Democracy is not in steady state and democratizations are open-ended processes; they depend on structures and functions in systemic contexts that idiosyncratically evolve in tone, tenor, direction, and pace. They affect and are affected by scores of determinants, both perceived and hypothetical. In interlinked chapters that span a number of disciplines, this volume reexamines the basic traits, the comparable outcomes, and the self-defining dynamics of some of the more widely attempted versions of democracy across the world. It discusses some of (...) the controversies that can speed up or slow democratizations. The crucial question these chapters address is whether democratization is possible without an understanding of what is expected from a mode of citizenship inseparable from an ethic of freedom. (shrink)

This volume examines continuities and change in the normative underpinnings of both ancient and modern practices of political governance, public duties, private virtues, and personal responsibilities. As such, it stands at the cross-disciplinary intersection between the practice of democratic citizenship and the exercise of political ethics. Contributors address law and morality in history, from Ancient Mesopotamia and Enlightenment Europe to modern America and the new millennium's scientific and technological transformations; the links among different systems of belief; and complex ethical issues (...) in domestic and international democratic governance in the context of today's globalized world. (shrink)

Some philosophers conceive freedom as a state; others view it as an ideal. A songwriter sees it as a way of life: "Like a bird on a wire, like a drunk in a midnight choir, I have tried in my way to be free." The embattled statesman and the political idealist perceive causal links among personal freedoms, societal democracy, and global peace. In this cross-disciplinary volume, the contributors reassess and rephrase the conceptualizations and theorizations of freedom and their applicability to (...) daily life. Framed by historical contexts, their field-specific studies help reconcile theory and practice. Their shared and unique ideational framework can be paraphrased in six words, a question mark, and a exclamation point: Freedom? Beware what you wish for. (shrink)

Formal thinking about certainty/uncertainty gained greater focus in scientific domains with the advent of particle physics and quantum mechanics. Concern with the exact predictability of events under guidance from scientific determinism led to speculation, then acknowledgement of quantum indeterminacy. But distinctions were made between what is physically indeterminate out there and what is indeterminable by human observation or in human action--over here, on the inside, right now. The implications of these insights into indeterminacy and indeterminabilities for practical and theoretical knowledge (...) span physics, philosophy, ontology, causality, and the philosophy of mind. In this book, contributors from a range of disciplines consider the concept of indeterminacy and a few varieties of indeterminability, with attention to the distinctions between the two phenomena, appropriate approaches for examining both, and the differences vis-à-vis uncertainty, vagueness, and ambiguity. (shrink)

The ongoing expansion in the field of citizenship studies is one of the most important and remarkable recent trends in social sciences and humanities research. Some scholars raise questions about citizenship within a larger critique of liberalism and its institutions; others point to citizenship's inherently exclusionary nature. This volume examines--without advocating any ideological agenda--the evolving meaning of citizenship, with an eye to the future. The contributors--writing from the perspectives of anthropology, sociology, psychology, law, history, and other disciplines--examine four modes of (...) citizenship in comparative global context: Differentiated, Divided, Dispersed, and Deterritorialized. The future of citizenship, they argue, may be a worldwide "citizenship by association," tantamount to a global civic interface. (shrink)

A propósito de la publicación en Suhrkamp de los Philosophische Aufsätze de Tugendhat (1992), se propone una interpretación de la obra del autor (hasta ese momento) que no se conforma a la visión tópica de la ruptura entre el Tugendhat fenomenológico y el analítico-lingüístico, sino que subraya (o demuestra, más bien) los elementos de continuidad entre ambas fases, destacando el papel que cumple en ambos casos la lectura de Aristóteles y su estructura "ti kata tinos" (algo de algo), que es (...) a la vez lógica y ontológica. Un ejemplo significativo: la lectura heideggeriana de la teoría de la identificación de particulares de P. F. Strawson a partir de la inter-remisión de lugares espacio-temporales del mundo. (shrink)

Is an epistemological reduction strictly possible? Scientific methodology claims that a boundary separating the system from the “extra-system” can be defi ned. However, no system defi nes its own limits: rather, every system needs extra-systemic presuppositions that are defi ned from outside the system. In this article, we show how various areas of knowledge presuppose the presence of an extra-systemic reality that provides meaning: to know any system, knowledge of the “extra-system” is also necessary.

The notion of conceptual space, proposed by Gärdenfors as a framework for the representation of concepts and knowledge, has been highly influential over the last decade or so. One of the main theses involved in this approach is that the conceptual regions associated with properties, concepts, verbs, etc. are convex. The aim of this paper is to show that such a constraint—that of the convexity of the geometry of conceptual regions—is problematic; both from a theoretical perspective and with regard to (...) the inner workings of the theory itself. On the one hand, all the arguments provided in favor of the convexity of conceptual regions rest on controversial assumptions. Additionally, his argument in support of a Euclidean metric, based on the integral character of conceptual dimensions, is weak, and under non-Euclidean metrics the structure of regions may be non-convex. Furthermore, even if the metric were Euclidean, the convexity constraint could be not satisfied if concepts were differentially weighted. On the other hand, Gärdenfors’ convexity constraint is brought into question by the own inner workings of conceptual spaces because: some of the allegedly convex properties of concepts are not convex; the conceptual regions resulting from the combination of convex properties can be non-convex; convex regions may co-vary in non-convex ways; and his definition of verbs is incompatible with a definition of properties in terms of convex regions. Therefore, the mandatory character of the convexity requirement for regions in a conceptual space theory should be reconsidered. (shrink)

Responding to recent concerns about the reliability of the published literature in psychology and other disciplines, we formed the X-Phi Replicability Project to estimate the reproducibility of experimental philosophy. Drawing on a representative sample of 40 x-phi studies published between 2003 and 2015, we enlisted 20 research teams across 8 countries to conduct a high-quality replication of each study in order to compare the results to the original published findings. We found that x-phi studies – as represented in our sample (...) – successfully replicated about 70% of the time. We discuss possible reasons for this relatively high replication rate in the field of experimental philosophy and offer suggestions for best research practices going forward. (shrink)

This paper reports an experiment that investigates interpretive distinctions between two different expressions of generalization in Spanish. In particular, our aim was to find out when the distinction between generic statements (GS) such as Tigers have stripes and universally quantified statements (UQS) such as All tigers have stripes was acquired in Spanish-speaking children of two different age groups (4/5-year-olds and 8/9-year-olds), and then compare these results with those of adults. The starting point of this research was the semantic distinction between (...) GS and UQS in that the former admit exceptions, unlike the latter. On the other hand, several authors have observed a Generic overgeneralization effect (GOG) consisting in allowing for UQS to be felicitous in the face of exceptions, thus proposing that this “error” stems from GS being defaults (simpler, more easily learned and processed). In the current paper we aimed to test the “Generics as Default” (GaD) hypothesis by comparing GS and UQS in three different age ranges. Our data show that, overall, the accuracy of GS is greater than the accuracy of UQS. Moreover, we also confirm a hypothesized interaction between age and NP type (GS vs UQS). Further, we present several data points that are not predicted by the GaD, including an observed decline in the accuracy of GS in the older group of children as well as in adults, and that children fail at rejecting statements that are not considered to be true generalizations. (shrink)

El trabajo explora críticamente la idea de una justificación débil o pen última de la moral enmarcándola en el conjunto de la filosofía de Tugendhat, reordenan do sus escritos éticos y discriminando los diversos aspectos que incluye dicha idea. Entre ellos, revisa el concepto formal de moral, ligado a los sentimientos, antes de centrarse en el punto crucial: la fundamentación de la ética moderna. Aquí se distingue, por un lado, la justificación comparativa de un contractualismo igualitario frente a otras alternativas (...) teóricas y, por otro, los motivos que pueden llevar a un individuo autónomo a entenderse en términos morales. (shrink)

Recently, Casasanto and Lupyan (2015) have asserted that there are no context-independent concepts: all concepts are constructed ad hoc when they are instantiated. My aim is to show that the ad hoc cognition framework can be characterized by a similarity-based theory of concepts, and that two different notions of concept should be distinguished —which may be identified with two distinct stages of their life cycle (storage and instantiation). This approach brings together virtues from opposing views: (a) invariantist: stored concepts are (...) stable enough to collect new information; (b) contextualist: instantiated concepts are context-dependent, what explains our adaptive ability to changing environments. (shrink)

Appendix 1 was incomplete in the initial online publication. The original article has been corrected.

Recently, Casasanto and Lupyan (2015) have proposed an appealing and daring thesis: there are no context-independent concepts—that is, all concepts are ad hoc concepts. They argue that the seeming stability of concepts is merely due to commonalities across their different instantiations but that, in fact, there is nothing invariant in them. In their view, concepts only exist when they are instantiated for categorizing, communicating, drawing inferences, etc., and those instantiations are produced on the fly from a set of contextual cues. (...) However, the main weakness of Casasanto and Lupyan’s framework is that it lacks a proposal for articulating it within a theory on the structure of concepts. My aim is to show that the ad hoc cognition framework can be characterized by means of a prototype theory of concepts developed in terms of a conceptual similarity space. (shrink)

This article argues that bodily awareness is a basic form of self-consciousness through which perceiving agents are directly conscious of the bodily self. It clarifies the nature of bodily awareness, categorises the different types of body-relative information, and rejects the claim that we can have a sense of ownership of our own bodies. It explores how bodily awareness functions as a form of self-consciousness and highlights the importance of certain forms of bodily awareness that share an important epistemological property with (...) canonical forms of self-consciousness such as introspection. (shrink)

A partir de las perspectivas del poeta Rainer Maria Rilque, el autor desarrolla las nociones de la condición existencial del hombre y la naturaleza del hombre así como otras ideas que conforman la poesía antropológica y existencial de Rilque. Se abordan aquí la fragilidad de la existencia, la soledad, la subjetividad, la angustia, la apertura a las posibilidades, la muerte como fruto maduro de la existencia e inmanente a la vida, entre otras temáticas y se dejan atrás las visiones metafísicas (...) del yo como substancia para ofrecer una descripción fáctica del existir del hombre. (shrink)

RESUMENSuele mantenerse que la tesis de la inconmensurabilidad enunciada por Kuhn en La estructua de las revoluciones científicas constituye el núcleo de las doctrinas relativistas. Frente a esta tesis, el artículo argumenta que admitir la incomensurabilidad entre tradiciones culturales diferentes o, incluso, negar que existan criterios absolutos y eternos de racionalidad no implica de suyo relativismo. Se recogen y critican los argumentos de Popper y Gombrich en contra del llamado "mito del marco conceptual" y se examina la postura de Putnam, (...) para concluir que éste se encuentra mucho más cerca de la inconmensurabilidad que lo que él mismo admite. En conra de la interpretación de la inconmensurabilidad que convierte a las culturas en totalidades cerradas y aisladas, se argumenta que la doctrina de la inconmensurabilidad no niega la existencia de comunicación intercultural: la caracteriza. En la misma línea se subraya que la inconmensurabilidad no impide el reconocimiento de lo humanoPALABRAS CLAVECULTURA-PARADIGMA-INCONMENSURABILIDAD-RELATIVISMOABSTRACTIt is usually maintained that Kuhn's claims on inconmensurability made up the core of the relativist doctrines. Against this view, the paper argues that the inconmensurability between the different cultural traditions or, even, the denial of the existence of eternal and absolute standars of rationaliti do not commit to relativist thesis. Popper and Hombrich's arguments are challenged and Putnam's view is examined in order to prove that he is closer to Kuhn than what he himself seems to think. In face of the reading of the idea of incommensurability that looks cultures as isolated and closed wholes, it is maintained that theinconmensurability thesis does not deny the existence of cultural communication: rather it characterizes how they communicate. Following the same line of thought, it is emphazised that the existence of inconmensurability between different cultures does not make impossible the recognition of the specific human phenomena.KEYWORDSCULTURE-PARADIGM-INCOMMENSURABILITY-RELATIVISM. (shrink)

This paper shows the importance of the topic of personal identity in both analytical and continental tradition. Makes a general approach of the subject and explains the relevance of the other articles of this number of Anuario Filosófico.