Pocas personas habr n suscitado tan un nimemente la imagen del maestro como don Manuel Pedroso. Nadie que lo haya conocido ha dejado de mencionar ese ejemplar del magisterio que rebasaba ampliamente el mbito meramente universitario. Los pr logos a este libro, obra de disc pulos o amigos, dan fe, de la huella profunda que dej en ellos. Pero nos informan tambi n de la renuencia de Pedroso a rematar sus abundantes notas y esbozos y a publicar (...) sus resultados. Por eso es tan importante la labor realizada con estas p ginas, ordenadas por sus disc pulos y reimpresas ahora en esta colecci n dedicada a rescatar la labor in dita o desconocida en Espa a del exilio espa ol de 1939. (shrink)

In this paper I argue for a novel interpretation of Shepherd’s notion of selfhood. In distinction to Deborah Boyle’s interpretation, I contend that Shepherd differentiates between the mind and the self. The latter, for Shepherd, is an effect arising from causal interactions between mind and body – specifically those interactions that give rise to our present stream of consciousness, our memories, and that can unite these two. Thus, the body plays a constitutive role in the formation of the self. The (...) upshot of this interpretation is that it can dissolve the problem of individuating mind that Boyle identifies. Briefly, the problem consists in Shepherd seemingly individuating minds in terms of their associated bodies and bodies in terms of the minds they are united with. My interpretation, however, allows to see that Shepherd neither wants nor needs to individuate the mind in isolation of the body and to read the passages, in which the problem seems to arise, as being about what makes living beings individual – with mind and body both playing a crucial role in this context. (shrink)

In her last known piece of work Lady Mary Shepherd’s Metaphysics (1832), Mary Shepherd writes that “mind, may inhere in definite portions of matter […] or of infinite space” (LMSM 699). Shepherd thus suggests that a mind – a “capacity for sensation in general” (e.g., EPEU 16) – may have a spatial location. This is prima facie surprising given that she is committed to the view that the mind is unextended. In this paper, we argue that Shepherd can consistently honor (...) both of these commitments. We argue, first, that even though finite minds, due to their unextendedness cannot, to use Shepherd’s term, ‘occupy’ space as material bodies do, such minds can nonetheless be said to have a spatial location in virtue of what we call their presence, or what Shepherd calls ‘inherence’, in a material body. Second, we argue that, in a similar way, the divine mind is present throughout the whole of space and is thus omnipresent. We then argue that, in contrast to finite minds, the divine mind does not require a body to be present in space. Rather, we contend, God’s omnipresence might be best understood in a ‘holenmerist’ sense, where the divine mind is wholly present in every part of creation. (shrink)

"Manuel DeLanda is a distinguished writer, artist and philosopher. In his new book, he offers a fascinating look at how the contemporary world is characterized by an extraordinary social complexity. Since most social entities, from small communities to large nation-states, would disappear altogether if human minds ceased to exist, Delanda proposes a novel approach to social ontology that asserts the autonomy of social entities from the conceptions we have of them." Editorial.

Inspired by Castañeda (1966, 1968), Perry (1979) and Lewis (1979) showed that a specific variety of singular thoughts, thoughts about oneself “as oneself” – de se thoughts, as Lewis called them – raise special issues, and they advanced rival accounts. Their suggestive examples raise the problem of de se thought – to wit, how to characterize it so as to give an accurate account of the data, tracing its relations to singular thoughts in general. After rehearsing the main tenets of (...) two contrasting accounts – a Lewisian one and a Perrian one – in the first section of this paper, in the second I will present a proposal of my own, which is a specific elaboration of the Perrian account. In the first section I will indicate some weaknesses of Perry’s presentation of his view; the proposal I will articulate in the second overcomes them. I will conclude with a brief discussion of reasons for preferring one or another account, in particular regarding the issue of the communication of de se thoughts. (shrink)

Business and Society Review, Volume 127, Issue S1, Page 343-367, Spring 2022.

When someone masters a skill, their performance looks to us like second nature: it looks as if their actions are smoothly performed without explicit, knowledge-driven, online monitoring of their performance. Contemporary computational models in motor control theory, however, are instructionist: that is, they cast skillful performance as a knowledge-driven process. Optimal motor control theory, as representative par excellence of such approaches, casts skillful performance as an instruction, instantiated in the brain, that needs to be executed—a motor command. This paper aims (...) to show the limitations of such instructionist approaches to skillful performance. We specifically address the question of whether the assumption of control-theoretic models is warranted. The first section of this paper examines the instructionist assumption, according to which skillful performance consists of the execution of theoretical instructions harnessed in motor representations. The second and third sections characterize the implementation of motor representations as motor commands, with a special focus on formulations from OMCT. The final sections of this paper examine predictive coding and active inference—behavioral modeling frameworks that descend, but are distinct, from OMCT—and argue that the instructionist, control-theoretic assumptions are ill-motivated in light of new developments in active inference. (shrink)

This paper examines Margaret Cavendish’s ecological views and argues that, in the Appendix to her final published work, Grounds of Natural Philosophy (1668), Cavendish is defending a normative account of the way that humans ought to interact with their environment. On this basis, we argue that Cavendish is committed to a form of what, for the purposes of this paper, we will call ‘deep ecology,’ where that is understood as the view that humans ought to treat the rest of nature (...) as something of intrinsic value. (shrink)

We propose a view of identity beyond the individual in what we call interpersonal interidentities (IIIs). Within this approach, IIIs comprise collections of entangled stabilities that emerge in recurrent social interaction and manifest for those who instantiate them as relatively invariant though ever-evolving patterns of being (or more accurately, becoming) together. Herein, we consider the processes responsible for the emergence of these IIIs from the perspective of an enactive cognitive science. Our proposal hinges primarily on the development of two related (...) notions: enhabiting and coenhabiting. First, we introduce the notion of enhabiting, a set of processes at the individual level whereby structural interdependencies stabilise and thereafter undergird the habits, networks of habits, and personal identities through which we make sense of our experience. Articulating this position we lean on the notion of a tendency towards an optimal grip, though offering it a developmental framing, whereby iterative states of selective openness help realise relatively stable autonomous personal identities with their own norms of self-regulation. We then extend many of the notions found applicable here to an account of social coenhabiting, in particular, we introduce the notion of tending towards a co-optimal grip as central to the development of social habits, networks of habits, and ultimately IIIs. Such structures, we propose, also emerge as autonomous structures with their own norms of self-regulation. We wind down our account with some reflections on the implications of these structures outside of the interactions wherein they come into being and offer some thoughts about the complex animations of the individual embodied subjects that instantiate them. (shrink)

William Molyneux was born in Dublin, studied in Trinity College Dublin, and was a founding member of the Dublin Philosophical Society (DPS), Ireland’s counterpart to the Royal Society in London. He was a central figure in the Irish intellectual milieu during the Early Modern period and – along with George Berkeley and Edmund Burke – is one of the best-known thinkers to have come out of that context and out of Irish thought more generally. In 1688, when Molyneux wrote the (...) letter to Locke in which he posed the now famous question about a man born blind made to see, he was an active member of the DPS and was on familiar terms with several other key figures in Irish philosophy at the time. For the most part, Irish thinkers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries answered “no” to Molyneux’s question of whether a blind man made to see could distinguish, by sight alone, between a cube and a sphere. (shrink)

Theoretical tools aimed at making explicit the injustices suffered by certain socially disadvantaged groups might end up serving purposes which were not foreseen when the tools were first introduced. Nothing is inherently wrong with a shift in the scope of a theoretical tool: the popularization of a concept opens up the possibility of its use for several strategic purposes. The thesis that we defend in this paper is that some public figures cultivate a public persona for whom the conditions of (...) the notion of testimonial injustice might be taken to apply, and this situation is exploited to their advantage, as a means to advance their political agendas. More specifically, they take advantage of this to generate situations of crossed disagreements, which in turn foster polarization. (shrink)

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion.

‘British Empiricism’ is a name traditionally used to pick out a group of eighteenth-century thinkers who prioritised knowledge via the senses over reason or the intellect and who denied the existence of innate ideas. The name includes most notably John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume. The counterpart to British Empiricism is traditionally considered to be Continental Rationalism that was advocated by Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz, all of whom lived in Continental Europe beyond the British Isles and all embraced innate (...) ideas. This article characterizes empiricists more broadly as those thinkers who accept Locke’s Axiom that there is no idea in the mind that cannot be traced back to some particular experience. It includes British-Irish Philosophy from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth century. As well as exploring the traditional connections among empiricism and metaphysics and epistemology, it examines how British empiricists dealt with issues in moral philosophy and the existence and nature of God. The article identifies some challenges to the standard understanding of British Empiricism by including early modern thinkers from typically marginalised groups, especially women. Finally, in showing that there is nothing uniquely British about being an empiricist, it examines a particular case study of the eighteenth-century philosopher Anton Wilhelm Amo, the first African to receive a doctorate in Europe. (shrink)

The relationship between students and higher education is seen to have become increasingly transactional. We approach the study of the student–HE relationship in a novel way, by focusing on students’ behaviour post-university, rather than on student narratives. Conceptually, the article builds on multidimensional views of student engagement and the differentiation between psychological transactional contracts – where students who achieve better academic results are more likely to donate – and relational contracts – where students donate more following engagement in social experiences. (...) Making use of longitudinal data on donation behaviour from over 50,000 alumni from an English university over two decades, we find that while students who get better degree outcomes are more likely to donate, the association between participation in social experiences and donations is much stronger. This questions prevalent transactional models of HE and underlines the limitations of purely consumerist views of the relation between students and higher education institutions, even in the marketized UK context. (shrink)

The emphasis of systems and synthetic biology on quantitative understanding of biological objects and their eventual re-design has raised the question of whether description and construction standards that are commonplace in electric and mechanical engineering are applicable to live systems. The tuning of genetic devices to deliver a given activity is generally context-dependent, thereby undermining the re-usability of parts, and predictability of function, necessary for manufacturing new biological objects. Tolerance and allowance are key aspects of standardization that need to be (...) brought to biological design. These should endow functional building blocks with a pre-specified level of confidence for bespoke biosystems engineering. However, in the absence of more fundamental knowledge, fine-tuning necessarily relies on evolutionary/combinatorial gravitation toward a fixed objective. (shrink)

A distinção entre interior e exterior é um tema recorrente na história da filosofia. Embora a maioria das vezes seja assumido de forma implícita nas reflexões filosóficas, é fundamental procurar esclarecê-lo. Desde a noção socrática de interior como aquilo que importa realmente conhecer, passando pela conceção agostiniana de marca da transcendência até às perspetivas de Fernando Pessoa e Wittgenstein, percorre-se um caminho merecedor da nossa atenção.

En las siguientes páginas encontraremos el Misterio Pas­cual como base de la reflexión teológica en general y de la especulación eclesiológica, ético-moral y escatològica en particular, pues se pretende mostrar la vinculación existente entre la Pascua y el nacimiento de la Iglesia, por un lado, junto con las implicaciones y derivaciones en ma­teria de moral que de ella se puedan derivar, y por otro lado, presentar al hombre como ser histórico en tanto que sujeto que se proyecta hacia el futuro (...) considerando, por consiguiente, la pasión, muerte y resurrec­ción de Cristo como aval de la esperanza cristiana. (shrink)

According to the social ontology proposed by John Searle, there are ontologically objective facts or “brute facts”, independent from human attitudes, and ontologically subjective facts. Among the latter, the most notable are institutional facts, such as money or borders, which existence is explained through a collective attribution of status function within a certain social context. Could “moral truths” exist according to an ontology like this? Assuming the truth as correspondence, the notion of “moral truth” remits to the notion of “moral (...) fact”. As we will see, these moral facts, contrary to what authors such as Markus Gabriel suggest, are similar to institutional facts. For this reason, the truth or falsity of moral statements will be, as indicated by authors such as Gilbert Harman, relative to a social context; without that being an obstacle for acknowledging their expressive and directive function. (shrink)

La polémica entre feminismo y transactivismo lleva tiempo ocupando titulares, artículos, debates, etc. En este trabajo se intentan clarificar algunos de los problemas conceptuales que subyacen al conflicto. Para empezar, se abordan los conceptos de «sexo», «género» e «identidad de género» a partir del aparato conceptual proveniente de la ontología social presentada por John Searle. A continuación, ante la conveniencia de disponer de términos para hacer referencia unívoca a las personas de un sexo y de otro, se contrastan diferentes sentidos (...) de «mujer». La discusión de estas nociones permitirá abordar la cuestión política de fondo de si las categorías de género son un instrumento de opresión que abolir o, por el contrario, una identidad que reivindicar; así como una cuestión de cariz más jurídico como para qué deben servir las categorías «hombre» y «mujer» consignadas en leyes y documentos oficiales. (shrink)

This chapter evaluates which approach within 4E cognition is in a better position to offer a research program and a scientific framework for the embodied and situated cognitive sciences that could outcompete cognitivism once and for all. The main thesis of this work is that ecological psychology is in a better position to develop that scientific framework. This is because enactivism can be defined as a philosophy of nature rather than a scientific framework with its own research program (following Gallagher, (...) 2017). This means that enaction did not develop its own scientific methods, models, and metrics for human in vivo experimentation, which are key aspects in order to offer a whole new scientifically feasible foundation of a new science of the mind from a purely embodied and situated perspective. Although I agree that a philosophy of nature is a necessary aspect for any general theory of cognition, it is not enough: we also need a research program and a scientific framework in order to establish a fully-fledged science of the mind. Ecological psychology, as I show in this work, includes a philosophy of nature and a research program, which makes it suitable to settle the foundations for a fully embodied and situated cognitive science. In conclusion, I think that everyone working on embodiment and situated cognition should follow the ecological lead. (shrink)

After posing the problem of technocracy according to the debate between Marcuse and Habermas, the article situates Simondon’s perspective and, thematizing the relations between society, culture and technological development, it analyzes a series of ethical and political elements involved in his philosophy. In this vein, the paper addresses Simondon’s criticism of the technocratic utopia, introduces his conceptualization of the technique and examines the three concepts he provides to rethink political practice.

Synthetic biology aims at making life easier to an engineer by applying biotechnology engineering principles such as standardization and modularity. I argue that living organisms are inherently non-machine, non-standardized entities and that the current state-of-the-art in SynBio combines pre- and post-standardization efforts, in a scenario without evidence that full standardization in biology is even possible. I finally propose a new view on SynBio based on purpose rather than on technicalities.

El cosmopolitismo es uno de los elementos fundamentales de la concepción de la justicia defendida por M.C. Nussbaum. Esta sería una de las tesis esenciales del presente ensayo. El enfoque de las capacidades (EC) defendido por ella pretende ser una alternativa a las modernas teorías del contrato. Para Nussbaum, dignidad, capacidades humanas y recursos materiales son indesligables. Del mismo modo, la perspectiva cosmopolita es una exigencia inexcusable en la teoría de la justicia de Nussbaum. En este artículo tratamos de rastrear (...) los distintos ingredientes de esta, sus raíces en el cosmopolitismo estoico, y también su discusión con él para afrontar los desafíos que plantea la justicia global en el presente, con una perspectiva de futuro. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Art as Occupations:Two Neglected Roots of John Dewey's AestheticsAuthors: Fabio Campeotto (Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas, CONICET, Univ. Nacional de La Rioja); Juan Manuel Saharrea (CONICET, Universidad Católica de Córdoba-Unidad Asociada al CONICET) and Claudio M. Viale (CONICET, Universidad Católica de Córdoba-Unidad Asociada al CONICET). Campeotto and Saharrea contributed similarly to the development of this work. Language edition: Rita Karina Plascencia, https://www.rkplasencia.com/. This article was made (...) in the frame of two research projects: "Pragmatismo y educación: Fundamentos teóricos y abordajes empíricos," financed by the Universidad Católica de Córdoba (2019–2023); and "Praxis, experimentalismo, aprendizaje y democracia: hacia una reevaluación de la filosofía de la educación contemporánea," PICT 2020 serie A 01539 financed by the Fondo para la Investigación Científica y Tecnológica (FONCyT). Both projects were under the direction of C. M. Viale.undoubtedly, art as experience1 is one of the most important texts by John Dewey, as well as his most systematic approach to aesthetics.2 This book usually appears in the literature as an almost mandatory reading for interpreters of classical pragmatism, and it is praised as an ineludible reference for those interested in aesthetics from a pragmatic point of view. However, this justified centrality tends to invisibilize two important veins of Dewey's thought: the vital role of his fragmentary or piecemeal approach to aesthetics, on one hand, and the relevance of his educational conceptions in relation to aesthetics, on the other.Going beyond the centrality of Art as Experience toward a comprehensive and contemporary view of Dewey's aesthetics entails looking upon three elements of his thought: Firstly, Dewey's works—some of them considered minor and some implicit or sporadic references in canonical texts—depicting the links between education and aesthetics in his philosophy as well as texts that belong to his fragmentary approach to aesthetics. Secondly, his systematic development of aesthetics, mainly in Art as Experience, where Dewey presents his conceptions at length. Thirdly, what we could call a re-evaluated aesthetics, which consists in a contemporary attempt to integrate diverse aspects of his philosophy, trying to overcome some weaknesses in his theoretical developments, especially regarding his dealing with the links between education and [End Page 1] aesthetics. It is necessary to remark that these links were neither adequately addressed by Dewey nor exhaustively examined by the literature, as far as we know. We hold that it is crucial to make them critically explicit, in order to get fruitful contemporary approaches not only to Dewey's aesthetics but also to his pedagogy and philosophy of education.Thus, the core question of this article is the following: How should the educational root of Dewey's aesthetics have worked? Or, more precisely, how should he have explicitly or meticulously conceived aesthetics in relation to his educational developments? We think that two neglected roots of Dewey's writings related to aesthetics can help us to re-evaluate it: what we call its fragmentary approach and Albert C. Barnes's role in it, on one hand, and a coherent articulation among occupation, art teaching, and the overcoming of the distinction between vocational and humanistic education, on the other.To carry out our task, we have divided this article into three parts. In the first (The Genesis of Dewey's Aesthetics: A Re-interpretation), we argue how to interpret the emergence of Dewey's aesthetics. In the second (Dewey and Education: Central Issues), we present the key aspects of this topic related to our purposes. In the third section (Two Neglected Roots of Dewey's Aesthetics), we develop our argument by describing how to recover these sources, and also by showing how Dewey's aesthetics could be critically re-evaluated or reconstructed from a contemporary viewpoint. Finally, we put forward a conclusion.The Genesis of Dewey's Aesthetics: A Re-interpretationIt is well-known that Dewey's aesthetics is usually equated with Art as Experience. This is part of the canonical interpretations that tend to conceive Dewey's philosophy in, using his term, grooves (LW 2:113). Democracy and Education... (shrink)

Las herramientas teóricas destinadas a señalar las injusticias que sufren ciertos grupos socialmente oprimidos pueden acabar siendo utilizadas con propósitos completamente opuestos a los iniciales. Modificar el alcance de una herramienta teórica no es necesariamente problemático: la popularización de un concepto abre las puertas a que se utilice estratégicamente para diferentes fines. La tesis que defendemos en este artículo es que algunos personajes públicos cultivan una imagen particular de sí mismos que parece satisfacer los requisitos de la noción de injusticia (...) testimonial y utilizan esta situación como medio para obtener beneficio político de ella. Más concretamente, estos personajes públicos se benefician de esta condición para generar situaciones de desacuerdos cruzados, que están estrechamente relacionados con el aumento de la polarización. (shrink)

José Álvarez fue uno de los más activos maestros mayores de obras de la archidiócesis sevillana del XVIII. Contemporánea de Pedro de Silva, Ambrosio y Antonio de Figueroa y Fernando Rosales, alternó los encargos del Cabildo eclesiástico con los del Arzobispado, siendo estos últimos los que le otorgaron mayor prestigio. Basta citar algunos de los templos que construyó para comprender la magnitud de sus realizaciones. Sorprendentemente, su obra no había merecido aún la edición de una monografía, debido quizá a la (...) falta de noticias biográficas más allá de la de su origen onubense. Este trabajo pretende subsanar dicho vacío, documentando por vez primera su nacimiento y fallecimiento, su reducido círculo familiar, su autoría sobre relevantes obras eclesiales y repasando cronológicamente su actividad profesional. Todo ello para poner en valor la figura de uno de los grandes nombres de la arquitectura tardo-barroca sevillana. (shrink)

El objetivo de esta investigación es contribuir al conocimiento de la obra arquitectónica legada por el nieto de Leonardo de Figueroa al servicio de la diócesis hispalense, particularizando el estudio en la barroca Écija. Antonio de Figueroa, mal conocido como Antonio Matías, a pesar de ser el más prolífico maestro mayor del arzobispado en la segunda mitad del siglo XVIII, no ha merecido el debido interés por parte de la historiografía, manteniéndose hasta nuestros días diversas incógnitas sobre su obra, algunas (...) de las cuales se ponen de manifiesto en la ciudad astigitana. Al efecto de aclararlas, se documentan aquí sus intervenciones en cinco de las parroquias, destacando el inédito proyecto de Antonio de Figueroa para la realización del cuerpo de iglesia y capilla sacramental de Santa María, culminando la obra iniciada por su padre Ambrosio. El estudio se completa con la aportación de otros datos novedosos, referidos tanto al maestro como al proceso constructivo de los referidos templos. (shrink)

Radical enactivism supports radical embodied cognition (REC), which is the idea that basic or fundamental cognition (perception and action) does not need to be understood in representational, contentful terms. REC departs from the idea that the mind can be naturalized through biological functions, but rejects the idea that mental content, which is understood as having a representational nature, can be naturalized. For REC, the natural origins of content (or NOC) is a program based on the following hypothesis: first, we depart (...) from basic cognitive processes that are target-based and guided by an Ur-intentionality or directedness toward the world, and then sociality enters in the picture when language appears into the scene, allowing for establishing full-blown semantic content in which that content is about worldly states of affairs. Here, we are going to focus on the phenomenon of directedness since there are blind spots in this picture: as many authors claim, REC takes Ur-intentionality as the starting point, but there is simply no explanation to date of how this directedness or Ur-intentionality is established. Therefore, how could we account for Ur-intentionality? How does this kind of intentionality emerge? We believe that we can answer this question if we invoke the best scientific evidence from ecological perceptual learning especially in regard to the role of the environment and the information for perceiving affordances in our learning processes. This allows us to offer an answer to the question of how the most basic form of cognition (Ur-intentionality or directedness) emerges in nature. (shrink)

El presente artículo reconoce que las dos grandes metodologías de Foucault (la arqueología y la genealogía) surgieron en dos momentos diferentes de su enfoque metodológico, y argumenta que a partir de la década del setenta se desarrolla el concepto de dispositivo en el filósofo debido a una discontinuidad en su investigación. Se sostiene que este problema surgió a raíz de una serie de situaciones: el descubrimiento de un nuevo problema de investigación y su relación con la ocurrencia de una coyuntura (...) sociopolítica especifica (fracaso de las movilizaciones sociales del mayo francés en 1968). Lo anterior llevó a Foucault a plantear la pregunta por ¿cómo se ejerce el poder y cuál es su relación con el saber?, en lugar del antiguo interrogante sobre ¿qué es el poder? Esta transformación de la pregunta resultó fundamental en Foucault, ya que le permite concluir que todo dispositivo presupone la existencia de un poder y que todo poder se ejerce mediante la utilización de un saber. El artículo se cierra con una referencia a Jurgen Habermas, autor que precisa la crisis que generó en Foucault el fracaso de las movilizaciones sociales ocurridas durante el denominado mayo francés. El presente trabajo se elaboró a partir de un método de investigación cualitativa y una técnica de rastreo bibliográfico. (shrink)

This paper analyzes two different proposals, one by Ellis and Brundrit, based on classical relativistic cosmology, the other by Garriga and Vilenkin, based on the DH interpretation of quantum mechanics, both concluding that, in an infinite universe, planets and beings must be repeated an infinite number of times. We point to possible shortcomings in these arguments. We conclude that the idea of an infinite repetition of histories in space cannot be considered strictly speaking a consequence of current physics and cosmology. (...) Such ideas should be seen rather as examples of «ironic science» in the terminology of John Horgan. (shrink)

El _De Institutione Musica_, uno de los primeros tratados científicos de Boecio, expone la relación entre el hombre y la música basada en la armonía musical del cuerpo y el alma, donde Platón y Aristóteles aparecen confirmando a Pitágoras, quien sería el creador de esta antropología. En nuestro análisis, la enseñanza de Boecio proviene del neo-pitagorismo de Nicómaco de Gerasa y es incompatible no sólo con las doctrinas correspondientes de Platón y Aristóteles, a quien Boecio dice honrar con la traducción (...) de sus obras, sino con otros tratados, especialmente el _Contra Eutychen_ que se analiza aquí, por tener un fuerte componente antropológico. La pregunta que nos hacemos es si Boecio era consciente de la incoherencia doctrinal de sus fuentes. Nuestra respuesta es que él no fue inconsciente ni un traductor servil de sus fuentes, sino que él se identifica con las enseñanzas de Nicómaco sólo en la etapa inicial de su desarrollo, y esta doctrina no está integrada con el resto de sus trabajos científicos y teológicos. (shrink)

I present some puzzling cases regarding knowledge and its relation to rational credence. They seem to entail a failure of an apparently correct principle: if S knows P, then the epistemic justi...

A book dedicated to the thought of St. Bonaventure that consists of nine chapters. The first is a broad introduction to his work and thought and the rest analyzes various aspects of his philosophy.

Human–robot interactions are often affected by error situations that are caused by either the robot or the human. Therefore, robots would profit from the ability to recognize when error situations occur. We investigated the verbal and non-verbal social signals that humans show when error situations occur in human–robot interaction experiments. For that, we analyzed 201 videos of five human–robot interaction user studies with varying tasks from four independent projects. The analysis shows that there are two types of error situations: social (...) norm violations and technical failures. Social norm violations are situations in which the robot does not adhere to the underlying social script of the interaction. Technical failures are caused by technical shortcomings of the robot. The results of the video analysis show that the study participants use many head movements and very few gestures, but they often smile, when in an error situation with the robot. The results suggest that participants do not see the robot as a social interaction partner with comparable communication skills. Our findings have implications for builders and evaluators of human–robot interaction systems. The builders need to consider including modules for recognition and classification of head movements to the robot input channels. The evaluators need to make sure that the presence of an experimenter does not skew the results of their user studies. (shrink)

The hermeneutic path involved in the interpretation of law as well as in the interpretation of sacred texts, though peculiar, seems - as Emilio Betti pointed out - to share several things, most importantly the "normative" nature of interpretation. The 1999 issue of the Yearbook "Ars Interpretandi" accounts for the several and disparate relationships between these two important "regional hermeneutics".