En los últimos años, Europa asiste a un desconcertante fenómeno: la consolidación y crecimiento de una pluralidad de partidos populistas de derecha radical que luchan por hacerse con un espacio en el escenario político. En este artículo sugiero que existe una relación particularmente compleja entre el liberalismo y este tipo de movimientos, por la cual los populistas de derecha son capaces de detectar y explotar algunas de las debilidades y contradicciones del discurso y la práctica liberales. Mediante la utilización de (...) las herramientas conceptuales proporcionadas por la teoría política y jurídica, propongo tratar de desentrañar con cierto nivel de detalle en qué consiste esta paradójica relación y reflexionar sobre los que considero que pueden ser sus aspectos más relevantes. (shrink)

Las últimas décadas han supuesto la irrupción de la nueva disciplina de la “política judicial”, heredera del realismo jurídico y empeñada en estudiar el comportamiento judicial con herramientas científico-sociales y desde variables explicativas sociopolíticas. Al hacerlo, sin embargo, dichos estudios han preterido el papel del derecho en la explicación del comportamiento de los magistrados, para lo cual se han esgrimido razones teóricas acerca de la indeterminación de la norma jurídica. En este artículo, defiendo que dicha preterición constituye una importante limitación (...) para la construcción de modelos empíricos de comportamiento judicial. (shrink)

Legal and political controversies persist about the performance of Kelsenian-type constitutional courts in democratic systems. One of the reasons is that the design of these institutions cannot easily accommodate simultaneous but conflicting demands for the strong protection of democracy and human rights, judicial independence and constitutional restraint. Challenging the dominant approach to the design of contemporary constitutional courts, this article proposes a new way to balance these three values through reforms to the structure of Kelsenian institutions. The proposal seeks to (...) institutionalize constitutional restraint, embedding it into courts’ internal functioning rules while, concurrently, emancipating constitutional judges from political control through a reform of appointment procedures. It is argued that the combined effects of these two reforms will produce constitutional courts that are more independent and able to protect the core elements of a democratic political community while, at the same time, increasing constitutional deference to the democratically elected legislator. (shrink)

El trabajo tiene como objetivo el estudio de los modelos de civilización en dos novelas de gauchos: Aventuras de un centauro en la América Meridional , de José J. de Vedia, y Pablo, o la vida en las pampas de Eduarda Mansilla. Ambas obras elaboran una etopeya del paisano, que más adelante otros autores consagrarían, pero además establecen nuevas convenciones genéricas en cuanto novelas sentimentales. La realidad carente de cultura -religión, educación y civilidad- del gaucho conforma nuevos modelos (...) culturales que dialogan con los discursos políticos, la prensa y la literatura; y, además, convierten el romance nacional en vehículo de denuncia, discurso que se entronca más con la estética realista que con la romántica. The aim of this paper is to analyze the cultural models in two Gaucho novels: José J. de Vedia’s Aventuras de un centauro en la América Meridional , and Eduarda Mansilla’s Pablo, o la vida en las pampas . Both novels propose a gaucho’s ethopoeia. This was later developed by others writers, who also established new generic conventions for sentimental novels. The Gaucho´s lack of culture about religion, education and citizenship entail new cultural paradigms . These are linked to political discourses, the press and literature, and also turn the national romance into a means of complaint, a discourse more rooted onto a realistic aesthetics than onto a romantic one. (shrink)

This paper will review the strategies and learning trajectories followed to tap the opportunities opened by the successive waves of biotechnologies: early imitators followed by late imitators in the first generation of biosimilars (erythropoietin, insulins, interferons), and then sequential entry and skipping stages during the second generation (monoclonal antibodies).

Anthropogenic changes in the biosphere, driven mainly by human cultural habits and technological advances, are altering the direction of evolution on Earth, with ongoing and permanent changes modifying uncountable interactions between organisms, the environment, and humankind itself. While numerous species may go extinct, others will be favored due to strong human influences. The Bio-Evolutionary Anthropocene hypothesizes that directly or indirectly human-driven organisms, including alien species, hybrids, and genetically modified organisms, will have major roles in the evolution of life on Earth, (...) shifting the evolutionary pathways of all organisms through novel biological interactions in all habitats. We anticipate that, in future scenarios, novel organisms will be continuously created, and contemporary native organisms with no obvious economic use will decline—while anthropogenic-favored and novel organisms will spread. The Bio-Evolutionary Anthropocene hypothesis therefore predicts that humankind and novel organisms will interact within a strong evolutionary bias that will lead to unexpected, and probably irreversible, outcomes for the evolution of life on our planet. (shrink)

The 2016 Royal Society of Chemistry’s report Future of the Chemical Sciences presents four different scenarios for the future of chemistry: chemistry saves the world; push-button chemistry; a world without chemists; and free market chemistry. In this paper we ethically assess them. If chemistry is to solve many of the greatest challenges facing the contemporary world, prioritization of research topics will need to be done explicitly on the basis of moral values, ​​such as solidarity and equity, but also environmental justice, (...) which will have to be central in determining a research agenda for chemistry. The decentralization of chemistry will also present ethical challenges to the research standards established by the scientific community. Ethical education in chemistry may help counteract these risks. We also argue that if chemistry and its subdisciplines are to fulfil their goal of generating knowledge and helping us solve the great challenges of the contemporary world, then it is ethically imperative that scientists from different disciplines be more open to interdisciplinary work. Finally, if the future of chemistry is in free market forms, then it is necessary that we pay more attention to the possible risks that this model has. We call attention to two: first, it is likely that problems that affect the lowest income countries or the most disadvantaged sectors of society, who do not have the means to pay for some of the goods and services, will not be addressed; second, the free market tends to foster unsustainable forms of development. (shrink)

El presente artículo, refiere una investigación de carácter cualitativo, desarrollada con el propósito de interpretar los significados construidos por los docentes sobre la evaluación en sus prácticas, se contextualiza en la escuela primaria del Núcleo Escolar Rural N°323 en el estado Falcón, Venezuela, llevada a cabo en el año escolar 2016-2017. Asumido este quehacer como multireferencial, cíclico, emergente, co-construido y cambiante, fue abordado con una metódica orientada por la fenomenología social. Para la sistematización de la información se realizaron intercambios y (...) entrevistas en profundidad, mientras que los registros fueron realizados haciendo uso del diario del investigador y equipos tecnológicos como recursos. Los datos fueron analizados siguiendo los procesos de categorización y triangulación de fuentes, con la finalidad de ampliar el fenómeno estudiado para su comprensión. En el contraste, integración e interpretación de los significados se consideraron tres categorías medulares alusivas a la evaluación como proceso complejo, los nudos críticos en las prácticas evaluativas y la evaluación como componente curricular. Los hallazgos develados dan cuenta de los significados construidos por los docentes sobre la evaluación, quienes la plantean como un proceso auténtico, con el propósito de facilitar la mejora del proceso de aprendizaje. (shrink)

Valorising the biocultural heritage of common goods could enable peasant farmers to achieve socially and economically inclusive sustainability. Increasingly appreciated by consumers, peasant heritage products offer small farmers promising opportunities for economic, social and territorial development. Identifying the obstacles and levers of this complex, multi-scale and multi-stakeholder objective requires an integrative framework. We applied the panarchy conceptual framework to two cases of participatory research with small quinoa producers: a local fair in Chile and quinoa export production in Bolivia. In both (...) cases, the “commoning” process was crucial both to bring stakeholders together inside their communities and to gain outside recognition for their production and thus achieve social and economic inclusion. Despite the differences in scale, the local fair and the export market shared a similar marketing strategy based on short value chains promoting quality products with high identity value. In these dynamics of biocultural heritage valorisation, the panarchical approach revealed the central place as well as the vulnerability of the community territory. As a place of both anchoring and opening, the community territory is the privileged space where autonomous and consensual control over the governance of common biocultural resources can be exercised. (shrink)

La crisis multidimensional por la que atraviesa actualmente la humanidad coloca en primer plano la cuestión, más que de «la salida de la crisis», de la superación de los condicionamientos negativos que han conducido a ella. Más allá de las causas próximas reconocibles se hallan las apuestas paradigmáticas, la Weltanschauung dominante que inspira las conductas erróneas. En el artículo se sostiene que a la metafísica materialista —que el autor distingue del ateísmo—, en tanto que idea-guía principal de la modernidad, corresponde (...) gran parte de la responsabilidad por las patologías de la sociedad actual, a cuyo clímax estamos asistiendo. Se asume que el mundo ha experimentado tales transformaciones que ninguna de las concepciones metafísicas o criptometafísicas a las que estamos acostumbrados sirve para fundamentar una guía de actuación capaz de sacarnos del atolladero. Y se propone una idea de fondo que se estima que sí podría hacerlo: un noocentrismo, la consideración de la consciencia como la realidad fundamental y, por supuesto, referencial. Un neoespiritualismo, si se quiere, capaz de fundamentar una Ética universal, y orientado a la liberación individual y colectiva del ser humano, en armonía con una Naturaleza entendida como de igual importancia, y dejando atrás el espejismo pseudocientífico —y en realidad sojuzgador y bloqueante— del materialismo metafísico. (shrink)

Globally, mortality and fertility rates generally fall as resource abundance increases. This pattern represents an evolutionary paradox insofar as resource-rich ecological contexts can support higher numbers of offspring, a component of biological fitness. This paradox has not been resolved, in part because the relationships between fertility, life history strategies, reproductive behavior, and socioeconomic conditions are complex and cultural-historically contingent. We aim to understand how we might make sense of this paradox in the specific context of late-twentieth-century, mid–demographic transition Chile. We (...) use distribution-specific generalized linear models to analyze associations between fertility-related life-history traits—number of offspring, ages at first and last reproduction, average interbirth interval, and average number of live births per reproductive span year—and socioeconomic position (SEP) using data from a cohort of 6,802 Chilean women born between 1961 and 1970. We show that Chilean women of higher SEP have shorter average interbirth intervals, more births per reproductive span year, later age at first reproduction, earlier ages at last reproduction, and, ultimately, fewer children than women of lower SEP. Chilean women of higher SEP consolidate childbearing over a relatively short time span in the middle of their reproductive careers, whereas women of lower SEP tend to reproduce over the entirety of their reproductive lifespans. These patterns may indicate that different SEP groups follow different pathways toward declining fertility during the demographic transition, reflecting different life-history trade-offs in the process. (shrink)

En este trabajo, se propone una clasificación epistemológica teórica para el discurso astrológico a partir de evidencia empírica a fin de abordar el problema de cómo determinar específicamente qué es lo que lo hace ilegítimo. A partir de esta clasificación, se diseñó una intervención didáctica, enmarcada en el enfoque de Enseñanza de las Ciencias Naturales en Contexto (ECNC), con el objetivo de fomentar, en estudiantes de nivel secundario, la capacidad de distinguir enunciados cognoscitivamente ilegítimos -por infalsables o por falsos- respecto (...) de aquellos que pueden constituir genuino conocimiento científico. La secuencia didáctica se implementó con un grupo de 51 estudiantes de 14 a 17 años. Se evaluó su impacto por comparación entre un pretest y un postest. Los resultados mostraron que su capacidad de discernimiento entre enunciados falsables y no falsables se incrementó apreciablemente. (shrink)

Cancer is a singular cellular state, the emergence of which destabilises the homeostasis reached through the evolution to multicellularity. We present the idea that the onset of the cellular disobedience to the metazoan functional and structural architecture, known as the cancer phenotype, is triggered by changes in the cell's external environment that occur with ageing: what ensues is a breach of the social contract of multicellular life characteristic of metazoans. By integrating old ideas with new evidence, we propose that with (...) ageing the environmental information that maintains a multicellular organisation is eroded, rewiring internal processes of the cell, and resulting in an internal shift towards an ancestral condition resulting in the pseudo‐multicellular cancer phenotype. Once that phenotype emerges, a new local social contract is built, different from the homeostatic one, leading to tumour formation and the foundation of a novel local ecosystem. (shrink)

Since the 1980s, there has been a significant increase in the number of studies concerning Andalusian rural settlements linked to irrigated agriculture, both related to large suburban green belts and to small hydraulic systems. In the vast areas where water is scarce, the settlement apparently would have been concentrated in cities and fortified towns, leaving without population most of the dry lands between them. However, thanks to the intensive survey of one of these regions, La Mancha’s Southeastern area, we are (...) recording a dense rural settlement corresponding to a pattern unknown until now. It consists basically of small villages in plain, devoid of community defense elements, which must have been inhabited by humble peasants, judging by the modesty of the architecture and domestic goods. Surely they make use of the scanty natural resources, which have traditionally oriented the economy of the region towards livestock and rainfed agriculture. In particular, the studied settlement would be related to the demand of wool for the export oriented textile production of the region, within the framework of the commercial expansion of that period. Apparently, most of those villages could have appeared in the eleventh century, disappearing in the middle of the thirteenth century because of the Christian conquest. Their existence would be associated with a general context of population growth that pushed the competition between urban elites and peasants pursuing the privileged agricultural areas, as well as the colonization of less favorable production areas. (shrink)

For different reasons, Husserl's original, thought-provoking ideas on the philosophy of logic and mathematics have been ignored, misunderstood, even despised, by analytic philosophers and phenomenologists alike, who have been content to barricade themselves behind walls of ideological prejudices. Yet, for several decades, Husserl was almost continuously in close professional and personal contact with those who created, reshaped and revolutionized 20th century philosophy of mathematics, logic, science and language in both the analytic and phenomenological schools, people whom those other makers of (...) 20th century philosophy, Russell, Frege, Wittgenstein and their followers, rarely, if ever, met. Independently of them, Husserl offered alternatives to the well-trodden paths of logicism, nominalism, formalism and intuitionism. He presented a well-articulated, thoroughly argued case for logic as an objective science, but was not philosophically naive to the point of not seeing the role of subjectivity in shaping the sense of the reality facing objective science. Given the preeminent role that philosophy of logic and philosophy of mathematics have played in transforming the way philosophy has been done since Husserl's time, and given the depth of his insights and his obvious expertise in those fields, his ideas need to be integrated into present-day, mainstream philosophy. Here, philosopher Claire Ortiz Hill and mathematician-philosopher Jairo da Silva offer a wealth of interesting insights intended to subvert the many mistaken idees recues about the development of Husserl's thought and reestablish broken ties between it and philosophy now. (shrink)

En este artículo se expone una reflexión desde la propuesta teórica de Charles Taylor sobre la construcción de la identidad individual como una narración social frente a la crítica de Amartya Sen, quien propone la identidad como resultado solo de la elección personal. Se argumenta que las criticas que Amartya Sen hace a los argumentos de Taylor son infundadas, ya que la perspectiva de Charles Taylor se centra más en el carácter fundamentalmente constructivo, narrativo y dialógico de la identidad que (...) en la pérdida de la libertad y la mera aceptación acrítica de la identidad asumida. Se concluye que la identidad como narración social desde la perspectiva teoría de Taylor sí da cabida a la capacidad de elegir de los individuos y a la consideración de las identidades múltiples y múltiples lealtades identitarias, pero se hace notar la importacia del contexto social y del grupo por encima de la elección personal en el momento en que una persona contruye su identidad, ya que les da valor a los bienes externos como la comunidad cultural y lingüística a la que la pertenece y que hacen posible la inteligibilidad y la narracción de lo que somos y de quiénes somos. This paper presents Charles Taylor's theoretical proposal of construction of identity confronted to the criticism of Amartya Sen who conceives identity as a result of personal choice. It is argued that the critiques that Amartya Sen makes to the arguments of Taylor are groundless given that the perspective of Charles Taylor focuses more on the fundamentally constructive nature of identity than on the loss of freedom and the mere uncritical acceptance of the assumed identity. Taylor's theory does has space for the ability to choose and the consideration of multiple identities but it draws attention to the importance of social and group context when a person builds his identity and it assigns a higher value to the external goods that define the way people live in contemporary societies, such as the cultural and linguistic community, than to personal choice. (shrink)

La sociedad griega fue una sociedad oral. La palabra fue el medio de la educación y de la convivencia política de los griegos. Desde Homero y Pitágoras hasta Empédocles, Gorgias y Sócrates, la palabra se convierte en el fármaco de las enfermedades de la ciudad y del alma. Por ello, puede constatarse que la filosofía es entendida en la Grecia antigua como medicina y que ésta es la metáfora más elocuente del poder y la eficacia de la palabra del filósofo.

The purpose of this paper is to defend, contra Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini (F&PP), that the theory of natural selection (NS) is a perfectly bona fide empirical unified explanatory theory. F&PP claim there is nothing non-truistic, counterfactual-supporting, of an “adaptive” character and common to different explanations of trait evolution. In his debate with Fodor, and in other works, Sober defends NS but claims that, compared with classical mechanics (CM) and other standard theories, NS is peculiar in that its explanatory models are (...) a priori (a trait shared with few other theories). We argue that NS provides perfectly bona fide adaptive explanations of phenotype evolution, unified by a common natural-selection guiding principle. First, we introduce the debate and reply to F&PP’s main argument against NS. Then, by reviewing different examples and analyzing Fisher’s model in detail, we show that NS explanations of phenotypic evolution share a General Natural Selection Principle. Third, by elaborating an analogy with CM, we argue against F&PP’s claim that such a principle would be a mere truism and thus explanatorily useless, and against Sober’s thesis that NS models/explanations have a priori components that are not present in CM and other common empirical theories. Irrespective of differences in other respects, the NS guiding principle has the same epistemic status as other guiding principles in other highly unified theories such as CM. We argue that only by pointing to the guiding principle-driven nature that it shares with CM and other highly unified theories, something no-one has done yet in this debate, one can definitively show that NS is not defective in F&PP’s sense: in the respects relevant to the debate, Natural Selection is as defective and as epistemically peculiar as Classical Mechanics and other never questioned theories. (shrink)

Anthropogenic changes in the biosphere, driven mainly by human cultural habits and technological advances, are altering the direction of evolution on Earth, with ongoing and permanent changes modifying uncountable interactions between organisms, the environment, and humankind itself. While numerous species may go extinct, others will be favored due to strong human influences. The Bio-Evolutionary Anthropocene hypothesizes that directly or indirectly human-driven organisms, including alien species, hybrids, and genetically modified organisms, will have major roles in the evolution of life on Earth, (...) shifting the evolutionary pathways of all organisms through novel biological interactions in all habitats. We anticipate that, in future scenarios, novel organisms will be continuously created, and contemporary native organisms with no obvious economic use will decline—while anthropogenic-favored and novel organisms will spread. The Bio-Evolutionary Anthropocene hypothesis therefore predicts that humankind and novel organisms will interact within a strong evolutionary bias that will lead to unexpected, and probably irreversible, outcomes for the evolution of life on our planet. (shrink)

Although the correlation between Entrepreneurial Orientation and concrete actions to set up a business or the Probability of Starting a Business has been widely studied, the psychological factors that can affect this relationship have not yet been sufficiently addressed in the field of entrepreneurship. One of them is curiosity. Both at theoretical and empirical level, a distinction are usually made between two types of curiosity. I-type curiosity is associated with the anticipated pleasure of discovering something new, and D-type curiosity is (...) associated with reducing uncertainty and eliminating unwanted states of ignorance. Consequently, this paper aims to analyze the moderating role that the types of curiosity play in the relationship between EO and PSB, considering their interaction with sociodemographic variables. The sample of this cross-sectional study consisted of 1,761 participants. The EO scale and a curiosity scale were applied. In addition, participants were asked, based on their perception, how likely they were to start their own business within the next 5 years. A simple moderation analysis was considered to test the moderating role of both types of curiosity in the relationship between EO and PSB. Next, a double moderation analysis was carried out in order to identify, which sociodemographic variables moderate the moderating effect of curiosity. The results show that only the D-type component moderates the relationship between EO and PSB: The higher the D-type curiosity, the stronger the association between EO and PSB. In terms of sociodemographic variables, neither culture nor gender showed a moderating effect on the moderation exerted by D-type curiosity. While, age did moderate the moderating effect of D-type curiosity on the relationship between EO and PSB. Results are discussed in terms of spirituality and the resolution of problems associated with the entrepreneurial process, considering cognitive and psychological factors, particularly with an emphasis on explaining why only D-type curiosity shows a moderating effect. Finally, the limitations of the study and potential future lines of research are pointed out. (shrink)

The epistemic status of Natural Selection has seemed intriguing to biologists and philosophers since the very beginning of the theory to our present times. One prominent contemporary example is Elliott Sober, who claims that NS, and some other theories in biology, and maybe in economics, are peculiar in including explanatory models/conditionals that are a priori in a sense in which explanatory models/conditionals in Classical Mechanics and most other standard theories are not. Sober’s argument focuses on some “would promote” sentences that (...) according to him, play a central role in NS explanations and are both causal and a priori. Lange and Rosenberg criticize Sober arguing that, though there may be some unspecific a priori causal claims, there are not a priori causal claims that specify particular causal factors. Although we basically agree with Lange and Rosenberg’s criticism, we think it remains silent about a second important element in Sober’s dialectics, namely his claim that, contrary to what happens in mechanics, in NS explanatory conditionals are a priori, and that this is so in quite specific explanatory models. In this paper we criticize this second element of Sober’s argument by analyzing what we take to be the four possible interpretations of Sober’s claim, and argue that, terminological preferences aside, the possible senses in which explanatory models in NS can qualify, or include elements that can qualify, as a priori, also apply to CM and other standard, highly unified theories. We conclude that this second claim is unsound, or at least that more needs to be said in order to sustain that NS explanatory models are a priori in a sense in which CM models are not. (shrink)

El artículo aborda la responsabilidad médica penal por omisión en situaciones de emergencia de salud, debido a las dudas que aún existen sobre el accionar médico en estas circunstancias y las posibles consecuencias jurídicas por negligencia, impericia e imprudencia. La responsabilidad médica incluye la obligación moral de responder de los propios actos y reparar o indemnizar las consecuencias perjudiciales para terceros. Se identifican las falencias en las normativas ecuatorianas con relación al actuar médico en situaciones de emergencia de salud y (...) se busca aportar a la academia con publicaciones de conocimiento. Se analizan los elementos normativos y fácticos de la responsabilidad médica penal por omisión en situaciones de emergencia de salud en la República de Ecuador, y se busca identificar el marco normativo en la legislación ecuatoriana para superar la inadecuada actuación médica en estas situaciones. El conocimiento de la normativa legal contribuye a superar la responsabilidad médica penal por omisión en situaciones de emergencia en el Ecuador y se menciona y se analiza el art.146 del COIP que es la normativa vigente. El artículo concluye que el objetivo no es criminalizar la práctica médica, ya que no toda muerte es homicidio y no todo proceso judicial implica el encarcelamiento de los involucrados. (shrink)

We analyse the relationship between applicability and effectiveness of legal norms from a philosophical perspective. In particular, we distinguish between two concepts of applicability. The external applicability of norms refers to institutional duties; a norm N is externally applicable if and only if a judge is legally obliged to apply N to some case c. Internal applicability refers instead to the sphere of validity of legal norms. A norm N is internally applicable to actions regulated by its sphere of validity. (...) We also explore the consequences of a thesis which maintains that applicability restricts the concept of effectiveness, so that only applicable norms can be considered effective. Our analysis illustrates that a proper reconstruction of the concept of applicability is of great importance not only for understanding the concept of effectiveness but also for providing insight into the nature of law. (shrink)