We show a sentence and modal square of opposition and equivalence to be expanded into an hexagon according to oe suggestion from William of Sherwood. This expansión is permittedby two sentence and modal rules.The logical relations of the square allow us to formulate several theorems in order to show a glimpse of the Medieval Logic complexity.

We examine the "Theaetetus" in the light of its juxtaposition of philosophical, mathematical and sophistical approaches to knowledge, which we show to be a prominent feature of the drama. We suggest that clarifying the nature of philosophy supersedes the question of knowledge as the main ambition of the "Theaetetus". Socrates shows Theaetetus that philosophy is not a demonstrative science, like geometry, but it is also not mere word-play, like sophistry. The nature of philosophy is revealed in Socrates' activity of examination (...) and his refusal to deny his ignorance about knowledge. (shrink)

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

Following the proposal of a new kind of selective structural realism that uses as a basis the distinction between framework and interaction theories, this work discusses relevant applications in fundamental physics. An ontology for the different entities and properties of well-known theories is thus consistently built. The case of classical field theories—including general relativity as a classical theory of gravitation—is examined in detail, as well as the implications of the classification scheme for issues of realism in quantum mechanics. These applications (...) also shed light on the different range of applicability of the ontic and epistemic versions of structural realism. (shrink)

Processing data streams arriving at high speed requires the development of models that can provide fast and accurate predictions. Although deep neural networks are the state-of-the-art for many machine learning tasks, their performance in real-time data streaming scenarios is a research area that has not yet been fully addressed. Nevertheless, much effort has been put into the adaption of complex deep learning (DL) models to streaming tasks by reducing the processing time. The design of the asynchronous dual-pipeline DL framework allows (...) making predictions of incoming instances and updating the model simultaneously, using two separate layers. The aim of this work is to assess the performance of different types of DL architectures for data streaming classification using this framework. We evaluate models such as multi-layer perceptrons, recurrent, convolutional and temporal convolutional neural networks over several time series datasets that are simulated as streams at different speeds. In addition, we evaluate how the different architectures react to concept drifts typically found in evolving data streams. The obtained results indicate that convolutional architectures achieve a higher performance in terms of accuracy and efficiency, but are also the most sensitive to concept drifts. (shrink)

En este artículo se realiza una semblanza general del pensador colombiano Darío Botero Uribe, en especial, sobre sus ideas en torno al pensamiento latinoamericano. En este sentido, se aborda el problema de la particularidad y la universalidad del pensamiento, la crítica de la modernización y el colonialismo intelectual, el problema de la cultura y de su puesto en la filosofía latinoamericana y colombiana, a la vez que establece una relación con la problemática del mestizaje indoamericano.

Aesthetics presents a confusing domain for a philosopher. Its territory seems like an Empedoclean cosmos: a ceaselessly dynamic interchange of mixtures, at times resisting division, at times fracturing into an incomprehensible manifold. There may be no truth in aesthetics at all. Perhaps there is not even much truth about it. Some think of aesthetics primarily as a cultural or political phenomenon, others manage to reduce it to history (indeed, to a history that is over, and therefore safe). Still others investigate (...) it from the points of view of psychology, physiology, religion, technology, or morality. These are just a few of the innumerable “discourses” of aesthetics. Within a narrow focus some of these discourses appear to be meaningful, but this appearance owes much to the artificial and conditioned structure of the conversation. When viewed from the outside, the discourses of aesthetics often appear to be little more than babble. The hypothesis that they might someday converge on a perfectly general aesthetics seems implausible, even for arts and art histories of a more or less continuous, singular culture. (shrink)

Benito Jerónimo Feijoo (1676-1764) fue uno de los autores que, a partir del siglo XVI, formularon críticas a la enseñanza de la lógica clásica. En el presente artículo se examinan varios de los argumentos esgrimidos por Feijoo contra la lógica tradicional; algunos de estos se explican mejor al revisar la obra del pensador Novohispano Tomás de Mercado (15?-1575). Se resaltan los planteamientos de Feijoo que son afines o pertinentes a las críticas actuales a la lógica.

El presente artículo expone, de manera general, ciertos aspectos de la clasificación de oraciones realizada por varios autores en la edad media y más tarde en el autor novohispano Tomás de Mercado.

Philosophy and Literature is an internationally renowned refereed journal founded by Denis Dutton at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch. It is now published by the Johns Hopkins University Press. Since its inception in 1976, Philosophy and Literature has been concerned with the relation between literary and philosophical studies, publishing articles on the philosophical interpretation of literature as well as the literary treatment of philosophy. Philosophy and Literature has sometimes been regarded as iconoclastic, in the sense that it repudiates academic pretensions, (...) insidious jargon and institutional vogue. Dutton, who remains the editor, still writes a regular column. A distinctive feature of Philosophy and Literature was the annual Bad Writing Contest, held from 1995–98, which sought to identify (and publish) the ‘most stylistically lamentable passages’ of academic prose, often to great amusement. (shrink)

I present some ideas from medieval thinkers concerning sentences which subject term has no reference and as kif those sentences can admit truth values. I present the ideas of William of Ockham, Jean Buridan and Albert of Saxony, from the nominalist side, and Vicente Ferrer exposing the moderate realism. Then we present two New Spain thinkers, Alonso de la Veracruz and Tomas de Mercado.

La igualdad entre hombres y mujeres no será plena mientras que no transformemos el orden patriarcal que sigue sustentando una diferenciación jerárquica entre unos y otras. Ello pasa por revisar la masculinidad tradicional y la racionalidad construida a imagen y semejanza del varón. Un reto que supone a su vez transformar las relaciones entre lo público y lo privado, así como las bases del conocimiento y de una concepción de lo humano basada en los privilegios masculinos y en la negación (...) de la diversidad.Equality will not be full if we don’t transform the patriarchal order that continues to support a hierarchical differentiation between men and women. This calls for reviewing the traditional masculinity and the rationality constructed in the image and the likeness of the male. A challenge which in turn means to transform the relationship between public and private, and the basis of knowledge and a conception of humanity based on male privilege and the denial of diversity. (shrink)

In this chapter, I focus on the faculties by which we gain knowledge, namely, sensibility and the understanding, as well as on the methodological framework within which Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz examines them. I stress the importance that the author gives to sensibility and the physiological apparatus that grounds and explains sensation.With respect to her conception of understanding, I will show that it is both the sign of man’s filiation with God and a faculty that displays deficiencies and (...) limitations with respect to the difficult task of attaining knowledge.Finally, I examine Sor Juana’s criticism both of the Neoplatonic method, which looks for a vision of the universe as a whole, as well as of the deductive method of the Aristotelian- Scholastic tradition, which attempts to reduce the unmanageable diversity of beings to some specific characteristics and laws.My conclusion is that Sor Juana shares with modern philosophers the critical attitude against tradition; she holds that traditional methods do not enable us to reach knowledge about either the remotest causes or the closest effects. On my view, Sor Juana takes an epistemological approach to philosophy, as do Bacon and Descartes, but she does not propose a new method; this is not because of some radical skepticism on her part, but because of the enormity of the task of the human mind achieving complete knowledge. (shrink)

In Republic VI 508e-9b Plato has Socrates claim that the Good is the cause (αίτίαν) of truth and knowledge as well as the very being of the Forms. Consequently, as causes must be distinct from and superior to their effects, the Good is neither truth nor knowledge nor even being, but exceeds them all in beauty (509a), as well as in honour and power (509b). No other passage in Plato has had a more intoxicating effect on its readers. To take (...) just one example, James Adam was moved to quote St. Paul when he remarked about this passage that, 'it is highly characteristic of Plato's whole attitude that he finds the true keystone of the Universe — the ultimate fountain from which both Knowledge and Existence flow — in no cold and colourless ontological abstraction, like Being, but in that for which "all creation groans and labours". (shrink)

These essays discuss Plato's dialogues understood as processes of habituation and discuss issues of moral expertise, moral training, moral knowledge, and the transcendent good. The essays considered include Crito, Charmides, Phaedo, Philebus, Republic, and Sophist.

Many Christian thinkers have embraced the notion “art for art’s sake.” Chesterton did not. To the contrary, he saw such an idea as deeply problematic for a Christian aesthetic. In the following article, I will explore some philosophical aspects of the “art for art’s sake” movement and then explain why Chesterton parted company with it.

Ontic structural realism constitutes a promising take on scientific realism, one that avoids the well‐known issues that realist stances have with underdetermination and theory change. In its most radical versions, ontic structural realism proposes a type of eliminativism about theoretical entities, ascribing ontological commitment only to the structures, and not to the objects appearing in our theories. More moderate versions of ontic structural realism have also been proposed, allowing for ‘thin’ objects in the ontology. This work connects these takes on (...) structural realism with the independent notion that there are two categorically different kinds of scientific theories, namely those that deal with interactions and those that deal with structural constraints – what are known as interaction and framework theories, respectively. By taking this classification seriously, one can arrive at a selective version of ontic structural realism which is better adapted to our scientific knowledge, in which eliminativist ontic structural realism constitutes a natural fit to framework theories, whereas the moderate version is connected to interaction theories. (shrink)

The objectives of the present study were to adapt a grief intervention program to family caregivers of patients with dementia, and assess its effectiveness in improving the symptoms of grief and other health-related variables. The intervention was based on Shear and Bloom's grief intervention program, with the necessary adaptations for use in the grieving process for a family member's illness. A total of 52 family caregivers of individuals with dementia participated. They were evaluated using a battery of self-report measures assessing (...) grief, overload, resilience, post-traumatic growth, experiential avoidance, health-related quality of life, and benefits of care. The results suggest that the program is effective in improving grief symptoms, caregiver burden, resilience, post-traumatic growth, and quality of life of family caregivers. It is necessary to create and implement interventions targeting caregivers' feelings and manifestations of ambiguous grief, because there is a lack of programs providing an efficient solution for the mental and physical health of caregivers, and because of the human and socioeconomic cost involved in neglecting this group. (shrink)

This study consists of a series of essays on the metaphysics and epistemology of Plato's Philebus. My chief aim is to determine to what extent Plato maintains the theory of Forms in that dialogue. Because it is generally thought to be a late dialogue, the Philebus is a key to setting a long-standing debate about Plato's philosophical development. Scholars disagree on whether the theory of Forms is maintained in Plato's late dialogues. Most recent interpretations of the Philebus claim that it (...) is incompatible with the theory of Forms. My study shows, however, that the Philebus reaffirms the ontological and epistemological claims of that theory. To secure my thesis I make extensive comparisons with Plato's middle dialogues, particularly the Phaedo, Symposium, Phaedrus, Republic, and Cratylus. This sort of comparison is crucial because Plato's actual descriptions of Forms differ in significant ways from standard accounts of his theory. I show that the distinctions between being and becoming and between knowledge and opinion, which were essential to the theory of Forms in the middle dialogues, are reaffirmed in the Philebus. As in the middle dialogues, Forms in the Philebus are the prime bearers of the attributes their names describe. Forms are logical causes of the attributes of sensibles, and each Form is a unit having many sensible participants. Plato's reaffirmation of the essential features of the theory of Forms in the Philebus shows that he did not substantially revise that theory in dialogues after the Parmenides. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 6, June 2022.

In this article, after some thoughts on medieval logic and teaching, we present Thomas Murner’s text, Logica memorativa, showing some of his mnemonic strategies for the student to learn logic quickly. Murner offers a type of “flash cards” that illustrate much of the teaching of logic at the beginning of the sixteenth century. The first impression is visual, because the cards do not contain words that illustrate their content. Murner’s exposition rests on analogies between logic themes that are explained and (...) the visual images presented. (shrink)

Francisco Suárez se inserta en la línea de los escolásticos españoles del siglo XVI, especialmente de los dos jesuitas que, junto con él, culminan esta escuela: Gabriel Vázquez de Belmonte y Luis de Molina. Se diferencia de ellos en que él es nominalista. Se adelantó a los autores de la Edad Moderna en la carrera por las libertades típicamente modernas, tales como la afirmación de los derechos subjetivos naturales, la democracia como la forma más natural o más próxima a la (...) libertad del hombre, la libertad de conciencia (no de cultos). Estuvo omnipresente en los escolásticos de las Edades Modernas y Contemporánea que, de hecho, entendieron que él culminó la escolástica, de forma tal que también Tomás de Aquino debe ser interpretado a la luz de sus escritos. (shrink)

I describe an octagon of opposition and equivalence developed by fourteenth-century logicians, in particular by Jean Buridan in his Summulae de dialectica. This «square» of opposition displays complex logical relations, one of which is not found in the traditional square of opposition. The octagon allows expression of three kinds of sentences: quantified modal sentences, oblique sentences, and sentences with quantified predicates. The octagon shows that medieval logicians were working with a logic of relations, an identity logic, and a modal logic (...) not unlike the logic of our own day. (shrink)

May I be permitted to chat a little, by way of recreation, at the end of a somewhat toilsome and perhaps fruitless adventure?”1 So begins the introduction to Robert Browning’s “transcription,” as he entitles it, of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, in which the principles of literal translation are discussed and defended.2 As one who has recently been on the same adventure as Robert Browning, I wonder whether it is not salutary to review his arguments, for I have come to believe firmly that (...) the path he took was fruitless, or very nearly so. Yet of the many translators, stretching into the most recent times, who have provided us with literal renditions of ancient Greek texts, he at least offered an apology for it, and a better one, in my view, than any I have seen. I want to try, by reviewing Browning’s arguments, to shed some light on why his adventure of translation was barren, and in the process state some precautions for the translation of ancient Greek literature. I am not sure whether these precautions apply to the philosophy of translation in general, for the differences between two languages vary greatly with time and place; nevertheless, the review may be of some general help. (shrink)

One of the most important contributions of Einstein to the philosophy of science is the distinction between two types of scientific theories: ‘principle’ and ‘constructive’ theories. More recently, Flores proposed a more general distinction, classifying scientific theories by their functional role into ‘framework’ and ‘interaction’ theories, attempting to solve some inadequacies in Einstein’s proposal. Here, based on an epistemic criterion, we present a generalised distinction which is an improvement over Flores approach. In this work (i) we evaluate the shortcomings related (...) to Flores’s proposal, (ii) we present an epistemological criterion that opens the door for a more general classification of any scientific theory in all of the natural science into two distinct groups, which we call ‘mechanistic theories’ and ‘structural theories’, and (iii) we show that such a criterion is connected to Flores’ proposal while overcoming issues of all previous approaches. (shrink)

We re-examine the geometry lesson in the Meno, focusing on the interaction between interlocutors in the practice of recollection. We appeal to an analogy with interactive memory to suggest how Plato could think that inquiry could be successful even when participants have no awareness of what would satisfy their inquiry. This exposes a feature of recollection that needs no metaphysical assumptions, and which emphasises interaction. This feature, which has escaped the notice of philosophers, is more fundamental to the Meno than (...) a theory of innate ideas. Such a theory may be superimposed on the view about interactive memory we describe for the Meno, but to focus on Plato’s epistemological theory without first understanding what he has to say about the social dimensions of memory is putting the cart before the horse. (shrink)

There is a research programme in linguistics that is founded on describing language as an emergent phenomenon. This paper clarifies how the core concept of emergence is deployed in this emergentist programme. We show that if one adopts the weak understandings of the concept of language emergence, the emergentist programme is not fundamentally different from the other non-emergentist research programmes in linguistics. On the other hand, if one adopts the stronger understandings of emergence then the programme would have a unique (...) character, but at the cost of some corollaries (philosophical, but not only) which the emergentist linguists would seemingly want to avoid. We show that if the emergentists accept those corollaries, the resulting hypothetical emergentist programme would be totally different from the emergentist programme in its present shape. We conclude that the emergentist programme, as it stands, should be either abandoned or reshaped in both theory and methodology. (shrink)

This is a critical review of Manuel García-Carpintero's "Las palabras, las ideas y las cosas".

Recent advances in genetics and neurobiology have greatly increased the degree of variation that one finds in what is taken to provide the biological foundations of our species-specific linguistic capacities. In particular, this variation seems to cast doubt on the purportedly homogeneous nature of the language faculty traditionally captured by the concept of “Universal Grammar.” In this article we discuss what this new source of diversity reveals about the biological reality underlying Universal Grammar. Our discussion leads us to support (1) (...) certain hypotheses advanced in evolutionary developmental biology that argue for the existence of robust biological mechanisms capable of canalizing variation at different levels, and (2) a bottom-up perspective on comparative cognition. We conclude by sketching future directions for what we call “comparative biolinguistics,” specifying which experimental directions may help us succeed in this new research avenue. (shrink)

Together with language, music is perhaps the most distinctive behavioral trait of the human species. Different hypotheses have been proposed to explain why only humans perform music and how this ability might have evolved in our species. In this paper, we advance a new model of music evolution that builds on the self-domestication view of human evolution, according to which the human phenotype is, at least in part, the outcome of a process similar to domestication in other mammals, triggered by (...) the reduction in reactive aggression responses to environmental changes. We specifically argue that self-domestication can account for some of the cognitive changes, and particularly for the behaviors conducive to the complexification of music through a cultural mechanism. We hypothesize four stages in the evolution of music under self-domestication forces: (1) collective protomusic; (2) private, timbre-oriented music; (3) small-group, pitch-oriented music; and (4) collective, tonally organized music. This line of development encompasses the worldwide diversity of music types and genres and parallels what has been hypothesized for languages. Overall, music diversity might have emerged in a gradual fashion under the effects of the enhanced cultural niche construction as shaped by the progressive decrease in reactive (i.e., impulsive, triggered by fear or anger) aggression and the increase in proactive (i.e., premeditated, goal-directed) aggression. (shrink)

Este trabajo explora las representaciones de las mujeres en una selección de manuales escolares empleados en las escuelas paraguayas durante el período 1989-2020, con el objetivo de analizar el papel histórico atribuido a las mujeres en los relatos escolares acerca de la Guerra de la Triple Alianza. Se sostiene que a pesar del proceso de revisión del currículo escolar y la política educativa iniciado con la transición democrática en 1989 persisten las representaciones hegemónicas de las mujeres ligadas al nacionalismo, afianzando (...) los roles tradicionales de género en el marco de una sociedad patriarcal. (shrink)

Many of Plato’s dialogues explicitly discuss matters that today fall under the umbrella of aesthetics. Literary criticism occupies a prominent place in the Ion, Menexenus, Symposium, Republic, Phaedrus and Laws . Arguments about the standard of aesthetic judgement occupy most of the Hippias Major , as well as portions of the Smp. and the second book of theLg. Some dialogues even venture into territory that we might describe as ‘pure aesthetics’, in that they dis-cuss specific perceptible properties of form, colour (...) or sound (Hp. Ma. 298 ff.;Philebus 51c), the manner by which art objects appear as they do to spectators (Sophist 236a), the characteristics of an artwork purely in terms of art (Lg. 667d) or the ontological status of art objects ( R. 596a ff.). A few dialogues inci-dentally discuss painting, sculpture or music (narrowly construed), by way of illustrat-ing a more general topic (R. 472d ff.;Phlb. 17d;Critias 107b), and some dialogues, such as theGorgias andTimaeus , delineate or at least prominently display the aims, condi-tions and principles of art (technê , q.v.). Thus it can be said that aesthetic themes are prom-inent throughout the works of Plato. There are two dimensions of Plato’s aesthetics, however, that are arguably more fundamen-tal to his philosophy than any of the specific themes just mentioned. They are the dimen-sions ofmimêsis (q.v.), or representation, and the dimension ofmousikê , or ‘music’ in the broad sense that includes all the arts (q.v. music). When these are taken into con-sideration it becomes plain that aesthetics is not just prominent in, but central to Plato’s thought. (shrink)

As proposed for the emergence of modern languages, we argue that modern uses of languages (pragmatics) also evolved gradually in our species under the effects of human self‐domestication, with three key aspects involved in a complex feedback loop: (a) a reduction in reactive aggression, (b) the sophistication of language structure (with emerging grammars initially facilitating the transition from physical aggression to verbal aggression); and (c) the potentiation of pragmatic principles governing conversation, including, but not limited to, turn‐taking and inferential abilities. (...) Our core hypothesis is that the reduction in reactive aggression, one of the key factors in self‐domestication processes, enabled us to fully exploit our cognitive and interactional potential as applied to linguistic exchanges, and ultimately to evolve a specific form of communication governed by persuasive reciprocity—a trait of human conversation characterized by both competition and cooperation. In turn, both early crude forms of language, well suited for verbal aggression/insult, and later more sophisticated forms of language, well suited for persuasive reciprocity, significantly contributed to the resolution and reduction of (physical) aggression, thus having a return effect on the self‐domestication processes. Supporting evidence for our proposal, as well as grounds for further testing, comes mainly from the consideration of cognitive disorders, which typically simultaneously present abnormal features of self‐domestication (including aggressive behavior) and problems with pragmatics and social functioning. While various approaches to language evolution typically reduce it to a single factor, our approach considers language evolution as a multifactorial process, with each player acting upon the other, engaging in an intense mutually reinforcing feedback loop. Moreover, we see language evolution as a gradual process, continuous with the pre‐linguistic cognitive abilities, which were engaged in a positive feedback loop with linguistic innovations, and where gene‐culture co‐evolution and cultural niche construction were the main driving forces. (shrink)