (suitable for identity-free languages and studied in [11]), the Löwenheim–Skolem property, and compactness. Furthermore, we show that compactness can be replaced by being recursively enumerable for validity under certain conditions. In the proofs, we (...) use a form of strong upwards Löwenheim–Skolem theorem not available in the framework with identity. (shrink)