La tesis de la “colonialidad del saber” es filosóficamente débil e históricamente cuestionable. A través de un análisis de una variedad de textos de autores del “giro decolonial” demuestro que hacen afirmaciones no fundadas respecto a la conexión entre la epistemología cartesiana y las condiciones y relaciones socio-políticas de dominación en América Latina (dominación colonial, explotación capitalista, racismo, sexismo). Sostengo que su conceptualización de las ciencias naturales y sociales, además de su caracterización de la epistemología cartesiana, son superficiales e históricamente (...) discutibles. Concluyo que la relación entre la epistemología y la política que la colonialidad del saber presupone no es plausible y se debe reformular. (shrink)

Restless Ideas is a lively new textbook of contemporary social theory that speaks directly to the anxious age in which we live today. In addition to providing a highly readable guided tour of major social theories from the mid-20th to the early 21st century, this book is full of dynamic examples that show how these theories may be used to deepen our understanding of current events and of our own life experiences. The emergence of demagogic political leaders like Donald Trump (...) in the USA, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey; the rise of religious fundamentalism, terrorism, and political populism; the digital echo-chamber of social media; and the underlying causes of Brexit are only some of the many current social issues that can be framed through contemporary social theories. Similarly, the politics of sexual, racial and ethnic minorities can be analyzed through the prism of theoretical perspectives such as queer theory, standpoint and intersectional theory, postcolonial theory and critical race theory, while the ongoing struggles for gender equality and gender justice can usefully be examined through the generational perspectives of feminist theories. This book sets the stage with a critical discussion of the loaded history of the social theory canon and makes the argument that there has never been a better time than the present to broaden our understanding of our shared global heritage of social theory, to include some of the formerly excluded classics of past social thinkers, and to open the doors to current social thinkers theorizing from the margins. The book traces the modern roots of contemporary social theory back to the works of the early structural functionalists, systems theorists, conflict theorists, symbolic interactionists, ethnomethodologists and sociobiologists, building on and at times inverting the canon with the critical advancements to social theory. Later chapters focus on the current influence of structuration theory, third wave critical theory, postmodernism and poststructuralism, critical race theory, postcolonialism, liquid and late modernity theories, and globalization theories. These perspectives include the works of contemporary social theorists such as Anthony Giddens, Pierre Bourdieu, Juliet Mitchell, Dorothy Smith, Judith Butler, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Gayatri Spivak, Homi K. Bhabha, Zygmunt Bauman, Slavoj Zizek, Alain Badiou, Jürgen Habermas, Axel Honneth, Nancy Fraser, Manuel Castells and Ulrich Beck. The underlying premise - and the promise - of this book is that social theory has the power to provide us with the skills for more informed observation, analysis, and empathic understanding of social behavior and social interaction. In a word: the value of social theory may be seen in how it can enhance social literacy - by deepening our understanding of the world around us, and by empowering us to become practical theorists in our own lives. (shrink)

According to the doxastic compatibilist, compatibilist criteria with respect to the freedom of action rule-in our having free beliefs. In Booth (Philosophical Papers 38:1–12, 2009), I challenged the doxastic compatibilist to either come up with an account of how doxastic attitudes can be intentional in the face of it very much seeming to many of us that they cannot. Or else, in rejecting that doxastic attitudes need to be voluntary in order to be free, to come up with a principled (...) account of how her criteria of doxastic freedom are criteria of freedom. In two recent papers, Steup (Synthese 188:145–163, 2012; Dialectica 65(4):559–576, 2011) takes up the first disjunct of the challenge by proposing that even though beliefs cannot be practically intentional, they can be epistemically intentional. McHugh (McHugh forthcoming) instead takes up the second disjunct by proposing that the freedom of belief be modelled not on the freedom of action but on the freedom of intention. I argue that both Steup’s and McHugh’s strategies are problematic. (shrink)

This book examines the notion of honor with an eye to dissecting its intellectual demise and with the aim of making a case for honor’s rehabilitation. Western intellectuals acknowledge honor’s influence, but they lament its authority. For Western democratic societies to embrace honor, it must be compatible with social ideals like liberty, equality, and fraternity. Cunningham details a conception of honor that can do justice to these ideals. This vision revolves around three elements—character , relationships , and activities and accomplishment (...) . Taken together, these elements articulate a shared aspiration for excellence. We can turn the tables on traditional ills of honor—serious problems of gender, race, and class—by forging a vision of honor that rejects lives predicated on power and oppression. (shrink)

Idealization is a central feature of human thought. We build ideal models in the sciences, our politics is guided by pictures of impossible utopias, and our thinking about the arts and moral life is guided by images of how things might have been. In all these cases we sometimes proceed with a representation of the world that we know is not true or aim at a world we accept we cannot realize. This is the world of the "as if," which (...) the philosopher Hans Vaihinger delineated at the turn of the century, in ways he traced back to Kant. In this book, I aim to explore idealization in aesthetics, ethics, and metaphysics, as well as in the philosophy of mind, of language, of religion, and of the social and natural sciences. No one could be an expert on all of these things, but sometimes in philosophy it helps to stand back and take a broader view. On the way I hope to illuminate many issues, large and small, but there is one over-arching lesson: our best chance of understanding the world must be to have a plurality of ways of thinking about it. This book is about why we need a multitude of pictures of the world. It is a gentle jeremiad against theoretical monism. (shrink)

We examine the theory of the extended mind, and especially the concept of the “parity principle” (Clark and Chalmers in Analysis 58.1:7–19, 1998), in light of Hegel’s notion of objective spirit. This unusual combination of theories raises the question of how far one can extend the notion of extended mind and whether cognitive processing can supervene on the operations of social practices and institutions. We raise some questions about putting this research to critical use.

Frauchiger and Renner have recently claimed to prove that “Single-world interpretations of quantum theory cannot be self-consistent”. This is contradicted by a construction due to Bell, inspired by Bohmian mechanics, which shows that any quantum system can be modelled in such a way that there is only one “world” at any time, but the predictions of quantum theory are reproduced. This Bell–Bohmian theory is applied to the experiment proposed by Frauchiger and Renner, and their argument is critically examined. It is (...) concluded that it is their version of “standard quantum theory”, incorporating state vector collapse upon measurement, that is not self-consistent. (shrink)

In _Feminist Interpretations of John Rawls_, Ruth Abbey collects eight essays responding to the work of John Rawls from a feminist perspective. An impressive introduction by the editor provides a chronological overview of English-language feminist engagements with Rawls from his Theory of Justice onwards. She surveys the range of issues canvassed by feminist readers of Rawls, as well as critics’ wide disagreement about the value of Rawls’s corpus for feminist purposes. The eight essays that follow testify to the continuing ambivalence (...) among feminist readers of Rawls. From the perspectives of political theory and moral, social, and political philosophy, the essayists address particular aspects of Rawls’s work and apply it to a variety of worldly practices relating to gender inequality and the family, to the construction of disability, to justice in everyday relationships, and to human rights on an international level. The overall effect is to give a sense of the broad spectrum of possible feminist critical responses to Rawls, ranging from rejection to adoption. Aside from the editor, the contributors are Amy R. Baehr, Eileen Hunt Botting, Elizabeth Brake, Clare Chambers, Nancy J. Hirschmann, Anthony Simon Laden, Janice Richardson, and Lisa H. Schwartzman. (shrink)

The precautionary principle justifies postponing the implementation of development projects to await better information about their environmental impacts. But if implementation capacity is congestible, as is often the case in practical settings, a postponed project may have to vie for implementation priority with projects that arrive later. Limitations of implementation capacity create two risks. First, it may sometimes not make sense to go back to a postponed project, even if it is later revealed to be a good one. Second, the (...) planner may find it worthwhile to go back to it, but at the expense of undesirable delay of subsequent projects. We consider a planner facing a sequence of projects that vary stochastically in their (1) importance and (2) improvability, but knowing that implementation capacity is congestible. The scope for congestion implies a ‘bonus’ for earlier-than-otherwise decisions, in common parlance ‘keeping the desk clear’, which works against the well-understood option value that encourages postponement. The optimal decision rule depends upon the stochastic environment whereby future projects are generated, in ways that are not obvious. The value of the bonus is increasing in the expected importance of future projects but decreasing in their expected improvability. Higher variability of the importance of projects, in the sense of mean-preserving spread, increases the size of the bonus, but variability in their improvability has a generally ambiguous impact. We characterize the adjusted decision rule and note its implications for the conduct of cost-benefit informed policy. (shrink)

Sidgwick famously claimed that an argument in favour of utilitarianism might be provided by demonstrating that a set of defensible philosophical intuitions undergird it. This paper focuses on those philosophical intuitions. It aims to show which specific intuitions Sidgwick endorsed, and to shed light on their mutual connections. It argues against many rival interpretations that Sidgwick maintained that six philosophical intuitions constitute the self-evident grounds for utilitarianism, and that those intuitions appear to be specifications of a negative principle of universalization (...) (according to which differential treatments must be based on reasonable grounds alone). In addition, this paper attempts to show how the intuitions function in the overall argument for utilitarianism. The suggestion is that the intuitions are the main positive part of the argument for the view, which includes Sidgwick's rejection of common-sense morality and its philosophical counterpart, dogmatic intuitionism. The paper concludes by arguing that some of Sidgwick's intuitions fail to meet the conditions for self-evidence which Sidgwick himself established and applied to the rules of common-sense morality. (shrink)

Sir Anthony Kenny presents a second edition of his landmark work The Aristotelian Ethics, which transformed Aristotle studies in 1978 by showing, on stylistic, historical, and philosophical grounds, that the Eudemian Ethics was a mature work with as strong a claim to be Aristotle's ethical masterpiece as the more widely studied Nicomachean Ethics. In this new edition Kenny offers a critical survey of developments in the field since The Aristotelian Ethics was first published. Kenny also addresses the criticisms of (...) his first edition, both accepting those he sees as justified and addressing and refuting those which he feels are unfounded. The book remains essential reading for anyone interested in Aristotle's ethical works, arguably the most influential ever written. (shrink)

ABSTRACTSkepticism about citizen competence is a core component of Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels’s call, in Democracy for Realists, for rethinking our model of democracy. In this paper I suggest that the evidence for citizen incompetence is not as clear as we might think; important research shows that we are good group problem solvers even if we are poor solitary truth seekers. I argue that deliberative democracy theory has a better handle on this fundamental fact of human cognition (...) and therefore has a more realistic view of the conditions that might improve citizen competence. (shrink)

El artículo ofrece una recensión de las diversas opiniones sobre la datación del Sermón 90A (Dolbeau 11, Mainz 40), así como la opinión del autor, a partir de un análisis del contenido temático, lexical y hermenéutico del mismo.

Anne Cova & Bruno Dumons (dir.), « Femmes, genre et catholicisme. Nouvelles recherches, nouveaux objets (France, xixe-xxe siècle) », Chrétiens et sociétés (Documents et mémoire, n° 17), 2012, 208 p. Le dernier numéro de la revue Chrétiens et sociétés dirigé par Anne Cova et Bruno Dumons s’intéresse aux « nouvelles recherches » et aux « nouveaux objets » portant sur les femmes, le genre et le catholicisme à l’époque contemporaine. Cet ouvrage est principalement issu d’une journée d’étude orga...

An ethic of the fitting: a conceptual framework for nursing practiceNurses are expected to act within an ethos of care cognisant of duty, the right, and the good. Concepts of virtue theory, utilitarianism and deontology are used to outline a conceptual ethical framework for nurses in practice. This ‘Moebius’ framework aims to locate the virtues in a symbiotic relationship with the principles of utilitarianism and deontology. Under this framework, fitting ethical responses are sought. Within an ethic of the fitting, rules (...) and principles do not guarantee the most ethically justifiable outcomes. Within the Moebius approach, the nurse ought to respond with a sense of compassion that befits the moment rather than adhere to a rule at all costs. (shrink)

Presents the intellectual milieu of mid-Tang China, particularly the conservative defense of literary pursuits and cultural tradition in the face of political and social uncertainty.

Rawls criticizes utilitarianism for not taking the distinction between persons seriously, and suggests that his own theory: justice as fairness, does. I argue that justice as fairness aims to take the distinction seriously at four levels, ranging from the content of its principles to its conception of political philosophy, and that doing so at each stage is of fundamental importance in working out the basis of a conception of justice for a democratic society. Understanding Rawls’s theory in this way points (...) to a clearer understanding of how to go on doing political philosophy after Rawls. (shrink)

J.D. Collier sees Putnam as arguing that metaphysical realism is false.' He sees the argument as proceeding from the background assumption that metaphysical realism has the consequence that truth is 'radically non-epistemic', so that 'an [epistemically] ideal theory could be radically wrong about the world' [3, p. 413]. But, according to Collier, Putnam argues that 'an ideal theory satisfying all of our methodological and theoretical constraints cannot be false' [3, p. 413]. Collier attempts to defend metaphysical realism against this Putnamian (...) attack by distinguishing 'between our ability to state a theory and our ability to conceive its possibility' [3, p. 413]. I will show that this defence is unsuccessful. (shrink)