Este ensaio busca dar continuidade e expandir o diálogo baseado no conceito de antropossemiose, como o estudo das ações dos signos conforme relacionado à nossa espécie, com atenção especial ao conceito de multimodalidade, ou a iniciativa pluralística que combina as vertentes de significações múltiplas ou medianas em uma análise ampla da iniciativa da semiose. Nas últimas décadas, a multimodalidade forneceu uma estrutura tão necessária para a análise da multiplicidade de modos, um conjunto de ferramentas multipropósito. Este ensaio buscará estruturar esses (...) processos pertencentes a um processo amplo, daquilo que pode ser percebido como semiose multidimensional. Por esta tipologia, as modalidades ou modos não são independentes do processo de significação para criar um todo, nem são processos independentes que interagem entre si, mas, em vez disso, são partes de um sistema simbiótico amplo de significação. (shrink)

Firm managers play an important role in the implementation of corporate social responsibility (CSR) actions. Education is emerging as the key factor in developing a sense of moral responsibility amongst the business students who will eventually become company managers and decision makers. The aim of this research is, thus, twofold. First, to analyze the existence of a direct positive correlation between university students’ perception of CSR and its impact on business performance; and second, to examine the extent to which two (...) factors (advantages brought by CSR and responsibilities toward stakeholders) act as mediation variables in the aforementioned correlation. The analysis was performed with a sample of 390 business‐related university students. Amongst the potential contributions made by this study we can highlight the possibility of knowing future managers’ way of thinking and of knowing the aspects where educational centers might improve their CSR teaching. (shrink)

Pour surmonter le terrorisme comme obstacle à l'hospitalité cosmopolitique, il convient de promouvoir une éthique de l'hospitalité, basée sur la compréhension de l'existence humaine individuelle comme "être-accueilli-et-accueillant". L'occupant autochtone ou national est le premier à bénéficier de l'hospitalité offerte par sa propre terre. Il ne peut lutter contre le terrorisme qu'en offrant à son tour cette même hospitalité, de sorte que la paix cosmopolitique est le partage de l'hospitalité reçue, celle qui vient de la terre-mère.

La quatrième de couverture indique : "Cet ouvrage est traversé par cette thèse : la place centrale de l'oralité oriente de manière décisive la conception et l'exercice de la souveraineté politique en Afrique contemporaine. Il examine l'imaginaire du pouvoir en Afrique, en interrogeant les rapports qui lient les peuples africains, inconsciemment, au souverain ou à l'autorité politique. Ces rapports sont fondés sur un accueil affectif de la parole des autorités, sans une prise en compte consciente de leur action, et une (...) évaluation des résultats de leur gouvernance politique. La primauté de l'oralité, l'oubli du droit positif et de la relativisation des textes rédigés (comme la constitution), sont une culture vivante en Afrique. Pour une bonne articulation gouvernance / politique, il est urgent de suggérer aux politiques en Afrique, l'émergence d'une "éthique de la constitution", de sorte que leurs discours soient la traduction orale du texte constitutionnel et leurs actions, le déploiement de la constitution, au bénéfice du bien-être individuel de chaque citoyen.". (shrink)

Managers’ commitment to contribute to sustainable development holds the key to their long-term business success and may be a source of competitive advantage. The managerial perception of business ethics is influenced by the level of moral development and personal characteristics of managers. These perceptions are also shaped by forces existing in the environment of the firm, including available resources, societal expectations, sector, and regulations. The resource-based perspective can thus contribute to the analysis of ethical issues offering important insights on how (...) they can influence the environmental strategy of the firm. The findings of this study show that firm resources have a strong influence on business managers’ ethical attitudes. In addition, the application of resource-based rationales to ethical issues can be justified in the following several ways: it influences a managerial perception of natural environment as a competitive opportunity, it requires investments of financial and human resources, flexibility and speed in the adaptation to environmental changes, and it creates new resource-based opportunities through changes in prevention pollution technology, policy process, and market forces. (shrink)

Ante la falta o disminución de la motivación de los alumnos universitarios la enseñanza, y con ello la Universidad se ve en la tesitura de poner en práctica nuevas metodologías más activas y motivantes que permitan a los alumnos tener un rol más protagonista en el proceso de enseñanza y aprendizaje que el que han tenido hasta ahora.En el este artículo se expone una experiencia que consiste en el diseño de un escape room on line enmarcado en el Máster en (...) Educación Especial. Se plantea como objetivo motivar a los alumnos y facilitar el aprendizaje de la asignatura. (shrink)

In this paper we analyze some of the major difficulties of informed consent. We consider insufficient to base IC on the principle of autonomy. We must not forget that the patient may be in a situation of extreme vulnerability and the good doctor should assume a degree of commitment and responsibility with his/her decisions. Our aim is to introduce the ethics of responsibility of Levinas in practice and theory of IC in order to generate a beneficent medical practice in which (...) the supervision and overseeing of the patient do not undermine his/her autonomy. (shrink)

Ortega trasladó sus ideas pedagógicas a su quehacer como profesor universitario. Muchos de sus discípulos y colaboradores han dejado constancia de ello, como aquí se refiere. Fue para ellos, sobre todo ejemplo, ejemplo de vida, de orientación vital, de sinceridad intelectual en su quehacer filosófico. En este artículo no analizamos la filosofía de Ortega, lo que hemos hecho en otros textos, sino el impacto que causó la «persona» Ortega en sus colaboradores y discípulos. Aunque es algo estudiando, nunca se ha (...) presentado de esta forma sintética que muestra la envergadura del impacto que Ortega produjo en el mundo intelectual de la Edad de Plata de la cultura española. (shrink)

Este estudio es una aproximación al tema del trabajo desde el pensamiento sociológico de Zygmunt Bauman. Uno de los textos más conocidos de Bauman al respecto es Trabajo, consumismo y nuevos pobres; sin embargo, este es un tema que el sociólogo trata en otras obras. Aquí se pretende dar una visión en la que se tienen en cuenta la globalidad de sus escritos. Además, se dan unas claves que permiten comprender el enfoque que Bauman tiene del trabajo: se hace una (...) breve explicación de su perspectiva sociológica y de la importancia de la modernidad en su pensamiento. Por último, se expone cómo el trabajo cambia de sentido e importancia en la modernidad sólida y en la líquida. (shrink)

What is the so-called “question of ontology?” Is the question of ontology genuinely a question about “categories” (Lowe 2006), “structure” (Sider 2011), “existence” (Thomasson 2015), or rather “reality” (Fine 2009)? In this article, I defend the neo-Sellarsian approach to the question of ontology, a novel, naturalistic approach according to which the foundational question of ontology is about “understanding the manifest and the scientific images of the world, and their multiple relationships.” First, I argue for the thesis of Impure Eliminativism, a (...) form of constructive pluralism about the question of ontology by which the substantivity of questions of ontology which are not the neo-Sellarsian one is to be built upon certain relations with the neo-Sellarsian question of ontology. Second, I argue for the categorial plasticity of the two images and their relations in connection with the hypothesis of Weak Epistemic Factualism. Third, and lastly, I argue for a person-based ontology framed in terms of the crucial notions of “fact” and “understanding” in response to the eliminativist categorizations of the two images and their relationships proposed by substantialism and structuralism. (shrink)

The paper defends an interactive theory of the distinctiveness of criminal law. It argues that criminal law’s distinctive behavior can be connected to the interaction between five traits: it is an institutional practice administered by a large and special bureaucracy, playing a substantial role in authorizing the use of coercive police force, leading to a harsh sanctioning regime linked, at least in part, with core wrongs and notions of personal responsibility. Although none of these features is exclusive to criminal law, (...) their interaction leads to modes of behavior that set it apart from other institutions. The paper argues that putting attention on the effects of this interaction provides us with powerful tools to both understand and asses the value and problems of criminal law. (shrink)

Bourrat and Griffiths :33, 2018) have recently argued that most of the evidence presented by holobiont defenders to support the thesis that holobionts are evolutionary individuals is not to the point and is not even adequate to discriminate multispecies evolutionary individuals from other multispecies assemblages that would not be considered evolutionary individuals by most holobiont defenders. They further argue that an adequate criterion to distinguish the two categories is fitness alignment, presenting the notion of fitness boundedness as a criterion that (...) allows divorcing true multispecies evolutionary individuals from other multispecies assemblages and provides an adequate criterion to single out genuine evolutionary multispecies assemblages. A consequence of their criterion is that holobionts, as conventionally defined by hologenome defenders, are not evolutionary individuals except in very rare cases, and for very specific host-symbiont associations. This paper is a critical response to Bourrat and Griffiths’ arguments and a defence of the arguments presented by holobiont defenders. Drawing upon the case of the hologenomic basis of the evolution of sanguivory in vampire bats, I argue that Bourrat and Griffiths overlook some aspects of the biological nature of the microbiome that justifies the thesis that holobionts are evolutionarily different to other multispecies assemblages. I argue that the hologenome theory of evolution should not define the hologenome as a collection of genomes, but as the sum of the host genome plus some traits of the microbiome which together constitute an evolutionary individual, a conception I refer to as the stability of traits conception of the hologenome. Based on that conception I argue that the evidence presented by holobiont defenders is to the point, and supports the thesis that holobionts are evolutionary individuals. In this sense, the paper offers an account of the holobiont that aims to foster a dialogue between hologenome advocates and hologenome critics. (shrink)

Are properties universal or particular? According to Universalism, properties are universals because there is a certain fundamental tie that makes properties capable of being shareable by more than one thing. On the opposing side, Particularism is the view that properties are particulars due to the existence of a fundamental tie that makes properties incapable of being shared. My aim in this paper is to critically examine the connections between the notions of the fundamental tie and universality and particularity. I argue, (...) first, that universality and particularity can characterize a property if and only if there is a universalist or a particularist fundamental tie, and, second, that it is unclear that these should be the fundamental ties that connect ordinary and scientific properties to their respective bearers. Then I develop an alternative approach to properties and the fundamental tie, which is neutralist because it dispenses with universality and particularity as features of properties, and naturalist because it naturalizes the possession of properties by replacing metaphysical fundamental ties with a scientific one, in particular, a physical process. I show how this approach improves our understanding of properties and instantiation. (shrink)

1. Categories and the Scientific Turn of Metaphysics: The Notion of World-Fundamentality What are the fundamental inhabitants of the world? This question, as old as it is new, is about the fundamental structure of our world. Is our world a world of Aristotle's ordinary substances, Locke's physical substances, Husserl's wholes, Wittgenstein's facts, Sellars's processes, or Quine's sets? In order to distinguish the sort of metaphysical fundamentality at stake in this discussion from other possible types of fundamentality, I shall call it (...) from now on "world-fundamentality." In this article I want to make a proposal in the context of this metaphysical dispute. The proposal is the addition of a new criterion of world-fundamentality to the existing catalog of independence and simplicity, among some other prominent classical examples. I call this criterion "the materialist criterion of world-fundamentality" because it states that metaphysicians should not decide the question of whether our world is a world of facts rather than a world of sets or other categories without considering the explanatory power of such categories to account for the relation between "the manifest image" and "the scientific image," to use the words of Wilfrid Sellars. (shrink)

Is structure a fundamental and indispensable part of the world? Is the question of ontology a question about structure? Structure is a central notion in contemporary metaphysics [Sider 2011. Writing the Book of the World. Oxford: Clarendon Press]. Realism about structure claims that the question of ontology is about the fundamental and indispensable structure of the world. In this paper, I present a criticism of the metaphysics of realism about structure based on a version of Russell’s famous regress argument against (...) nominalism [Russell 1911. “On the Relation of Universals and Particular.” In Logic & Knowledge. Reprint, London: George Allen & Unwin]. First, I argue that the three general tests for the fundamentality of structure proposed by realism about structure rely on a particular empirical test for structure, namely, the so-called ‘similarity test for structure.’ Second, I argue that the similarity test is not well-founded because it leads to a vicious regress. Third, I argue that the regress affects the whole metaphysics of realism about structure, and that no structural notion can be said to be fundamental in connection with any of the other tests. Lastly, I argue that the question of ontology as a question about structure is not substantive. (shrink)

Contemporary biological research has suggested that some host–microbiome multispecies systems (referred to as “holobionts”) can in certain circumstances evolve as unique biological individual, thus being a unit of selection in evolution. If this is so, then it is arguably the case that some biological adaptations have evolved at the level of the multispecies system, what we call hologenomic adaptations. However, no research has yet been devoted to investigating their nature, or how these adaptations can be distinguished from adaptations at the (...) species-level (genomic adaptations). In this paper, we cover this gap by investigating the nature of hologenomic adaptations. By drawing on the case of the evolution of sanguivory diet in vampire bats, we argue that a trait constitutes a hologenomic adaptation when its evolution can only be explained if the holobiont is considered the biological individual that manifests this adaptation, while the bacterial taxa that bear the trait are only opportunistic beneficiaries of it. We then use the philosophical notions of emergence and inter-identity to explain the nature of this form of individuality and argue why it is special of holobionts. Overall, our paper illustrates how the use of philosophical concepts can illuminate scientific discussions, in the trend of what has recently been called metaphysics of biology. (shrink)

The German word Destruktion was used by Heidegger in the sense that philosophy should destroy some ontological concepts and the everyday meanings of certain words. Tradition allows the transmission of knowledge and sensations of continuity and connection with the past, but it must be critically evaluated so that it does not perpetuate certain prejudices. According to Heidegger, tradition transmits, but it also conceals. Tradition induces self-evidence and prevents us from accessing the origin of concepts. It makes us believe that we (...) do not need to return to that origin. Making tradition transparent dissolves the concealments it has provoked. Here I will apply this idea to the mental and the physical by suggesting that the mind-body problem has inherited occultations that are born in Descartes himself. As a result, what could be a new philosophical framework for the research in consciousness emerges: That as an individual cognitive being I cannot avoid splitting reality into what I am and what I am not, extending then the individual duality to a collective error transmitted culturally. (shrink)

All projects take place within a context of uncertainty. That is especially noticeable in complex hydroelectric power generation projects, which are affected by factors such as the large number of multidisciplinary tasks to be performed in parallel, long execution times, or the risks inherent in various fields like geology, hydrology, and structural, electrical, and mechanical engineering, among others. Such factors often lead to cost overruns and delays in projects of this type. This paper analyzes the efficiency of the Earned Value (...) Management technique and its Earned Schedule extension, as means of forecasting costs and deadlines when applied to complex hydroelectric power production projects. It is worth noting that this analysis was based on simulation models applied to real-life projects. The results showed that cost forecasting becomes very accurate over time, whereas duration forecasting is not reliably accurate. (shrink)

De Monarchia representa una de las obras de Dante que más influjo político ha ejercido. Probablemente movido a escribirla, hacia 1313. Con ella, Dante quiere contribuir a erradicar la anarquía imperante de su época, en Italia y, concretamente, en su ciudad florentina. Sueña con un orden social que establezca la paz universal. El tono de la obra, netamente gibelino, muestra a un Dante que ha evolucionado intelectualmente. Dante se muestra aquí como un intelectual a caballo entre la escolástica y el (...) florecimiento de un estilo nuevo. Hay en él toda una serie de giros, expresiones, alegorías, imágenes y simbolismos claramente medievales, pero también un conjunto de ideas que, contra corriente, contribuyeron a cambiar el modo de interpretar el mundo. Su De Monarchia ha de considerarse una obra innovadora porque, aunque el texto ciertamente recogió tradiciones legales, jurídicas, políticas y teológicas precedentes, su mayor mérito radicó en la elaboración de una densa, brillante y novedosa teoría, según la cual, el emperador no sólo debía su poder a la elección directa de Dios —con lo que su investidura no devenía un mero oficio de la Iglesia— sino que, además, la institución imperial resultaba superior a la pontificia. Por tanto, hay que plantearse si «De Monarqchia» es una obra que precederá algunas de las principales tesis que posteriormente defenderá la Reforma protestante en cuestiones políticas. (shrink)

Symbiosis plays a fundamental role in contemporary biology, as well as in recent thinking in philosophy of biology. The discovery of the importance and universality of symbiotic associations has brought new light to old debates in the field, including issues about the concept of biological individuality. An important aspect of these debates has been the formulation of the hologenome concept of evolution, the notion that holobionts are units of natural selection in evolution. This review examines the philosophical assumptions that underlie (...) recent proposal of the hologenome concept of evolution, and traces those debates back in time to their historical origins, to the moment when the connection between the topics of symbiosis and biological individuality first caught the attention of biologists. The review is divided in two parts. The first part explores the historical origins of the connection between the notion of symbiosis and the concept of biological individuality, and emphasizes the role of A. de Bary, R. Pound, A. Schneider and C. Merezhkowsky in framing the debate. The second part examines the hologenome concept of evolution and explores four parallelisms between contemporary debates and the debates presented in the first part of the essay, arguing that the different debates raised by the hologenome concept were already present in the literature. I suggest that the novelty of the hologenome concept of evolution lies in the wider appreciation of the importance of symbiosis for maintaining life on Earth as we know it. Finally, I conclude by suggesting the importance of exploring the connections among contemporary biology, philosophy of biology and history of biology in order to gain a better understanding of contemporary biology. (shrink)

Given one conception of biological individuality (evolutionary, physiological, etc.), can a holobiont – that is the host + its symbiotic (mutualistic, commensalist and parasitic) microbiome – be simultaneously a biological individual and an ecological community? Herein, we support this possibility by arguing that the notion of biological individuality is part‐dependent. In our account, the individuality of a biological ensemble should not only be determined by the conception of biological individuality in use, but also by the biological characteristics of the part (...) of the ensemble under investigation. In the specific case of holobionts, evaluations of their individuality should be made either host‐relative or microbe‐relative. We support the claim that biological individuality is part‐dependent by drawing upon recent empirical evidence regarding the physiology of hosts and microbes, and the recent characterization of the ‘demibiont’. Our account shows that contemporary disagreements about the individuality of the holobiont derive from an incorrect understanding of the ontology of biological individuality. We show that collaboration between philosophers and biologists can be very fruitful in attempts to solve some contemporary biological debates. (shrink)

Categories play a major role in contemporary metaphysics. They have not only been invoked in a number of philosophical theories but are themselves objects of epistemological and metaphysical scrutiny. In this article, we will discuss the following questions: How do we know when something belongs to a certain category? Is there a fundamental category of the world? Can we give a satisfactory account of the number of categories and the completeness of systems of categories? Are categories the genuine subjects of (...) ontology? (shrink)

Holobionts are symbiotic assemblages composed by a host plus its microbiome. The status of holobionts as individuals has recently been a subject of continuous controversy, which has given rise to two main positions: on the one hand, holobiont advocates argue that holobionts are biological individuals; on the other, holobiont detractors argue that they are just mere chimeras or ecological communities, but not individuals. Both parties in the dispute develop their arguments from the framework of the philosophy of biology, in terms (...) of what it takes for a “conglomerate” to be considered an interesting individual from a biological point of view. However, the debates about holobiont individuality have important ontological implications that have remained vaguely explored from a metaphysical framework. The purpose of this paper is to cover that gap by presenting a metaphysical approach to holobionts individuality. Drawing upon a conception of natural selection that puts the focus on the transgenerational recurrence of the traits and that supports the thesis that holobionts are units of selection, we argue that holobionts bear emergent traits and exert downward powers over the entities that compose them. In this vein, we argue, a reasonable argument can be made for conceiving holobionts as emergent biological individuals. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to offer two novel solutions to two perennial problems of categorial ontology, namely, the problem of the categorial structure: how are the categories related to one another? And the problem of categorial completeness: how is the completeness of a proposed list of categories justified? First, I argue that a system of categories should have a structure such that there is a most basic category that is a bearer of all other categories and that has (...) what I shall call “combinatorial conditions”. To do so, I compare this approach to categorial structure with the approaches given by substantialist, mereological, factualist, and geo ontologies. Second, I argue that the problem of categorial completeness is only a problem for certain ontologies. In this connection, I explore views on categorial completeness proposed by substantialists and geo-ontologists. Lastly, I conclude that factualism does a better job of accounting for categorial structure and categorial completeness than other categorial ontologies. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to defend a naturalistic approach to instantiation and the Principle of Instantiation. I argue that the instantiation of an ordinary property F consists of two coordinated relationships at the levels of the manifest and scientific images, namely, constituency and entailment. Also, I offer an account of the Principle of Instantiation related to this conception of instantiation based on the notion of scientific prediction.

The Sellarsian task of ontology is to reconcile two seemingly divergent images of ordinary objects such as persons, tomatoes and tables, namely, the manifest image of common sense and the scientific image provided by fundamental physics (Sellars, Science, Perception, and Reality, 1963). Can the genuine categories of the ontologies of Substantialism (Heil, The World as We Find It, 2012), Structural Realism (Ladyman and Ross,Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized, 2007; French, The Structure of the World: Metaphysics and Representation, 2014), and (...) Factualism (Cumpa, ‘A Materialist Criterion of Fundamentality’, American Philosophical Quarterly, 2014), such as ‘substance’, ‘structure’, and ‘fact’, help us to solve the problem of the reconciliation of the two images of ordinary objects? In this paper I defend the thesis that the ontology of Factualism does a better job of reconciling the manifest and the scientific images of ordinary objects than other ontologies. (shrink)

Lewis has objected to Armstrong's notion of a structural universal on the grounds that it violates the Principle of Uniqueness of Composition (PUC), which says that given some parts, there is only one whole that they compose. This paper reviews Armstrong's case for structural universals, and then attempts to reconcile structural universals with PUC by arguing for the existence of arrangement universals. The latter are not only a key to defending structural universals against Lewis' objection, but are in fact essential (...) to Armstrong's conception of structural universals in general. Three objections to my proposal are deflected, and two alternative proposals are shown to be inferior to it. (shrink)

[1]. [without special title] -- 2. Fundamentación de la bioética y manipulación genética -- 5. Etica y ecología -- 9. Etica y ancianidad -- 11. Procreación humana asistida -- 12. El derecho a la asistencia sanitaria y la distribución de recursos -- 14. Aspectos científicos, jurídicos y éticos de los transgénicos -- 15. Los derechos de los animales -- 17. Células troncales humanas.

Lyotard’s diagnosis of a ‘postmodern condition’ has been repeatedly interpreted as a disavowal of the universal aspiration of political action and judgment. This article challenges this interpretation by showing that postmodernity involves an attempt to reconsider universality in such a way that it involves dissensus rather than consensus. I proceed by reconstructing Lyotard’s critique of the idea of consensus as a ground of political action and judgment, which in his view is based on a certain model of production of scientific (...) knowledge. Then, I analyse Lyotard’s turn to Kant’s judgment of the sublime as an alternative to a consensus-based conception of universal judgments. In the judgment of the sublime, universality stems from the disagreement between the faculties, which arouses respect for universal ideas. Analogously, political judgments stem from the disagreement between heterogeneous discourses, which produces a universal call to invent new languages that make communication possible. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to clarify what is properly common to the common good and to support its irreducibility as a guarantee of overcoming an atomistic conception of civil society. We begin by addressing the notion of individual freedom and the questioning of the selfish condition of the human being. Then, we delve into the normative possibilities offered by an ethical interpretation of the common good. The difference of the common good from other notions used in late-modern discourses (...) is key in determining the intrinsic commonality of social relations. In concluding, we argue for a conception of the common good that accommodates individual freedom, understanding it no longer in isolation, but as part of intersubjectivity. (shrink)

In this paper I will defend the incapacity of the informational frameworks in thermal physics, mainly those that historically and conceptually derive from the work of Brillouin (1962) and Jaynes (1957a), to robustly explain the approach of certain gaseous systems to their state of thermal equilibrium from the dynamics of their molecular components. I will further argue that, since their various interpretative, conceptual and technical-formal resources (e.g. epistemic interpretations of probabilities and entropy measures, identification of thermal entropy as Shannon information, (...) and so on) are shown to be somehow incoherent, inconsistent or inaccurate, these informational proposals need to 'epistemically parasitize' the manifold of theoretical resources of Boltzmann's and Gibbs' statistical mechanics, respectively, in order to properly account for the equilibration process of an ideal gas from its microscopic properties. Finally, our conclusion leads us to adopt a sort of constructive skepticism regarding the explanatory value of the main informationalist trends in statistical thermophysics. (shrink)

Philippe Huneman has recently questioned the widespread application of mechanistic models of scientific explanation based on the existence of structural explanations, i.e. explanations that account for the phenomenon to be explained in virtue of the mathematical properties of the system where the phenomenon obtains, rather than in terms of the mechanisms that causally produce the phenomenon. Structural explanations are very diverse, including cases like explanations in terms of bowtie structures, in terms of the topological properties of the system, or in (...) terms of equilibrium. The role of mathematics in bowtie structured systems and in topologically constrained systems has recently been examined in different papers. However, the specific role that mathematical properties play in equilibrium explanations requires further examination, as different authors defend different interpretations, some of them closer to the new-mechanistic approach than to the structural model advocated by Huneman. In this paper, we cover this gap by investigating the explanatory role that mathematics play in Blaser and Kirschner’s nested equilibrium model of the stability of persistent long-term human-microbe associations. We argue that their model is explanatory because: i) it provides a mathematical structure in the form of a set of differential equations that together satisfy an ESS; ii) that the nested nature of the ESSs makes the explanation of host-microbe persistent associations robust to any perturbation; iii) that this is so because the properties of the ESS directly mirror the properties of the biological system in a non-causal way. The combination of these three theses make equilibrium explanations look more similar to structural explanations than to causal-mechanistic explanation. (shrink)

The Nacional Socialist totalitarian project unleashed an unprecedented savagery in Europe, giving raise to the largest war to have taken place in our history and to a never before seen systematic genocide. In opposition to those who consider this way of savagery as something purely irrational, the truth is that Nazism’s savagery was product of a “rational” project which would have its roots in the period of the Enlightenment. The cruel and inhuman murder of millions of people was the result (...) of a perfectly planned, systematic, and rational act, supported in a bureaucracy which made easier the creation of a series of psychological barriers by perpetrators and whose traces were intended to be erased from history. From this point of view, National Socialism showed that Reason by itself does not save the world from savagery. (shrink)

The human rights system continues to evolve including new groups that are discriminated or oppressed in the world. Spain, as a Western country seemingly respectful of human rights must meet the challenge of maintaining that respect after the recent adoption of the recently approved United Nations Convention on the rights of people with disabilities (functional diversity), and modify its social policies, current laws, as well as prevent new laws that discriminate on the grounds of functional diversity, such as the recent (...) proposed law of sexual and reproductive health and abortion. (shrink)