In this article, the authors examine the systemic nature of state violence and racial terror in the context of the Australian settler state and Indigenous deaths in custody. Drawing on Steve Martinot and Jared Sexton’s (2003) concept of a “double economy of terror,” the authors contend that police violence and Aboriginal deaths in custody must be read in terms of the standard operating procedures of a double economy of terror that ensures the institutional reproduction of the Australian settler colonial state. (...) Death in police custody, Perera and Pugliese argue, is coextensive with the larger governmental and administrative apparatuses of the colonial state. In the face of the settler state’s systemic ignorability of the ongoing racialized violence against Indigenous peoples, the authors conclude their paper opposing such a state with an Indigenous voice that refuses tacit acquiescence and that howls with rage at the mounting Aboriginal deaths in custody and rates of Indigenous imprisonment. (shrink)

Joaquín M. Fuster is an eminent cognitive neuroscientist whose research over the last five decades has made fundamental contributions to our understanding of the neural structures underlying cognition and behaviour. This book provides his view on the eternal question of whether we have free will. Based on his seminal work on the functions of the prefrontal cortex in decision-making, planning, creativity, working memory, and language, Professor Fuster argues that the liberty or freedom to choose between alternatives is a function (...) of the cerebral cortex, under prefrontal control, in its reciprocal interaction with the environment. Freedom is therefore inseparable from that circular relationship. The Neuroscience of Freedom and Creativity is a fascinating inquiry into the cerebral foundation of our ability to choose between alternative actions and to freely lead creative plans to their goal. (shrink)

Animals navigate through three-dimensional environments, but we argue that the way they encode three-dimensional spatial information is shaped by how they use the vertical component of space. We agree with Jeffery et al. that the representation of three-dimensional space in vertebrates is probably bicoded (with separation of the plane of locomotion and its orthogonal axis), but we believe that their suggestion that the vertical axis is stored (that is, not containing distance or direction metrics usable for novel computations) is unlikely, (...) and as yet unsupported. We describe potential experimental protocols that could clarify these differences in opinion empirically. (shrink)

En las siguientes páginas presentamos el resultado de una propuesta didáctica implementada en el Grado en Maestro en Educación Primaria de la Escuela Universitaria de Magisterio de Zamora (Universidad de Salamanca). Se realizó una secuencia didáctica interdisciplinar, fundamentada en el aprendizaje guiado y el trabajo cooperativo gracias al recurso del itinerario didáctico. Siguiendo lo propuesto por Vigotsky y Bruner, hemos aspirado el desarrollo de un aprendizaje espontáneo y cotidiano mediante la utilización del entorno cercano de los docentes y de los (...) discentes -así como su pasado histórico-, favoreciéndose la adquisición de un pensamiento crítico e individual. (shrink)

The use of new paradigms of false belief tasks (FBT) allowed to reduce the age of children who pass the test from the previous 4 years in the standard version to only 15 months or even a striking 6 months in the nonverbal modification. These results are often taken as evidence that infants already possess an—at least implicit—theory of mind (ToM). We criticize this inferential leap on the grounds that inferring a ToM from the predictive success on a false belief (...) task requires to assume as premise that a belief reasoning is a necessary condition for correct action prediction. It is argued that the FBT does not satisfactorily constrain the predictive means, leaving room for the use of belief-independent inferences (that can rely on the attribution of non-representational mental states or the consideration of behavioral patterns that dispense any reference to other minds). These heuristics, when applied to the FBT, can achieve the same predictive success of a belief-based inference because information provided by the test stimulus allows the recognition of particular situations that can be subsumed by their ‘laws’. Instead of solving this issue by designing a single experimentum crucis that would render unfeasible the use of non-representational inferences, we suggest the application of a set of tests in which, although individually they can support inferences dissociated from a ToM, only an inference that makes use of false beliefs is able to correctly predict all the outcomes. (shrink)

This essay considers the challenges that the gendered and raced transnational subaltern refugee subject poses to the order of ‘the liberal state’ and ‘the liberal subject’, and argues that the latter are bound up in complex ways with entrenched understandings of the ocean as elementally distinct from land. This distinction, constituted by the freedom of the sea-going individualist liberal subject, invariably raced as white and gendered as male, to range across the waves in search of new worlds to conquer, is (...) one that is continually reproduced both in popular culture's contemporary sea romances, and in the spatial and legal demarcations of the nation and its limits. In the diverse forms of traffic flowing from south to north, the historical oceanic mobility of this unfettered liberal subject (always shadowed and weighted down by its invisible freight of non-white bodies) now meets the transversal movements of the contemporary transnational subaltern as complex subject. Through the narratives of two refugees to Australia, the article traces the possibilities of an embodied refugee poetics for inscribing new geographies across the global borderlands. (shrink)

In this paper, I offer a reconstruction of Wittgenstein's view of the happy life by sketching out three interconnected themes in his early works. The first theme is the distinction between a science of ethics and the ethical. The second is the idea of the willing subject. And finally, the third is the possibility of the happy life.

I propose that a scientific account of perceptual consciousness decomposes into two sub-problems: the conceptual problem of reframing our internal, first-personal perspective in external, thirdpersonal terms, and the scientific one of providing a theory that accounts for the phenomenon reframed in this way. In this paper I consider both aspects of the problem, drawing on the ideas of Dennett and Metzinger. For the first part, I use Dennett's method of heterophenomenology to argue that perceptual experience should be understood as a (...) structured space of possible behaviours. On this view, each phenomenal 'detail' that we consciously apprehend is not quintessentially private, but rather a reflexive affordance: an opportunity to behave, perhaps covertly, about how the world looks, sounds, or feels from our perceptual vantage point. I then present a novel argument in favour of a higher-order, self-representationalist account of this aspect of our phenotype, along the lines of Metzinger's phenomenal model of the intentionality relation. I conclude with the suggestion that a conscious organism has a design which is distinctly Cartesian in flavour: a self-simulating agent able to observe itself perceiving. (shrink)

We examined the subjective experiences of young environmentalists who engage in green consumption practices from the theoretical lens of Warde’s :131–153, 2005) practice theory. Data were gathered through 21 photo-elicited, in-depth interviews with young environmentalists. Based on our findings, we postulated a theoretical framework to understand green consumption practices among our informants as a process with three interrelated phases: green credibility seeking, green procurement and prosumption, and green whispers. This inductive investigation revealed various symbolic meanings of green consumption that are (...) instrumental in effectively engaging in green consumption practice and are widely shared among our informants. Our investigation extends the existing literature on green consumption with an alternative theoretical perspective and provides managers with insights into the motivations and practices of green consumers. (shrink)

For the past three decades Sri Lanka was stalemated between governments that were not prepared to devolve power to the Tamil majority provinces and a Tamil militant movement that wanted a separate country. In February 2002, the Sri Lankan government and LTTE signed a ceasefire agreement under Norwegian government auspices that appeared to offer the real prospect of a final end to violence as a means of conflict resolution. The ceasefire between the government and the LTTE held for nearly four (...) years despite significant problems affecting the peace process, problems that led to the LTTE’s withdrawal from the peace talks. However, the ceasefire collapsed in early 2006 with a series of ambushes of government soldiers by the LTTE, eventually leading to counter measures and counter attacks by the forces of the government, measures in which the government wrested back control of territory placed under the control of the LTTE by the terms agreed upon by the Ceasefire Agreement. Today Sri Lanka is a country that continues to be deeply divided on lines of ethnicity, religion and politics. Horizontal inequalities, defined as severe inequalities in economic and political resources between culturally defined groups, were undoubtedly a contributing factor for the perpetuation of Sri Lanka’s long-running conflict. No sooner it won the war, the government asserted economic development to be the main engine of reconciliation. (shrink)

In order to fulfil their essential roles as the bearers of truth and the relata of logical relations, propositions must be public and shareable. That requirement has favoured Platonist and other nonmental views of them, despite the well-known problems of Platonism in general. Views that propositions are mental entities have correspondingly fallen out of favour, as they have difficulty in explaining how propositions could have shareable, objective properties. We revive a mentalist view of propositions, inspired by Artificial Intelligence work on (...) perceptual algorithms, which shows how perception causes persistent mental entities with shareable properties that allow them to fulfil the traditional roles of (one core kind of) propositions. The clustering algorithms implemented in perception produce outputs which are (implicit) atomic propositions in different minds. Coordination of them across minds proceeds by game-theoretic processes of communication. The account does not rely on any unexplained notions such as mental content, representation, or correspondence (although those notions are applicable in philosophical analysis of the result). (shrink)

This article surveys different philosophical theories about the nature of truth. We give much importance to truth; some demand to know it, some fear it, and others would even die for it. But what exactly is truth? What is its nature? Does it even have a nature in the first place? When do we say that some truth-bearers are true? Philosophers offer varying answers to these questions. In this article, some of these answers are explored and some of the problems (...) raised against them are presented. (shrink)

In elementary logic textbooks, Venn diagrams are used to analyze and evaluate the validity of syllogistic arguments. Although the method of Venn diagrams is shown to be a powerful analytical tool in these textbooks, it still has limitations. On the one hand, such method fails to represent singular statements of the form, “a is F.” On other hand, it also fails to represent identity statements of the form, “a is b.” Because of this, it also fails to give an account (...) of the validity of some obviously valid arguments that contain these types of statements as constituents. In this paper, owing to the developments in the literature on Venn diagrams, we offer a way of supplementing the rules of the Venn diagram found in textbooks, and show how this retooled Venn diagram technique could account for the problem cases. (shrink)

The gap between the limited human sense of how living entities change over time and the ways in which living systems change is one of the most potent uncertainties in ecological knowledge. This gap remains a significant source of problems and errors for those working with the transformations of living systems. This article foregrounds Mary Catherine Bateson’s cybernetic practice of working with narratives in order to cultivate better understanding and responses to change, at the level of both societies and individuals. (...) To do so, I investigate some significant moments, encounters and projects that connect her practice to the ecological ideas of her father, Gregory Bateson and situate their ideas on abduction, metaphor, recursion and narrative within broader discussions of ecological change. The Batesons did not seek a particular attitudinal change towards the transformation of selves, cities and worlds but rather sought to change the very understanding of what an attitude towards change should be, a distinction that is worth pondering given the challenges of attending to change within the present ecological crisis. (shrink)

This paper surveys medieval Christian philosophy.

Un atlas zoopolítico es lo que pretende tener aquí lugar. Un atlas en el sentido en que cada pequeño tratado de los cincuenta y dos que configuran el libro se presenta en la forma de un retrato donde el pensamiento, entre sus pensadores, se aplica en el esfuerzo de hacerse cargo de la presencia animal sin renunciar a la diferencia humana, y en que, entre todos ellos, se delinea en todas sus valoraciones posibles esta nueva presencia del animal entre nosotros. (...) Retrato con animal. Prefacio. Pablo Perera Velamazán es escritor, además de filósofo e historiador del arte. Esta triple condición –y alguna otra (profesor, traductor)- le han permitido entrar en el círculo de los que escriben siempre de los que no saben y le ha impedido, también formar parte de ninguna empresa concreta, salvo la del precipicio del pensamiento en la singularidad que se resiste a los nombres. Allí suelen estar acompañado de niños y animales, de ángeles como muñecos, pero allí también se pueden encontrar a cualquiera. Buen compañero de viaje de invierno. (shrink)

Several decades of behavioral research have established that variations in socioeconomic status are related to differences in cognitive performance. Neuroimaging and psychophysiological techniques have recently emerged as a method of choice to better understand the neurobiological processes underlying this phenomenon. Here we present a systematic review of a particular sub-domain of this field. Specifically, we used the PICOS approach to review studies investigating potential relationships between SES and scalp event-related brain potentials. This review found evidence that SES is related to (...) amplitude variations in a diverse range of ERPs: P1, N1, N2, Error-Related Negativities, N400, auditory evoked potentials, negative difference waves, P3 and slow waves. These ERPs include early, mid-latency and late potentials that reflect a broad range of cognitive processes. In this review, all SES effects on ERPs appeared to reflect an impairment or a less efficient form of task-related neural activity for low-SES compared to high-SES individuals. Overall, these results confirm that a wide variety of distinct neural processes with different functional meanings are sensitive to SES differences. The findings of this review also suggest that the relationship between SES and some ERP components may depend on the developmental stage of study participants. Results are further discussed in terms of the current limitations of this field and future avenues of research. (shrink)

In the wake of corporate ethical scandals that have harmed millions of employees and investors, there has been an increase in the number of works written in the last decade, which aim to answer one apparently simple question: what causes unethical behavior, and what can we do, if anything, to prevent similar transgressions in the future? The extensive research around this question is the best proof of its real complexity as the challenge of disentangling the background of ethical behavior has (...) obvious academic and practical interest. This study aims to take a further step toward that goal. Much research has noted the impact of multiple aspects of organizational contexts on individuals’ ethical behavior. However, studies that analyze the impact of organizational learning capability (OLC) on employees’ ethical behavior are few and far between. This was the first aim of this study. The second centered on gaining a deeper understanding of the relationship between OLC and ethical behavior by analyzing the mediating role of employability and organizational commitment. We tested our hypotheses through a structural equation methodology applied to a sample of 641 workers from 166 Spanish consultancy firms and found a positive, direct relationship between OLC and employability, OLC and organizational commitment, employability and organizational commitment, and organizational commitment and ethical behavior. (shrink)

L’article vise à montrer le lien nécessaire entre responsabilité et liberté, tout en exposant le sens de cette responsabilité, décomposée entre responsabilité envers Autrui et responsabilité envers la Nature. Dans la deuxième partie, l’article s’attache à présenter les mutations de la responsabilité à l’époque contemporaine, remettant aujourd’hui en cause la liberté telle qu’elle était conçue en 1789, c’est-à-dire comme autodétermination.

En el presente artículo se pretende poner en relación la noción de kénosis, sobre la que se configura esencialmente la concepción hermenéutica de la religión en Gianni Vattimo, con la pretensión emancipatoria que surge del nihilismo hermenéutico. Para ello rastrearemos esa concepción hermenéutica de la verdad que ya no nos violenta, a partir de la cual se estructura la religión del pensamiento débil. Además, constataremos cómo la concepción hermenéutica de la metafísica, aparte de presentarse como clave de la secularización, permitirá (...) identificar la salvación con la interpretación. Sobre estos presupuestos generales de su filosofía Vattimo anuncia la venida de Jesús como fenómeno hermenéutico. Tendremos que preguntarnos finalmente si las posibilidades de este planteamiento trágico de la kénosis se llevan hasta sus últimas consecuencias con el anuncio sociopolítico de una emancipación de corte hermenéutico. (shrink)

El proceso de construcción de una escuela de calidad es un reto permanente que intentan abordar tanto los sistemas educativos como los centros y los profesionales que trabajan en ambos. Sirven a este propósito las recientes muestras de evaluación externa y las experiencias de autoevaluación interna, que a menudo se acompañan de programas de innovación y cambio con o sin soporte externo. Sin embargo, lograr cambio no es fácil, dado el dinamismo de los sistemas educativos, las respuestas que no se (...) dan a una realidad sociocultural cambiante y el desencanto docente. (shrink)

In “God of the Gaps: A Neglected Reply to God’s Stone Problem”, Jc Beall and A. J. Cotnoir offer a gappy solution to the paradox of (unrestricted) omnipotence that is typified by the classic stone problem. Andrew Tedder and Guillermo Badia, however, have recently argued that this solution could not be extended to a more serious Curry-like version of the paradox. In this paper, we show that such a gappy solution does extend to it.