In the final decades of the 20th century, issues such as identity, Otherness and the role of social and cultural boundaries have been prominent in social theory, sociology and cultural studies. In this context, an analysis of Bauman's work is important because it raises pertinent questions pertaining to the nature of social and cultural boundaries and the nature of boundary construction under modernity. The metaphors of inside and outside and the idea of the boundary are significant in Bauman's critique of (...) modernity's search for a meta-order and in his examination of strangerhood. The article illustrates how this ordering process manifests itself at the individual and societal levels of modernity. Bauman's contention is that modernity's search for a meta-order leads to the construction of boundaries and to exclusionary practices. It is the presence of the Third, for Bauman, which threatens the certainty of order. Different images of the stranger in Bauman's work are identified and the ways in which Bauman's conception of freedom and `community' is intrinsically linked to his work on the ambivalent stranger are demonstrated. (shrink)

In spite of a large and diverse body of research on the topic, the relationship between Christianity and modernity is still an open question and a nodal point for our understanding of Western civilization. This paper aims at providing an original contribution to this debate by bringing into play the impact of gender-related views and practices. In particular, it focuses on Catholic Modernism, and analyzes this phenomenon and its repression by the Vatican hierarchy from the understudied perspective of female historiography (...) by way of an exemplary case study: the life and work of Maude Petre. Maude Petre (1863–1942) was a British Roman Catholic, member of a female religious community, a leading figure of Catholic Modernism, and one of its first historians. Because of the long-term patterns of gender imbalance which shaped the Catholic establishment and milieu, Petre's position as an active female modernist intellectual gave her a truly unique perspective on the confrontation between tradition and change within Western Christianity. Her work offers an outstanding opportunity to revise existing definitions of Catholic Modernism, while also opening new avenues to interpret the religious entanglements of the Western intellectual tradition at large. (shrink)

The use of sensors has had an enormous increment in the last years, becoming a valuable tool in many different areas. In this kind of scenario, the quality of data becomes an extremely important issue; however, not much attention has been paid to this specific topic, with only a few existing works that focus on it. In this paper, we present a proposal for managing data streams from sensors that are installed in patients’ homes in order to monitor their health. (...) It focuses on processing the sensors’ data streams, taking into account data quality. In order to achieve this, a data quality model for this kind of data streams and an architecture for the monitoring system are proposed. Moreover, our work introduces a mechanism for avoiding false alarms generated by data quality problems. (shrink)

Anthropology of Consciousness, EarlyView.

The idea of experience has been taken at face value in scholarly accounts of the migration experience, consequently very little attention has been given to how this idea has acquired its meaning and how it relates to the category of the ‘migration experience’. This article provides an analytical investigation into the nature of the phenomenon known as the ‘migrant experience’; firstly, by examining mediated and non-mediated conceptions of experience as well as an alternative account of experience associated with strangeness/disruption. Through (...) this conceptual lens, I then critically consider how the migration experience, as an analytical construct, has been constituted through a spatial–temporal framework, a critical migration perspective, and within the phenomenological and existential accounts. In conclusion, these approaches, as I will demonstrate, are not necessarily mutually exclusive, rather they complement and, at times, are in tension with each other. Such an examination will provide some conceptual clarity that is currently lacking in empirical work on an ‘experience’ categorized as migration. (shrink)

Neoclassical economics assumes that individuals have stable and context-independent preferences, and uses preference satisfaction as a normative criterion. By calling this assumption into question, behavioural findings cause fundamental problems for normative economics. A common response to these problems is to treat deviations from conventional rational choice theory as mistakes, and to try to reconstruct the preferences that individuals would have acted on, had they reasoned correctly. We argue that this preference purification approach implicitly uses a dualistic model of the human (...) being, in which an inner rational agent is trapped in an outer psychological shell. This model is psychologically and philosophically problematic. (shrink)

The Invention of Enterprise: Entrepreneurship from Ancient Mesopotamia to Modern Times, David S. Landes, Joel Mokyr, and William J. Baumol, eds., Princeton University Press, 2010, is a dense anthology that provides an “orbital view” of the history of trade and commerce. The essays encompass several theoretic frameworks while following three themes: the creation of enterprises; the distinctions between creative and corrosive capitalism; and the societies that engender those different modes.

Investigating the influence of perception on the control of visually guided action typically involves controlled experimentation within the laboratory setting. When appropriate, however, behavioral research of this nature may benefit from the use of methods that allow for remote data collection outside of the lab. This study tested the feasibility of using remote data collection methods to explore the influence of perceived target size on visually guided cursor movements using the Ebbinghaus illusion. Participants completed the experiment remotely, using the trackpad (...) of their personal laptop computers. The task required participants to click on a single circular target presented at either the left or right side of their screen as quickly and accurately as possible, or to emphasize speed or accuracy. On each trial the target was either surrounded by small or large context circles, or no context circles. Participants’ judgments of the targets’ perceived size were influenced by the illusion, however, the illusion failed to produce differences in click-point accuracy or movement time. Interestingly, the illusion appeared to affect participants’ movement of the cursor toward the target; more directional changes were made when clicking the Perceived Large version of the illusion compared to the Perceived Small version. These results suggest the planning of the cursor movement may have been influenced by the illusion, while later stages of the movement were not, and cursor movements directed toward targets perceived as smaller required less correction compared to targets perceived as larger. (shrink)

Relying on some auxiliary assumptions, usually considered mild, Bell’s theorem proves that no local theory can reproduce all the predictions of quantum mechanics. In this work, we introduce a fully local, superdeterministic model that by explicitly violating ‘settings independence’—one of these auxiliary assumptions, requiring statistical independence between measurement settings and systems to be measured—is able to reproduce all the predictions of quantum mechanics. Moreover, we show that contrary to widespread expectations, our model can break settings independence without an initial state (...) that is too complex to handle, without visibly losing all explanatory power, and without outright nullifying all of experimental science. Still, we argue that our model is unnecessarily complicated and does not offer true advantages over its non-local competitors. We conclude that while our model does not appear to be a viable contender to its non-local counterparts, it provides the ideal framework to advance the debate over violations of statistical independence via the superdeterministic route. (shrink)

It’s often claimed in the philosophical and scientific literature on temporal representation that there is no such thing as a genuine sensory system for time. In this paper, I argue for the opposite—many animals, including all mammals, possess a genuine sensory system for time based in the circadian system. In arguing for this conclusion, I develop a semantics and meta-semantics for explaining how the endogenous rhythms of the circadian system provide organisms with a direct information link to the temporal structure (...) of their environment. In doing so, I highlight the role of sensory systems in an information processing architecture. (shrink)

This note replies to a comment by Daniel Hausman on our paper ‘Preference purification and the inner rational agent: a critique of the conventional wisdom of behavioural welfare economics’. We clarify our characterisation of behavioural welfare economics and acknowledge that Hausman does fully endorse this approach. However, we argue that Hausman’s response to our critique, like behavioural welfare economics itself, implicitly uses a model of an inner rational agent.

A central debate in the current philosophical literature on temporal experience is over the following question: do temporal experiences themselves have a temporal structure that mirrors their temporal contents? Extensionalists argue that experiences do have a temporal structure that mirrors their temporal contents. Atomists insist that experiences don’t have a temporal structure that mirrors their contents. In this paper, I argue that this debate is misguided. Both atomism and extensionalism, considered as general theories of temporal experience, are false, since temporal (...) experience is not a single undifferentiated phenomena as both theories require. I argue for this conclusion in two steps. First, I show that introspection cannot settle the debate. Second, I argue that the neuroscientific evidence is best read as revealing a host of mechanisms involved in temporal perception - some admitting of an extensionalist interpretation while others admitting only of an atomistic interpretation. As a result, neither side of the debate wins. (shrink)

While we perceive events in our environment through multiple sensory systems, we nevertheless perceive all of these events as occupying a single unified timeline. Time, as we perceive it, is unified. I argue that existing accounts of the perceived unity of time fail. Instead, the perceived unity of time must be constructed by integrating our initially fragmented timekeeping capacities. However, existing accounts of multimodal integration do not tell us how this might occur. Something new is needed. I finish the paper (...) by articulating the hurdles that must be overcome to provide an account of the perceived unity of time. (shrink)

We argue that animals are not cognitively stuck in time. Evidence pertaining to multisensory temporal order perception strongly suggests that animals can represent at least some temporal relations of perceived events.

This article analyses the Swedish TV series Hållbart näringsliv (HN) to study hegemonic discursive formations over the meaning of the climate crisis. Combining new materialist approaches in discourse studies with a political ecology understanding of the socio-ecological entanglement, we propose the concept of technocratic solutionism to understand how the neo-liberal green economy secures instrumentalist discourses on nature in the Swedish context. The discourse-theoretical analysis of nine HN episodes identifies four nodal points which articulate the technocratic solutionist discourse: capital’s leading role, (...) Nordic exceptionalism, substitutionalism and long-termism. We argue that the climate crisis can be understood as a materiality that dislocates capitalist assemblages, which then, in response, deploy a techno-solutionism discourse to protect the core principles of economic growth and profitability while marginalizing potential radical alternatives. (shrink)

Memories often come with a feeling of pastness. The events we remember strike us as having occurred in our past. What accounts for this feeling of pastness? In his recent book, Memory: A self-referential account, Jordi Fernández argues that the feeling of pastness cannot be grounded in an explicit representation of the pastness of the remembered event. Instead, he argues that the feeling of pastness is grounded in the self-referential causal content of memory. In this paper, I argue that this (...) account falls short. The representation of causal origin does not by itself ground a feeling of pastness. Instead, I argue that we can salvage the temporal localization account of the feeling of pastness by describing a form of egocentric temporal representation that avoids Fernández’s criticisms. (shrink)

Various writers have attempted to use the sender–receiver formalism to account for the representational capacities of biological systems. This article has two goals. First, I argue that the sender–receiver approach to representation cannot be complete. The mammalian circadian system represents the time of day, yet it does not control circadian behaviours by producing signals with time of day content. Informative signalling need not be the basis of our most basic representational capacities. Second, I argue that representational capacities are primarily about (...) control, and only when specific conditions obtain does this control require informative signalling. (shrink)

En el presente artículo analizaremos los artículos publicados por Mario Presas en la Revista Latinoamericana de Filosofía, en el período que va de 1975 a 2000. El propósito es esbozar una aproximación de conjunto a este corpus, distinguiendo básicamente dos períodos de su desenvolvimiento intelectual. El primero se centra en aspectos fenomenológicos y existenciales de la temporalidad y la corporalidad en el contexto de investigación del mundo de la vida. El segundo se aboca al análisis de problemas estéticos y hermenéuticos (...) de la recepción textual y artística, con particular énfasis en las operaciones constitutivas de la actividad lectora. En conformidad con el autor, puede resumirse esa evolución como una reflexión que lleva del ser a la palabra. En el trabajo sostenemos que el trayecto filosófico de Mario Presas, mediante un despliegue coherente de la temática que conecta el mundo de la vida con la identidad narrativa pasando por el acto de leer, permite comprender que la experiencia estética es una dimensión esencial del existente humano. (shrink)

Presento mi Teología del cambio de época [=TCE] como una teología del “peregrinando-nos”, reducción teologal que se corresponde con el “estar siendo discípulo/s misionero/s”. Al “peregrinando-nos” le son inherentes el icono sapiencial del “camino” y el icono teologal del “santuario”: el primero remite al mundo y el segundo remite a Dios. En la dialéctica controlada existente entre ambos iconos vamos desplegando un proceso de “autotrascendencia teocéntrica en la consistencia”. Este yo peregrinante tiene una vertiente personal (el creyente individual) y otra (...) colectiva (el pueblo de Dios peregrino, pero también implícitamente, una nación en camino). La peregrinación se va desplegando espacio-temporalmente, desde la existencialidad histórica en progresiva apertura al misterio trascendente. O también, desde la progresiva vivencia teologal de las virtudes en diálogo interpelante con todo lo que de bueno, bello y verdadero vamos encontrando por el camino. Esto nos conduce a una cada vez más satisfactoria vida en el Espíritu, renacida de lo alto desde el “santuario” descubierto como ya inhabitando en el mismo “camino”, lo cual traduce y expresa muy bien e inculturadamente lo propio de la esperanza teologal cristiana. A esta teología, el magisterio pastoral del Papa Francisco le fue confiriendo un dinamismo evangelizador que no tenía, al menos no en el mismo grado, en su fundante Trilogía. (shrink)

Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, EarlyView.

El presente texto aborda el parágrafo 36 de los Aportes a la filosofía de Martin Heidegger, para desde este exponer una vía de comprensión de esta obra en torno al lenguaje filosófico-poético, vía que llevaría a considerar el pensamiento del filósofo como una posibilidad de un proyecto pensante que no asumiría el lenguaje como mero medio de enunciación del ente, como instrumento de la razón, sino que lo piense como modo de darse el Ser mismo. En este sentido, se piensa (...) al lenguaje como silenciamiento (Erschweigung) y, al pensarlo de esta manera, se presenta como modo en el que el ente se decide y el hombre se ajusta a su esencia. El texto toma como reflexión la inflexión hecha por Heidegger con respecto al pensar y al poetizar como ámbitos en los que el lenguaje se da como posibilidad de escucha, pero también de dicción. En esta última se juega el todo del ente, como se mencionará al final, al considerar algunas palabras de Nietzsche, que el mismo Heidegger piensa. (shrink)