In this paper I discuss some of the criteria that are widely used in the linguistic and philosophical literature to classify an aspect of meaning as either semantic or pragmatic. With regards to the case of scalar implicature (e.g. some Fs are G implying that not all Fs are G), these criteria are not ultimately conclusive, either in the results of their application, or in the interpretation of the results with regards to the semantics/pragmatics distinction (or in both). I propose (...) a psychologically relevant criterion, that of the primary or secondary role of context. This criterion applies to sub-personal processes that derive the interpretation of a scalar term rather than to the eventual interpretation of the term, and there exist well-established experimental paradigms that can generate quantitative data. I present recent studies on scalar implicature which employ such off-line and real-time paradigms, aiming to demonstrate how research on the semantics/pragmatics distinction can benefit from experimental investigation. (shrink)

One fundamental healthcare issue brought to the fore by the current COVID-19 pandemic concerns the scope and nature of the right to healthcare. Given our increasing need for the usually limited healthcare resources, to what extent can we demand provision of these resources as a matter of right? One philosophical way of handling this issue is to clarify the nature of this right. Using the challenges of COVID-19 in the Philippines as the context of analysis, we argue for the view (...) that regards the right to healthcare as fundamentally moral in kind, which should thereby guide its legal and contractual appropriations. In particular, we respond to objections against this view stemming from issues concerning the universality and satisfiability of the right’s correlative duty. We deal with such issues by invoking the relative degree of incumbency of moral rights and the capability-relativity of positive duties. We further contend that as these factors define the scope of the moral right to healthcare, they thus constrain what we can demand as a matter of right to meet our healthcare needs in this time of the pandemic. (shrink)

The supposition that Wittgenstein's Tractatus advances a certain metaphysics has given rise to a controversy over the ontological status of his Tractarian objects. It has been debated, for instance, whether these objects consist only of particulars or of both particulars and universals; whether they are physical, phenomenal, or phenomenological entities; and whether they correspond to Russell's objects of acquaintance or Kant's phenomena and substance. In this essay, I endorse Ishiguro's view that these objects, being formal concepts, are ontologically neutral and (...) thus are not identifiable with any ontological kind of entities. I elaborate on the coherence of this view with the propositional dependence of the meaning of Tractarian names. After showing why some arguments for ascribing a Russellian theory of meaning to these names do not work, I demonstrate why Ishiguro's account of Tractarian objects and names provides a better explanation of the unalterability of these objects. (shrink)

Uno de los problemas más traumáticos que enfrentamos al asumir un proceso de investigación tiene que ver con la falta de comprensión de las perspectivas teóricas con que podemos emprender la solución de un determinado problema. Existe por ejemplo, la creencia derivada de resolver problemas de invest..

This paper acknowledges the fact human beings are social animals, as they tend to live in well-organized societies. However, human population expansion explodes into internal implosions that continue to wreck havoc globally on the social, economic, political, architectural, and aesthetic environments. To harness the universal territorial imperatives, of contending components harmoniously, the world requires synergy and dialogue.

This paper acknowledges the fact human beings are social animals, as they tend to live in well-organized societies. However, human population expansion explodes into internal implosions that continue to wreck havoc globally on the social, economic, political, architectural, and aesthetic environments. To harness the universal territorial imperatives, of contending components harmoniously, the world requires synergy and dialogue.

The paper examines the bond between architecture and history on the premise that everybody is familiar with both architecture and history. The paper views architecture as a profession that is satiated with imaginative and creative thinking; and contends that architecture extends, historically, into wherever human beings live their life. The author opines that architecture easily extends its influence, as a vivid universal metaphor into every sphere of human activity as a synonym, in building either concrete or abstract forms. Thus, the (...) paper proceeds to demonstrate that architecture chronicles the achievements of peoples in creatively constructed concrete forms, which it infuses with the histories of abstract concepts in time and space. Conversely, the paper points out that history, which highlights the living memories of humanity, chronicles the antecedences, precedence, sequences, and consequences of man’s concrete achievements incogent abstract forms. Consequently, the paper concludes that while architecture builds conceptualized concrete forms from and for history; history builds its concrete abstract forms from and for architecture. Thus, the paper concludes that The Architecture of History and The History of Architecture ultimately coincides in their complementarity, as mutual witnesses to the activities of man in time and space. (shrink)

The epic life of Pope John Paul II touches virtually all aspects of the human being in time and space. His successful world outreach achieves unprecedented superlative proportions in his search for universal harmonies among peoples, cultures and religions. Significantly, his death confirms the success of his positive mission on the Earth as his death caused an extraordinary unity of people, cultures, and religions during his funeral. No one else has unified such opposing opposites in a memorial service in a (...) millennium! Thus, Pope John Paul II by his calling served the sacred; his deeds achieve a synchronized symphony of the sacred and secular. This paper examines the views of Pope John Paul II, as expressed in Laborem Excercens, through the concept of the unity of oppositesin sacred and secular architecture. (shrink)

The epic life of Pope John Paul II touches virtually all aspects of the human being in time and space. His successful world outreach achieves unprecedented superlative proportions in his search for universal harmonies among peoples, cultures and religions. Significantly, his death confirms the success of his positive mission on the Earth as his death caused an extraordinary unity of people, cultures, and religions during his funeral. No one else has unified such opposing opposites in a memorial service in a (...) millennium! Thus, Pope John Paul II by his calling served the sacred; his deeds achieve a synchronized symphony of the sacred and secular. This paper examines the views of Pope John Paul II, as expressed in Laborem Excercens, through the concept of the unity of oppositesin sacred and secular architecture. (shrink)

The paper examines the bond between architecture and history on the premise that everybody is familiar with both architecture and history. The paper views architecture as a profession that is satiated with imaginative and creative thinking; and contends that architecture extends, historically, into wherever human beings live their life. The author opines that architecture easily extends its influence, as a vivid universal metaphor into every sphere of human activity as a synonym, in building either concrete or abstract forms. Thus, the (...) paper proceeds to demonstrate that architecture chronicles the achievements of peoples in creatively constructed concrete forms, which it infuses with the histories of abstract concepts in time and space. Conversely, the paper points out that history, which highlights the living memories of humanity, chronicles the antecedences, precedence, sequences, and consequences of man’s concrete achievements incogent abstract forms. Consequently, the paper concludes that while architecture builds conceptualized concrete forms from and for history; history builds its concrete abstract forms from and for architecture. Thus, the paper concludes that The Architecture of History and The History of Architecture ultimately coincides in their complementarity, as mutual witnesses to the activities of man in time and space. (shrink)

Contemporary humanity—especially urban‐industrial civilization with its domination of nature—is disturbing complex, integrated, self‐regulating systems that have evolved over long periods of time. We are threatening not only biological ecosystems but also human self‐regulating capabilities at both the biological and the social‐systems levels. This paper presents examples of such disturbance both in the organism—respiratory‐cardiovascular problems related to environmental pollution‐and at the population level—rates of infant mortality and relations between fertility and mortality in light of economic and emotional factors. Prospects for our (...) future survival and flourishing are thus linked less to technical know‐how than to ecological understanding. (shrink)

Social reality is configured and permanently re-configured from the meaning societies give to the world. From these meanings, people shape their social order; their ways of being, doing, represent in the world, organizing in this framework their daily lives. It is established as a social practice as far as it acquires enough roots, significance and objectification to give a transformative sense to its social actors and their environment. The purpose of this article is to question some perspectives from which social (...) practice has been set up, departing decisively from the functional dimension, showing the power of the concept of social practice in the human configuration as an expression of humanity from the social imaginary. The article analyses some trends in social practice, seeking to establish a synthesis as an expression of humanity; it confronts theories and support its proposal in the logic of social imaginary to overcome the practice as mere activity and place it as socio-historical and psychosomatic stage. La realidad social se configura y re-configura permanentemente a partir del sentido que las sociedades dan al mundo. Desde estas significaciones las personas configuran su orden social; sus formas de ser, hacer, representar en el mundo, organizando en este marco su vida cotidiana. Ella se establece como práctica social en la medida que adquiere el suficiente arraigo, significación y objetivación que les da un sentido transformador a sus actores sociales y su entorno. El objeto del presente artículo es abordar algunas perspectivas desde las cuales se ha configurado la práctica social, que se salen decididamente de la dimensión meramente funcional, y que evidencian la potencia de este concepto en la configuración de seres humanos como expresión de humanidad desde los imaginarios sociales. En el texto se propone un análisis de algunas tendencias de la práctica social buscando establecer una síntesis de consideraciones por las cuales esta adquiere una dimensión como expresión de humanidad; confronta teorías que la apoyan y soporta su propuesta en la lógica de los imaginarios sociales para superar la práctica como mera actividad y situarla como escenario socio-histórico y psicosomático. (shrink)

This essay is a critical examination of how Edmund Husserl, in his appropriation of Franz Brentano’s concept of intentionality into his phenomenology, deals with the very issues that shaped Brentano’s theory of intentionality. These issues concern the proper criterion for distinguishing mental from physical phenomena and the right explanation for the independence of the intentionality of mental phenomena from the existence or non-existence of their objects. Husserl disagrees with Brentano’s views that intentionality is the distinguishing feature of all mental phenomena (...) and that the mental status of intentional objects is what explains the said independence. The crucial concept in Husserl’s theory of intentionality is the noema of consciousness, which functions in the same way as Gottlob Frege’s sense in his theory of semantics. This essay argues that Husserl’s alternative solutions to the problems of Brentano run in conflict either with the desired rigor of his phenomenology or with the actual workings of language. (shrink)

Resumen: Las relaciones entre motricidad y corporeidad son fundamentales en una consideración de desarrollo humano. Mostrar las particularidades de cada una de ellas, así como de sus dimensiones, y analizar su fuerte articulación, nos resulta importante para comprender la naturaleza humanizadora de las mismas. El texto muestra las diferencias entre la motricidad y la corporeidad y argumenta desde la analogía de los magmas la posibilidad de comprender su imbricada relación y diferencia para poder desarrollar un concepto hacia el desarrollo de (...) lo humano del ser.: The relationships between motor skills and corporeality are fundamental in a consideration of human development. To show the particularities of each one of them, as well as their dimensions, and analyze their strong articulation, it is important for us to understand their humanizing nature. The text shows the differences between motor skills and corporeality and argues from the analogy of magmas the possibility of understanding their overlapping relationship and difference to develop a concept towards the development of the human being. (shrink)

A large body of experience and expertise on the implementation of sustainable public school food procurement policies has developed in recent years. However, there has been little investigation of the values and motivations of the public officials implementing the policies. To address this gap, we examine how the city of Avignon took a step toward transition to local fresh food procurement for public schools, under French government calls for sustainable food products in public canteens. Our analysis combines the Multi-Level Perspective (...) on sustainable transitions with the Public Service Motivation construct. Unlike other studies addressing the MLP at a macro level, we focus on individual motivations behind public action. We demonstrate that staff motivations have a major impact on how policies supporting transition to local fresh food procurement for public schools are implemented. These public officials’ approach to food shows concern for the public interest regardless of financial return. It is not the rational choice that primarily drives the implementation of urban food policies, but normative conformity and affective bonding. Interestingly, we conclude that the success of Avignon’s politically-driven school food procurement policy is essentially due to the catering and procurement staff who overcame the barriers to its implementation. (shrink)

Due to his significant role in the development of computer technology and the discipline of artificial intelligence, Alan Turing has supposedly subscribed to the theory of mind that has been greatly inspired by the power of the said technology which has eventually become the dominant framework for current researches in artificial intelligence and cognitive science, namely, computationalism or the computational theory of mind. In this essay, I challenge this supposition. In particular, I will try to show that there is no (...) evidence in Turing’s two seminal works that supports such a supposition. His 1936 paper is all about the notion of computation or computability as it applies to mathematical functions and not to the nature or workings of intelligence. On the other hand, while his 1950 work is about intelligence, it is, however, particularly concerned with the problem of whether intelligence can be attributed to computing machines and not of whether computationality can be attributed to human intelligence or to intelligence in general. (shrink)

This essay primarily disputes Dreyfus’s account of Heidegger’s critique of Husserl’s theory of intentionality. Specifically, it raises objections to the three central claims of such an account; namely: (1) that Searle’s theory of intentional action can be used as a stand-in for Husserl’s; (2) that Heidegger rejects the primordiality of the intentionality of consciousness; and (3) that Heidegger distinguishes between conscious and unconscious types of intentional actions and he privileges the latter over the former. I show the first to be (...) unwarranted owing to a lack of fundamental parallelisms between Searle’s and Husserl’s theories of intentionality. I show the second to be mistaken for failing to take into account Heidegger’s strategic handling of the concept of consciousness and for contradicting Heidegger’s concept of care as the essential meaning of Dasein’s being-in-the-world. Lastly, I show the third to be highly problematic for lacking in textual evidence and explanatory power. (shrink)

John Searle and Roger Penrose are two staunch critics of computationalism who nonetheIess believe that with the right framework the mind can be naturalized. while they may be successful in showing the shortcomings of computationalism, I argue that their alternative noncomputational frameworks equally fail to carry out the project to naturalize the mind. The main reason is their failure to resolve some fundamental incompatibilities between mind and science. Searle tries to resolve the incompatibility between the subjectivity of consciousness and the (...) objectivity of silence by means of conceptual clarification. He, howeve4 fails to deal with the concepts crucial to this incompatibility, namely, the publicness of scientific knowledge and the privacy of psychological knowledge. Penrose tries to resolve the incompatibility between the non-computationality of psychological process and the computationality of scientific process by expanding the scope of science through some radical changes in quantum physics. His strategy, howeve4 has the danger of trivializing the distinction between science and non-science thereby putting into question the very value of the project to naturalize the mind. In addition, the feasibility of this strategy remains dubious in light of the mysteries that still surround quantum physics. (shrink)

En el presente articulo se aborda la persona de Mauricio Beuchot, uno de los filósofos mexicanos más relevantes de la actualidad, en su aspecto de tomista analítico.

With its use of the powerful technology of computer, the computational theory of mind or computationalism, which regards minds as computational systems, has been widely hailed as the most promising theory that will carry out the project of explaining the workings of the mind in purely scientific terms. While it continues to serve as the primary framework for scientifically inclined theorizing and investigations about the nature of minds, especially in the area of cognitive science, it, however, continues to face strong (...) objections from its critics. And with the growing complexity and sophistication of the arguments used to promote and reject the theory, the debate has become intractable. It has become quite difficult to assess which side of the dispute is gaining the upper hand. Such difficulty may be due to a variety of reasons. In this essay, I critically examine two of such reasons. The first concerns the ambiguity of the theory’s intended scope of application: whether it is limited to the mind’s cognitive features only or it also includes the mind’s phenomenal features. The second concerns the vagueness of how the so-called computer modelling of human cognitive processes is able to duplicate such processes. Accordingly, if insufficiently addressed, they remain as two roadblocks to the entire project of computationalism. (shrink)

This essay deals with the following issues: (1) whether corporations can have moral responsibilities; (2) whether, granting that corporations can have moral responsibilities, nature can be an object of these responsibilities; and (3) what moral theory can appropriately justify why corporations ought to contribute to the cause of environmental protection. It is here argued that while it can be shown that corporations can have moral responsibilities, such responsibilities are limited towards humans and other corporations. The main reason is that the (...) morally relevant functional capacities which corporations can be shown as possessing are limited to those functional capacities that give moral status to humans. As such, natural nonhumans are beyond the scope of these responsibilities. But this does not mean that it becomes justifiable for corporations to disregard environmental concerns. For part of the moral responsibilities of corporations towards humans is to respect the right of humans to a livable natural environment. In addition, because of their enduring existence and long-term goals, corporations can act as a bridge between humans of the present generation and those of future generations. This bridge makes it meaningful to speak of the moral responsibilities of humans of the present generation towards those of future generations. (shrink)

This essay shows why children advertising or business ads directed at children cannot be justified on moral grounds. It is argued that while the persuasive intent of business ads in general does not always lead to the manipulation of consumers, children’s yet undeveloped or general lack of the capacity to make autonomous, rational, or free and informed buying decisions renders business ads directed at them necessarily manipulative. Accordingly, it is when ads are manipulative that they are unethical. And the absence (...) of an internal mechanism in children to guard themselves against the possible manipulations of the ads directed at them renders the persuasive techniques of these ads as ways of taking advantage of their vulnerability. (shrink)

Contemporary philosophy of mind is generally characterized by its project to naturalize the mind. Utilizing the findings of the different sciences involved in cognitive science, especially those of artificial intelligence and neuroscience, it continues to explore ways to explain the workings of the mind in purely scientific terms. But despite the rigor and sophistication of its methods, certain questions critical to its success have remained unanswered, such as how consciousness emerges from the brain’s physical processes and how the phenomenal properties (...) of our conscious experiences arise from the physical properties of our bodily experiences. This has led some scholars to seek alternative perspectives. One such perspective that is widely explored today is Buddhist thought. The centrality of the mind in Buddhist thought and its perceived compatibility with the findings of modern science make it an attractive alternative framework to carry out the naturalization project. In this paper, I aim to examine the plausibility of this strategy. In particular, I shall evaluate whether Buddhist thought provides the needed insights to overcome the challenges facing the said project. (shrink)

The damaging effects of the activities of corporations on the natural environment have given rise to the need to evaluate corporate policies, decisions, and actions affecting the natural environment on moral grounds. There are two important questions that need to be addressed in this regard. The first is whether corporations have a moral obligation to protect the natural environment, which is over and above their economic duty to maximize profits for their stockholders and their legal duty to obey environmental laws. (...) And the second is, given that they do have this moral obligation, what sort of environmental ethical theory (homocentrism, biocentrism, utilitarianism) ought to guide the exercise of such an obligation? This paper argues that corporations do have such moral obligations, for they are moral agents in virtue of their nonmetaphorical possession of rational capacities. This, however, implies that the corporations’ exercise of this obligation can only be properly guided by a rationalist type of ethics. (shrink)

The second article, in which the author suggests an analysis of other three authors' state of nature models and tries to define the role of the models in their respective law concepts. The analysis demonstrates that all three models share same basic idea, which is the concept of an independent reasonable individual; this very idea is what these different models are based upon. The concept of an individual itself does not have a substantiation.