Nous voulons réfléchir sur ce que Sénèque choisit de révéler et de taire, de montrer et de cacher sur la scène tragique, à travers l'étude de deux situations de Phèdre. En étudiant la parole de la protagoniste lors de deux moments cruciaux (face à Hippolyte à qui elle veut avouer son amour et face à Thésée à qui elle doit expliquer son souhait de mourir), nous mettons en lumière le processus de métamorphose du personnage à l'acte II, scandé par trois (...) occurrences du verbe miserere. Phèdre insère dans sa tirade des signa amoris de plus en plus explicites, jusqu'à la révélation finale qui la consacre en tant qu'amans. Cela s'accompagne de la métamorphose d'un objet, l'épée d'Hippolyte, qui, tout d'abord absente et symbolique, apparaît ensuite sur scène et reçoit un rôle significatif : des mains du jeune homme, elle passe à celles de sa belle-mère, devenant tour à tour arme qui peut blesser, objet souillé, gage d'amour et de mort, puis preuve qui accuse – pignus sceleris – grâce aux indices savamment distillés par la nourrice et par Phèdre. (shrink)

Resumen Este artículo analiza la construcción de la infancia en las novelas El mercurio (1968), El río de la luna (1981) y Esta pared de hielo (2005), de José María Guelbenzu, a la luz de los conceptos mítico-simbólicos de Bachelard y Durand para demostrar que funciona como un absoluto primigenio al que se busca volver constantemente, pues resguarda a los personajes hasta el inminente choque con la realidad adulta. Esto para concluir que desde la adultez los personajes observan la infancia (...) con el anhelo de volver allí, lo que tiene una función paliativa mediante la memoria y la palabra, por ello, la narrativa de Guelbenzu plantea regresar al ámbito infantil desde las imágenes literarias y así conservar ese mundo de fantasía. Abstract This article analyzes the construction of childhood in the novels El mercurio (1968), El río de la luna (1981) and Esta pared de hielo (2005), by José María Guelbenzu, in the light of the mythical-symbolic concepts of Bachelard and Durand to demonstrate that it functions as a primitive absolute to which it is sought to return constantly, since it protects the characters until the imminent clash with adult reality. This to conclude that in their adulthood the characters observe childhood with the desire to return there, this has a palliative function through memory and word, therefore, Guelbenzu’s narrative proposes the return to the child environment trough literary images to preserve that world of fantasy. (shrink)

How to reconcile monadic simplicity with the successive plurality of the monadic states ? The doctrine of continued creation seems to entail the existence of independent temporal parts and thus lead to the thesis that the world contains only transitory things. I try to show how Leibniz has the resources to get out of this quandary. The analysis of the concept of extension shows that a plurality of states does not constitute a divisible aggregate. Then I examine the Leibnizian interpretation (...) of continued creation, by com- paring it to the scholastic and Cartesian Background. From thence I conclude that Leibniz’s final thesis is that monads are wholly present at each moment of their duration. (shrink)

Los niños con trastorno por déficit de atención con hiperactividad presentan alteraciones en el desarrollo de la función ejecutiva que se traducen en dificultades del control atencional y de la flexibilidad cognitiva. Considerando la complejidad de los procesos involucrados en la comprensión de lectura y el papel fundamental que en ellos cumple la función ejecutiva, puede esperarse que los niños con TDAH presenten diferencias en su desempeño lector en comparación con sus pares sin TDAH. El presente estudio, de carácter correlacional-predictivo, (...) tiene como propósito determinar si tales diferencias de comprensión lectora existen realmente y si es posible predecirlas a partir de la función ejecutiva. Para ello se seleccionaron 71 escolares de tercer y cuarto año de enseñanza básica y se les evaluó la habilidad de comprensión de lectura, el reconocimiento de palabras, la amplitud de la memoria de trabajo verbal, el control atencional y la velocidad de procesamiento. Con el fin de determinar qué variables tenían capacidad para predecir el nivel de comprensión de los escolares se aplicó un análisis de regresión logística binaria. Los resultados ponen en evidencia que el TDAH afecta significativamente el desempeño lector de los escolares y que las variables vinculadas a la función ejecutiva, especialmente la memoria de trabajo, son buenos predictores del rendimiento en comprensión de lectura. (shrink)

Shoemaker (1996) presenteda prioriarguments against the possibility of ‘self‐blindness’, or the inability of someone, otherwise intelligent and possessed of mental concepts, to introspect any of her concurrent attitude states. Ironically enough, this seems to be a position that Gopnik (1993) and Carruthers (2006, 2008, 2009a,b) have proposed as not only possible, but as the actual human condition generally! According to this ‘Objectivist’ view, supposed introspection of one's attitudes is not ‘direct’, but an ‘inference’ of precisely the sort we make about (...) the attitudes of others, an inference that has the advantage in our own case ofonlyour own sensory data and memories, our behavior, and of the context we are in; i.e. we are all substantially self‐ blind. After sorting out a number of methodological and verbal issues, I argue, first, that thea prioriarguments against Objectivism don't succeed, and that Gopnik and Carruthers are right to regard the issue as an empirical one. On the other hand, I think they seriously underestimate the difficulty of establishing Objectivism. It is unlikely there is an inferential procedure from the data of pure sensation, behavior and context to the relevant self‐attributions that would be as spectacularly reliable as people manifestly seem to be. Moreover, there is a simpler model: the mind very likely consists of a panoply of sub‐routines some of whose outputs are ‘tagged’ for their having been so processed, rather in the way that software ‘documents’ are on standard computers. Introspection plausibly consists in a person's simply attending to distinctive constellations of these tags, even though they may lack phenomenal feels. This draws attention to an important independent fact: that much of phenomenology (or ‘what it's like’ to be in a certain state) may be constituted by facts that are not phenomenal. (shrink)

Speech Acts, Criteria and Intentions What makes a speech act a speech act? Which are its necessary and sufficient conditions? I claim in this paper that we cannot find an answer to those questions in Austin's doctrine of the infelicities, since some infelicities take place in fully committing speech acts, whereas others prevent the utterance from being considered as a speech act at all. With this qualification in mind, I argue against the idea that intentions—considered as mental states accomplishing a (...) causal role in the performance of the act—should be considered among the necessary conditions of speech acts. I would thus like to deny a merely ‘symptomatic’ account of intentions, according to which we could never make anything but fallible hypotheses about the effective occurrence of any speech act. I propose an alternative ‘criterial’ account of the role of intentions in speech acts theory, and analyse Austin's and Searle's approaches in the light of this Wittgensteinian concept. Whether we consider, with Austin, that speech acts ‘imply’ mental states or, with Searle, that they ‘express’ them, we could only make sense of this idea if we considered utterances as criteria for intentions, and not as alleged behavioural effects of hidden mental causes. (shrink)

Pascal was a scientist and man of the world who came to be a passionately devout Christian. The fragments of his great defense of Christianity, left unfinished at his death in 1662, survive in the form of the Pensees. This series of brief, dramatic notes on his religious convictions are here translated into English. These thoughts expose Pascal's vision of the world and display powerful reasoning and a profound faith.

Thick terms and concepts, such as honesty and cruelty, are at the heart of a variety of debates in philosophy of language and metaethics. Central to these debates is the question of how the descriptive and evaluative components of thick concepts are related and whether they can be separated from each other. So far, no empirical data on how thick terms are used in ordinary language has been collected to inform these debates. In this paper, we present the first empirical (...) study, designed to investigate whether the evaluative component of thick concepts is communicated as part of the semantic meaning or by means of conversational implicatures. While neither the semantic nor the pragmatic view can fully account for the use of thick terms in ordinary language, our results do favour the semanticist interpretation: the evaluation of a thick concept is only slightly easier to cancel than semantically entailed content. We further discovered a polarity effect, demonstrating that how easily an evaluation can be cancelled depends on whether the thick term is of positive or negative polarity. (shrink)

In Ancient Greece, the figure of the hero was identified as a demigod, possessed of altruistic and virtuous deeds. When Pierre de Coubertin reinstated the Olympic Games, the athlete was personified as a modern hero. Its antithesis, the anti-hero, has more virtue that defects, no evil but he does not care on the means to achieve his goals. In the eyes of everyone involved in sports competition, these characters captivate and at the same time, create conflicts of ethics and aesthetics. (...) The purpose of this paper is to perform an ethical reflection linked to principles that contribute for the human growth and accomplishment, as well as the aesthetic on the perception of the sensitive, reverberated by sensations and feelings emerging from athletes. Connecting the ethic with the aesthetic spheres, we could have in the sports a phenomenon walking toward a common point between moral and aesthetic, between the good and the beauty. (shrink)

How evaluative are legal texts? Do legal scholars and jurists speak a more descriptive or perhaps a more evaluative language? In this paper, we present the results of a corpus study in which we examined the use of evaluative language in both the legal domain as well as public discourse. For this purpose, we created two corpora. Our legal professional corpus is based on court opinions from the U.S. Courts of Appeals. We compared this professional corpus to a public corpus, (...) which is based on blog discussions on the internet forum Reddit. While many linguistic phenomena can give insights into evaluativity, we investigated the use of a wide selection of evaluative adjectives (more specifically, thick adjectives) to gain a more comprehensive picture of the degree of evaluativity in the legal domain. Our analysis shows that legal professionals use thick terms less evaluatively than laypeople, which suggests that legal texts are less evaluative than ordinary discussions. This result, more generally, supports the philosophical idea that thick concepts may vary in their evaluative intensity. (shrink)

Une relecture de ce philosophe anglais (1676-1729), à la lumière de ce que disaient de et contre lui ses adversaires théologiens (Clarke, Berkeley), et surtout, de ce qu'il disait de lui-même. Pour ce libre-penseur, le concept de Dieu est vide de sens ou contradictoire, le dualisme créationniste une hypothèse intenable, et le christianisme un simple produit du besoin anthropologique de croire.

El propósito del estudio que generó el presente artículo fue analizar las percepciones de coordinadores y docentes tutores sobre el desarrollo de competencias generales en estudiantes de pregrado desde la acción tutorial. El estudio se realizó según el enfoque cualitativo y diseño fenomenológico, cuya población la constituyeron coordinadores y docentes tutores de estudiantes de pregrado de una Universidad de Lima desde sus experiencias en la acción tutorial. El tamaño de la muestra se determinó por el criterio de saturación. Los datos (...) se recogieron por medio de una guía de encuesta estructurada y el rigor científico se orientó según criterios de calidad: credibilidad, transferibilidad, dependencia y confirmabilidad. Se encontró como resultado principal que la acción tutorial contribuye al desarrollo de algunas competencias genéricas, tales como las comunicativas escritas y orales, y el trabajo en equipo, que son las más valoradas por la experiencia tutorial, ya que se requiere de comunicación fluida. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger once wrote that the world had, in the age of modern science, become a world picture. For Rey Chow, the world has, in the age of atomic bombs, become a world target, to be attacked once it is identified, or so global geopolitics, dominated by the United States since the end of the Second World War, seems repeatedly to confirm. How to articulate the problematics of knowledge production with this aggressive targeting of the world? Chow attempts such an (...) articulation by probing the significance of the chronological proximity of area studies, poststructuralist theory, and comparative literature—fields of inquiry that have each exerted considerable influence but whose mutual implicatedness as postwar U.S. academic phenomena has seldom been theorized. Central to Chow’s discussions is a critique of the predicament of self-referentiality—the compulsive move to interiorize that, in her view, constitutes the collective frenzy of our age—in different contemporary epistemic registers, including the self-consciously avant-garde as well as the militaristic and culturally supremacist. Urging her readers to think beyond the inward-turning focus on EuroAmerica that tends to characterize even the most radical gestures of Western self-deconstruction, Chow envisions much broader intellectual premises for future transcultural work, with reading practices aimed at restoring words and things to their constitutive exteriority. (shrink)

Le sceptique nous demande " Comment sais-tu que tu as deux mains? Peut-être rêves-tu, ou es-tu trompé par quelque Malin Génie? Peut-on même définir ce que c'est que la connaissance? Va savoir! " Lui rétorquer, comme le faisaient G.E. Moore et la tradition de la philosophie du sens commun : " Mais je sais bien que j'ai deux mains! " semble à la fois une pétition de principe et une bien mauvaise réponse. Le mieux, depuis que nous avons perdu le (...) souci de fonder nos croyance sur des raisons ultimes, serait, tout simplement, de ne pas se soucier des questions du sceptique. Ce que l'on sait dépend, nous dit-on, des circonstances, et toutes nos connaissances sont faillibles. N'y a-t-il pas plutôt des savoirs, dont l'histoire nous montre combien leurs modes de validations sont variés? Ce livre entend refuser ce type de réponse contextualiste et relativiste. Il propose de revenir à la réponse de sens commun de Moore, à partir des reformulations contemporaines des raisonnements sceptiques issues de la philosophie analytique de la connaissance. Personne ne peut nous envoyer savoir quelque chose que nous ne pourrions pas savoir. De fait, nous savons, mais notre savoir n'est pas transparent : nous n'avons pas besoin de savoir que nous savons. Pour parvenir à cette réponse, il faut replacer la notion de connaissance, plutôt que celle de croyance justifiée ou rationnelle, au centre de l'épistémologie, et reformuler des questions traditionnelles comme celles de la nature de la perception, du témoignage, et de la connaissance a priori. On peut aussi reprendre le vieux projet d'une enquête sur la nature de la connaissance en général. (shrink)

The history of organizations and collectives is something alive. It is a network of memories, actions, collaborations, dreams, encounters, and disconnections that live within each of its members. The EcoDialogue Center is an academic space of the University of Veracruz for promoting dialogue between disciplines. In this article we are presenting the stories, both personal and collective, and the values and ideals that create our Center. We are using this opportunity to reflect on the cultural, geographical, emotional, intellectual, and societal (...) conditions that have allowed this innovative process within the rules and customs of a university. (shrink)

Since antiquity two different negations in natural languages have been noted: predicate negation and predicate term negation . The extensive literature offers no models. We propose category-theoretic models with two distinct negation operators, neither of them in general Boolean. We study combinations of the two and sentential counterparts of each. We emphasize the relevance of our work for the theory of cognition.

Marx says of alienated labor that it does not "belong" to the worker, that it issues in a product that does not belong to her, and that it is unfulfilling, unfree, egoistically motivated, and inhuman. He seems to think, moreover, that the first of these features grounds all the others. All of these features seem quite independent, however: they can come apart; they share no obvious common cause or explanation; and if they often occur together this seems accidental. It is (...) not clear, then, how Marx's concept of alienated labor could possess the strong unity which he takes it to have. I defend a reinterpretation of the concept which explains this unity. The various features of alienated labor, I argue, all follow from a single, hitherto underappreciated feature of its formal motivational structure: the fact that such labor is motivated not by its product but by an incentive. (shrink)

" Nous savons désormais, comme l'expliquait Roland Barthes dans sa leçon inaugurale au Collège de France, que toute langue implique une relation d'aliénation et se définit par ce qu'elle oblige à dire. Comment, alors, écouter la voix particulière d'une langue, si elle se trouve asservie par un pouvoir qui tient à sa nature même, si, dès qu'elle est parlée, elle classe, interdit, refuse, exclut? C'est à cette problématique que la démarche de Reyes Mate apporte une réponse à la fois appliquée (...) au cas de l'espagnol et exemplaire. A travers une exploration de longue haleine, qui le conduit aussi bien à revoir les textes de Heidegger ou de Husserl qu'à analyser les productions littéraires de l'Amérique latine contemporaine, Reyes Mate ouvre, du même coup, un espace propre à l'expérience hispanophone, jusqu'à reconnaître dans l'ibéro-américanité une mémoire du Logos. " Michèle Gendreau-Massaloux. (shrink)

Lorsqu’elle nous reçoit à Conakry, en république de Guinée, ce 22 janvier 2002, Mme Kadidiatou Diallo prépare la commémoration de la « journée des pendus » au cours de laquelle, le 25 janvier 1971, de nombreuses personnes furent exécutées par pendaison à travers toute la Guinée, sur ordre du président de la République Ahmed Sékou Touré. Mme Diallo Telli a déjà accordé de nombreux entretiens à des journalistes qui l’ont interrogée sur son époux, Boubacar Diallo Telli, une des plus célèbres (...) per... (shrink)

Largement déterminée par la « scène primitive » de la Révolution française, notre conception de la citoyenneté est encore souvent associée à l’exercice des droits de suffrage et d’éligibilité. Le moment révolutionnaire, en abolissant les privilèges d’Ancien Régime et en promulguant la Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen, a, de fait, fondé une citoyenneté juridique définie par un ensemble de droits « naturels », civils et politiques. Or l’histoire des femmes et du genre, comme les...

Since its origin, bioethics has attracted the collaboration of few social scientists, and social scientific methods of gathering empirical data have remained unfamiliar to ethicists. Recently, however, the clouded relations between the empirical and normative perspectives on bioethics appear to be changing. Three reasons explain why there was no easy and consistent input of empirical evidence into bioethics. Firstly, interdisciplinary dialogue runs the risk of communication problems and divergent objectives. Secondly, the social sciences were absent partners since the beginning of (...) bioethics. Thirdly, the meta‐ethical distinction between ‘is’ and ‘ought’ created a ‘natural’ border between the disciplines. Now, bioethics tends to accommodate more empirical research. Three hypotheses explain this emergence. Firstly, dissatisfaction with a foundationalist interpretation of applied ethics created a stimulus to incorporate empirical research in bioethics. Secondly, clinical ethicists became engaged in empirical research due to their strong integration in the medical setting. Thirdly, the rise of the evidence‐based paradigm had an influence on the practice of bioethics. However, a problematic relationship cannot simply and easily evolve into a perfect interaction. A new and positive climate for empirical approaches has arisen, but the original difficulties have not disappeared. (shrink)

The compliance-based approach and the integrity approach have been the mainstream responses to corporate scandals. This paper proposes that, despite each approach comprising necessary elements, neither offers a comprehensive solution. Compliance and integrity, far from being mutually exclusive, reinforce each other. Working together, in a correct relationship, they build a harmonized system that yields positive synergies and which also advocates prudence. It enables the generation of a culture of compliance that tends to minimize the technical and ethical errors in decision (...) making. In order to explore an applied harmonized approach, we analyze the audit committee, a specific and broadly accepted regulatory instrument. Formed by non-executive members, regulation requires these members to be dedicated, qualified, and independent as a guarantee of efficiency. We show how the compound of those elements produces positive effects in a context of solid governance. We conclude that it is the strong relationship between efficiency and prudence, in the creation of a culture of compliance, which enables the minimization of errors. (shrink)

Presents results of free‐recall experiments conducted in France, Gabon and Nepal, to test predictions of a cognitive model of religious concepts. The world over, these concepts include violations of conceptual expectations at the level of domain knowledge (e.g., about ‘animal’ or ‘artifact’ or ‘person’) rather than at the basic level. In five studies we used narratives to test the hypothesis that domain‐level violations are recalled better than other conceptual associations. These studies used material constructed in the same way as religious (...) concepts, but not used in religions familiar to the subjects. Experiments 1 and 2 confirmed a distinctiveness effect for such material. Experiment 3 shows that recall also depends on the possibility to generate inferences from violations of domain expectations. Replications in Gabon (Exp. 4) and Nepal (Exp. 5) showed that recall for domain‐level violations is better than for violations of basic‐level expectations. Overall sensitivity to violations is similar in different cultures and produces similar recall effects, despite differences in commitment to religious belief, in the range of local religious concepts or in their mode of transmission. However, differences between Gabon and Nepal results suggest that familiarity with some types of domain‐level violations may paradoxically make other types more salient. These results suggest that recall effects may account for the recurrent features found in religious concepts from different cultures. (shrink)

It has recently been argued that normative considerations play an important role in causal cognition. For instance, when an agent violates a moral rule and thereby produces a negative outcome, she will be judged to be much more of a cause of the outcome, compared to someone who performed the same action but did not violate a norm. While there is a substantial amount of evidence reporting these effects, it is still a matter of debate how this evidence is to (...) be interpreted. In this paper, we engage with the three most influential classes of explanations, namely, (a) the Norm‐Sensitive Cognitive Process View, (b) the Normative Concept View, and (c) the Pragmatics View. We will outline how these theories explain the empirical results and in what ways they differ. We conclude with a reflection on how well these strategies do overall and what questions they still leave unanswered. (shrink)

Ritualized behavior, intuitively recognizable by its stereotypy, rigidity, repetition, and apparent lack of rational motivation, is found in a variety of life conditions, customs, and everyday practices: in cultural rituals, whether religious or non-religious; in many children's complicated routines; in the pathology of obsessive-compulsive disorders (OCD); in normal adults around certain stages of the life-cycle, birthing in particular. Combining evidence from evolutionary anthropology, neuropsychology and neuroimaging, we propose an explanation of ritualized behavior in terms of an evolved Precaution System geared (...) to the detection of and reaction to inferred threats to fitness. This system, distinct from fear-systems geared to respond to manifest danger, includes a repertoire of clues for potential danger as well as a repertoire of species-typical precautions. In OCD pathology, this system does not supply a negative feedback to the appraisal of potential threats, resulting in doubts about the proper performance of precautions, and repetition of action. Also, anxiety levels focus the attention on low-level gestural units of behavior rather than on the goal-related higher-level units normally used in parsing the action-flow. Normally automatized actions are submitted to cognitive control. This “swamps” working memory, an effect of which is a temporary relief from intrusions but also their long-term strengthening. Normal activation of this Precaution System explains intrusions and ritual behaviors in normal adults. Gradual calibration of the system occurs through childhood rituals. Cultural mimicry of this system's normal input makes cultural rituals attention-grabbing and compelling. A number of empirical predictions follow from this synthetic model. (Published Online February 8 2007) Key Words: childhood ritual; compulsion; event boundaries; evolutionary psychology; obsessive-compulsive disorder; ritual; thought intrusion. (shrink)

Hume presenta su teoría estética en el ensayo Sobre el criterio del gusto [On the Standard of Taste], en el que propone la existencia de un criterio [standard] capaz de zanjar discusiones de gusto. Ese criterio se basa en la existencia de ciertas formas y cualidades que complacen naturalmente a todo ser humano. Hume asevera que tal criterio corresponde a la opinión del crítico: un hombre que ha desplegado particularmente sus facultades cognoscitivas, lo cual le permite percibir esas finas cualidades (...) que suscitan naturalmente el placer de lo bello en el ser humano. Con respecto a en qué consisten esas formas y cualidades universalmente placenteras, Hume guarda silencio. Pretendo mostrar cómo la teoría de la emoción en la música desarrollada por Leonard Meyer en su texto Emoción y significado en la música (Emotion and Meaning in Music) puede aportar inmensidades en ese aspecto. (shrink)

Manuscript type Empirical. Research question/issue This paper aims to contribute to an improved theoretical and empirical understanding of the role that corporation has to play in anticorruption efforts. Research findings/insights Using cross-country data from three databases (Bribe Payers Index, Corruption Perceptions Index, and Doing Business) we found that pro-bribery Investment Climate conditions in host countries are not related to the payments of bribes by multinational companies when these corporations operate abroad. Theoretical/academic implications After describing the conceptual and policy framework that (...) surrounds the discussion on the role played by firms in anticorruption, we present the current debate regarding the effectiveness of international bribery control instruments, with the World Bank-GAC (2006-2008) report as a basis. Both literature and policy seem to be divided into two main, although not mutually exclusive, positions: one demands improvements in Investment Climate conditions from a joint public-private consensus led by international agencies; the other one supports the effectiveness of self-regulation by firms, independent of Investment Climate improvements. The study provides empirical support to the idea that a better Investment Climate is not enough for reducing corrup tion. Practitioner/policy implications This study offers insights to policy makers interested in promoting the involvement of corporations in the fight against corruption. (shrink)

Imagine you and your friend Pierre agreed on meeting each other at a café, but he does not show up. What is the difference between a friend’s not showing up meeting? and any other person not coming? In some sense, all people who did not come show the same kind of behaviour, but most people would be willing to say that the absence of a friend who you expected to see is different in kind. In this paper, I will spell (...) out this difference by investigating laypeople’s conceptualisation of absences of actions in four experiments. In languages such as German, French, Italian, or Polish, people consider a friend’s not coming an omission. Any other person’s not coming, in contrast, is not considered an omission at all, but just a mere nothing. This use of the term omission differs from the usage in English, where ‘omission’ refers to all kinds of absences. In addition, ‘omission’ is not even an everyday term, but invented by philosophers for the sake of philosophical investigation. In other languages, ‘omission’ is part of an everyday vocabulary. Finally, I will discuss how this folk concept of omission could be made fruitful for philosophical questions. (shrink)