Today it is difficult to investigate how to deal with the interaction of heterogeneous societies living in common spaces of coexistence (interculturality). Certainly, the intervention in this field of scientific knowledge requires to know and to be able to apply the concepts, models and paradigms of social relation that differ considerably according to the social context in which we are investigating. It is not the same (although done fairly frequently), contextualizing this situation in the American society, or in the European, (...) Asian or Latin American, to give some examples. The education, through a new concept of sociocultural relations, specific to each context, will favour the establishment of ties to promote and encourage the coexistence of peoples. This coexistence in the social context of Latin America is based on the momentum generated by the Indigenous Peoples that have led to profound changes in educational paradigms and social relations. The new situation causes the interaction of such disparate concepts as intra- and transculturality through the incidence of identity in the context of globalization. (shrink)

David Charles presents a major new study of Aristotle's views on meaning, essence, necessity, and related topics. These interconnected views are central to Aristotle's metaphysics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of science, and are also highly relevant to current philosophical debates. Charles aims to reach a clear understanding of Aristotle's claims and arguments, to assess their truth, and to evaluate their importance to ancient and modern philosophy.

Aristotle initiated the systematic investigation of perception, the emotions, memory, desire, and action. David Charles argues that Aristotle's account of these phenomena is a philosophically live alternative to conventional modern thinking about the mind: it offers a way to dissolve, rather than solve, the mind-body problem we have inherited.

[David Charles] Aristotle, it appears, sometimes identifies well-being with one activity, sometimes with several, including ethical virtue. I argue that this appearance is misleading. In the Nicomachean Ethics, intellectual contemplation is the central case of human well-being, but is not identical with it. Ethically virtuous activity is included in human well-being because it is an analogue of intellectual contemplation. This structure allows Aristotle to hold that while ethically virtuous activity is valuable in its own right, the best life (...) available for humans is centred around, but not wholly constituted by, intellectual contemplation. /// [Dominic Scott] In Nicomachean Ethics X 7-8, Aristotle distinguishes two kinds of eudaimonia, primary and secondary. The first corresponds to contemplation, the second to activity in accordance with moral virtue and practical reason. My task in this paper is to elucidate this distinction. Like Charles, I interpret it as one between paradigm and derivative cases; unlike him, I explain it in terms of similarity, not analogy. Furthermore, once the underlying nature of the distinction is understood, we can reconcile the claim that paradigm eudaimonia consists just in contemplation with a passage in the first book requiring eudaimonia to involve all intrinsic goods. (shrink)

What is the role of "teleological explanation" in aristotle's account of psychological and biological phenomena? this paper argues that it provides a way of understanding these phenomena which is not reducible to purely material explanation, And which allows for the possibility of a full material account of the conditions under which these phenomena occur. It also offers an alternative account of hypothetical necessity to that proposed by john cooper.

Aristotle, in the Historia Animalium, follows the explanation‐involving approach to classification that he developed in the pattern of the Posterior Analytics. Thus, he draws in his theory of animal classification on his explanatory account of soul functions developed in De Anima. However, his project encounters a severe problem: he failed to uncover in his study of biological phenomena the unified, causally basic essences that his theory of definition required. I consider whether Aristotle can resolve this crisis while remaining true to (...) the basic features of his Analytics paradigm. (shrink)

Aristotle seeks to resolve the problems raised in Posterior Analytics B.3–7 by arguing that our practices of definition and explanation are interdependent. It is not possible to define kinds without appeal to their causal structure, nor is it possible to single out the relevant causal structure without appeal to what is required for good definition. This is why Aristotle holds that the answer to the questions, ‘What is F?’ and ‘Why is F as it is?’ are the same. Neither definition (...) nor explanation can be completed without assistance from the other. (shrink)

Socrates' greatest philosophical contribution was to have initiated the search for definitions. In Definition in Greek Philosophy his views on definition are examined, together with those of his successors, including Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Galen, the Sceptics and Plotinus. Although definition was a major pre-occupation for many Greek philosophers, it has rarely been treated as a separate topic in its own right in recent years. This volume, which contains fourteen new essays by leading scholars, aims to reawaken interest in a (...) number of central and relatively unexplored issues concerning definition. These issues are briefly set out in the Introduction, which also seeks to point out scholarly and philosophical questions which merit further study. (shrink)

Aristotle's solution to the problem raised in Ch. 4 depends on his account of how we arrive at thoughts on the basis of experience. In his view, we standardly acquire a term for a kind on the basis of contact with members of a kind, without thereby knowing that the kind in question exists. Further, we can grasp such terms without knowing that the kind has a unifying basic feature that explains its necessary properties. Our understanding of the kind is (...) to be compared with that of a craftsman and not that of a proto‐scientist. Aristotle's view is distinguished from several twentieth‐century accounts of these issues. (shrink)

Aristotle introduces the fourth cause, the teleological cause, in Physics II 3, based on the idea of something's being for the sake of a goal: the good to be achieved. The goal causes an activity to occur or an instrument to exist. They happen or exist because of some good that results from them. While Aristotle discerns teleological causation in a wide range of cases, these passages contain his key thought. Some things happen or exist because of some further good (...) they help to produce. Aristotle's use of the teleological cause constitutes one of the most distinctive aspects of his philosophy. Hypothetical necessity is appropriate in characterizing teleological causation. In the Physics, Aristotle compares craft and nature as teleological causes. Many philosophers reject his account of rational agents as acting on the basis of their sensitivity to what is in fact good for them. Many more will not accept Aristotle's account of teleological causation as applied to natures and organisms. (shrink)

The question of who possesses the moral rights of creative works made using the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) is not fully resolved. In particular, the relationship between moral rights and moral agency in the production of creative works has been under-investigated in the literature. I explore these topics and argue that moral agency, intentionality and values-based reasoning are crucial for the entitlement of moral rights and hence the assignment of authorship. I conclude that, despite their great power to produce (...) creative works, current generative AI systems cannot be the moral author of such works due to the absence of intentionality with values-based reasoning. Instead, the human end-user of a generative AI system is the moral author in most cases. (shrink)

This chapter analyses the paradox of enquiry in the Meno as grounded in a failure fully to separate definitional accounts of what terms signify and definitions of the basic natures of kinds or properties in the world. It considers several passages in which Aristotle addresses this issue, arguing that important chapters of Posterior Analytics II are set up to investigate and defuse this paradox. It further considers Aristotle's discussion of how we form accounts of what terms signify on the basis (...) of experience. (shrink)

David Charles; XII*—Rationality and Irrationality, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 83, Issue 1, 1 June 1983, Pages 191–212, https://doi.org/10.1.

The decision tree of life is colossal. While physicists and metaphysicians explore the possibility that the multiverse grows larger at every decision, it is the ethicist’s lot to consider the paths chosen. That is to say, ethics is generally concerned with the build-up to a decision point. But what happens afterwards? And how do our choices influence our future decision-making?

Contemporary philosophers have not, at least until very recently, been much concerned with the study of the emotions. It was not always so. The Stoics thought deeply about this topic. Although they were divided on points of detail, they agreed on the broad outline of an account. In it emotions are valuational judgments and resulting affective states.

Advocates of ordinary aesthetics argue that aesthetic experiences found in everyday life can have an impact on our ethical being. This raises the question of how, specifically, action arises from aesthetic experience. Although this matter affects both Aesthetics and Ethics, the current literature provides few details on potential mechanisms. Using neurophysiological evidence, this article proposes specific action profiles and associated mechanisms for aesthetic experiences. To achieve this, it is argued that aesthetic experience originates within the mind and that ordinary aesthetic (...) experiences are logically permissible. Subsequently, a proposed landscape of aesthetic experience is derived. Mechanisms for pathways from experience to action are provided for each category of aesthetic experience. In sum, this provides a tangible bridge between Aesthetics and Ethics, enabling a better understanding of how one’s ethical being is influenced by certain experiences. (shrink)

These days it seems like everyone knows that we should do something about climate change, but there also seems to be a lot of inertia to take action. Until relatively recently, a common view was that governments would provide the solutions. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) special report “SR15”, released in 2018, established that individuals should also contribute to reducing greenhouse gas emissions in order to meet the mitigation requirements to limit warming to 1.5 C. Publicly, there are (...) plenty of good intentions from both individuals and governments, but there’s not a lot of action on either side. So, what’s going on? (shrink)

Aristotle's view of the interdependency of explanation and definition rests on a metaphysical thesis: essences are what determine the nature of kinds in such a way as to make their causal structure completely intelligible to us and to locate them in their own distinctive niche in a nexus of genera and species. We can rationally base our understanding of the first principles of science on our understanding of this causally based pattern of kinds. The world, so understood, contains its own (...) intelligible structure, which Aristotle identifies with the Active Intellect. (shrink)

Aristotle, in Posterior Analytics B.3–7, prepares for the three‐stage view by arguing that no one account can tell us both the essence of a kind and the signification of the term that names that kind. Here, he lays the foundation for the separation of two questions, which we would represent as follows: ‘What does “triangle” signify?’ and ‘What is the triangle?’ This distinction provides him with a way to address and resolve Meno's paradox of enquiry.