Kasahara, Javier. “Una relectura leibniziana al mecanicismo.” _Eidos_ 22 (2015): 35-48.

Resumen: En este artículo se hará, en primer lugar, una breve revisión de las diferentes interpretaciones del escepticismo de Michel de Montaigne; en segundo lugar, una tentativa de unificación de dichas interpretaciones -utilizando la del profesor F. Brahami como referente heurístico- a partir de los rasgos más generales presentes en el escepticismo del bordolés; y, en tercer lugar, se identificarán estos rasgos en la obra Notas de Nicolás Gómez Dávila, que para los autores es un texto escéptico de corte (...) montaigniano.: In this article we will do, in the first place, a brief review of the different interpretations on Michel de Montaigne's skepticism. In the second place, we will try to unify these interpretations -with the one of Professor Brahami as heuristic reference-, considering the more general traits of his skepticism. Thirdly, we will try to identify these traits in the work Notas of Nicolás Gómez Dávila that, in our opinion, is a skeptical montaignian text. (shrink)

I propose a reading of some theoretical-critical texts published during the first decade of the twenty-first century, in order to perform a cartography of the complex weft of aesthetic knowledge and, in doing so, to consider new inflections and points of view to read the arts, the literature and its policies. The inquiries of Jacques Rancière, Andreas Huyssen, Nicolás Bourriaud, Reinaldo Laddaga and Néstor García Canclini are projected on the contemporary scene as reformulations of a discourse that tries to (...) refer the work with form and sensation, now disseminated as a production that reorganizes the material an symbolic conditions of art in its dialogue with the world. Each of these authors make unique characterization of contemporary aesthetics, all of which question the modern disciplinary rigidity to identify aesthetic practices as acts that can reorganize the sense of community and the ways of life through sensible exploration. (shrink)

This book is the first extensive treatment of Husserl's phenomenology of time-consciousness. Nicolas de Warren uses detailed analysis of texts by Husserl, some only recently published in German, to examine Husserl's treatment of time-consciousness and its significance for his conception of subjectivity. He traces the development of Husserl's thinking on the problem of time from Franz Brentano's descriptive psychology, and situates it in the framework of his transcendental project as a whole. Particular discussions include the significance of time-consciousness for other (...) phenomenological themes: perceptual experience, the imagination, remembrance, self-consciousness, embodiment, and the consciousness of others. The result is an illuminating exploration of how and why Husserl considered the question of time-consciousness to be the most difficult, yet also the most central, of all the challenges facing his unique philosophical enterprise"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

Our discussion of the commentaries begins, at the evolutionary level, with issues raised by our account of the evolution of morality in terms of partner-choice mutualism. We then turn to the cognitive level and the characterization and workings of fairness. In a final section, we discuss the degree to which our fairness-based approach to morality extends to norms that are commonly considered moral even though they are distinct from fairness.

To become more broadly applicable, positions on AI ethics require perspectives from non-Western regions and cultures such as China and Japan. In this paper, we propose that the addition of the concept of harmony to the discussion on ethical AI would be highly beneficial due to its centrality in East Asian cultures and its applicability to the challenge of designing AI for social good. We first present a synopsis of different definitions of harmony in multiple contexts, such as music and (...) society, which reveals that the concept is, at its core, about well-balanced relationships and appropriate actions which give rise to order, balance, and aesthetically pleasing phenomena. The mediator for these well-balanced relationships isTaktwhich is an ability to act thoughtfully and sensibly according to the specific situation and to put things into proportion and order. We propose that the central challenge of building harmonizing AI is to make intelligent systems tactful and also to design and use them tactfully. For an AI system to become tactful, it needs to be able to have an advanced sensitivity to the specific contexts which it is in and their social and ethical implications and have the capability of approximately inferring the emotional and cognitive states of people with whom it is interacting. (shrink)

Based on anthropological fieldwork on the revival of hallucinogen research as well as on the epistemic culture of neurophilosophy, this Common Knowledge guest column examines two very different philosophical engagements with psychedelic drugs. In Thomas Metzinger's evidence-based philosophy of mind, hallucinogens help to operationalize questions about the nature of consciousness. While this project contributes to the great divide between empirically enlightened moderns and tradition-oriented premoderns, Metzinger's neurophilosophical reanimation of the ancient conception of philosophy as cultura animi can build a bridge (...) to Aldous Huxley's perennial philosophy, which has informed the psychedelic intelligentsia like no other body of thought. In the sixteenth century, the philosophia perennis grew out of a decidedly nonmodern philosophy of religion that sought to suture the historical and cultural cracks that would come to define modernity. This essay argues that neurophilosophy and ethnographic studies of consciousness cultures could function as critical correctives in a contemporary rearticulation of perennial philosophy. (shrink)

Our discussion of the commentaries begins, at the evolutionary level, with issues raised by our account of the evolution of morality in terms of partner-choice mutualism. We then turn to the cognitive level and the characterization and workings of fairness. In a final section, we discuss the degree to which our fairness-based approach to morality extends to norms that are commonly considered moral even though they are distinct from fairness.

In Time Deposits, Dimension, and Fraud (2009), William Barnett and Walter Block argue that by borrowing short and lending long there is an over issuance of property rights. Their article, however, does not fully extend the consequences of their contribution. Once this is done, it becomes clearer that their argument suits a great impediment to banking, becoming a possible reason to support rather than to oppose fractional reserve banking. Bagus and Howden (J Bus Ethics 90(3):399–406, 2009) comment on Barnett and (...) Block (J Bus Ethics 88(4):711–716, 2009), the authors claim that while maintaining the illegitimacy of fractional reserve deposits, borrowing short and lending long it is actually not illegitimate. An extension on Bagus and Howden (2009) will show that their line of argumentation can be applied as a defense of fractional reserve banking as well. (shrink)

This paper compares two explanations of the process by which human communication systems evolve: iterated learning and social collaboration. It then reports an experiment testing the social collaboration account. Participants engaged in a graphical communication task either as a member of a community, where they interacted with seven different partners drawn from the same pool, or as a member of an isolated pair, where they interacted with the same partner across the same number of games. Participants’ horizontal, pair‐wise interactions led (...) “bottom up” to the creation of an effective and efficient shared sign system in the community condition. Furthermore, the community‐evolved sign systems were as effective and efficient as the local sign systems developed by isolated pairs. Finally, and as predicted by a social collaboration account, and not by an iterated learning account, interaction was critical to the creation of shared sign systems, with different isolated pairs establishing different local sign systems and different communities establishing different global sign systems. (shrink)

Critics of the target article objected to our account of art appreciators' sensitivity to art-historical contexts and functions, the relations among the modes of artistic appreciation, and the weaknesses of aesthetic science. To rebut these objections and justify our program, we argue that the current neglect of sensitivity to art-historical contexts persists as a result of a pervasive aesthetic–artistic confound; we further specify our claim that basic exposure and the design stance are necessary conditions of artistic understanding; and we explain (...) why many experimental studies do not belong to a psycho-historical science of art. (shrink)

This paper intends to bring Austinian themes into methodological discussion about models. Using Austinian conceptual vocabulary, I argue that models perform actions in and outside of the academic field. This multiplicity of fields induces a variety of felicity conditions and types of performed actions. If for example, an inference from a model is judged according to some epistemological criteria in the scientific field, the representation of the world which the model carries will not be judged by the same criteria outside (...) the scientific field. A model can be considered as a standard in a strict scientific framework, while not being used as part of public policies, or vice versa. However, we focus on the dynamics between different fields. (shrink)

The claim that the observation of a violation of a Bell inequality leads to an alleged alternative between nonlocality and non-realism is annoying because of the vagueness of the second term.

“The apocalypse of hope” and other comparable flourishes in the writings of Frantz Fanon and Jean-Paul Sartre on political violence strike an alarming tone. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon advocates the way of revolutionary violence as the inevitable consequence of colonialism and its systematic exploitation of colonized natives. In his role of agent provocateur, Sartre’s preface to Fanon’s influential and controversial work characteristically dramatizes this redemptive promise of violence: “to gun down a European is to kill two birds (...) with one stone…there remains a dead man and a free man.” This notorious pronouncement constitutes itself as an act of violence—we must feel threatened—meant to incite the latent counter-violence behind, in Sartre’s diagnosis, the false consciousness of bourgeois toleration and understanding. Could Sartre’s bold statement be spoken today without violent condemnation? This statement claims that, against the dehumanization of colonial oppression, only revolutionary violence allows for the colonized natives to constitute a “people” and recreate themselves in the image of a new humanity forged from the experience of liberation. For Fanon in particular, the recreation of humanity is impossible without the birth of a national consciousness and a revolutionary culture. As Fanon writes, “[w]e believe that the conscious, organized struggle undertaken by a colonized people in order to restore national sovereignty constitutes the greatest cultural manifestation that exists.” This reach toward a new humanism through the praxis of revolutionary violence points directly to the problem of beginnings. As Arendt observes in On Revolution, “[r]evolutions are the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning.” Anti-colonial violence, for Fanon, inaugurates the beginning of political life; the colonized native reconstitutes himself as a βίοσ πολιτικόσ capable of both speech and praxis. For Sartre, anti-colonial violence reveals the dialectical necessity of world history in its struggle towards genuine universality and the utopia of a “classless” society. (shrink)

Since the Industrial Revolution, human societies have experienced high and sustained rates of economic growth. Recent explanations of this sudden and massive change in economic history have held that modern growth results from an acceleration of innovation. But it is unclear why the rate of innovation drastically accelerated in England in the eighteenth century. An important factor might be the alteration of individual preferences with regard to innovation resulting from the unprecedented living standards of the English during that period, for (...) two reasons. First, recent developments in economic history challenge the standard Malthusian view according to which living standards were stagnant until the Industrial Revolution. Pre-industrial England enjoyed a level of affluence that was unprecedented in history. Second, behavioral sciences have demonstrated that the human brain is designed to respond adaptively to variations in resources in the local environment. In particular, Life History Theory, a branch of evolutionary biology, suggests that a more favorable environment should trigger the expression of future-oriented preferences. In this paper, I argue that some of these psychological traits – a lower level of time discounting, a higher level of optimism, decreased materialistic orientation, and a higher level of trust in others – are likely to increase the rate of innovation. I review the evidence regarding the impact of affluence on preferences in contemporary as well as past populations, and conclude that the impact of affluence on neurocognitive systems may partly explain the modern acceleration of technological innovations and the associated economic growth. (shrink)

This essay defends the possibility of preemptive forgiving, that is, forgiving before the offending action has taken place. This essay argues that our moral practices and emotions admit such a possibility, and it attempts to offer examples to illustrate this phenomenon. There are two main reasons why someone might doubt the possibility of preemptive forgiving. First, one might think that preemptive forgiving would amount to granting permission. Second, one might think that forgiving requires emotional content that is not available prior (...) to wrongdoing. If, however, preemptively forgiving is genuinely possible—as this essay hopes to illustrate—then this fact has implications for our understanding of both relational normativity and the nature of forgiveness. (shrink)

Henrich et al.’s article fleshes out in a very useful and timely manner comments often heard but rarely published about the extraordinary cultural imbalance in the recruitment of participants in psychology experiments and the doubt this casts on generalization of findings from these “weird” samples to humans in general. The authors mention that one of the concerns they have met in defending their views has been of a methodological nature: “the observed variation across populations may be due to various methodological (...) artifacts that arise from translating experiments across contexts” (sect. 7.2, para. 1). Here we want to express a less sweeping methodological concern. While accepting the general conclusions and recommendations of the article, we believe they should be complemented with a.. (shrink)

This article offers a justification for accommodating claims of conscience. The standard justification points to the pain that acting against one’s conscience entails. But that defense cannot make sense of the state’s refusal to accommodate individuals where the law interferes with their deeply meaningful but nonmoral projects. An alternative justification, we argue, arises once one recognizes the connection between conscience and moral address: One’s lived moral convictions determine when and with what force one can hold others to account. Acting against (...) one’s convictions can undermine one’s standing to blame others who act in similar ways. When the state compels someone to act against conscience, it renders her complicit in conduct she takes to be wrong and thereby impairs her ability to condemn similar conduct in the future, in a manner akin to the hypocrite. The reason the state should not compel people to act against conscience, then, is that doing so would undercut their moral standing. (shrink)

The picture of moral development defended by followers of Aristotle takes moral cultivation to be like playing a harp; one gets to be good by actually spending time playing a real instrument. On this view, we cultivate a virtue by doing the actions associated with that virtue. I argue that this picture is inadequate and must be supplemented by imaginative techniques. One can, and sometimes must, cultivate virtue without actually performing the associated actions. Drawing on strands in Buddhist philosophy, I (...) explain several methods of moral development that rely on imagination and visualization rather than overt action. These techniques are essential in cases where cultivating virtue the way one practices the harp is impossible. In particular, I focus on single-event virtues, first-time virtuous acts, and morally dangerous situations. (shrink)

Most people agree that inflicting unnecessary suffering upon animals is wrong. Many fewer people, including among ethicists, agree that painlessly killing animals is necessarily wrong. The most commonly cited reason is that death (without pain, fear, distress) is not bad for them in a way that matters morally, or not as significantly as it does for persons, who are self-conscious, make long-term plans and have preferences about their own future. Animals, at least those that are not persons, lack a morally (...) significant interest in continuing to live. At the same time, some argue that existence itself can be good, insofar as one’s life is worth living. For animals, a good life can offset a quick, if early, death. So, it seems to follow that breeding happy animals that will be (prematurely) killed can be a good thing overall. Insofar as slaughter and sale makes it economically sustainable to raise new ones, who would otherwise not exist, raising and killing animals for food who will have lives worth living is good overall. It benefits them as well as consumers, and makes the world better by adding to the sum of happiness. The process of raising and killing animals with positive welfare produces a sequence of replacement that maintains or increases overall welfare, all else being equal (assuming in particular no overall negative impact on the welfare of other parties). Call this the Replaceability Argument (RA) and the ensuing controversy the Replaceability Problem (RP). This is a problem at the crossroads of the ethics of killing, agricultural ethics, procreation ethics, and population ethics. (shrink)

I defend an account of when and why anger is morally virtuous or vicious. Anger often manifests what we care about; a sports fan gets angry when her favorite team loses because she cares about the team doing well. Anger, I argue, is made morally virtuous or vicious by the underlying care or concern. Anger is virtuous when it manifests moral concern and vicious when it manifests moral indifference or ill will. In defending this view, I reject two common views (...) about anger and moral character. First, I respond to several arguments that attempt to show that all anger is vicious. Then I respond to the view that some anger is required to be a virtuous person. Anger, on my view, can be morally virtuous but is not a necessary condition for being a virtuous person. This best accommodates not only morally irrelevant failures to get angry but also allows for emotional variation among virtuous people. (shrink)

The term biosocial evolution refers to mutual relations between different organisms and specially to functional systems composed of individuals belonging to a species , or to two or more different species .The main features of the biosocial evolutioni.e. historical development of the functional systems of biosocial order are: 1. functional differentiation of the individual components of corresponding systems, 2. coordination of the differentiated functions and as a result, 3. the intergration of this systems as functional wholes.The tropical rain forest is (...) to be considered as one of the most advanced terrestrial ecosystems, caracterized by its extreme differentiation, high level of its integration and violent reactions to main forces.The functional differentiation of the components of ecosystems is considered as a manifestation of the development of their individual traits as members of this system.The mechanisms of both phylogenetical and biosocial evolution as well as some other questions related to the problem are briefly discussed in the text. (shrink)

Recent models of the conceptual system hold that concepts are grounded in simulations of actual experiences with instances of those concepts in sensory-motor systems (e.g., Barsalou, 1999, 2003; Solomon & Barsalou, 2001). Studies supportive of such a viewhave shown that verifying a property of a concept in one modality, and then switching to verify a property of a different concept in a different modality generates temporal processing costs similar to the cost of switching modalities in perception. In addition to non-emotional (...) concepts, the present experiment investigated switching costs in verifying properties of positive and negative (emotional) concepts. Properties of emotional concepts were taken from vision, audition, and the affective system. Parallel to switching costs in neutral concepts, the study showed that for positive and negative concepts, verifying properties from different modalities produced processing costs such that reaction times were longer and error rates were higher. Importantly, this effect was observed when switching from the affective system to sensory modalities, and vice-versa. These results support the embodied cognition view of emotion in humans. (shrink)

To introduce the issue of the tracking and identification of human agents, I examine the ability of an agent to track a human person and distinguish this target from other individuals: The ability to perform person identification. First, I discuss influential mechanistic models of the perceptual recognition of human faces and people. Such models propose detailed hypotheses about the parts and activities of the mental mechanisms that control the perceptual recognition of persons. However, models based on perceptual recognition are incomplete (...) theories of person identification because they do not explain several identification behaviors that are fundamental to human social interactions. Furthermore, recognition-based models tend to appeal to the controversial concept of the “identity” of a person without explaining what determines personal identity and persistence. To overcome these limitations, I propose to integrate the face-recognition program into a broader causal-historical theory of identification. The causal-historical theory of identification complements models focused on perceptual recognition because it can account for the types of non-perceptual identification overlooked by the face-recognition program. Moreover, it can decompose the identification behaviors into tracking processes that succeed or fail to be sensitive to causal characteristics of a target. I illustrate these advantages with a discussion of the difference between the tracking of a person understood as either a causally continuous biological organism or a psychologically continuous mind. Finally, I argue that the causal-historical theory provides a theoretical framework for investigating the tracking of relations between a target and its contextual and historical attributes, such as a target's possessions. (shrink)

Recent models of the conceptual system hold that concepts are grounded in simulations of actual experiences with instances of those concepts in sensory-motor systems (e.g., Barsalou, 1999, 2003; Solomon & Barsalou, 2001). Studies supportive of such a viewhave shown that verifying a property of a concept in one modality, and then switching to verify a property of a different concept in a different modality generates temporal processing costs similar to the cost of switching modalities in perception. In addition to non-emotional (...) concepts, the present experiment investigated switching costs in verifying properties of positive and negative (emotional) concepts. Properties of emotional concepts were taken from vision, audition, and the affective system. Parallel to switching costs in neutral concepts, the study showed that for positive and negative concepts, verifying properties from different modalities produced processing costs such that reaction times were longer and error rates were higher. Importantly, this effect was observed when switching from the affective system to sensory modalities, and vice-versa. These results support the embodied cognition view of emotion in humans. (shrink)

Some things have positive value and some things have negative value. The things with positive value are good and the things with negative value are bad. There are also things in-between that are neither good nor bad, which are neutral. All in all, then, there are three monadic value predicates: “good,” “bad,” and “neutral.”.

This longitudinal study investigated the capability of various positive psychological resources to directly or indirectly protect specific well-being outcomes and moderate the effects on well-being of health and economic threats in a lockdown situation during the 2020 health crisis in France. At the beginning of lockdown, participants completed self-assessment questionnaires to document their initial level of well-being and state of nine different well-established psychological resources, measured as traits: optimism, hope, self-efficacy, gratitude toward the world, self-transcendence, wisdom, gratitude of being, peaceful (...) disengagement, and acceptance. Three weeks later, a weekly follow-up was started to record changes in well-being and reported threats for a duration of 5 weeks. Results show that psychological resources efficiently protected well-being in a variety of ways: they buffered the adverse effects of reported threats to health and wealth, increased the well-being averages, and reduced the decline in well-being over time. More specifically, emotional well-being was positively predicted by hope, gratitude of being, and, to a lesser level, by acceptance; psychological well-being by self-efficacy, personal wisdom, and gratitude of being; social well-being only by gratitude toward the world; and inner well-being by optimism, gratitude of being, and acceptance. The study emphasizes the importance of cultivating psychological resources in ordinary times to protect individuals' well-being when difficult and extraordinary circumstances occur. It also offers clues to the kind of resources one may want to develop. (shrink)

The growing popularization of stakeholder theory among management scholars has offered a useful framework for understanding the multiple and interdependent roles of government and business in an increasingly challenging political and regulatory environment. Despite this trend, attention to the role and responsibility of government to protect citizen rights has been limited. To the two traditional stakeholder theory views of government where the focal organization remains the firm, we propose to add two views by pivoting the government’s place and making it (...) the focal organization. We thus describe governments as serving four roles in the business–government–society nexus. For each role, we analyze typical governmental activities/behaviors, relationships with firms’ stakeholders, as well as the challenges and limits to these roles. We also focus on the central notion of salience amplification, as a means of checks and balances across stakeholders in order to safeguard citizen rights and reveal the greater good. (shrink)

El objetivo de este artículo es indagar en la fundamentación schmittiana del individuo y de la reserva de conciencia. En la actualidad, buena parte de la recepción contemporánea considera al jurista renano como un antiliberal y, por lo tanto, como un antiindividualista. Sin embargo, nuestra hipótesis es que es posible encontrar en su obra no solo una crítica a la noción liberal de individuo, sino también una concepción propositiva a través de sus reflexiones sobre la crítica frente a la autoridad (...) y al poder público. Para demostrarla, se propone un abordaje hermenéutico-exegético de sus obras —principalmente, de las conferencias sobre El Leviatán en la teoría del Estado de Thomas Hobbes y del artículo "La visibilidad de la Iglesia. Una reflexión escolástica”— para indagar la acción humana como fundadora del orden político y las posibilidades del individuo de criticar a la autoridad. El artículo sostiene que Carl Schmitt formula una noción de individualidad de signo distinto a la liberal y que se vincula íntimamente con la idea de Derecho, el entramado institucional-estatal y el sustrato comunitario. (shrink)

The phenomenon of performativity has recently sparked debates about the status of the economic discourse. This paper aims to discuss the subjectivist idea that if economics ‘performs’ social reality, rather than merely reflects it, then every theory can be considered ‘true.’ My main goal is to point out three limits of performativity. First, not all theories can be performative since some do not produce empirical landmarks for agents. Second, social institutions restrict performativity. Third, I emphasize the necessity that a theory (...) to be self-fulfilling. This article is a prelude to a new kind of performative studies based on an original definition: a theory performs the world if it implies a behavioral regularity which leads to a general coordination between agents. That is to say, if it becomes a convention à la David Lewis. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence and robots may progressively take a more and more prominent place in our daily environment. Interestingly, in the study of how humans perceive these artificial entities, science has mainly taken an anthropocentric perspective (i.e., how distant from humans are these agents). Considering people’s fears and expectations from robots and artificial intelligence, they tend to be simultaneously afraid and allured to them, much as they would be to the conceptualisations related to the divine entities (e.g., gods). In two experiments, (...) we investigated the proximity of representation between artificial entities (i.e., artificial intelligence and robots), divine entities and natural entities (i.e., humans and other animals) at both an explicit (Study 1) and an implicit level (Study 2). In the first study, participants evaluated these entities explicitly on positive and negative attitudes. Hierarchical clustering analysis showed that participants’ representation of artificial intelligence, robots and divine entities were similar, while the representation of humans tended to be associated with that of animals. In the second study, participants carried out a word/non-word decision task including religious semantic-related words and neutral words after the presentation of a masked prime referring to divine entities, artificial entities and natural entities (or a control prime). Results showed that after divine and artificial entity primes, participants were faster to identify religious words as words compared to neutral words arguing for a semantic activation. We conclude that people make sense of the new entities by relying on already familiar entities and in the case of artificial intelligence and robots, people appear to draw parallels to divine entities. (shrink)