Ya sea comprendida como sistema de gobierno, como concepto político o, incluso, como forma de vida, durante los últimos años la democracia ha sido objeto de un persistente debate tanto en el ámbito académico como fuera de él. Ya se trate de destacar sus virtudes y ensalzar sus bondades o de examinar sus límites y denunciar sus desviaciones en el contexto del capitalismo desregulado, la democracia ha sido el centro de los más variados análisis críticos. Sin embargo, como destacan Alfonso (...) Galindo y Enrique Ujaldón, ello no ha impedido que la democracia haya sido naturalizada. Es decir, concebida como algo "definitivo, imperdible e incuestionable" y, en consecuencia, no necesitado de revisión permanente. Es por ello que en el ensayo Diez mitos de la democracia. Contra la demagogia y el populismo aparecido en España a fines de 2016, los autores nos invitan a realizar una reflexión crítica sobre la democracia desde una perspectiva que resulta a la vez audaz y atractiva - dirigida tanto a los especialistas en la materia como al público en general-, centrada en la consideración y el examen de lo que presentan como diez mitos de la democracia. (shrink)

RESUMEN La cuestión de la constitución del sujeto político ha sido uno de los ejes centrales del pensamiento de Ernesto Laclau. En el presente trabajo nos centramos en un período específico de su reflexión teórica en torno a esta problemática: entre los años posteriores a la publicación de Hegemonía y estrategia socialista y la aparición de La razón populista. Consideramos que esta etapa de su pensamiento puede ser interpretada como el intento por elaborar una teoría deconstructiva del sujeto político, la (...) cual se sostiene sobre dos nociones que cobran vital importancia en este período: la decisión y la dislocación. ABSTRACT The constitution of the political subject has been one of the main issues in Ermesto Laclau's thinking. In this paper, we will focus on a specific period of his theoretical reflection regarding this issue: the one developed between the publication of Hegemony and socialist strategy and the appearance of On populist Reason. We intend to show how this period may be interpreted as an attempt to elaborate a de-constructivist theory of political subject, based on the notions of decision and dislocation. (shrink)

CONTENIDO: Kant y la pedagogía - De la objetividad a la objetivación - De la tensión entre el investigador y el método - Interdisciplinariedad e investigación cualitativa en educación - Formación y subjetividad: epistemología, lenguaje y pedagogía - La pedagogía ante la tecnología como estructura del mundo de la vida - Alcances y limitaciones de la inteligencia artificial en pedagogía - A propósito de la informática en el mundo de la pedagogía y de la educación - La representación del conocimiento (...) y la inteligencia artificial - La lógica de las ciencias como didáctica: ¿un bastión de modernidad? - La educación del futuro como futuro de la educación - De la epistemología de la pedagogía a la filosofía de la educación. (shrink)

CONTENIDO: Pensar temáticamente la filosofía - Nosotros y la filosofía - El método en la construcción del discurso filosófico - El mundo circundante: estudio sobre la conciencia, la toma de conciencia y la realización de la conciencia - El puesto de la estética en la filosofía - Sobre el concepto de naturaleza en empédocles - La pregunta por la técnica en serenidad de M. Heidegger - Cuatro paradojas en el proyecto de la filosofía latinoamericana - La secularización de la cultura: (...) una exigencia para la modernidad - El concepto de imagen y de política en paradiso de José Lezama Lima. (shrink)

I. El filósofo perseguido. 1. Metafísica del perseguidor ; 2. Filosofía de Jacob ; 3. Falsos mesías ; 4. Profeta, no rey-filósofo -- II. El pueblo perseguido. 1. Amalec o la persecución sin fin ; 2. Resistencia secreta ; 3. Israel o ser perseguido ; 4. El gobierno de la gran nación.

There are communities in which disadvantaged groups experience severe inequality. For instance, poor and indigent families face many difficulties accessing their social rights. Their condition is largely the consequence of the wrong choices of those in power, either historical or more recent choices. The lack of opportunities of these deprived citizens is due to state omissions. In such communities, it is not unusual for homeless members of these particular groups to occupy abandoned lands and build their shelters there. However, almost (...) everywhere, these actions constitute a crime. The typical response to this situation is prosecution and punishment. In this paper, I will defend the occupation of public places as a consequence of the failure of governments to solve the problem of housing, and I will argue that we must distinguish a social claim from a crime and avoid the use of criminal law in these “occupation cases”. I will also argue that our right—as a community—to blame and punish these “squatters” is eroded by the fact that we perpetrated their situation of injustice. (shrink)

Is anthropology a science? To put the question today amounts to a reply in the negative. The representatives of the ‘true’ sciences are not alone in suggesting a conjunctural or crippling lacuna which would preclude membership by right of the prestigious world, which, however, the name ‘humanistic sciences’ seems to demand. We should remember that some years ago Claude Lévi-Strauss caused a shudder to run through his discipline by describing it as a ‘flattering imposture’. Since then denigration has spread constantly, (...) and it no longer consists of deploring a slowness, an equivocation or a handicap which we would have the hope of remedying: it is definitely a fatality which we are from now on invited to confirm. (shrink)

Is anthropology a science? To put the question today amounts to a reply in the negative. The representatives of the ‘true’ sciences are not alone in suggesting a conjunctural or crippling lacuna which would preclude membership by right of the prestigious world, which, however, the name ‘humanistic sciences’ seems to demand. We should remember that some years ago Claude Lévi-Strauss caused a shudder to run through his discipline by describing it as a ‘flattering imposture’. Since then denigration has spread constantly, (...) and it no longer consists of deploring a slowness, an equivocation or a handicap which we would have the hope of remedying: it is definitely a fatality which we are from now on invited to confirm. (shrink)

Propõe o ensino das duas linguagens fundamentais - de Língua Materna e de Matemática - através da argumentação para que se articule o ensino de todas as disciplinas. Ao final, faz uma proposta global de avaliação para a escola, centrada em textos argumentativos, transformando a "cola" consentida em consulta necessária.

In fact, analogy is a legitimate form of comparison, and comparison is the only practical means we have for the understanding of things. The fault of the biological sociologists was not that they used it but that they used it wrongly. Instead of trying to control their studies of society by their knowledge of biol ogy, they tried to infer the laws of the first from the laws of the second.

Throughout the twentieth century, social anthropology has given the impression of being a science that is eternally in the throes of birth, all the while wondering whether it has the right to exist. As it has taken root, developed, and subdivided, it has become increasingly doubt-ridden. Today this self-doubt seems to have reached critical proportions: it is difficult to see how this discipline can continue to emphasize its schizophrenia without completely falling apart. Researchers who wish to sustain a belief in (...) the potential scientific vocation of anthropology feel obliged to seek assistance from the outside; for this help they look to the thermodynamics of heat, the selfish gene, or the newly-formed coalition of “cognitive sciences” (which combines the traditionally attractive capabilities of formal logic, psychophysiology, neurology, and so forth). Such researchers prefer second-hand knowledge to ephemeral knowledge. As for anthropologists who seek to preserve the professional autonomy of their practice at any cost, most of them believe that the only way to do that is to abdicate: to hell with the mirage of objectivity, down with laws, and long live the “text”! (shrink)

CONTENIDO: Génesis, estructura y función de la epistemología - Cuestiones fundamentales de filosofía de las ciencias - Fundamentos de epistemología - Epistemología, problemas, teorías y verdad - Epistemología, tecnología y ciencias sociales - La tecnología, estructura de mundo de la vida. El problema del sentido y la ontología del presente - La neonarrativa en ciencias sociales - La lectura heideggeriana de la sentencia: ¡Dios ha muerto¡ - ¿Epistemología u ontología? - De la lógica a la retórica - La lógica y (...) el final de la guerra. (shrink)

Dung’s argumentation frameworks have been applied for over twenty years to the analysis of argument justification. This representation focuses on arguments and the attacks among them, abstracting away from other features like the internal structure of arguments, the nature of utterers, the specifics of the attack relation, etc. The model is highly attractive because it reduces most of the complexities involved in argumentation processes. It can be applied to different settings, like the argument evaluation of an individual agent or the (...) case of dialectic disputes between two agents (pro and con), or even in multi-agent collective argumentation. The latter case involves agents with possibly different arguments and/or opinions on how to evaluate them, leading to the possibility of considering multiple sets of arguments and attack relations. Two basic questions can be asked here, namely ‘what to aggregate’ and ‘how to aggregate’. The former concerns what kinds of entities do the agents intend to choose (arguments, attacks, assessments, etc.), while the second one focuses on which aggregation mechanisms yield rational choices (voting on arguments, merging procedures to obtain a common argumentation framework, deliberation processes, etc.). In particular, the question about the rationality of a collective argument choice relates this topic to Social Choice and Judgment Aggregation theories, while its associated strategic issues relate it to Game Theory. The research efforts on the disparate problems elicited by collective argumentation have generated a considerable corpus of literature that deserves an orderly evaluation. This survey is intended as a contribution to that end. (shrink)

The problems that arise from the presence of self-attacking ar- guments and odd-length cycles of attack within argumentation frameworks are widely recognized in the literature on defeasible argumentation. This paper introduces two simple semantics to capture different intuitions about what kinds of arguments should become justified in such scenarios. These semantics are modeled upon two extensions of argumentation frameworks, which we call sustainable and tolerant. Each one is constructed on the common ground of the powerful concept of admissibility introduced by (...) Dung in [10]. The novelty of this approach consists in viewing the admissibility of a subset of arguments as relative to potentially challenging subsets of arguments. Both sustainable and tolerant semantics are more credulous than preferred semantics (i.e. they justify at least the same arguments, and possibly more). Given certain sufficient conditions they coincide among them as well as with other semantics introduced by Dung. (shrink)

In this paper we provide a compact presentation of the verisimilitudinarian approach to scientific progress (VS, for short) and defend it against the sustained attack recently mounted by Alexander Bird (2007). Advocated by such authors as Ilkka Niiniluoto and Theo Kuipers, VS is the view that progress can be explained in terms of the increasing verisimilitude (or, equivalently, truthlikeness, or approximation to the truth) of scientific theories. According to Bird, VS overlooks the central issue of the appropriate grounding of scientific (...) beliefs in the evidence, and it is therefore unable (a) to reconstruct in a satisfactory way some hypothetical cases of scientific progress, and (b) to provide an explanation of the aversion to falsity that characterizes scientific practice. We rebut both of these criticisms and argue that they reveal a misunderstanding of some key concepts underlying VS. (shrink)

This brief review of Mario Bunge’s research on physics begins with an analysis of his masterpiece Foundations of Physics, and then it discusses his other contributions to the philosophy of physics. Following that is a summary of his more recent reactions to scientific discoveries in physics and a discussion of his position about non-locality in quantum mechanics, as well as his changing opinions on the nature of spacetime. The paper ends with a brief assessment of Bunge’s legacy concerning the foundations (...) of physics. (shrink)

ABSTRACTContrary to what some critics of epistemic democracy claim, the association between democracy and truth does not necessarily make the former inhospitable to conflict, contestation, and pluralism. With the help of John Stuart Mill and William James, truth can be interpreted so as to make it compatible with a democratic politics that appreciates conflict and dissent. In some circumstances, truth claims are politically relevant and should become the object of democratic deliberation.

O artigo busca elaborar um conceito de liberdade democrática como desenvolvimento de si, resistência à opressão e à injustiça epistêmica mediante engajamento crítico com as obras de Paulo Freire, Amílcar Cabral e Augusto Boal. No pensamento dos três autores, democracia, liberdade e desenvolvimento de si constituem uma tríade de mútua influência, de sorte que o pleno exercício de quaisquer desses itens é impossível na ausência de qualquer um dos outros dois. Trata-se de mostrar, além disso, a maneira pela qual a (...) opressão é compreendida nos trabalhos dos três pensadores como o oposto da liberdade, e a injustiça epistêmica, como uma dimensão psíquica da opressão. (shrink)

Theory change is a central concern in contemporary epistemology and philosophy of science. In this paper, we investigate the relationships between two ongoing research programs providing formal treatments of theory change: the (post-Popperian) approach to verisimilitude and the AGM theory of belief change. We show that appropriately construed accounts emerging from those two lines of epistemological research do yield convergences relative to a specified kind of theories, here labeled “conjunctive”. In this domain, a set of plausible conditions are identified which (...) demonstrably capture the verisimilitudinarian effectiveness of AGM belief change, i.e., its effectiveness in tracking truth approximation. We conclude by indicating some further developments and open issues arising from our results. (shrink)

The body of Eva in Thomas Aquinas The constitution of the first female body or the body of Eva presents several physical and metaphysical problems, problems that have gone through the centuries and reach the present, generating social and cultural consequences for women. The non-existence of parents demands from Aquino answers that go beyond the anthropological and biological and lead to the search of philosophical answers intertwined with the theological ones. Thomas Aquinas provides rational answers although the background is of (...) faith, and even, with literal interpretations of the Sacred Scriptures now abandoned. The Aquinate makes an intellectual effort to find answers in a rational field because the matter of the body of the first woman brings difficulties for its elucidation and understanding. As in other parts of his extensive work, Thomas Aquinas, follows the biological and physical works of Aristotle. Although the Aristotelian background is in line with Christian thought, Aquinas shows his extraordinary capacity for synthesis between the faith received and reason argued, between revelation and the principles of reason. (shrink)

Conceptualization and measurement of organizational commitment involve different dimensions that include economic, affective, as well as moral aspects labelled in the literature as: ‘continuance’, ‘affective’ and ‘normative’ commitment. This multidimensional framework emerges from the convergence of different research lines. Using Aristotle’s philosophical framework, that explicitly considers the role of the will in human commitment, it is proposed a rational explanation of the existence of mentioned dimensions in organizational commitment. Such a theoretical proposal may offer a more accurate definition of ‘affective (...) commitment’ that distinguishes feelings from rational judgments. The use of a philosophical explanation coherent with psychological findings also allows the discovery of a wider moral concept of ‘normative commitment’. (shrink)

Micro Credit (MC) programs lend money to poor borrowers using innovative mechanisms such as group lending under joint liability while successfully accounting for the presence of asymmetric information in underdeveloped financial markets. MC programs have achieved what the conventional financial institutions and the government have not been able to: lend to the poor, impressive loan recuperation, and a positive impact in poverty reduction. This article analyzes the performance of ALSOL, an MC program in Chiapas, México, for 2151 participants in urban (...) and rural areas for the time period between July 2000 and July 2001. While loan recuperation is high (95%), administrative costs also remain high. Socially responsible lenders and donors play a key role in providing continuous funding to MC programs and assisting in reducing the level of poverty. (shrink)

This paper questions the notion that states may be justified in denying certain prisoners the right to vote as a means of distancing themselves from particularly grave wrongs. Christopher Bennett has recently defended prisoner disenfranchisement as a fair and deserved retributive punishment for crimes, and Mary Sigler and Andrew Altman have argued in favor of prisoner disenfranchisement as a civil restriction. All three proponents agree that disenfranchisement should be reserved for those guilty of the most serious offenses. I assert that (...) it is inappropriate to treat citizens in this manner and will advocate for the right to vote, whether disenfranchisement is perceived as a form of punishment or as a civil measure. I will present two arguments against disenfranchisement as it impacts both citizens and political community at large. First, it excludes citizens from the democratic arena and restricts the opportunity to reintegrate offenders into the political community. While a criminal sentence is intended to be burdensome, the burden associated with disenfranchisement extends beyond the appropriate penal scope. (shrink)

En el presente artículo, el autor analiza la adecuada reinserción social del recluso como finalidad de la ejecución de la pena privativa de la libertad. Con ese propósito, el jurista identifica los diferentes modelos de readaptación social (“readaptación para la moralidad” y “readaptación para la legalidad”), con sus virtudes y críticas. Por último, Arocena examina los condicionamientos que impone un arquetipo de Estado social y democrático de Derecho, a la hora de adherir a uno u otro de esos modelos, y (...) finalmente expone sus razones a favor de un paradigma de readaptación social mínimo. (shrink)

Dung’s argumentation frameworks are formalisms widely used to model interaction among arguments. Although their study has been profusely developed in the field of Artificial Intelligence, it is not common to see its treatment among those less connected to computer science within the logical-philosophical community. In this paper we propose to bring to that audience a proof-theory for argument justification based on tableaux, very similar to those the Logic students are familiar with. The tableaux enable to calculate whether an argument or (...) subset of arguments are accepted or rejected in accordance to Dung’s preferred and grounded extension-based semantics. Soundness and completeness results regarding those semantics are provided. (shrink)

In this paper, we address the problem of truth approximation through theory change, asking whether revising our theories by newly acquired data leads us closer to the truth about a given domain. More particularly, we focus on “nomic conjunctive theories”, i.e., theories expressed as conjunctions of logically independent statements concerning the physical or, more generally, nomic possibilities and impossibilities of the domain under inquiry. We define both a comparative and a quantitative notion of the verisimilitude of such theories, and identify (...) suitable conditions concerning the (partial) correctness of acquired data, under which revising our theories by data leads us closer to “the nomic truth”, construed as the target of scientific inquiry. We conclude by indicating some further developments, generalizations, and open issues arising from our results. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In the 1960s, when Dr. Belding Scribner discovered how to accomplish the process of dialysis in a repeated way, he could not imagine that in solving such a problem others as or more difficult would appear. Given the technological progress and the impossibility of assisting all patients through the most modern methods, the medical doctor often finds himself faced with the moral dilemma of choosing which patient in the waiting list will receive the treatment. This same dilemma is amplified (...) in the case of organ transplants. Professionals, students, professors of the juridical and health fields, and the population in general, were interviewed as a means of documenting the moral concepts and opinions surrounding this problem. In the reality in which we find ourselves, it seems to us that deciding who lives, and the responsibility for all the events that culminate in such decisions, is still a subject left open to discussion. (shrink)

O acontecimento do compreender, enquanto questão-chave do pensamento de Gadamer, também pode ser compreendido como uma fusão de horizontes. Do ponto de vista da hermenêutica filosófica, tal aspecto abre a possibilidade de tematização do âmbito próprio da compreensão como uma experiência filosófica simultaneamente ontológica e prática. Por isso, a descrição do compreender enquanto fusão de horizontes indica o tratamento de traços fundamentais da vida humana que, para Gadamer, encontra afinidades com a retomada da filosofia prática de Aristóteles. Deste modo, pretendemos (...) discutir alguns aspectos da relação entre os conceitos de compreensão e fusão de horizonte a partir da conexão essencial entre hermenêutica filosófica e filosofia prática.: The happening of understanding, as key-issue of Gadamer’s thought, can be also understood like a fusion of horizons. From the point of view of philosophical hermeneutics, this aspect opens the possibility of discussing about the sphere of understanding simultaneously ontological and practice philosophical experience. Therefore, the description of understanding as fusion of horizons indicates the treatment of basic traces of human life that finds affinities with the rehabilitation of practical philosophy of Aristotle. Thus, we intend to discuss some aspects of the relation between the notions of understanding and fusion of horizons from the essential connection between philosophical hermeneutics and practical philosophy. Keywords: Gadamer; understanding; fusion of horizons; practical philosophy; Aristotle. (shrink)

Na abordagem hermenêutica das obras de arte, Gadamer discute a arquitetura como uma das expressões artísticas na qual se pode reconsiderar a relação ontológico-interpretativa com as coisas em geral. Repensando a estrutura representativa própria da experiência hermenêutica das obras de arte, Gadamer introduz a arquitetura como uma expressão artística peculiar, na qual as obras de arte resistem aos posicionamentos estéticos atuais, reinserindo-as na esfera prática da vida. Essa tematização encontra ecos importantes na teoria e prática arquitetônicas, à medida que possibilita (...) uma nova relação com as obras de arquitetura, para além das variáveis estéticas. O presente artigo, portanto, tem como objetivo discutir a experiência hermenêutica da arquitetura como um momento interpretativo decisivo da relação com as obras de arte, explicitando tanto o caráter ontológico-hermenêutico do pensamento de Gadamer quanto o traço hermenêutico das obras de arquitetura. Para isso, partimos de um diálogo estabelecido por Gadamer e dois arquitetos, Jacques Herzog e Pierre de Meuron sobre a essência da arquitetura. A resposta gadameriana indicou-nos o horizonte de tematização das obras arquitetônicas como extensão da experiência da obra de arte, tal como foi discutido em Verdade e Método, notadamente na discussão sobre a representação artística e a retomada das noções de ocasional e decorativo. A tematização hermenêutica encontra, por conseguinte, repercussões na teoria e prática arquitetônicas, indicando um horizonte alternativo de questionamento do sentido da arquitetura e urbanismo, situando-o e remetendo-o para o horizonte da vida em comum. (shrink)

A covid-19 tem gerado grande mobilização por parte das sociedades contemporâneas. Como forma de prevenção e controle da doença, o isolamento social tem sido uma medida eficaz, recomendada por diversos órgãos da saúde. Por isso, pensar o isolamento social como prática solidária tem sido fundamental. Nesta perspectiva, o presente artigo busca problematizar o isolamento social enquanto isolamento solidário. Para isso, partimos da tematização da enfermidade, até agora conhecida, seus modos de prevenção e controle e, por conseguinte, o diálogo entre a (...) Saúde Coletiva e a Hermenêutica Filosófica, na tentativa de repensar o isolamento criticamente, para além de uma questão biomédica. Assim, discutir o isolamento solidário como noção essencial ao enfrentamento da pandemia da COVID-19 significa contribuir para uma visão mais ampla de saúde, ao passo que se encontra em jogo o restabelecimento da vida comunitária para além de sua concepção biomédica. (shrink)

Conceptual engineering is commonly characterized as the method for assessing and improving our representational devices. Little has been said, however, on how best to construe these representational devices—in other words, on what conceptual engineering should be all about. This paper tackles this problem with a basic strategy: First, by presenting a taxonomy of the different possible subject matters for conceptual engineering; then, by comparatively assessing them and selecting the most conducive one with a view to making conceptual engineering an actionable (...) method, that is, a method that can be applied effectively and consistently to specific case studies. The outcome is that conceptual engineering should be all about concepts on pain of pragmatic inconsistencies otherwise. (shrink)

We reported a series of experiments carried out to confront the underlying intuitions of value-based argumentation frameworks (VAFs) with the intuitions of ordinary people. Our goal was twofold. On the one hand, we intended to test VAF as a descriptive theory of human argument evaluations. On the other, we aimed to gain new insights from empirical data that could serve to improve VAF as a normative model. The experiments showed that people’s acceptance of arguments deviates from VAF’s semantics and is (...) rather correlated with the importance given to the promoted values, independently of the perceptions of argument interactions through attacks and defeats. Furthermore, arguments were often perceived as promoting more than one value with different relative strengths. Individuals’ analyses of scenarios were also affected by external factors such as biases and arguments not explicit in the framework. Finally, we confirmed that objective acceptance, that is, the acceptance of arguments under any order of the values, was not a frequent behavior. Instead, participants tended to accept only the arguments that promoted the values they subscribe. (shrink)

In this paper we present an embedding of abstract argumentation systems into the framework of Barwise and Seligmans logic of information flow. We show that, taking P.M. Dungs characterization of argument systems, a local logic over states of a deliberation may be constructed. In this structure, the key feature of non-monotonicity of commonsense reasoning obtains as the transition from one local logic to another, due to a change in certain background conditions. Each of Dungs extensions of argument systems leads to (...) a corresponding ordering of background conditions. The relations among extensions becomes a relation among partial orderings of background conditions. This introduces a conceptual innovation in Barwise and Seligmans representation of commonsense reasoning. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue for a pragmatic theory of the motivations behind the practice of defining concepts in philosophy. The “correct” definition in philosophy is not, as is usually supposed, the definition that accurately describes some pre-philosophical meaning, but the definition which is useful for the achievement of certain theoretical goals. I consider different examples of definitional debates from the history of philosophy. The analysis of these examples also evidences why philosophers do not usually grant the incidence of pragmatic (...) reason in their conceptual investigations. At the end of the paper, I provide some reasons that explain why the incidence of pragmatic reasons is inevitable. (shrink)

Richard Holton has criticized the common idea that self-deception is deception by the self, and suggested it is rather deception about the self; self-deception must include necessarily erroneous beliefs about the self. In this article I claim that this condition is not necessary, based on two central traits of self-deception: its temporal character and its bound to multiplication. In addition, I suggest an alternative condition in relation to the beliefs system implied in self-deception.

Recently, the idea that all rights are positive and costly has come to prominence in international human rights law. This has been taken to imply that there are no reasons to object to providing economic, social, and cultural rights with the same level of protection than civil and political rights. The present contribution aims to reject this undifferentiated view. It argues that even if it is accepted that all rights are in a sense positive and costly, there are still strong (...) grounds for finding the welfare implications of human rights problematic from the perspective of adjudication. (shrink)