Reseña del libro de Miguel Catalán González: La creación burlada. Seudología IV.

This article first presents the aristotelian criticism of the conception of God as Esse ipsum subsistens in Thomas Aquinas, through one of the most important aristotelian philosophers today, Enrico Berti. Then the answer offered by the thomist Stephen L. Brock in his defense of the ipsum esse is set forth, with reference to the recent disputes regarding this issue in the so-called «analytical thomism». The aim is to determine the status of the recent debate between aristotelians and thomists regarding the (...) question of God as Esse ipsum subsistens, in order to ascertain whether the historical incompatibility between the two metaphysical conceptions is to be considered definitive. (shrink)

El neo-pragmatismo teorizado por el que puede ser considerado como el pensador más leído e influyente de nuestro tiempo, Richard Rorty, presagia una cultura nueva en relación con la filosofía. El pensador americano se sitúa en el debate abierto, tolerante y flexible de toda la humanidad, negando que haya criterios absolutos, metafísicos, en los que basar la actividad humana. El criterio de justificación y elección entre diversas posturas o visiones del mundo vendrá determinado por los intereses de los miembros y (...) no por correspondencia con la realidad, la naturaleza humana o cualquier principio ahistórico. Sin embargo, la tolerancia, la aceptación del pluralismo, la asimilación de nuevos vocabularios y metáforas… asumen un absoluto, un elemento totalitario, a saber: la contingencia. Aunque pudieran parecer la negación de toda metafísica, las tesis rortyanas albergan y encubren una teoría o metafísica extremadamente fuerte y simple: no hay nada necesario, todo es contingente. (shrink)

En este trabajo se presenta una interpretación sobre la célebre distinción entre el intelecto activo y el intelecto pasivo en _De anima_ III, 5, a partir de “otra modesta propuesta”. Para ello, se expone el núcleo fundamental de esa reciente propuesta, que identifica el intelecto activo con el hábito de los principios y con el contenido de los primeros principios. A continuación, se ponen de manifiesto algunas objeciones a dicha interpretación y, finalmente, se analizan las notas o características del intelecto (...) activo presentes en el texto de Aristóteles. El propósito de este artículo consiste en mostrar una posible comprensión del intelecto activo de Aristóteles, con la intención de que se convierta en una “aún más modesta propuesta”. (shrink)

In the present study, we have demonstrated hysteresis phenomena in the excitability of single, enzymatically dissociated guinea pig ventricular myocytes. Membrane potentials were recorded with patch pipettes in the whole-cell current clamp configuration. Repetitive stimulation with depolarizing current pulses of constant cycle length and duration but varying strength led to predictable excitation (1:l) and non-excitation (1:0) patterns depending on current strength. In addition, transition between patterns depended on the direction of current intensity change and stable hysteresis loops were obtained in (...) stimulus:response pattern vs. current intensity plots in 14 cells. Increase of pulse duration and decrease of stimulation rate contributed to a reduction in hysteresis loop areas. Changes in amplitude and shape of the subthreshold responses during the transitions from one stable pattern to the other, suggested that activity led to an increase in membrane resistance, particularly in the voltage domain between resting potential, and threshold. Therefore, we modelled the dynamic behaviour of the single cells as a function of diastolic membrane resistance, using previously published analytical solutions. Numerical iteration of the analytical model equations closely reproduced the experimental hysteresis loops in both qualitative and quantitative ways. In particular, the effect of stimulation frequency on the model was similar to the experimental findings. The overall study suggests that the excitability pattern of guinea pig ventricular myocytes accounts for hysteresis and bistabilities when current intensity is allowed to fluctuate around threshold levels. (shrink)

El pensador norteamericano Richard Rorty sostiene que uno de los deseos de la tradición filosófica occidental ha sido el deseo de la Verdad. Esta premisa asume que la filosofía que arranca con Platón ha establecido las bases para una teoría filosófica de la verdad como correspondencia entre pensamiento y realidad. Como alternativa a la interpretación histórica de Rorty sobre la Verdad, se presenta la noción �clásica� de verdad que forjaron Platón y Aristóteles. Con este análisis se pretende poner de relieve (...) las características del intelecto humano en su relación con la realidad, para distinguir el discurso verdadero del falso. (shrink)

Business Ethics: A European Review, EarlyView.

In this article, we analyze the relationship between the main dimensions of organizational structure (i.e., formalization, centralization, and complexity) and ecological responsiveness in a sample of 109 firms in the European air passenger transport industry. Broadly confirming our hypotheses, the results show that high formalization of routine tasks favors ecological responsiveness. Structures characterized by high decentralization and low complexity also favor ecological responsiveness. Furthermore, decentralization has a significant, positive relationship with ecological responsiveness among firms with low vertical complexity. Overall, the (...) results indicate that organizational structure plays a major role in ecological responsiveness. (shrink)

This study analyzes the logic behind the development of environmental responsiveness in companies that are located in geographical clusters. Drawing on previous research, we contend that competitiveness and legitimation are important sources of variation in these companies’ environmental responses. In particular, the companies’ perceived rivalry, competition tracking capabilities, interaction with industry associations and network embeddedness influence their competitiveness and legitimation motivations for environmental responsiveness. We used structural equation modeling to test these hypotheses on a sample of 251-clustered agricultural firms in (...) Spain. The results support the hypotheses and provide a number of insights about the underlying motivations behind going green in geographical clusters. (shrink)

El presente estudio presenta en esquema comparativo dos modelos antropológicos antagónicos del ser personal, provenientes de los dos autores más influyentes de los comienzos de la filosofía contemporánea: Søren Kierkegaard y Friedrich Nietzsche. En el paradigma de pensador danés encontramos en la estructura del ser personal la necesidad de relacionarse con Dios, pasando por distintos estadios de la vida desde un primer estadio inferior “estético” a otro estadio superior “ético-religioso”. En la visión del filósofo alemán, por su parte, situamos la (...) esencia del ser humano en la vivencia instintiva de la inmediatez propia de la exaltación de la vida sin límite y de la búsqueda del placer autonomizado, vivencias que al final se vuelven contra la vida misma. (shrink)

Descripción del sentido y alcance cognitivo del libro recensionado.

La Promoción y Educación para la Salud desarrollada desde los Centros educativos Es-pañoles es una de las herramientas clave de las intervenciones en salud. Por un lado, el acceso a la población infantil y juvenil es casi total debido a la obligatoriedad de la educación. Por otro lado, en esta época de la vida las personas se hallan más receptivas para el aprendizaje, siendo la época del desarrollo vital en la que se adquieren los principales hábitos de vida que se (...) consolidarán con los años (actividad física, alimentación, etc.). Además se trata de un ámbito de intervención social que cuenta con agentes de salud que disponen de alta calificación desde el punto de vista pedagógico: el profesorado, ya sea en el nivel de educación Infantil, como en Primaria y Secundaria. En este marco, el principal objetivo de la Educación para la salud, es desarrollar actividades e incentivar al alumnado para conseguir el mayor grado posible de salud, mediante la adquisición de conocimientos y habilidades que favorezcan la elección y adopción de estilos de vida saludables; buscando la participación, la interacción y la integración social, y trabajando la capacidad crítica y creativa, así como la búsqueda de soluciones. Los Centros escolares, junto con el hogar, son dos de los lugares clave donde tiene lugar el desarrollo individual y social de las personas en sus estadios más tempranos, ejerciendo un importante papel en la configuración de la conducta y los valores sociales de la infancia, la adoles-cencia y la juventud. (shrink)

This book explores the epistemic side of racial and sexual oppression. It elucidates how social insensitivities and imposed silences prevent members of different groups from listening to each other.

On knowledge and practices: a manifesto -- The web of practices -- Agents and frameworks -- Complementarity in mathematics -- Ancient Greek mathematics: a role for diagrams -- Advanced math: the hypothetical conception -- Arithmetic certainty -- Mathematics developed: the case of the reals -- Objectivity in mathematical knowledge -- The problem of conceptual understanding.

The relation of the conformal group to various earlier proposed relativistic quantum mechanical dynamical groups (and other related groups) is studied in the framework of projective geometry, by explicitly constructing the contractions of the six-dimensional coordinate transformations. Five-dimensional realizations are then derived. An attempt is made to improve our physical insight through geometry.

José L. Zalabardo defends a pragmatist account of what grounds the meaning of central semantic discourses--ascriptions of truth, of propositional attitudes, and of meanings. He argues that it is the procedures that regulate acceptance and rejection that give the sentences of these discourses their meanings, and explores the application of the pragmatist template to ethical discourse. The pragmatist approach is presented as an alternative to representationalist accounts of the meaning grounds of declarative sentences, according to which a sentence has (...) the meaning it has as a result of links with the bits of the world that it purports to represent. Zalabardo develops a version of the open-question argument to support the claim that the meaning grounds of the discourses he focuses on cannot receive representationalist accounts. It is generally assumed that a declarative sentence cannot perform the function of representing the world unless it has a representationalist meaning ground. Zalabardo rejects this assumption, arguing that sentences with pragmatist meaning grounds can represent the world in exactly the same sense that sentences with representationalist meaning grounds do. This requires that there are states of affairs that the target sentences represent as obtaining, and Zalabardo develops an account of the nature of the states of affairs that can play this role for sentences with pragmatist meaning grounds. Pragmatist Semantics concludes by developing the suggestion that the meaning grounds of all our representational discourses might be ultimately pragmatist. (shrink)

Legaz Lacamba, L. José Ignacio de Alcorta, filósofo de nuestro tiempo.--Semblanza del profesor Alcorta.--Rodríguez Resina, A. El realismo trascendental, introducción a la filosofía de J. I. de Alcorta.

While in agreement with Miranda Fricker’s context-sensitive approach to hermeneutical injustice, this paper argues that this contextualist approach has to be pluralized and rendered relational in more complex ways. In the first place, I argue that the normative assessment of social silences and the epistemic harms they generate cannot be properly carried out without a pluralistic analysis of the different interpretative communities and expressive practices that coexist in the social context in question. Social silences and hermeneutical gaps are misrepresented if (...) they are uniformly predicated of an entire social context, instead of being predicated of particular ways of inhabiting that context by particular people in relation to particular others. I contend that a more nuanced—polyphonic—contextualization offers a more adequate picture of what it means to break social silences and to repair the hermeneutical injustices associated with them. In the second place, I argue that the particular obligations with respect to hermeneutical justice that differently situated subjects and groups have are interactive and need to be determined relationally. That is, whether individuals and groups live up to their hermeneutical responsibilities has to be assessed by taking into account the forms of mutual positionality, relationality, and responsivity (or lack thereof) that these subjects and groups display with respect to one another. The central argument is developed through an examination of what in race theory and in contemporary epistemologies of ignorance has been termed “white ignorance”; that is, the kind of hermeneutical inability of privileged white subjects to recognize and make sense of their racial identities, experiences, and social positionality. (shrink)

Though Wittgenstein's On Certainty has been influential in analytic epistemology, its interpretation has been enormously controversial. It is true that exegesis has been mainly concerned with the proper characterization of Wittgenstein's very notion of ?certainty?; however, some important questions remain unanswered regarding this notion. On the one hand, I am above all referring to the study of the possibilities we have of retaining a certainty when it has seemingly been placed into question and, on the other hand, of regaining a (...) certainty once it has been lost. In this paper, I attempt to provide a detailed answer to both questions. In so doing, some important features of the picture of ourselves which emerges from Wittgenstein's On Certainty are also revealed. (shrink)

This book explores the epistemic side of oppression, focusing on racial and sexual oppression and their interconnections. It elucidates how social insensitivities and imposed silences prevent members of different groups from interacting epistemically in fruitful ways--from listening to each other, learning from each other, and mutually enriching each other's perspectives. Medina's epistemology of resistance offers a contextualist theory of our complicity with epistemic injustices and a social connection model of shared responsibility for improving epistemic conditions of participation in social practices. (...) Through the articulation of a new interactionism and polyphonic contextualism, the book develops a sustained argument about the role of the imagination in mediating social perceptions and interactions. It concludes that only through the cultivation of practices of resistance can we develop a social imagination that can help us become sensitive to the suffering of excluded and stigmatized subjects. Drawing on Feminist Standpoint Theory and Critical Race Theory, this book makes contributions to social epistemology and to recent discussions of testimonial and hermeneutical injustice, epistemic responsibility, counter-performativity, and solidarity in the fight against racism and sexism. (shrink)

This book explores the epistemic side of racial and sexual oppression. It elucidates how social insensitivities and imposed silences prevent members of different groups from listening to each other.

Background The Regional Committee for Africa of the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2001 expressed concern that some health-related studies undertaken in the Region were not subjected to any form of ethics review. In 2003, the study reported in this paper was conducted to determine which Member country did not have a national research ethics committee (REC) with a view to guiding the WHO Regional Office in developing practical strategies for supporting those countries. Methods This is a descriptive study. The (...) questionnaire was prepared and sent by diplomatic pouch to all the 46 Member States in the WHO African Region, through the WHO country representatives, for facilitation and follow up. The data were entered in Excel spreadsheet and subsequently exported to STATA for analysis. A Chi-Squared test (χ 2) for independence was undertaken to test the relationship between presence/absence of Research Ethics Committee (REC) and selected individual socioeconomic and health variables. Results The main findings were as follows: the response rate was 61% (28/46); 64% (18/28) confirmed the existence of RECs; 36% (10/28) of the respondent countries did not have a REC (although 80% of them reported that they had in place an ad hoc ethical review mechanism); 85% (22/26) of the countries that responded to this question indicated that ethical approval of research proposals was, in principle, required; and although 59% of the countries that had a REC expected it to meet every month, only 44% of them reported that the REC actually met on a monthly basis. In the Chi-Squared test, only the average population in the group of countries with a REC was statistically different (at 5% level of significance) from that of the group of countries without a REC. Conclusion In the current era of globalized biomedical research, good ethics stewardship demands that every country, irrespective of its level of economic development, should have in place a functional research ethics review system in order to protect the dignity, integrity and safety of its citizens who participate in research. (shrink)