This article is proposed to broaden the historiographic horizons of the participation of underling groups in the historical processes of New Granada. This paper makes part of a research project intended to report the actions carried out by the plebs of Santa Fe de Bogota at the dawn of independence. This project is aimed at revealing the cotidianity of those subjects invisibilized by official history, like the indigenous, mestizo, mulatto, African-American and poor people; the mass or the plebs, as they (...) have been labeled. This submission reconstructs the actions, interests and daily life of slave women in the context of independence. (shrink)

The political phenomenon that covered the period between 1958 and 1974 was known as the National Front. From the context of conceptual references related to this period, we will work on the concept of “hegemony”, which will be addressed based on Antonio Gramsci’s category. This paper aims to unravel the different political interests during a time of national unity that prevailed since the two-party system was established. Our general goal is to contribute to the discussion and analysis of our political (...) culture from a historical perspective, mostly of the student community, which, once inserted in the country’s reality, can take a stand regarding political events, thereby stopping dominance and hegemony based on National Unity agreements from becoming new totalitarian forms of “democracy”. (shrink)

Este estudio de relaciones médico-paciente en Mexico involucró entrevistas realizadas a 1700 pacientes inmediatamente de.\pués de salir de su consulta clínica. Se llevó a cabo entre los años 2004-05 en León, More ha, Guanajuato y en Charleston, West Virginia, USA. Los propósitos fueron: 1) establecer un base de datos como punto de referencia para investigaciones futuras en instituciones del cuidado de la salud con referencia a la comunicación médico-paciente, a la satisfacción de los pacientes y al consentimiento infórmado y, 2) (...) hacer una comparación entre las relaciones medico-paciente en Mexico y los Estados Unidos de America. Hicimos varias conclusiones sobre la comunicación médico-paciente, participación del paciente en decisiones con respecto a su cuidado de salud y el ambiente social de la consulta médica. Ofi-ecemos los datos y los cuestionarios completos por internet a cualquier investigador interesado para estudios futuros de acuerdo con sus propios intereses. Además, encontramos que no huho ninguna diferencia importante en las relaciones médico-pacientes con respecto al consentimiento infórmado y la satisfáccián del paciente entre México y los EEUU. (shrink)

This book present research in ethics with topics including a step-by-step guide to students; wellbeing and disadvantage; ethical disposition of accounting and business management students; collegiality of journals and self-citation on annual bibliometric scorings; trends of tainted publications and their authors' publication profiles; from bioethics to biopolitics and the limits of liberalism.

The creation of the prison camp at the U.S. naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba is part of a historical continuity of colonialism on the island. Over two hundred years before the United States sent the first "enemy combatants" to Cuba, the Spanish Empire began sending "enemy Indians" to the island. The rationales and circumstances that gave rise to the prison complex in Guantánamo share much in common with those that motivated Spain to imprison Apaches and other Native people on (...) Cuba. This essay argues that the policies of both Spain and the United States have roots in a similar logic of colonialism. (shrink)

This essay surveys the present position of postmodernism with respect to the effect of its ideas upon historiography. For this purpose it looks at a number of writings by historians that have been a response to postmodernism including the recently published collection of articles, The Postmodern History Reader. The essay argues that, in contrast to scholars in the field of literary studies, the American historical profession has been much more resistant to postmodernist doctrines and that the latters' influence upon the (...) thinking and practice of historians is not only fading but increasingly destined to fade. The essay also presents a critical discussion of the current philosophy of postmodernism in its bearing upon historiography, directed chiefly against its claim that the world has undergone an epochal transition from the modern to a postmodern age; its theory of language and linguistic idealism; its opposition to historical realism and denial of the actuality of the past as a possible object of reference; and its theory of historical narrative as unconstrained fictional construction. This discussion includes a consideration of the work of postmodernist thinkers such as J.-F. Lyotard, of the recent books by David Roberts and Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr. which espouse a postmodernist theory of history, and of the narrativist theory of Hayden White. The essay also notes some of the reasons for postmodernism's appeal; and while it does not deny that postmodernist philosophy may have served a useful purpose in provoking historians to be more self-critical and aware of their presuppositions and procedures, it maintains that its skeptical and politicized view of historical inquiry is deeply mistaken, out of accord with the way historians themselves think about their work, and incapable of providing an understanding of historiography as a form of thought engaged in the attainment of knowledge and understanding of the human past. (shrink)

Unfounded—conspiracy and health—beliefs about COVID-19 have accompanied the pandemic worldwide. Here, we examined cross-nationally the structure and correlates of these beliefs with an 8-item scale, using a multigroup confirmatory factor analysis. We obtained a two-factor model of unfounded (conspiracy and health) beliefs with good internal structure (average CFI = 0.98, RMSEA = 0.05, SRMR = 0.04), but a high correlation between the two factors (average latent factor correlation = 0.57). This model was replicable across 50 countries (total N = 13,579), (...) as evidenced by metric invariance between countries (CFI = 0.96, RMSEA = 0.06, SRMS = 0.07) as well as scalar invariance across genders (CFI = 0.98, RMSEA = 0.04, SRMS = 0.03) and educational levels (CFI = 0.98, RMSEA = 0.04, SRMS = 0.03). Also, lower levels of education, more fear of COVID-19, and more cynicism were weakly associated with stronger conspiracy and health beliefs. The study contributes to knowledge about the structure of unfounded beliefs, and reveals the potential relevance of affective (i.e., fear of COVID-19) and cognitive (i.e., cynicism) factors along with demographics, in endorsing such beliefs. In summary, we obtained cross-cultural evidence for the distinctiveness of unfounded conspiracy and health beliefs about COVID-19 in terms of their structure and correlates. (shrink)

Despite the central presence of materialism in the history of philosophy, there is no universal consensus on the meaning of the word “matter” nor of the doctrine of philosophical materialism. Dictionaries of philosophy often identify this philosophy with its most reductionist and even eliminative versions, in line with Robert Boyle’s seventeenth century coinage of the term. But when we take the concept back in time to Greek philosophers and forward onto our own times, we recognize more inclusive forms of (...) materialism as well as complex interplays with non-materialist thought about the place of matter in reality, including Christian philosophy and German idealism. We define philosophical materialism in its most general way both positively (the identification of reality with matter understood as changeability and plurality) and negatively (the negation of disembodied living beings and hypostatized ideas). This inclusive approach to philosophical materialism offers a new light to illuminate a critical history of the concept of matter and materialism from Ancient Greece to the present that is also attentive to scientific developments. By following the most important connections and discontinuities among theoretical frameworks on the idea of matter, we present a general thread that offers a rich and plural, but highly cohesive, field of investigation. Finally, we propose building on rich non-reductionist materialist philosophies, such as Mario Bunge’s systemic materialism and Gustavo Bueno’s discontinuous materialism, to elaborate powerful theoretical alternatives to both physicalism and spiritualism. (shrink)

Materialism has been the subject of extensive and rich controversies since Robert Boyle introduced the term for the first time in the 17th century. But what is materialism and what can it offer today? The term is usually defined as the worldview according to which everything real is material. Nevertheless, there is no philosophical consensus about whether the meaning of matter can be enlarged beyond the physical. As a consequence, materialism is often defined in stark exclusive and reductionist terms: (...) whatever exists is either physical or ontologically reducible to it. This conception, if consistent, mutilates reality, excluding the ontological significance of political, economic, sociocultural, anthropological and psychological realities. Starting from a new history of materialism, the present book focuses on the central ontological and epistemological debates aroused by today’s leading materialist approaches, including some little known to an anglophone readership. The key concepts of matter, system, emergence, space and time, life, mind, and software are checked over and updated. Controversial issues such as the nature of mathematics and the place of reductionism are also discussed from different materialist approaches. As a result, materialism emerges as a powerful, indispensable scientifically-supported worldview with a surprising wealth of nuances and possibilities. (shrink)

This book provides an up-to-date revision of materialism’s central tenets, its main varieties, and the place of materialistic philosophy vis a vis scientific knowledge. Materialism has been the subject of extensive and rich controversies since Robert Boyle introduced the term for the first time in the 17th century. But what is materialism and what can it offer today? The term is usually defined as the worldview according to which everything real is material. Nevertheless, there is no philosophical consensus about (...) whether the meaning of matter can be enlarged beyond the physical. As a consequence, materialism is often defined in stark exclusive and reductionist terms: whatever exists is either physical or ontologically reducible to it. This conception, if consistent, mutilates reality, excluding the ontological significance of political, economic, sociocultural, anthropological and psychological realities. Starting from a new history of materialism, the present book focuses on the central ontological and epistemological debates aroused by today’s leading materialist approaches, including some little known to an anglophone readership. The key concepts of matter, system, emergence, space and time, life, mind, and software are checked over and updated. Controversial issues such as the nature of mathematics and the place of reductionism are also discussed from different materialist approaches. As a result, materialism emerges as a powerful, indispensable scientifically-supported worldview with a surprising wealth of nuances and possibilities. (shrink)

“Si se da, pues, sentido de la realidad, y nadie dudará que tiene su razón de ser, se tiene que dar por consiguiente algo a lo que se le pueda llamar sentido de la posibilidad”Robert Musil.“El hombre sin atributos”La pregunta por el desarrollo, por las consecuencias de los modelos desarrollistas implantados en las últimas décadas del siglo XX en América Latina, así como por las posibilidades y la urgencia de re-significar el concepto y de transformar sus prácticas, son problemas (...) que aborda Ós.. (shrink)

In Kant's Human Being, Robert B. Louden continues and deepens avenues of research first initiated in his highly acclaimed book, Kant's Impure Ethics.

This is an interview by the Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics with Robert Sugden. The interview covers the intellectual trajectory of Sugden, from his early critique of Amartya Sen’s liberalism, to his interactions with James Buchanan and his contributions to behavioural economics. A major theme in the interview is Sugden’s development of a rival program of normative economics based on modern behavioural economics. The interview also discusses Sugden’s recent book The Community of Advantage which synthesizes many of the (...) themes he worked on. (shrink)

For most of the problems that economists consider, the assumption that agents are self-interested works well enough, generating predictions that are broadly consistent with observation. In some significant cases, however, we find economic behavior that seems to be inconsistent with self-interest. In particular, we find that some public goods and some charitable ventures are financed by the independent voluntary contributions of many thousands of individuals. In Britain, for example, the lifeboat service is entirely financed by voluntary contributions. In all rich (...) countries, charitable appeals raise large amounts of money for famine relief in the Third World. The willingness of individuals to contribute to such projects is an economic fact that requires an explanation. (shrink)

Thomas Robert Malthus was a pioneer in demography, economics and social science more generally whose ideas prompted a new 'Malthusian' way of thinking about population and the poor. On the occasion of the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of his birth, New Perspectives on Malthus offers an up-to-date collection of interdisciplinary essays from leading Malthus experts who reassess his work. Part one looks at Malthus's achievements in historical context, addressing not only perennial questions such as his attitude to the (...) Poor Laws, but also new topics including his response to environmental themes and his use of information about the New World. Part two then looks at the complex reception of his ideas by writers, scientists, politicians and philanthropists from the period of his own lifetime to the present day, from Charles Darwin and H. G. Wells to David Attenborough, Al Gore and Amartya Sen. (shrink)

Our thoughts about the world are clearly influenced by such things as point of view, temperament, past experience and culture. However, some thinkers go much further and argue that everything that exists depends on us, arguing that 'even reality is relative'. Can we accept such a claim in the face of events such as floods and other natural disasters or events seemingly beyond our control? 'Realists' argue that reality is independent of out thinking. 'Relativists' disagree, arguing that what there is (...) depends on our point of view. Which is right? Robert Kirk provides a crystal clear account of this debate from the Greek philosophers to Wittgenstein and Rorty. Along the way, he unpacks some of the more complicated issues surrounding ideas of objectivity, subjectivity, pragmatism and realism essential for those beginning any study of philosphy. (shrink)

Originally motivated by a sophism, Pardo's discussion about the unity of mental propositions allows him to elaborate on his ideas about the nature of propositions. His option for a non-composite character of mental propositions is grounded in an original view about syncategorems: propositions have a syncategorematic signification, which allows them to signify aliquid aliqualiter, just by virtue of the mental copula, without the need of any added categorematic element. Pardo's general claim about the simplicity of mental propositions is developed into (...) several specific thesis about mental propositions: a) it is not judgement which gives its unity to mental propositions, but judicative acts always follow some previous apprehensive act that is simple in its own right; b) this simplicity is compatible with a certain kind of complexity, that can be explained in terms of the "causal history" of the acts of knowing; c) traditional conceptions about subject and predicate must be recast, while keeping their usual explicative power concerning logical properties; d) of course, the traditional conception about the copula has been modified, giving rise to a fully innovative conception of the nature of mental propositions. Nevertheless, this innovative conception of mental language seems still infected by certain "common sense" prejudices, which lead Pardo to propose also a provocative conception of vocal language, which I consider unnecessary. (shrink)

Homework have different familiar impact in each familiar environment. In order to uncover the attitudes parents take towards their children’s homework, a national study about family balance, where 471 people have been interviewed, is done. The results show that women are more likely to help children doing homework. The study concludes making evidence some changes.

Robert Bernasconi explores in the context of Heidegger's thought a number of questions of far-reaching concern: what is the role of literary examples within philosophy? Is art dead? What is the relation of art to nature? Is there a place for the idea of a "people" in art and literary theory, and in philosophy? Is the history of philosophy to be written as a narrative? What is the status of ethics within philosophy? What place does philosophy give to praxis? (...) What is the place today of the belief in the nobility of the philosophical life? What is the relation of politics to thought? Reflecting a dominant concern of recent Heidegger scholarship, the focal point of a number of the essays is the relation of Heidegger's own politics to his thought. In addition to this examination of what appears to compromise Heidegger's philosophy, Bernasconi explores its relation to the further possibilities which that thought has opened in the writings of Arendt, Gadamer, Levinas, and Derrida. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is rather modest: we do not intend to reconstruct Aristotle’s theory of truth (although we are convinced that there is such a thing), and we will not try to settle the issue concerning Bivalence in Aristotle. We merely want, on the one hand, to argue for the consistency between the main Aristotelian texts on truth and a possible rejection of Bivalence; and on the other hand, to investigate the conditions of a possible counterexample to Bivalence. (...) The motivation for this research is also very specific. We are interested in the apparent violation of Bivalence introduced by vague predicates, and in particular we want to respond to a family of arguments put forward by T. Williamson in support of the idea that allowing for exceptions to Bivalence would be incoherent. We have focused on these arguments for two reasons. On the one hand, what is allegedly threatened by a denial of Bivalence is no less than the very “nature of truth or falsity”. On the other hand, Aristotle is explicitly mentioned as one of the defendants of this “natural” conception of truth, and we are reminded about the connection between Aristotle’s theory and Tarski’s semantic conception. These arguments, therefore, give us an occasion to explore Aristotle’s analysis of the nature of truth and falsity, and to examine its connection with the Tarskian conception of truth. In particular, we would like to question the assumption, which has become a commonplace in the field of analytical philosophy, that Aristotle’s notion of truth can be encoded in the pair of disquotational biconditionals that derive from Tarski’s “T schema”. (shrink)

The progress of Mathematics during the nineteenth century was characterised both by an enormous acquisition of new knowledge and by the attempts to introduce rigour in reasoning patterns and mathematical writing. Cauchy’s presentation of Mathematical Analysis was not immediately accepted, and many writers, though aware of that new style, did not use it in their own mathematical production. This paper is devoted to an episode of this sort that took place in Spain during the first half of the century: It (...) deals with the presentation of a method for numerically solving algebraic equations by José Mariano Vallejo, a late Spanish follower of the Enlightenment ideas, politician, writer, and mathematician who published it in the fourth (1840) edition of his book Compendio de Matemáticas Puras y Mistas, claiming to have discovered it on his own. Vallejo’s main achievement was to write down the whole procedure in a very careful way taking into account the different types of roots, although he paid little attention to questions such as convergence checks and the fulfilment of the hypotheses of Rolle’s Theorem. For sure this lack of mathematical care prevented Vallejo to occupy a place among the forerunners of Computational Algebra. (shrink)

Liberals have often been attracted by contractarian modes of argument— and with good reason. Any system of social organization requires that some constraints be imposed on individuals' freedom of action; it is a central problem for any liberal political theory to show which constraints can be justified, and which cannot. A contractarian justification works by showing that the constraints in question can be understood as if they were the product of an agreement, voluntarily entered into by every member of society. (...) Thus, no one is required to give up his freedom for someone else's benefit, or in the pursuit of someone else's conception of the social good. (shrink)

En el tercer milenio, en medio de una conciencia generalizada de crisis como resultado de los espectaculares cambios habidos en las dinámicas sociales, en las formas de relacionarse, en los perfiles de las ideologías y hasta en la disposición del hecho religioso, no es extraño que se asuma la vivencia de vacío abierto y lábil. Se han disociado las grandes "certezas" que han dirigido el desarrollo de la humanidad durante los últimos siglos -"la verdad os hará libres" se está transformando (...) en "la libertad os hará la verdad"-, se han disipado los límites y las referencias guía. Son las dinámicas emergentes, encriptadas y por lo general confusas las que vienen a ocupar ese vacío imponiendo sus propios códigos y reglas. Dinámicas que pueden generar desarrollo personal y scial, o, por el contrario, propiciar sufrimiento y vacío existencial. (shrink)