Reductionism, in the sense of the doctrine that theories on different levels of reality should exhibit strict and general relations of deducibility, faces well-known difficulties. Nevertheless, the idea that deeper layers of reality are responsible for what happens at higher levels is well-entrenched in scientific practice. We argue that the intuition behind this idea is adequately captured by the notion of supervenience: the physical state of the fundamental physical layers fixes the states of the higher levels. Supervenience is weaker than (...) traditional reductionism, but it is not a metaphysical doctrine: one can empirically support the existence of a supervenience relation by exhibiting concrete relations between the levels. Much actual scientific research is directed towards finding such inter-level relations. It seems to be quite generally held that the importance of such relations between different levels is that they are explanatory and give understanding: deeper levels provide deeper understanding, and this justifies the search for ever deeper levels. We shall argue, however, that although achieving understanding is an important aim of science, its correct analysis is not in terms of relations between higher and lower levels. Connections with deeper layers of reality do not generally provide for deeper understanding. Accordingly, the motivation for seeking deeper levels of reality does not come from the desire to find deeper understanding of phenomena, but should be seen as a consequence of the goal to formulate ever better, in the sense of more accurate and more-encompassing, empirical theories. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Institutions, Forms, Authorities Body as Substance Change and Causes Art and Nature References and Further Reading.

In Descartes’s reformulation of natural philosophy, two aspects of what came to be known as the mechanical philosophy were intimately joined: mechanism as an ontology of nature, according to which all natural things had only ‘mechanical’ properties; and mechanism as a method of explanation. One could, and many philosophers did, adopt mechanism as a method of explanation without adopting a mechanistic ontology. I examine two successors of Descartes who did just that, and one who did not. Giovanni Alfonso Borelli in (...) his De motu animalium and Charles Perrault in his Mécanique de animaux propose and argue for a variety of mechanical accounts of the operations of animals, in particular of their muscles. They reject, however, the Cartesian reduction of animal souls to mechanical forces; the principle of animal motion for them remains a non-mechanical soul. Pierre Sylvain Régis in his Cours entier de philosophie follows Descartes in taking the ‘physical cause’ of motion in animals to be the fermentation of blood in the heart, and thus denies animal souls any role in his physiology. That he can do so while taking over, sometimes word for word, Perrault’s accounts of animal motion shows that mechanistic explanation and mechanistic ontology could easily part company. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Teacher and Student Divine Will, Eternal Truths, the Laws of Nature Ideas Matter and the Void.

¿Cómo debe entenderse que una de las innovaciones de mayor alcance epocal del pensamiento cartesiano, a saber, su duda metódica, no haya sido adoptada por la inmediata posteridad filosófica de Descartes? Este artículo investiga las razones de esta supuesta desaparición de la duda en las filosofías de Spinoza y Leibniz mediante una revisión del rol de la duda en las Meditaciones de Descartes. Partiendo de una caracterización del proyecto cartesiano como la búsqueda del fundamento, el artículo muestra que la interpretación (...) de Descartes de la realidad inmediata en términos de representación constituye en realidad la apoteosis de una concepción más antigua que percibe la totalidad de lo ente como contingente y vana. De este modo, la duda no es la suspensión libre del juicio, sino el inevitable estado de irresolución que se deriva de la falta de solidez ontológica que muestra la realidad inmediata entendida como imagen o representación. Se muestra entonces que el pensamiento postcartesiano propiamente no elimina la duda, sino que la incorpora como un supuesto básico, lo cual explica por qué no hay un lugar definido para la misma en el discurso. El desarrollo ulterior del pensamiento moderno puede ser explicado de modo decisivo por medio de esta asimilación implícita de la duda y sus consecuencias. (shrink)

La pregunta por el sentido de la Filosofía en los niveles de enseñanza anteriores a la Universidad, demanda una honda reflexión sobre las virtualidades educativas propias del pensamiento filosófico. El artículo subraya esta importante cuestión, como condición indispensable para lograr una mínima congruencia entre lo que se hace en la clase de filosofía y lo que se dice que es la materia: no una asignatura más a aprender, sino unos problemas y cuestiones que deben ser pensados desde planteamientos rigurosos y (...) coherentes. Tal reflexión, además, permitirá desmontar ciertas propuestas técnico-educativas -de inquietante influencia entre nosotros-, para las que el discurso filosófico es irrelevante en educación. (shrink)

The present paper intent to support the usefulness of some theoretical-methodological qualitative perspectives for the study of women?s health studies. This is a contribution to women?s function recognition in health systems as traditional health providers, communitary organizers and an invaluable ..

El objetivo de este ensayo es mostrar algunos ejemplos del papel fundamental que tuvo la Biblia en la evangelización del Nuevo Mundo durante el siglo XVI. Tres aspectos serán estudiados aquí: 1) el intento inicial de traducir los textos bíblicos a las lenguas indígenas, finalmente frustrado; 2) la importancia de la Sagrada Escritura para dilucidar las estrategias políticas y religiosas a seguir con respecto al Nuevo Mundo, ejemplarizada en la cita de Lc 14,23; 3) los temas bíblicos en el teatro (...) de evangelización. The aim of this essay is to show some examples of the important role that had the Bible in the evangelization of the New World during the 16th century. Three aspects will be studied here: 1) the initial attempt to translate biblical texts to indigenous languages, finally frustrated; the importance of Sacred Scripture for political and religious strategies to be followed with respect to the New World, exampled on the appointment of Lc 14.23; biblical themes in the theatre of evangelization. (shrink)

A lot has happened in Indian Country recently: water protectors and the NoDAPL movement brought international attention to Native sovereignty and ongoing resistance to settler forms of violence against Indigenous ways of being; a settler public became aware of the MMIW movement and the ongoing assault on the lives of Indigenous women; an apology was given by executive order for a genocide that occurred in California and a Truth and Healing Council was created to investigate the historical relations between California (...) Indians and the state of California; and Native identity is "complex" and certain people seek to profit from that complexity by duplicitously or erroneously claiming Native identity, to name a few. To... (shrink)

Deictic (or pointing) gestures are traditionally known to have a simple function: to supply something as the referent of a demonstrative linguistic expression. I argue that deixis can have a more complex function. A deictic gesture can be used to _say something_ in conversation and can thereby become a full discourse move in its own right. To capture this phenomenon, which I call _rich demonstration_, I present an update semantics on which deictic gestures can indicate situations from a conversation’s context (...) and those situations coherently connect to prior discourse to generate information. (shrink)

Eric Davidson was a legend both in his science and his personality. He inspired and challenged a new generation of developmental biologists and I was lucky to be one of them. He changed the way we think about biological interactions by synthesizing a large scale, almost incomprehensible set of data into a causal model of a gene regulatory network. While his death leaves a big hole in our lives, his contribution to the conceptualization of regulatory biology will inspire developmental and (...) evolutionary biologists for decades to come. (shrink)

This article sets forth a compositional model of ideology by drawing on the tradition of historical materialism and further developing its insights into the aesthetic composition of reality. It demonstrates how ideology is not simply a set of false beliefs but is rather the process by which social agents are composed over time in every dimension of their existence, including their thoughts, practices, perceptions, representations, values, affects, desires, and unconscious drives. By working through a number of diverse debates and authors—ranging (...) from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to Louis Althusser, Eduardo Galeano, Rosaura Sánchez, and Paulo Freire—it thereby elucidates how ideology is best understood as an aesthetic process that includes aspect of sense and sense-making, and that therefore requires a collective, cultural revolution as its antidote. (shrink)

The A to Z of Descartes and Cartesian Philosophy includes a chronology, an introduction, a bibliography, and cross-reference dictionary entries Descartes's writings, concepts, and findings, as well as entries on those who supported him, those who criticized him, those who corrected him, and those who together formed one of the major movements in philosophy, Cartesianism.

La obra del economista chileno Manfred Max-Neef contiene múltiples referencias a filósofos como Aristóteles, Giordano Bruno, Schelling, entre otros, y corrientes filosóficas como el humanismo, el anarquismo y la Ecología Profunda, que encuadran y contextualizan su pensamiento en una actitud crítica y heterodoxa con respecto a la economía. Max-Neef recorre la historia del pensamiento occidental para profundizar y comprender por qué hemos llegado a la actual situación de crisis socioambiental y, a su vez, soñar por un futuro que aún no (...) está escrito. Los fundamentos filosóficos de este economista abarcan desde el plano ontológico, el epistemológico, el estético y el ético. No como planos separados, sino interrelacionados e interconectados. (shrink)

Con una belleza literaria incomparable, la Comedìa refleja la cosmovisión católica que vertebra la Cristiandad medieval, que tuvo su máximo exponente filosófico y teológico en santo Tomás. A lo largo de todo el itinerario poético, vemos la impronta del Aquinate presente en el meollo de la narración. Aquí analizaré cómo la cuestión teológica fundamental del gobierno divino del mundo permea la Comedìa, tanto en su estructura formal como en ciertos aspectos concretos del viaje de Dante. A partir de dicha premisa, (...) estudiaré las consecuencias que ello tiene en ese orden jurídico manifestado en la «arquitectura» del infierno, cuyo dintel es elocuente: «Giustizia mosse il mio alto fattore; / fecemi la divina podestate, / la somma sapienza e ‘l primo amore». Finalmente, abordaré la proporcionalidad de las penas que sufren los condenados, como indicador de la medida natural de los castigos dictados por justicia divina. (shrink)

En este artículo, y desde la sociología del trabajo, argumentamos que los recurrentes antagonismos entre sectores que defienden el medioambiente y los que defienden las fuentes de trabajo son una ficción política. Ello lo sustentamos en una reflexión ontológica-epistemológica desde donde se develan un encadenamiento de jerarquías, desigualdades, dominación y explotación, consagrado en la moderna ideología del desarrollo y progreso ilimitado, bajo cuyo eje se plantea una ficticia comunión de intereses en la que trabajo y capital comparten iguales anhelos de (...) progreso y éxito. Una ficción que resulta ser una estrategia política-ideológica que configura a las/os defensores del medioambiente como antagónicos al desarrollo y creación de fuentes de trabajo, tal como se revela en la industria del salmón del sur de Chile, abordada aquí como un caso “testigo”. Esta estrategia política adquiere pleno sentido en países como Chile, donde hoy se observa un doble y creciente proceso de “precarización de la naturaleza” y “naturalización de la precariedad laboral”. (shrink)

This paper proposes a reassessment of Hegel’s critical reading of Spinoza and of the charge of acosmism, for which this reading is known. We argue that this charge is actually the consequence of a more fundamental criticism, namely Spinoza’s presumable inability to conceive the unity of the finite and the infinite. According to Hegel, the infinite and the finite remain two poles apart in Spinoza’s metaphysics, which thus fails to be a true monism, insofar as it contains an irreducible duality. (...) Against this reading, we argue that Spinoza’s conception of the causal co-determination of finite modes entails the acknowledgment of their essentially infinite nature. The study of this particular instance of coincidentia oppositorum enables to counter some of Hegel’s criticisms as well as to illuminate a fairly unexplored aspect of Spinoza’s substance monism. (shrink)

This essay is a defence of the traditional notion of qualia - as properties of consciousness that are ineffable, intrinsic, private and immediately apprehensible - against the eliminative attempts of Daniel Dennett in the influential article "Quining Qualia." It is suggested that a thorough exploration of the concept is an appropriate starting point for future explanations of qualia, and the essay ends with some possible explanations of the four traditional properties.

En el presente trabajo se pretenderá ofrecer un esbozo de lo que el malrepresenta para el budismo. Se presentará la vida de buda y el momentoen que él es tentado antes de alcanzar la iluminación, o la liberacióndel mundo de los sentidos; ya que este momento se nos presentará comoel aspecto clave para entender lo que significa el mal para la religión deGotama. Se concluirá arguyendo que el mal no es sino el mundo de lossentidos y lo que busca el (...) budismo es liberarse del sufrimiento que estemundo terrenal causa; todo esto bajo la premisa implícita de que existeun mundo más consciente, ulterior a la existencia terrena, un mundo librede mal, libre de Mara “El Tentador”. (shrink)

This paper contends that the identification of a pro-competitive agenda in the process of regulatory reform undertaken in many developing countries ultimately rests on the vision held by the authority about the sources of market failures. Conventional IO theory rests on the assumption that the exercise of market power by incumbent firms limits the access of potential competitive entrants, and therefore, regulation should curb such power. However, the existence of market power is an inference from conventional thinking on markets and (...) competition. Professor Kirzner overturned this thinking, by introducing a realistic process perspective of markets, instead of the traditional structural view. Beyond the philosophical question of “realism,” the market process view sustains practical policy making advantages, mostly due to the lack of knowledge requirements placed upon the regulatory agencies to allocate resources more efficiently. The process view suggests the need of creating a proper institutional setting for firms to freely interact, rather than on impinging in the allocation of resources itself according to unreliable contrived views of market efficiency. Based on Kirzner´s process view, this paper outlines an alternative network competition perspective, focused on the integration of complementary capabilities, as a regulatory yardstick. This view balances the rights of incumbent firms to exploit their rights, and the possibilities of third parties to integrate into the network concerned on a non-discriminatory basis, thereby preserving the investments of incumbents on a more equitable basis.Cet article affirme que l’agenda proconcurrentiel de réforme réglementaire entrepris dans plusieurs pays en développement repose en fin de compte sur la vision qu’a l’autorité concernant les échecs de marché. La théorie conventionnelle d’organisation industrielle suppose que l’exercice du pouvoir marchand par les firmes existantes limite l’accès de concurrents potentiels et, qu’en conséque- nce, la réglementation devrait brider ces pouvoirs. Cependant, l’idée qu’il existe un pouvoir marchand est une émanation de la pensée conventionnelle à propos des marchés et de la concurrence. En opposant une vision réaliste du processus marchand à la vision structurelle traditionnelle, le Professeur Kirzner a réduit à néant ce mode de pensée conventionnelle. Audelà de la question philosophique du “réalisme”, la vision procédurale de marché affirme que la politique de réglementation est un échec car les agences de réglementation ne disposent pas des connaissances nécessaires requises pour affecter les ressources de manière efficace. La vision procédurale suggère le besoin de créer un environnement institutionnel dans lequel les entreprises peuvent interagir entre elles plutôt que d’empiéter sur l’affectation des ressources en ellemême comme le suggère la perspective artificielle et peu fiable de l’efficacité marchande. Se fondant en cela sur la vision procédurale de Kirzner, cet article ébauche une perspective différente du réseau concurrentiel dont l’étalon est l’intégration des capacités complémentaires. Dans cette vision, les droits des firmes existantes à exploiter leurs droits ont comme contrepoids les possibilités de tierces parties à s’intégrer dans le réseau concerné sur une base nondiscriminatoire, préservant ainsi les investissements des entreprises existantes suivant une base plus équitable. (shrink)

This paper gives an account of Colin McGinn's essay: "Can We Solve the Mind-Body Problem?". McGinn's answer to his own essay title is that the problem is forever beyond us due to the particular nature of our cognitive abilities.The present author offers a number of criticisms of the arguments which support this conclusion.

El artículo examina la conexión esencial que existe entre la concepción hegeliana del signo y el funcionamiento del discurso especulativo en la Ciencia de la lógica. Partiendo de la tensión irresuelta en la filosofía kantiana entre la capacidad significativa del discurso y su autorreferencialidad, se somete a consideración el intento hegeliano de resolver dicha tensión en su tratamiento del lenguaje, contenido en la Enciclopedia de las ciencias filosóficas. De esta manera se pone al descubierto el modo sutil en que la (...) concepción hegeliana del signo permite superar las restricciones que Kant impone al discurso filosófico sin contravenir la prescripción básica de la filosofía crítica, según la cual todo pensamiento debe asociarse con una intuición para poder constituir un conocimiento con pretensión de validez. A partir de este resultado y centrándose en la estructura misma del signo tal y como la conceptualiza Hegel, se intenta esclarecer el funcionamiento exacto del discurso lógico y de los momentos básicos que lo constituyen –entendimiento, dialéctica y especulación–, mediante el ejemplo concreto de las tres primeras determinaciones de la Lógica: Ser. Nada y Devenir. (shrink)

This explorative article conceptualizes the myth as a cultural locus where different concepts are ordered forming semantic networks and as a social narrative reflecting emotional predispositions toward the social significance of an episode in the past. The article analyzes the semantic network formed within the Arthurian myth by the concepts Britain and imperium. It identifies a persistent semilogical dynamic between both concepts but shifting emotional responses and temporalities: loss and longing among the Welsh (sixth century to eleventh century), fixing the (...) memory in the past; joy among the English (twelfth century to fifteenth century), bringing the memory into the present; and anxiety and desire among Welsh and English (sixteenth century) projecting the memory to the future. During the seventeenth century, the semantic network left the Arthurian myth, which fell into a relative oblivion. (shrink)