En estas líneas se quiere mostrar que la obra de Feijoo puede interpretarse en su conjunto como un proyecto político-científico. Para Feijoo, el escepticismo científico es la clave para la construcción de una comunidad ilustrada que, al dedicarse al verdadero conocimiento del mundo físico, no amenaza la religión católica ni el incipiente despliegue del Estado moderno. La ciencia (o filosofía natural) se presenta como el antídoto de las fuerzas centrífugas del error y la disgregación, en todas sus formas. Feijoo no (...) tiene reparo en recibir y propagar las aportaciones de científicos protestantes y sí intención de generar una cultura científica que constituya un cimiento sólido para una sociedad bien organizada. Feijoo promueve la formación científica porque es útil para el _progreso_ social, para la fundación de una comunidad propiamente católica, que incluya a todas las personas cultivadas, al margen de las incipientes unidades nacionales y de los distintos bandos confesionales. (shrink)

The target article by Alexander Kon (2009) offers an excellent conceptual toolkit to analyze the current literature on empirical bioethics, a topic which has attracted so much attention in the bioe...

Ethics committees are one of the main agents in the governance of science and technology, especially in the field of health care. This paper analyses some aspects of their nature, which show the internal relationship between the moral and the scientific-technological domains. Being both knowledge providers and users thereof, ethics committees deliberate and decide on complex contemporary ethical issues. To pursue their aims, they require adequate technical tools in order to deliberate and choose using new technologies of communication and information. (...) These tools carry new problems with themselves, so committees must acquire a mixed nature, dynamic, interdisciplinary and inclusive. Ethics committees do not only constitute a control device, rather they are an interactive means for the creation of value in society. (shrink)

Este artículo ofrece una perspectiva sobre el desarrollo recientede la bioética, un campo en el que es habitual distinguir entre hechosy valores. Examinando cómo se usa la palabra “valor” en la éticabiomédica más extendida internacionalmente, se muestra quealgunos usos refuerzan cierta tendencia esencialista a tratar losvalores como si fueran entidades independientes. Como ilustracióny explicación de la creciente importancia de este fenómeno,describimos el “lenguaje de los valores” en la obra reciente deDiego Gracia, mostrando cómo su propuesta metodológica para labioética emplea la (...) dicotomía entre hechos y valores, y analizándolaen relación con la de George Khushf para articular el debate sobrelos conceptos de salud y enfermedad. Concluimos sugiriendo unamanera alternativa de concebir los valores que permita superaresa dicotomía. (shrink)

En estas líneas se pretende ofrecer pistas sobre cómo podría medirse, no ya la innovación como efecto, sino la innovación como acción; es decir, las condiciones de posibilidad de la innovación. Se argumentará que esta medida debe basarse en ciertas variables culturales, que ponderen la diversidad de los individuos y grupos de una sociedad, como indicador de su capacidad combinatoria. Se concluirá que una medida estable y precisa de la innovación es irrealizable.

Transparency has evolved from an individual, dangerous power in Plato to a desirable, collective property in the contemporary world. This paper intends to give a brief account of this long and somehow surprising path and extract some interesting consequences for economic and political activities, as well as for information technologies. Six literary masterpieces are used to highlight the contradictions and dangers entailed by the abuse of the fascinating metaphor of transparency. In the end, what is usually intended when demanding transparency (...) from a corporation, a firm or a state is more (or more accessible) information about it, i.e., understandable and abundant black and white data. This means reporting, picturing, producing material, becoming apparent, which is precisely the contrary of being transparent. We don’t want to look through , but to look directly at . The question, then, is not transparency, but opacity: what do we need and want to see, and how is this going to be produced? (shrink)

This paper deals with the interpretation and distribution of universal Free Choice (FC) items, such as English FC any or Spanish cualquiera. Crosslinguistically, universal FC items can be characterized as follows. First, they have a restricted distribution. Second, they express freedom of choice: the sentence You can take any card conveys the information that the addressee is free to pick whichever card she chooses. Under standard assumptions, the truth conditions of sentences like You can take any card are taken to (...) be captured by formalizations in which a universal quantifier ranging over individuals has wide scope over the possibility modal. The crucial observation that informs the account in this paper is that this type of formalization cannot capture the freedom of choice component. I will argue that in order to derive the right interaction between possibility modals and FC items, we need to add an exclusiveness condition to the standard wide scope paraphrases. The same proposal that guarantees freedom of choice will automatically account for the distribution restrictions of FC items. The formal implementation of this proposal is cast in the Hamblin semantics proposed in Kratzer and Shimoyama (Indeterminate phrases: The view from Japanese, 2002). (shrink)

La oratoria martiana es objeto de estudio en la educación superior cubana con el propósito de destacar los principios éticos que el tribuno enarbola, pero se obvia la valoración de la poesía en la que estos se sustentan. Demostramos en este trabajo cómo ambos aspectos se relacionan a través del análisis de algunos de sus discursos políticos más importantes.

The concept of “self-realization” plays a central role in philosophy, since it summarizes the idea that a good life is a flourishing life, that is, an existence in which a person makes the best of what she is. A long tradition has understood this in terms of actualizing one’s potential or fulfilling one’s highest and most worthy aspirations. The aim of this paper is to analyze Hegel’s Logic and Philosophy of Right, in order to show that they outline an alternative (...) and valuable account of self-realization that conceives of human flourishing as tied to the flourishing of the world. (shrink)

This paper analyses the most important changes of philosophy of science since the middle of last century. Specifically, it considers this changes from so-called "historical turn", "naturalistic turn", "social turn", "pragmatic turn", and "political turn" of contemporary philosophy of science.

This article aims to highlight the theoretical and philosophical debate on hospitality underlining the normative elements of framing migrants and refugees as individual agents in the light of hospitality theory and migration governance. It argued the critiques of the neo-Kantian hospitality approach and the EU welcome culture with regard to refugees in the EU from a philosophical perspective. The “No human being is illegal” motto is proposed to be conceived as a principle of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. The (...) cosmopolitan right to visit and the universal right to reside were discussed in the context of human rights and co-responsibility. Linking the hospitality approach with migration governance enables the reconstruction of reception policies and practices, diversification of non-state actors that engage in migration governance mechanism, and polarization of political initiatives (e.g., politics of allocation and dispersal, readmission negotiations, convergence/divergence of priorities and strategic interests). The research findings highlight that the EU adopted a neo-Kantian hospitality approach that combines both “co-responsibility” and “vertical/heterarchical relations.” The EU’s “New Pact on Migration and Asylum” was considered proof of how the EU follows neo-Kantian hospitality that is manifested in dualism and contradictory approach. The study presents a typology that splits co-responsibility into individual/institutional actions and human rights/migration governance. (shrink)

Across languages, we find indefinites that trigger modal inferences. This article contributes to a semantic typology of these items by contrasting Spanish algún with indefinites like German irgendein or Italian uno qualsiasi. While irgendein-type indefinites trigger a Free Choice effect (Kratzer and Shimoyama 2002; Chierchia 2006), algún simply signals that at least two individuals in its domain are possibilities. Additionally, algún, but not irgendein, can convey that the speaker does not know how many individuals satisfy the existential claim in the (...) world of evaluation. We contend that the two types of indefinites impose different constraints on their domain of quantification: irgendein and its kin are domain wideners (Kratzer and Shimoyama 2002), whereas algún is an ‘anti-singleton’ indefinite (its domain cannot be restricted to a singleton). This, together with the fact that algún does not require uniqueness, allows us to derive the contrast between irgendein and algún by using the pragmatic reasoning presented by Kratzer and Shimoyama. (shrink)

In the evolution of criminally relevant action in modern crime theory, social action has assumed a particular significance as a dogmatic element that enables the effective protection of legal assets in a society beset by risks. In the vast array of theories regarding the role of the guarantor and its legal and doctrinal development, as well as the jurisprudential extension of equivalence clauses of improper omissions that serve as amplifier devices of the criminal statue through an indirect adaptation, there is (...) a need to identify the most effective means to shield legal assets, which allows for an imputation of passive conducts, despite having an active typical description. This introduces the controversial figure of the improper omission, which is used with the function of perfecting all of the structural elements of the criminal conduct. When an individual knows he is in a position of guarantor and is aware of the potential consequences, but fails to take action, having the means to prevent a foreseeable outcome, this device serves to enhance the criminal protection of legal assets, fostering social solidarity as the basis of the criminal justice system. This system, by satisfying the function of general prevention of the punishment, ideally dissuades the individual from committing crimes with the threat of penalty. These theories are fundamental to understanding criminal responsibility by improper omission in the context of the objective imputation theory. By guiding the evolution and delimitation of its application, they serve as a significant factor in criminal social control in Colombia. (shrink)

Repasamos brevemente la vida y la obra de Gaston Boissier (1823-1908) que perteneció a la gran generación de sabios que regeneró los estudios históricos en Francia durante la segunda mitad del siglo XIX. De entre todos ellos (Renan, Taine o Fustel de Coulanges) Boissier siempre contó con el favor del público tanto por sus monografías como por sus artículos, muchos de ellos aparecidos en la Revue des Deux Mondes (1829-). De su éxito da cuenta también el gran número de traducciones (...) aparecidas en castellano, tanto en España como en Iberoamérica. Finalmente, expondremos a modo de presentación de la traducción de su trabajo sobre la idea de humanitas, su concepción de la historia que habrá de rastrearse en sus escritos, pues nunca la expuso de forma sistemática. (shrink)

Why do people shift their strategies for solving problems? Past work has focused on the roles of contextual and individual factors in explaining whether people adopt new strategies when they are exposed to them. In this study, we examined a factor not considered in prior work: people's evaluations of the strategies themselves. We presented undergraduate participants from a moderately selective university (N = 252; 64.8% women, 65.6% White, 67.6% who had taken calculus) with two strategies for solving algebraic word problems (...) and asked them to rate these strategies and their own strategy on a variety of dimensions. Participants’ ratings loaded onto two factors, which we label quality and difficulty. Participants’ initial evaluations of the quality of the strategies were associated with whether they used the strategies at posttest, and this effect held even when controlling for individual and contextual factors. However, people's evaluations of the difficulty of the strategies were not consistently associated with their later adoption of those strategies. We also examined individual and contextual predictors of strategy ratings and strategy adoption. Participants’ need for cognition and their spatial visualization ability were associated with their strategy evaluations, and the framing of the story problems was associated with their strategy adoption. The findings highlight that strategy adoption depends on multiple interacting factors, and that to understand strategy change, it is critical to examine how people evaluate strategies. (shrink)