It is not possible to talk about bioethics without recognizing the plurality inherent in it. In this sense, the notion of person is important due to its multiplicity of possible interpretations depending on its cultural context. This fact is highlighted in the case of organ transplantation in Japan. While there are many critiques against this procedure from scholars in various fields, those that deal with the problem of brain death are especially problematic. This is because the definition of person that (...) is invoked in such debates does not seem to coincide with how the notion of person has been understood in the Japanese tradition. Hence, investigating the Japanese concept of ningen could be helpful in not only partially clarifying some of the attitudes that exist in Japan towards the notion of brain death, but also to illustrate the need to recognize the plurality of views in modern bioethics. (shrink)

El artículo discute la denominada crisis de la Universidad mostrando que simultáneamente al proceso de desestructuración y crisis, estamos asistiendo a una reconversión de la institución universitaria en el marco de la sociedad de la información que la configura como un posible negocio. Actualmente la Universidad está siendo insertada en el llamado capitalismo cognitivo, que hace de la producción de conocimiento una actividad mercantil sujeta a todos los mecanismos de la producción capitalista y de la mercantilización de sus productos /servicios. (...) El artículo termina dando un repaso a las diferentes estrategias para salvar la crisis de la Universidad: estrategias oficiales de las instituciones educativas, las propuestas de los colectivos docentes y las propuestas de los estudiantes; cada uno de ellos analiza este proceso de diferente forma. (shrink)

A partir de una reflexión sobre los cambios introducidos en la filosofía del s. XX por la corriente estructuralista, la autora pretende poner de relieve los retos a los que se enfrenta la filosofía del nuevo siglo, en especial en lo que afecta al borrado de la gran línea de demarcación entre "ciencias" y "letras" y a la posible, a la vez que deseable inserción de la filosofía en el campo de saberes gobernados por la idea de complejidad y de (...) indeterminación. From the changes that the structuralist currents brought to XXths philosophy, the autor wants to point out the challenges which philosophy faces on this new century, specially in what relates to the erasing of the dividing line between "sciences" and "humanities" and to the possible inclusion of philosophy into the field of knowledges ruled by the idea of complexity and indetermination. (shrink)

The article discusses the so-called university crisis showing that, simultaneously to this crisis and the unstructuring process, we are facing a reconversion of the institution on the frame of the contemporary information society that models it as a potential enterprise. Nowadays, universities are being inserted in the cognitive capitalism, which makes a business activity out of the production of knowledge, thus subjected to every mechanism of capitalist production and dependent of the marketing of its items/services. As a conclusion, the article (...) reviews the various strategies displayed to face the university crisis: the official strategies of the academic institutions, the proposals of the teaching profession and the student's proposals; each of them analyses this process from different. (shrink)

A partir de una investigación en torno a las diferencias de matiz entre el termino "realität" y "wirklichkeit", traducidos ambos como si fueran sinónimos por el castellano "realidad", se pone de relieve el rompimiento de una concepción substancialista de "lo real", y su sustitución por una realidad producida a partir de una acción de corte subjetual.

From the changes that the structuralist currents brought to XXths philosophy, the autor(ess) wants to point out the challenges which philosophy faces on this new century, specially in what relates to the erasing of the dividing line between "sciences" and "humanities" and to the possible (and also desirable) inclusion of philosophy into the field of knowledges ruled by the idea of complexity and indetermination.

The article discusses the so-called university crisis showing that, simultaneously to this crisis and the unstructuring process, we are facing a reconversion of the institution on the frame of the contemporary information society that models it as a potential enterprise. Nowadays, universities are being inserted in the cognitive capitalism, which makes a business activity out of the production of knowledge, thus subjected to every mechanism of capitalist production and dependent of the marketing of its items/services. As a conclusion, the article (...) reviews the various strategies displayed to face the university crisis: the official strategies of the academic institutions, the proposals of the teaching profession and the student's proposals; each of them analyses this process from different. (shrink)

‘Reasoning’ can be considered a general concept that, upon speaking, is the ‘enraonar’, a Catalan word that should not be mistaken with ‘explain’ nor with ‘discuss’ which imply more detail, and cover different situations. This article is presented as an essay on the ancient ideal of ‘enraonar’. To that end, it is explained in what sense ‘enraonar’ and reason are one of the most complex phenomena thought has to deal with. Here it is argued that these natural phenomena require a (...) systematic and ‘scientific’ study, and that withoutthis knowledge computer science cannot simulate people’s every-day ‘enraonar’. (shrink)

A growing body of research indicates that attentional biases toward emotional stimuli are not automatic, but may depend on the relevance of emotion to the top-down search goals of the observer. To...

Our object in this paper is to study the antecedents, contents, implications, and impact of a not well-known or appreciated paper by EHRENFEST in 1911 on the essential nature of the different quantum hypotheses in radiation theory. After a careful analysis of EHRENFEST’s notebooks, correspondence, and publications, we conclude that the essential points of EHRENFEST’s paper were not perceived to a large extent, and hence that its implications were not considered thoroughly. Specifically, we show that EHRENFEST contributed significantly to the (...) clarifications of the differences between PLANCK’s and EINSTEIN’s respective quantum hypotheses, as well as to those of the concepts ‘‘discontinuity,’’ ‘‘quantization,’’ and ‘‘corpuscularity.’’. (shrink)

I discuss in detail the contents of the adiabatic hypothesis, formulated by Ehrenfest in 1916. I focus especially on the paper he published in 1916 and 1917 in three different journals. I briefly review its precedents and thoroughly analyze its reception until 1918, including Burgers’s developments and Bohr’s assimilation of them into his own theory. I show that until 1918 the adiabatic hypothesis did not play an important role in the development of quantum theory.

El cálculo proposicional se basa proposiciones que son tautologías, antilogías y de tipo contingente, construidas con las operaciones de disyunción, conjunción, y negación, así como con el llamado condicional material para trasladar los enunciados condicionales. Con todo ello se obtiene una estructura de álgebra de Boole, que permite equiparar el cálculo proposicional al cálculo algebraico booleano. En parte, la simplificación conceptual que se obtiene resulta de ser el orden parcial del álgebra equivalente a la afirmación del condicional material. Además, con (...) tal metodología cabe ver qué partes del cálculo proposicional clásico pueden trasladarse, aun con limitaciones, a estructuras más débiles y, a la vez, más generales, como son los ortoretículos no booleanos o las álgebras de De Morgan.El cálculo proposicional trata con la deducción. Por ello, el artículo lo desarrolla a partir de un operador de consecuencias en el sentido de Tarski. Ampliado el modelo deductivo, es fácil ver otras consecuencias que las usualmente consideradas en los textos elementales; en particular, se analizan cuatro esquemas de razonamiento deductivo típicos y, entre ellos, se presta especial atención a los usuales Modus Ponens y Modus Tollens. En el caso de las estructuras algebraicas de conjuntos ‘borrosos’, ninguna es de álgebra de Boole ni siquiera de orto-retículo y sólo cabe trabajar, en algunos casos, con álgebras de De Morgan-Kleene. Por lo tanto el cálculo proposicional ‘fuzzy’ debe construirse de acuerdo con la estructura algebraica que corresponda en cada caso y una vez elegida como representación del condicional una función que verifique el Modus Ponens. (shrink)

Resumen: Analizo y critico las principales objeciones que Carlos Blanco plantea, en Las fronteras del pensamiento, contra las 5 vías de Tomás de Aquino. Mi objetivo es mostrar que dichas objeciones fallan, lo cual nos va a permitir traer, a la literatura en español, ciertas discusiones del mundo filosófico anglosajón. Palabras clave: 5 vías, Tomás de Aquino, Tomismo, Existencia de Dios, Filosofía de la religión Abstract: I analyze and critique Carlos Blanco’s main objections against Aquinas’s 5 ways, to be found (...) in his latest book, Las fronteras del pensamiento. My aim is to show how these objections miss the mark. This will allow us to bring into the Spanish literature some discussions that have taken place in the English-speaking world. Kewyords: 5 ways, Thomas Aquinas, Thomism, God’s existence, Philosophy of religion. (shrink)

We analyze the evolution of EHRENFEST's thought since he proved the necessity of quanta in 1911 until the formulation of his adiabatic hypothesis in 1914. We argue that his research contributed significantly to the solution of critical problems in quantum physics and led to a rigorous definition of the range of validity of BOLTZMANN's principle.

El objetivo de este trabajo es reconsiderar el punto de vista defendido por los pensadores que se pueden adscribir al famoso ‘Círculo de Viena’ sobre el significado y, especialmente, sobre los enunciados asignificativos. Para ello, procedemos usando la típica forma científica, heredera de la tradición del Círculo, de medir empíricamente los conceptos adquiridos. Además, proporcionamos algunas notas históricas, así como algunas reflexiones sobre el pensamiento de Karl Menger sobre la carencia de una geometría adecuada para el micromundo.

En este trabajo repaso la concepción del cuerpo de Nietzsche y de Butler, intentando mostrar cómo cada una nos ayuda a superar un error de la modernidad. Nietzsche nos permite recuperar el cuerpo y contrarrestar el dualismo cartesiano, que lo valora tan poco, convirtiéndolo en una mera máquina. La obra de Judith Butler, por otro lado, especialmente Precarious Life y Frames of War, nos sirve para hacer frente al individualismo, al poner sobre la mesa la socialidad del cuerpo, el modo (...) en que nuestro cuerpo habla de los otros y está expuesto a los otros. (shrink)

Ofrecemos un estudio introductorio del papel que tuvo el concepto de partícula en los artículos fundacionales de la mecánica cuántica. Nos centramos en el período 1925-1927, lo que incluye el análisis de los primeros trabajos de Heisenberg, Born, Jordan, Schrödinger y Dirac, y también las primeras formulaciones de la complementaridad de Bohr. Nuestro objetivo es discutir hasta qué punto se puso en duda entre los creadores de la nueva teoría, justo en el momento de su creación y cuando aún no (...) existía una interpretación consensuada ni establecida, el concepto de partícula. Posteriores desarrollos, como la teoría cuántica de campos, pusieron la vigencia de ese concepto bajo sospecha. Mostramos que un análisis historiográfico articulado mediante este concepto permite caracterizar la relación que los distintos autores de la mecánica cuántica mantuvieron con la visualización de los procesos atómicos. En algunos casos, como el de Heisenberg, su evolución es especialmente significativa. Asimismo, también citaremos algunos fragmentos donde los autores considerados reclaman para sí el legado de la antigua teoría cuántica, tratando de legitimar sus propios desarrollos a partir de su coherencia con los primeros descubrimientos de los Planck, Einstein o De Broglie. De prácticamente todos ellos hemos encontrado textos en este sentido. (shrink)

This paper provides an interpretation, based on the social systems theory of German sociologist Niklas Luhmann, of the recent paradigmatic shift of mental health care from an asylum-based model to a community-oriented network of services. The observed shift is described as the development of psychiatry as a function system of modern society and whose operative goal has moved from the medical and social management of a lower and marginalized group to the specialized medical and psychological care of the whole population. (...) From this theoretical viewpoint, the wider deployment of the modern social order as a functionally differentiated system may be considered to be a consistent driving force for this process; it has made asylum psychiatry overly incompatible with prevailing social values (particularly with the normative and regulative principle of inclusion of all individuals in the different functional spheres of society and with the common patterns of participation in modern function systems) and has, in turn, required the availability of psychiatric care for a growing number of individuals. After presenting this account, some major challenges for the future of mental health care provision, such as the overburdening of services or the overt exclusion of a significant group of potential users, are identified and briefly discussed. (shrink)

A partir de reflexiones propuestas por Joseph Roth, Walter Benjamin, Sigfried Kracauer y Claudio Guillén, se presenta el concepto de “ciudad blanca” ligado a la frontera y la centralidad para concluir que la “ciudad blanca” es desfocalizada y periférica, invadida y rebelde, modelo (sueño o proyecto) e infierno (pesadilla o caos). El concepto se aplica al examen de cuatro ciu- dades “blancas” a propósito de secuencias significativas de cuatro films: Los olvidados (1950) de Luis Buñuel, Pizza, birra, faso (1998) de (...) Bruno Stagnaro e Israel Adrián Caetano, Dans la ville blanche (1983) de Alain Tanner y Biutiful (2010) de Alejandro González Iñárritu. (shrink)

This article is devoted to give reasons against the naturalization of logic, in a sense which entails a revision of this science. The paper criticizes each historical important attempt to revise logical laws – intuitionism, quantum logic, alternative logics – and also it tries to argue that the explanation problem of quantum mechanics has nothing to do with a naturalization of logic.

One of the most remarkable implications of psychological medicine in the transition from the 18th to the 19th century was the advent of a new way of looking at the human being and new tools for analysing not only behaviour and individual experience, but also historical events, collective behavioural patterns or complex cultural achievements. Unsurprisingly, the deployment of this gaze could not advance without there being a series of disputes and controversies about its reach and the limits to its indiscriminate (...) application. Focusing on the figure of French alienist Alexandre Brierre de Boismont and on the controversial cases of hallucinations and suicide, this article addresses the conflicts generated by the use of certain emblematic concepts and categories present in French psychological medicine throughout the central decades of the 19th-century, as well as the essentially ambivalent relationship of the psychopathological point of view with the criticism of a culture that was made responsible, then, as now, for a great number of psychological disorders and illnesses. (shrink)

Basadas en un modelo matemático muy simple del razonamiento de sentido común, se presentan algunas reflexiones acerca de lo que podría ser pensar y razonar sin especular. Es decir, si razonar sólo fuese deducir y abducir pero sin inducir.

A través de una serie de ejemplos matemáticos elementales se Ilega a proponer una definición bastante general de Indistinguibilidad, por medio de operadores con valores en semigrupos conmutativos ordenados. Tal definición se aplica a casos provenientes de diversos campos, muchos de los cuales exhiban la propiedad da rotura de las cadenas de objetos relacionados a causa de un cierto parecido.

En el estilo de unas páginas-vividas del periodo 1984-88, y desde lo que permite la memoria del autor, se relatan acontecimientos, algunas de las ideas que estuvieron detrás de ellos y anécdotas sucedidas en ese tiempo. La única intención del artículo es la de ofrecer unos recuerdos que, eventualmente, puedan ayudar a comprender mejor aquellos años.

It can be said that Formal Logic begun by studying an idealization of the statements ’if p, then q’, something coming from long ago in both Greek and Scholastic Philosophy. Nevertheless, only in the XX Century it arrived at a stage of formalization once in 1910 Russell introduced and identified the ’material conditional’ with the expresion ”not p or q”. In 1918, and from paradoxical conditionals like ”If the Moon is a cheese, it is a Lyon’s face”, Lewis critiziced the (...) material conditional and introduced the so-called ’strict conditional’ as the modal necessity of the material one. In 1934, Huntington proved that both material and strict implications are coincidental in the setting of Boolean algebras and, hence, that they only can be actually different in algebraic structures weaker than Boolean algebras. Boolean algebras have too much laws for supporting the difference of both conditionals. This paper is nothing else than an algebraic trial to find simple binary Boolean operations able to express Lewis’ strict implication, and contains a new and simpler proof than that of Huntington, made by identifying ’possible’ with ’non self-contradictory’. By the way, it is shown that this proof is only valid in Boolean algebras, but neither in proper De Morgan algebras, nor in proper Ortholattices, with which it still remains open where the two conditional relations are actually different. (shrink)

This paper deals with the relation with Fuzzy Logic of some of the ideas of Karl Menger published between 1942 and 1966 and concerning what he called “Hazy Sets”, Probabilistic Relations and Statistical Metric Spaces. The author maintains the opinion that if Lofti A. Zadeh is actually the father of Fuzzy Logic, Menger not only was a forerunner of this field but that his ideas were and still are influential on it.

Causal finitism claims nothing can have an infinite causal history. An influential defense of this position uses infinity paradoxes to argue that, if causal finitism is false, several impossible scenarios would be possible. In this paper, I defend that theists should not be persuaded by this argument. If true, this is an important development, since causal finitism is often argued for by theists as a core premise in Kalam-style cosmological arguments for theism. I extend the same analysis to an argument (...) in favor of temporal finitism and conclude that my point may generalize to any reasoning of a similar structure. (shrink)

We present and defend a Thomistic cosmological argument that runs independently of the principle of sufficient reason, sidestepping perhaps two of the most recurrent objections to cosmological reasoning: (a) the possibility of brute facts (i.e., that not everything needs an adequate explanation of its existence) and (b) the accusation of the composition fallacy. Drawing upon the work of Barry Miller, we show that any contingent entity like Thumper the rabbit, upon metaphysical analysis, is either a contradictory structure and therefore an (...) impossible existent or else points towards an extrinsic cause for the unity of its really distinct metaphysical parts (namely, its essence and its existence). This conclusion enables the inference that only an uncaused cause with no really distinct metaphysical parts can ultimately produce anything with really distinct metaphysical parts. We then suggest it is not implausible that this entity is God. (shrink)

This article offers a comprehensive critical review of the most popular theoretical accounts on the recent processes of deinstitutionalization and reform of mental health services and their possible underlying factors, focusing in the sharp contrast between the straightforward ideas and models maintained by mainstream psychiatry and the different interpretations delivered by authors coming from the social sciences or applying conceptual tools stemming from diverse social theories. Since all these appraisals tend to illuminate only some aspects of the process while obscuring (...) others, or do not fit at all with some important points of the actual changes, it is concluded that the quest for an adequate explanation is far from having been completed. Finally, some methodological and conceptual strategies for a renewed theoretical understanding of these significant transformations are also briefly discussed, including a comprehensive empirical evaluation of the facts, the consideration of the shifting social values and needs involved in mental health care provision and the historical analysis of deinstitutionalization policies within the framework of the broader social and cultural trends of the decades following World War II. (shrink)