As ideias estão em Deus e são compreendidas por seus limites em relação à sua essência ilimitada. A originalidade do ser de Tomás de Aquino pode ser testada se comparada com as múltiplas teorias a respeito da ideia que se desenvolveram ao longo dos séculos na investigação filosófica. Das ideias subsistentes de Platão à ideia como subsistência em Hegel, os percursos aristotélico e tomista revelam-se opções intelectuais moderadas no âmbito gnosiológico, em razão de suas conquistas metafísicas. Deixando de lado os (...) problemas gnosiológicos em favor de uma abordagem metafísica do problema da ideia, pode-se perceber que, para Tomás, tanto o valor do conceito na ordem gnosiológica, quanto a subsistência da ideia na ordem metafísica, se resolvem apenas em ordem ao ser. A terceira das Quaestiones Disputatae De Veritate aborda diretamente o problema e traz sua formulação definitiva no pensamento de Tomás. Todas as perfeições das ideias estão em Deus formaliter, pertencem à sua essência, mas a ideia da essência divina somente Deus a conhece, pois identifica-se com seu ser, o Ipsum Esse Subsistens. (shrink)

Resumen: El presente artículo propone que la 31ª Bienal de Sao Paulo entraña un afán emancipador para los "sin tierra" - errantes, migrantes y viajeros. Para ello se conforma como un cuerpo sin órganos, que despliega estrategias liberadoras promoviendo: desarticulación, experimentación, vagabundeo y tránsito de sujetos y pueblos. Esta Bienal, en tanto CsO, mueve intensidades como flujos sensibles por los intersticios de los proyectos artísticos dispuestos en organismo. Acá el CsO es un conjunto de prácticas reservadas a desterritorializar los estratos (...) del "organismo social" y hacer estallar los órganos estructurados en dichos sistemas.: This article shows that the 31st Sao Paulo Biennial has an emancipatory affinity for the landless - wanderers, migrants, and travelers. As such it becomes a Body without Organs that displays liberating strategies, promoting disarticulation, experimentation, wandering, and the transit of subjects and peoples. This Biennial, as a BwO, moves intensities as sensible flows through the interstices of the artistic projects inside the organism. Here, the BwO becomes a set of practices that deterritorialize the strata of the "social organism", making the structured organs in these systems explode. (shrink)

Understanding compositional practices is a major goal of musicology and music theory. Compositional practices have been traditionally viewed as disembodied and idiosyncratic. This view makes it hard to integrate musical creativity into our understanding of the general cognitive processes underlying meaning construction. To overcome this unnecessary isolation of musical composition from cognitive science, in this conceptual analysis, we approach compositional processes with the analytic tools of blending theory, material anchoring, and enaction. Our case study is Iannis Xenakis’ use of sieves (...) for distributing rhythmic patterns in Psappha. Though disregarded in previous accounts, the timeline and the gearwheel provide crucial conceptual templates for anchoring Xenakis’ idea of time for this score. This case study of conceptual integration templates for temporal representation seeks to gain insight into musical creativity, embodiment, and blending, especially into how virtual interactions with material structures facilitate the construction of complex meanings. (shrink)

The purpose of this work is to explain how the axiomatic developed by Leonardo Polo in the Course of Theory of Knowledge corresponds with the notion of organic faculty of knowledge.

A biographical sketch of the Spanish philosopher Leonardo Polo which includes an outline of the central interests of philosophical work, centring on his contribution to the history of philosophy.

This article about the thought of Leonardo Polo treats of the notion of factive possibility in the consideration of the antropological radicals which form western history: the classical radical, the modern radical and the christian radical.

The global environmental and social-economic crises of industrialized agriculture have led to the emergence of agroecology as an alternative approach aiming to increase the ecological, social and economic sustainability of agri–food systems. The ‘multi-level perspective’ is now a widely used framework to understand and promote the upscaling of local innovation niches, such as agroecology, to broader scales, thus reconfiguring the dominant socio-technical regimes. Additionally, emergent ‘hybrid forums’ can provide a space between niche and regime where niche innovators can become important (...) actors in scaling up and out emergent innovations. In this paper, we examine a university training program, to better understand its role as a ‘hybrid forum’. Our analysis focuses especially on how the program, as an example of a hybrid forum, worked to reconfigure practices, concepts, and tools of local development practitioners. We also assess to what extent the program contributed to transitioning local development institutions toward agroecology. An online survey and in-depth interviews were carried out to determine how the training program has impacted the student’s opinions and their respective institutions. The results show that most of the students consider that they have acquired new theoretical frameworks and useful methods to re-framing their local development projects, that new alliances with multi-actor networks have been perceived, and that some internal changes of the local development practices have taken place. We conclude that the training program, as a hybrid forum, is capable of outscaling niche innovations through linkages with different kind of actors both from the niche and the regime. Political changes in the socio-technical landscape level offer an opportunity to amplify the impact of the innovations which are being generated by those multi-actor networks, but with a limited multi-level impact as far as institutional regime-actors not aligned with agroecological transition keep the most of the competencies on agri–food systems. (shrink)

Delusions are often portrayed as paradigmatic instances of incomprehensibility and meaninglessness. Here we investigate the relationship between delusions and meaning from a philosophical perspective, integrating arguments and evidence from cognitive psychology and phenomenological psychopathology. We review some of the empirical and philosophical literature relevant to two claims about delusions and meaning: delusions are meaningful, despite being described as irrational and implausible beliefs; some delusions can also enhance the sense that one’s life is meaningful, supporting agency and creativity in some circumstances. (...) Delusions are not incomprehensible representations of reality. Rather, they can help make sense of one’s unusual experiences and in some circumstances even support one’s endeavours, albeit temporarily and imperfectly. Acknowledging that delusions have meaning and can also give meaning to people’s lives has implications for our understanding of psychotic symptoms and for addressing the stigma associated with psychiatric conditions. (shrink)

The global environmental and social-economic crises of industrialized agriculture have led to the emergence of agroecology as an alternative approach aiming to increase the ecological, social and economic sustainability of agri–food systems. The ‘multi-level perspective’ is now a widely used framework to understand and promote the upscaling of local innovation niches, such as agroecology, to broader scales (e.g., regional, national, international), thus reconfiguring the dominant socio-technical regimes. Additionally, emergent ‘hybrid forums’ can provide a space between niche and regime where niche (...) innovators can become important actors in scaling up and out emergent innovations. In this paper, we examine a university training program (Postgraduate Diploma in Local Agroecological Dynamization at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona), to better understand its role as a ‘hybrid forum’. Our analysis focuses especially on how the program, as an example of a hybrid forum, worked to reconfigure practices, concepts, and tools of local development practitioners. We also assess to what extent the program contributed to transitioning local development institutions toward agroecology. An online survey (n = 46) and in-depth interviews (n = 16) were carried out to determine how the training program has impacted the student’s opinions and their respective institutions. The results show that most of the students consider that they have acquired new theoretical frameworks and useful methods to re-framing their local development projects, that new alliances with multi-actor networks have been perceived, and that some internal changes of the local development practices have taken place. We conclude that the training program, as a hybrid forum, is capable of outscaling niche innovations through linkages with different kind of actors both from the niche and the regime. Political changes in the socio-technical landscape level offer an opportunity to amplify the impact of the innovations which are being generated by those multi-actor networks, but with a limited multi-level impact as far as institutional regime-actors not aligned with agroecological transition keep the most of the competencies on agri–food systems. (shrink)

While the concept of adaptive preferences is an important tool for criticizing injustice, it is often claimed that using the concept involves showing disrespect for persons judged to have adaptive preferences. In this paper, I propose an account of adaptive preferences that does the relevant political work while still showing persons two centrally important kinds of respect. My account is based in what I call an indirect substantive account of autonomy, which places substantive requirements on the options available to a (...) person, rather than on the option that she ultimately prefers. This allows us to pinpoint cases in which a person's circumstances have rendered her insufficiently autonomous, without saying that any conception of the good must be non-autonomous tout court. (shrink)

Le monde compte entre 6500 et 7000 langues dont on peut présenter les rapports hiérarchisés dans les termes du modèle gravitationnel. Les unes sont très parlées, les autres en voie de disparition, et l'urbanisation de la planète, en constante augmentation, laisse penser que la croissance du nombre de langues a atteint son point culminant. Face à cette tendance , la Francophonie a choisi de défendre la diversité en s'alliant à deux autres ensembles linguistiques . Pour être crédible et ne pas (...) se voir taxée de « Yalta linguistique », cette politique se devrait de prendre en compte le devenir des langues qui gravitent dans chacun de ces trois ensembles. Mais, en même temps, elle doit prendre conscience que la diversité traverse les langues elles-mêmes, et qu'elle est un facteur de changement qui pourrait mener à l'émergence de nouvelles langues.Today the world counts between 6500 and 7000 languages. Hierarchical relations between these languages have been presented in what is known as the gravitational model. While some are widely spoken, others are on the verge of disappearing, and the constantly increasing urbanisation of our planet suggests that that the constant growth of the world’s languages - following a logistic model - has reached a culminating point. Faced with this tendency - well illustrated by Internet, for instance - "La Francophonie" has chosen to defend language diversity and ally itself with two other linguistic areas . To increase credibility and avoid being identified as "a linguistic Yalta", such policies need to take into account the future of the languages that gravitate within each of these areas. Yet at the same time it should be aware that diversity concerns these very languages too, which in itself is a factor of change that might lead to the emergence of new languages. (shrink)

En partant du « modèle gravitationnel » et de l'analyse des flux de traductions pour décrire le versant linguistique de la mondialisation on voit apparaître un « marché aux langues » sur lequel certaines sont très cotées et d'autres dévaluées. Des études de cas nous permettent de mieux cerner ce marché linguistique. Et une évolution récente dans la nomination des langues sources semble témoigner d'une tendance à l'éclatement des langues supercentrales, à leur dialectalisation.From the "gravity model" and the translations flow (...) analysis to describe the linguistic side of globalization we can see a "market language" on which some are listed and other devalued. Case studies allow us to better understand this language market. And recent developments in the appointment of the source language seems to indicate a tendency to burst supercentral languages, their dialectalisation. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue for the counter-intuitive conclusion that the same adaptive preference can be both prudentially good and prudentially bad for its holder: that is, it can be prudentially objectionable from one temporal perspective, but prudentially unobjectionable from another. Given the possibility of transformative experiences, there is an important sense in which even worrisome adaptive preferences can be prudentially good for us. That is, if transformative experiences lead us to develop adaptive preferences, then their objects can become prudentially (...) better for our actual selves than the objects of their non-adaptive alternatives would now be. I also argue, however, that the same worrisome adaptive preferences might still be prospectively prudentially objectionable: that is, our pre-transformation selves might be prudentially better off undergoing a non-adaptive alternative transformative experience instead. I argue that both claims hold across the range of the most broadly-defended accounts of well-being in the literature. (shrink)

Virtue ethics has often been regarded as complementary or laissez-faire ethics in solving business problems. This paper seeks conceptual and methodological improvements by developing a virtue character scale that will enable assessment of the link between organizational level virtue and organizational performance, financial or non-financial. Based upon three theoretical assumptions, multiple studies were conducted; the content analysis of 158 Fortune Global 500 firms ethical values and a survey of 2548 customers and employees. Six dimensions of organizational virtue (Integrity, Empathy, Warmth, (...) Courage, Conscientiousness and Zeal) are identified through confirmatory factor analysis, and validated against satisfaction measure. Strategic implications of virtue characters are discussed. (shrink)

La adolescencia es un periodo crítico de la vida para el desarrollo de depresión. Durante este periodo la prevalencia de adolescentes que sufren trastornos depresivos aumenta considerablemente, debido a múltiples factores biológicos, sociales y psicológicos. Además entre los 14 y 18 años emergen importantes diferencias de género en depresión, de forma que al final de este periodo las tasas de depresión en las chicas llegan a doblar las observadas en los chicos (Hankin et al., 1998). Estas diferencias tenderán a mantenerse (...) a lo largo del ciclo vital. De este modo las estadísticas indican que en la vida adulta las mujeres experimentan el Trastorno Depresivo Mayor dos veces más que los hombres, siendo las diferencias aún mayores para el Trastorno Distímico. (shrink)

I propose that we can explain the contribution of mental time travel to agency through understanding it as a specific instance of our more general capacity for narrative understanding. Narrative understanding involves the experience of a pre-reflective and embodied sense of self, which co-emerges with our emotional involvement with a sequence of events. Narrative understanding of a sequence of events also requires a ‘recombinable system’, that is, the ability to combine parts to make myriad sequences. Mental time travel shares these (...) two characteristics: it involves an embodied sense of self and the ability to create novel scenarios. What is unique about mental time travel is that it is a story explicitly about our selves, and it involves metarepresentation. Agency is enabled by narrative understanding when we are able to put our current situation into a larger narrative context, whereby some possible actions, but not others, make sense. However, new features of agency are enabled when we understand stories that are explicitly about our selves: we gain the ability to plan and act on plans. (shrink)

The brain is often taken to be a paradigmatic example of a signaling system with semantic and representational properties, in which neurons are senders and receivers of information carried in action potentials. A closer look at this picture shows that it is not as appealing as it might initially seem in explaining the function of the brain. Working from several sender-receiver models within the teleosemantic framework, I will first argue that two requirements must be met for a system to support (...) genuine semantic information: 1. The receiver must be competent —that is, it must be able to extract rewards from its environment on the basis of the signals that it receives. 2. The receiver must have some flexibility of response relative to the signal received. In the second part of the paper, this initial framework will be applied to neural processes, pointing to the surprising conclusion that signaling at the single-neuron level is only weakly semantic at best. Contrary to received views, neurons will have little or no access to semantic information (though their patterns of activity may carry plenty of quantitative, correlational information) about the world outside the organism. Genuine representation of the world requires an organism - level receiver of semantic information, to which any particular set of neurons makes only a small contribution. (shrink)

The significance of critical phenomenology for psychiatric praxis has yet to be expounded. In this paper, I argue that the adoption of a critical phenomenological stance can remedy localised instances of hermeneutical injustice, which may arise in the encounter between clinicians and patients with psychosis. In this context, what is communicated is often deemed to lack meaning or to be difficult to understand. While a degree of un-shareability is inherent to subjective life, I argue that issues of unintelligibility can be (...) addressed by shifting from individualistic conceptions of understanding to an interactionist view. This takes into account the contextual, historical and relational background within which meaning is co-constituted. I conclude by providing a corrective for hermeneutical injustice, which entails a specific attentiveness towards the person’s subjectivity, a careful sensitivity to contingent meaning-generating structures, and a degree of hermeneutical flexibility as an attitude of openness towards alternative horizons of possibility. (shrink)

Are there representations in the brain? It depends on what you mean by representations, and it depends on what you want them to do for you—both in terms of the causal role they play in the system, and in terms of their explanatory value. But ideally, we would like an account of representation that allows us to assign a representational role and content to the appropriate mechanistic precursors of behavior that in fact play that role and conversely, search for the (...) mechanistic realizers of representational roles that are posited by our models of behavior and cognition. Such an account would be methodologically valuable in neuroscience. Lately, people have started asking similar questions about deep neural networks. What representations do they learn and use, and what is the relation between those representations and the sometimes impressive capacities these networks exhibit? More philosophically puzzling, perhaps, is the question of why the internal activities or dispositions labeled as such in neuroscience and AI research should count as representations at all. I think we can give a unified answer to both sets of questions, in the form of a kind of representational pragmatism. What makes something a representation just is that we can identify and re-identify it as such, and moreover, that we can manipulate it effectively to do whatever it is that we think representations ought to do for us in that particular context. For the first condition, the idea is that so long as we have some probe that allows us to pick out the relevant causally effective candidate, we should consider that to be a candidate representation-relative-to-that-probe. The second condition can be understood as a kind of anti-gerrymandering constraint: one ought to be able to intervene on the candidate, and see effects of that intervention consistent with the functional role the representation is supposed to play. Naturally the details need to be spelled out for different contexts—and I will articulate them for a few illustrative cases—which effectively allows for a kind of pluralism about representation depending on the setting and the kinds of questions being asked. With the extra components filled in, representational pragmatism can make sense of existing practices in neuroscience and AI, as well as their relationship to naturalistic theories of representation in philosophy. (shrink)

Pritchard sostiene que la condición de habilidad y la condición de seguridad le imponen demandas independientes al conocimiento, i.e., que la satisfacción de una no implica la satisfacción de la otra y que, por lo tanto, ninguna de ellas es suficiente por sí misma para ofrecer una caracterización adecuada de esta noción. Argumento, por el contrario, que no hay buenas razones para pensar que la condición de seguridad es insuficiente. Empleando algunos conceptos de Greco y Pritchard y Kallestrup para caracterizar (...) a las habilidades cognitivas y el caso del mentiroso consistente de Lackey, argumento que TEMP, el caso clave de Pritchard para mostrar que puede haber seguridad sin habilidad, no funciona porque el proceso cognitivo relevante constituye una realización legítima, aunque anómala, de una habilidad. Pritchard maintains that the ability and the safety conditions impose independent demands on knowledge, i.e., that satisfying only one of them is not sufficient to acquire knowledge. I argue that there are no good reasons to suppose that the safety condition is not sufficient. I claim that TEMP, the key case proposed by Pritchard to show that there can be safety without ability, fails because therelevant cognitive process constitutes a legitimate, although anomalous, realization of a cognitive ability. (shrink)

Philosophical proponents of predictive processing cast the novelty of predictive models of perception in terms of differences in the functional role and information content of neural signals. However, they fail to provide constraints on how the crucial semantic mapping from signals to their informational contents is determined. Beyond a novel interpretative gloss on neural signals, they have little new to say about the causal structure of the system, or even what statistical information is carried by the signals. That means that (...) the predictive framework for perception can be relabeled in traditional, non-predictive terms, with no empirical consequences relevant to existing or future data. To the extent that neuroscientific research based on predictive processing is both innovative and productive, it will be due to the framework’s suggestive heuristic effects, or perhaps auxiliary empirical claims about implementation, rather than a difference in the information-processing structure that it describes. (shrink)

Although the problem of adaptiveness plays an important motivating role in her work on human capabilities, Martha Nussbaum never gives a clear account of the controversial concept of adaptive preferences on which she relies. In this paper, I aim both to reconstruct the most plausible account of the concept that may be attributed to Nussbaum and to provide a critical appraisal of that account. Although her broader work on the capabilities approach moves progressively towards political liberalism as time passes, I (...) aim to show that her account of adaptive preferences continues to maintain her earlier commitment to perfectionism about the good. I then distinguish between two obligatory kinds of respect for persons, which I call, respectively, primary and secondary recognition respect. This distinction allows us to see that her perfectionist account of adaptive preferences allows her to show persons primary but not secondary recognition respect. Ultimately, I claim that an acceptable account of adaptive prefer.. (shrink)

Multiple realizability says that the same kind of mental states may be manifested by systems with very different physical constitutions. Putnam ( 1967 ) supposed it to be “overwhelmingly probable” that there exist psychological properties with different physical realizations in different creatures. But because function constrains possible physical realizers, this empirical bet is far less favorable than it might initially have seemed, especially when we take on board the richer picture of neural and brain function that neuroscience has been uncovering (...) over the past forty years, in which all sorts of brain activities play crucial roles beyond all-or-nothing electrical signaling. Because of its evolutionary history, the brain’s metabolic and informational processes are inextricably intertwined. The resulting complex integrated functions impose more constraints on possible realizers than the clean, single-purpose functions usually cited as examples in discussions of multiple realizability—with ramifications for the functionalist and computationalist foundations of cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

Accounts of adaptive preferences are of two kinds: well-being accounts fully theorized for their own sake and political accounts theorized to facilitate the political project of reducing oppression and marginalization. Given their practical role, the latter are often less fully theorized, and are therefore less robust to theoretical criticism. In this paper, I first draw on well-being accounts to identify the well-theorized elements that political accounts should want to adopt in order to strengthen their project and avoid common criticisms. Second, (...) I appeal to the political project to show the shortcomings of the well-being accounts on which I draw. (shrink)

How do engineers respond to ethical dilemmas that occur in practice? How do they view their individual and collective responsibilities? How do they make decisions before all the facts are in? Using the space shuttle programme as the framework, this book examines the role of ethical decision making in the practice of engineering. In particular, the book considers the design and development of the main engines of the space shuttle as a paradigm for how individual engineers perceive, articulate, and resolve (...) ethical dilemmas in a large, complex organisation. A series of in-depth case studies show engineers at work on various stages of the project as they balance budgets, deadlines and risks. By documenting the historical development of a single system, the book provides a unique opportunity to explore the complex interactions between political, organisational and technical pressures and engineering and management decisions. (shrink)

In this article, I first propose four guidelines that follow from understanding the project of assigning victims duties to resist oppression as an ameliorative project. That is, if we understand the project to be motivated by the urgent aim of ending or mitigating the harm that oppression imposes on the oppressed, I argue that we should focus on developing and assigning duties that satisfy what I call the ability, weighting, fairness, and overdemandingness guidelines. Second, I develop the duty to be (...) a non-normative individual, which satisfies all four guidelines. (shrink)

As the “Sacred Place”—meant as the new space for religions offered by the Internet—demands for continuous investigations on the encounter between traditional narratives and social practices, the rapid growth of Question and Answering websites asks for improving social research about the Authenticity of the religious feeling as well as their responsibility in the construction of a shared knowledge. In this background, the aim of this study is to investigate the role of Q&A websites as additional interpretative resources in accordance with (...) different religious forms of life. About 800 extracts—composed by questions and answers—from the religious pages of Stack Exchange were analyzed, in accordance with social discursive psychology, through bottom-up and top-down pathways. In relation to the different emerging questioners’ profiles, the rhetoric of “closeness” and “openness” reveal a dialectic trend of these websites in offering both supplementary and extending religious experiences. (shrink)

Contingentism depicts normativity as one of our human effective possibilities rather than as a metaphysical bottleneck which we should necessary fulfill. The book is a critical survey of Richard McKay Rorty’s “neo-pragmatism”, in the light of various theoretical arguments as well as of his own resourceful attempts to renew philosophy from within its practice.

In this article, I develop a tension in the capabilities approach between committing to political liberalism and ensuring full capability for all persons. In particular, I argue that the capabiliti...