Spontaneous eye blink rate has been linked to attention and memory, specifically working memory. sEBR is also related to striatal dopamine activity with schizophrenia and Parkinson’s disease showing increases and decreases, respectively, in sEBR. A weakness of past studies of sEBR and WM is that correlations have been reported using blink rates taken at baseline either before or after performance of the tasks used to assess WM. The goal of the present study was to understand how fluctuations in sEBR during (...) different phases of a visual WM task predict task accuracy. In two experiments, with recordings of sEBR collected inside and outside of a magnetic resonance imaging bore, we observed sEBR to be positively correlated with WM task accuracy during the WM delay period. We also found task-related modulation of sEBR, including higher sEBR during the delay period compared to rest, and lower sEBR during task phases that place demands on visual attention. These results provide further evidence that sEBR could be an important predictor of WM task performance with the changes during the delay period suggesting a role in WM maintenance. The relationship of sEBR to DA activity and WM maintenance is discussed. (shrink)

Thomas Jefferson is among the most important and controversial of American political thinkers: his influence (libertarian, democratic, participatory, and agrarian-republican) is still felt today. A prolific writer, Jefferson left 18,000 letters, Notes on the State of Virginia, an Autobiography, and numerous other papers. Joyce Appleby and Terence Ball have selected the most important of these for presentation in the Cambridge Texts series: Jefferson's views on topics such as revolution, self-government, the role of women and African-American and Native (...) Americans emerge to give a fascinating insight into a man who owned slaves, yet advocated the abolition of slavery. The texts are supported by a concise introduction, suggestions for further reading and short biographies of key figures, all providing invaluable assistance to the student encountering the breadth and richness of Jefferson's thought for the first time. (shrink)

Should moral blame stop at the grave? We often blame the dead for the bad things they did while alive. But blaming the dead poses a prima facie challenge to accounts which take our blaming practices to aim at communicating moral disapproval to wrongdoers or at improving their moral agency. If these kinds of aims are made definitional for blame, blaming the dead becomes impossible. But even on accounts which say that paradigmatically, blame is a form of moral engagement which (...) aims to effect changes in the wrongdoer, blaming the dead may seem unjustified, pointless or even irrational. In this paper, I explain how blaming the dead can be made sense of and justified. However, not all cases of blaming the dead fit this explanation, because blaming the dead is not a homogenous practice. (shrink)

Desde 1935 Ortega anunció la publicación de un libro con el título de El hombre y la gente contendría su doctrina sociológica, pero sólo se publicó en 1957 y como la primera de sus obras póstumas. Esta nueva edición incluye el texto, inédito hasta la fecha, de la conferencia pronunciada por Ortega en 1934 a la que había dado el título que hoy lleva este libro, y en la que por primera vez expuso públicamente su idea de los (...) " usos " como realidad constitutiva del hecho social. Por otra parte, el texto va revisado y cotejado conforme a los originales. (shrink)

Volume Eight of the project documenting Thomas Jefferson's last years presents 591 documents dated from 1 October 1814 to 31 August 1815. Jefferson is overjoyed by American victories late in the War of 1812 and highly interested in the treaty negotiations that ultimately end the conflict. Following Congress's decision to purchase his library, he oversees the counting, packing, and transportation of his books to Washington. Jefferson uses most of the funds from the sale to pay old debts (...) but spends some of the proceeds on new titles. He resigns from the presidency of the American Philosophical Society, revises draft chapters of Louis H. Girardin's history of Virginia, and advises William Wirt on revolutionary-era Stamp Act resolutions. Jefferson criticizes those who discuss politics from the pulpit, and he drafts a bill to transform the Albemarle Academy into Central College. Monticello visitors Francis W. Gilmer, Francis C. Gray, and George Ticknor describe the mountaintop and its inhabitants, and Gray's visit leads to an exchange with Jefferson about how many generations of white interbreeding it takes to clear Negro blood. Finally, although death takes his nephew Peter Carr and brother Randolph Jefferson, the marriage of his grandson Thomas Jefferson Randolph is a continuing source of great happiness. Some images inside the book are unavailable due to digital copyright restrictions. (shrink)

"The Spanish original, 'La rebelión de las masas,' was published by 1930; this translation, authorized by Sr. Ortega y Gasset, remains anonymous at the translator's request." Contents: 1. The Coming of the Masses 2. The Rise of the Historical Level 3. The Height of the Times 4. The Increase of Life 5. A Statistical Fact 6. The Dissection of the Mass-Man Begins 7. Noble Life and Common Life, or Effort and Inertia 8. Why the Masses Intervene in Everything, and (...) Why Their Intervention is Solely by Violence 9. The Primitive and the Technical 10. Primitivism and History 11. The Self-Satisfied Age 12. The Barbarism of “Specialisation” 13. The Greatest Danger, the State 14. Who Rules the World 15. We Arrive at the Real Question. (shrink)

El filósofo español José Ortega y Gasset y su traductora al alemán Helene Weyl intercambiaron correspondencia entre los años 1923 y 1946. José Ortega y Gasset y Helene Weyl formaron parte de dos grandes comunidades de intelectuales europeos: Ortega, representante de la filosofía académica en España y Helene Weyl, representante de una intelectualidad vivida más allá de cualquier corsé academicista. Su correspondencia documenta el desarrollo de dos grandes espíritus europeos así como la singular intersección de estos dos (...) mundos y culturas a través de un momento histórico difícil y turbulento del siglo XX. (shrink)

The aim of this essay is to analyze the notion of “loving, knowing ignorance,” a type of “arrogant perception” that produces ignorance about women of color and their work at the same time that it proclaims to have both knowledge about and loving perception toward them. The first part discusses Marilyn Frye's accounts of “arrogant” as well as of “loving” perception and presents an explanation of “loving, knowing ignorance.” The second part discusses the work of Audre Lorde, Elizabeth Spelman, and (...) María Lugones in their attempts to deal with the issue of arrogant perception within feminism, and examines how Lugones's notion of “‘world’-traveling” may help us deal with “loving, knowing ignorance.” Ultimately, the author suggests that we need to become aware of instances of “loving, knowing ignorance,” especially if we are to stay true to Third Wave feminism's commitment to diversity. (shrink)

This paper contributes to the debate over the so-called “easy argument for numbers”, an argument that uses evidence from natural language to support the metaphysically significant claim that numbers exist. It presents novel data showing that critical examples in the literature are ambiguous between two readings, contrary to previous assumptions. It then accounts for these data using independently motivated linguistic theory. The account developed rescues the easy argument from the primary challenges leveled against it in the literature and sets the (...) agenda for future work to determine whether or not the argument is valid. (shrink)

Thesis summary BATISTA, Jefferson Pinto.The social doctrine of the Catholic Church and the foundations of social work: the graduation course of Social Work at PUC Minas.

Slippery slope arguments are frequently dismissed as fallacious or weak arguments but are nevertheless commonly used in political and bioethical debates. This paper gives an overview of different variants of the argument commonly found in the literature and addresses their argumentative strength and the interrelations between them. The most common variant, the empirical slippery slope argument, predicts that if we do A, at some point the highly undesirable B will follow. I discuss both the question which factors affect likelihood of (...) slippage and the relation between the strength of the prediction and the justificatory power of the argument. (shrink)

I defend an instrumentalist account of moral responsibility and adopt Manuel Vargas’ idea that our responsibility practices are justified by their effects. However, whereas Vargas gives an independent account of morally responsible agency, on my account, responsible agency is defined as the susceptibility to developing and maintaining moral agency through being held responsible. I show that the instrumentalism I propose can avoid some problems more crude forms of instrumentalism encounter by adopting aspects of Strawsonian accounts. I then show the implications (...) for our understanding of responsibility: my account requires us to adopt a graded notion of responsibility and accept the claim that certain individuals may not be responsible because they are not susceptible to being influenced by our moral responsibility practices. Finally, I discuss whether the account is committed to allowing the instrumentalization of non-responsible individuals in cases where blaming them may benefit others’ moral agency. (shrink)

El diálogo que aquí se transcribe discurre por Sevilla y el pensamiento de Ortega y Gasset. Se va hablando de la razón topográfica, de cosmopolitismo y de Don Juan, figura objeto de una reflexión filosófica que imita los métodos de dos escuelas antiguas: el diálogo socrático y el paseo peripatético. Partiendo del parque de María Luisa, la conversación recorre el centro de la capital hispalense hasta el barrio de la Macarena, sigue el curso del Guadalquivir, recala en Casa Robles (...) y termina frente a la Maestranza. En última instancia, no se hace sino poner en perspectiva o situación algunas meditaciones magistralmente escritas por Ortega y tirar del hilo. Con ello actualizamos dos claves orteguianas que consideramos fundamentales: la concepción de la vida como diálogo con el contorno y la condición dramática del pensar. (shrink)

The challenges facing us today require practical wisdom to allow us to react appropriately. In this paper, we argue that at a group level, we will make better decisions if we respect and take into account the moral judgment of agents with diverse styles of cognition and moral reasoning. We show this by focusing on the example of autism, highlighting different strengths and weaknesses of moral reasoning found in autistic and non-autistic persons respectively.

: The aim of this essay is to analyze the notion of "loving, knowing ignorance," a type of "arrogant perception" that produces ignorance about women of color and their work at the same time that it proclaims to have both knowledge about and loving perception toward them. The first part discusses Marilyn Frye's accounts of "arrogant" as well as of "loving" perception and presents an explanation of "loving, knowing ignorance." The second part discusses the work of Audre Lorde, Elizabeth Spelman, (...) and María Lugones in their attempts to deal with the issue of arrogant perception within feminism, and examines how Lugones's notion of "'world'-traveling" may help us deal with "loving, knowing ignorance." Ultimately, the author suggests that we need to become aware of instances of "loving, knowing ignorance," especially if we are to stay true to Third Wave feminism's commitment to diversity. (shrink)

The sportive origin of the state -- Unity and diversity of Europe -- Man the technician -- History as a system.

The aim of this essay is to carry out an analysis of the multi-voiced, multi-cultural self discussed by Latina feminists in light of a Heideggerian phenomenological account of persons or "Existential Analytic." In so doing, it (a) points out similarities as well as differences between the Heideggerian description of the self and Latina feminists' phenomenological accounts of self, and (b) critically assesses María Lugones's important notion of "world-traveling." In the end, the essay defends the view of a "multiplicitous" self which (...) takes insights from Lugones's view of the self that "travels 'worlds'" and from other Latina feminists' accounts of self as well as from Martin Heidegger's account of Dasein. (shrink)

El artículo reflexiona teóricamente sobre cómo a través del prisma de una experiencia históricamente desgarradora como fue la Gran Guerra (1914–1918) el sociólogo y filósofo Maurice Halbwachs (1877-1945) y el literato y biógrafo Stefan Zweig (1881-1942), recrean algunos de los dispositivos centrales al estudio social y filosófico de la memoria: el olvido, el silencio y el recuerdo. El texto revisa, en esa dirección, algunos de los aportes filosóficos, sociológicos y literarios de dos de los textos principales de estos autores: Los (...) marcos sociales de la memoria y El mundo de ayer. Memorias de un europeo. A lo largo del artículo se muestra que el objetivo de dicha revisión no es inventariar con exactitud lo propuesto por ambos autores alrededor de la memoria. Más bien, buscamos recrear como sus visiones sobre la memoria de la Gran Guerra resultan seductoras en su momento y de mucha actualidad hoy en día no solo por lo que dicen sino también por lo que omiten sobre este gran acontecimiento disruptivo.AbstractThis article of theoretical reflection aims at showing how through the prism of a historically harrowing like the Great War (1914-1918), the sociologist and philosopher Maurice Halbwachs (1877-1945) and the writer and biographer Stefan Zweig (1881-1942), recreate some of the central devices to the social and philosophical study of memory: oblivion, silence and remembrance. The paper reviews some of the philosophical, sociological and literary contributions of two major works by these authors: Social Frames of Memory, and the World of Yesterday. Memoirs of a European. Throughout the article I show that the views of these two authors about the memory of the Great War are seductive in their time and very current today not only for what they say but for what they omit about this great disruptive event. (shrink)

Se pretende en este artículo, desde la revisión de los llamados textos éticopolíticos de I. Kant, aventurar a lo largo de tres rutas temáticas la comprensión de los posibles cruces entre política y ética. Para ello, en primer término se aborda el problema de la libertad como condición de posibilidad no sólo de la moral sino de la política. Seguidamente se enfoca la discusión al enfrentamiento de Kant con el realismo político y su defensa de la emancipación político - moral (...) de los hombres. Finalmente la reflexión conduce a la comprensión del cruce entre política y moral bajo la tutela de una óptica política del derecho denominada por Kant Republicanismo. (shrink)

In this paper, I address the question whether mental disorders should be understood to be brain disorders and what conditions need to be met for a disorder to be rightly described as a brain disorder. I defend the view that mental disorders are autonomous and that a condition can be a mental disorder without at the same time being a brain disorder. I then show the consequences of this view. The most important of these is that brain differences underlying mental (...) disorders derive their status as disordered from the fact that they realize mental dysfunction and are therefore non-autonomous or dependent on the level of the mental. I defend this view of brain disorders against the objection that only conditions whose pathological character can be identified independently of the mental level of description count as brain disorders. The understanding of brain disorders I propose requires a certain amount of conceptual revision and is at odds with approaches which take the notion of brain disorder to be fundamental or look to neuroscience to provide us with a purely physiological understanding of mental illness. It also entails a pluralistic understanding of psychiatric illness, according to which a condition can be both a mental disorder and a brain disorder. (shrink)

What is the norm of Americanness today, how has it changed, and how pluralistic is it in reality? from the Introduction In this volume philosophers and social ...

6 volumenes: 1. Meditaciones del Quijote, I. 3a ed. 2. Personas, obras, cosas. 2a ed. 3. España invertebrada. 4-6. El espectador. t. 1-3. 2a ed.

Es ist klar, dass jede Gemeinschaft bereits Organisation ist und der Mensch ist, ob er will oder nicht, Glied einer Gesellschaft und leistet in ihr Dienste. Jedoch: wenn ein Volk sich die Organisation seines Kollektivlebens als Hauptaufgabe stellt, so tut es das um den Preis der Individualität seiner Mitglieder. Es stellt sich heraus, dass Organisation im Allgemeinen das individuelle Leben der Menschen ausschaltet; man verlangt von dem Menschen, dass er aufhört, Individuum zu sein. Organisation entmenschlicht in gewissem Sinne den Menschen; (...) das Amt ist eine Rolle, eine "Maske". Der Verfasser erörtert dann das schwere Problem der Gegenwart: ob oder in welchem Masse das Kollektive menschlich ist und ob Gemeinschaft, Gesellschaft, Staat allzu abstrakte Dinge sind, als dass wir sie jederzeit gegenwärtig haben könnten. Er behandelt ferner die Frage: ist eine 'Gemeinschaft' von Individuen nicht eine Gemeinschaft von 'Individuen', das heisst von Menschen, individuellen Existenzen? Und wenn diese herunterkommen, ist es nicht klar, dass dann auch die Gemeinschaft herunterkommt? Die bis jetzt ziemlich romantische Frage, ob man sich für die kollektivistischen oder für die individualistischen Theorien zu entscheiden gedenkt, nimmt so eine neue und und spannende Gestalt an, ob nämlich die gegenwärtigen Gesellschaften nicht an sich von kollektiver Verfassung sind und, ihrer eigenen Schwerkraft überlassen, das persönliche Leben schliesslich ersticken und zu menschlichen Ameisenhaufen werden lassen müssen. Im Laufe des 19. Jahrhunderts machte man den Versuch einer Analyse der Gesellschaft und begann ein Buch unter dem Titel 'Soziologie; aber es kam nicht über die ersten Zeilen hinaus; wahrscheinlich glich die neue Wissenschaft nicht genügend der Physik. Und dank diesem Umstand befinden wir uns heute in einer Lage in der es von höchster Dringlichkeit wäre, klare Vorstellungen davon zu haben, was das Soziale oder was ein Kollektivum ist und in welcher Beziehung es zu dem Menschen steht. Ortega y Gasset schlägt schliesslich eine Rundfrage vor um mit aller Strenge die Vorstellungen festzustellen zu suchen, welche die einflussreichsten Männer des Erdballes mit Vokabeln wie 'Gesellschaft', 'Kollektivität', 'Masse', 'Brauch', 'öffentliche Meinung', 'menschliches Individuum', 'Revolution', 'Staat' u.s.w. verbinden. Das Ergebnis wäre niederschmetternd, besonders wenn man die urweltliche Grobheit dieser Ideen dann mit der Präzision der naturwissenschaftlichen Begriffsbildung vergleicht. Die wirtschaftliche Krise hat ausserdem die Unzulänglichkeit der Nationalökonomie blossgelegt. Der Verfasser vermutet, die Mangelhaftigkeit der herkömmlichen Wirtschaftslehre möchte vielleicht daher rühren, dass sie eine soziale Spezialwissenschaft ist, deren Fundamente in der Luft hängen, solange es keine soziologische Grundwissenschaft gibt; genau wie keine gute Optik oder Akustik möglich ist, wenn man keine gute Mechanik hat. (shrink)

"This concise, elegant essay on the roots and historical justification of philosophy marks a decisive step in posing the problem of what philosophy is. With consummate clarity and the charisma that distinguished him as a lecturer, Jos Ortega y Gasset re-creates ""that moment when Parmenides began talking about something exceptionally strange, which he called 'being.'"" How and why, he asks, did such a surprising adventure come about?Considering the human qualities that prompt a curiosity about existence and eternity, Ortega (...) examines philosophy's etymology, its connection to poetry, and its differentiation from religion and other modes of thought. He lucidly delineates radical differences of doctrine and style among early Greek thinkers, especially the ""madman of reason"" Parmenides and the ""absolute individual"" Heraclitus. He also considers philosophy's fundamental task of revealing the latent world poised behind the manifest world and discovering the relations between them.""Unable to find lodging among the philosophies of the past,"" Ortega observes, ""we have no choice but to attempt to construct one of our own."" The Origin of Philosophy argues for the vital importance of philosophy as a human endeavor, even while noting that each generation of thought reveals the past as ""a defunct world of errors.""". (shrink)

Este trabalho tem como foco a filosofia de Schopenhauer em comparação com a proposta salvífica do cristianismo. Os grandes filósofos metafísicos que precederam Schopenhauer identificaram o objetivo maior do espírito com a realização de sua plenitude. Esta é indicada, paralelamente, no campo religioso, a partir da aproximação do homem com Deus. A novidade que este texto pretende apontar é que, diferentemente da tradição filosófica e religiosa do Ocidente, Schopenhauer realizou em sua metafísica um caminho para o espírito humano no qual (...) a sua “libertação” não coincide com a plenitude do espírito. Para este filósofo a libertação é atingida a partir de uma ascese radical, na medida em que propõe a mortificação/ aniquilação do ser como um todo. É um caminho que passa pela busca da nulidade da Vontade, visando sua suprema aniquilação. (shrink)

People hold wildly opposing and very strong views on the question whether mental disorders are brain disorders, and the disagreement is primarily a conceptual one, not one about whether there are,...

Translation of "Unas lecciones de metafísica," based on a course given at the University of Madrid in 1932-1933, and published by Revista de Occidente in 1966.

The question of whether psychopaths are criminally and morally responsible has generated significant controversy in the literature. In this paper, we discuss what relevance a psychopathy diagnosis has for criminal responsibility. It has been argued that figuring out whether psychopathy is a mental illness is of fundamental importance, because it is a precondition for psychopaths’ eligibility to be excused via the legal insanity defense. But even if psychopathy counts as a mental illness, this alone is not sufficient to show the (...) insanity defense is applicable; it must also be shown that, as a result of the illness, specific deficits in moral understanding or control are present. In this paper, we show that a diagnosis of psychopathy will generally not indicate that a defendant is eligible for an insanity defense. This is because the group of individuals subsumed under the diagnosis is so heterogeneous that while some psychopaths do show significant impairments in affect and control which may impact on their responsibility, many psychopaths are not incapacitated in a way relevant to responsibility. (shrink)

Based on the concept of interactional competence, our study analyzes how learners of Spanish as a foreign language in a B2 level manage repair in oral interaction in language classrooms. We understand repair as “the treatment of trouble in talk-in-interaction”. A corpus of eleven interactions between students in the classroom is analyzed through the perspective of Conversation Analysis. The interactions were collected in different kinds of tasks in the language classroom. In our analysis we compare interactions produced in practice activities (...) and interactions collected during assessment. The findings in this study show a tendency to manage repair in classroom oral interaction as it would be done in normal conversation. Regarding the different contexts of our corpus, we observe that, in interactions produced in assessment contexts, speakers try to protect their interlocutor’s face and their own face by avoiding to make repairs. (shrink)

Abstract:Jessica Elkayam asks Mariana Ortega about the influence both Latina feminisms and Martin Heidegger have had on the development of Ortega's mestiza theory.

Religious identity has, in recent times, become an important point of inquiry because of the growing awareness of religious diversity. On the one hand, this reality of diversity has served as an impetus to return to the roots of one’s religion. On the other hand, others have called for a more pluralist stance, out of the need to open up to other traditions. In light of this polarity, I argue that one can commit to one’s religion while opening up to (...) the religious other in a way that does not threaten one’s own tradition. This is done through a hermeneutic analysis of the religious identity, taking off from Paul Ricoeur’s phenomenological hermeneutics – how this identity is formed and informed by the different significations of meaning within the tradition, and how the believer interacts with this tradition to construct his or her own narrative identity, through his or her imagination, mapping out the constellations of possible human action that root themselves in the necessity in encountering and working with the religious other, for this necessity is constitutive of one’s commitment to the tradition, embodied in the biblical narratives that call for this encounter. In sum, it is possible to be committed to one’s faith conviction while being hospitable to the religious other because it is constitutive of religion itself to encounter its other, and it is in this encounter that faith is truly understood as conviction. (shrink)