According to some evolutionary theorists human prosocial dispositions emerged in a context of inter-group competition and violence that made our psychology parochially prosocial, ie. cooperative towards in-groups and competitive towards strangers. This evolutionary hypothesis is sometimes employed in bioethical debates to argue that human nature and contemporary environments, and especially large-scale societies, are mismatched. In this article we caution against the use of mismatch theories in moral philosophy in general and discuss empirical evidence that puts into question mismatch theories based (...) on parochial prosociality. Evolutionary mismatch theories play at best a rhetorical role in these moral debates and may misrepresent the status of relevant evolutionary research. We finally recommend that moral philosophers interested in the evolutionary literature also engage with dispositions such as xenophilia and social tolerance to counterbalance the focus on psychological mismatches adopted so far. (shrink)

The Author describes briefly how, through the confluence of trie new medical specialties of Reproductive Medicine and Molecular Genetics, a wide avenue has been opened to the genetic diagnosis and therapy of the preimplantation embryo. Today, the human embryo in its early stages has become the object of medical experimentation. In the next future, we will see the advent of new techniques for microsurgical manipulation and gene therapy Embryo-fetal Medicine will grow actively. The Author, after briefly analyzing the origin, and (...) criticizing the meaning, of the term preembryo, condueles, on the basis of unbiased observation of the continuum of human life, that only an attitude of respect for life and the determination to extend to the early human embryo the benefits of (gene)therapy are consistent with the deepest medical-deontological traditions. (shrink)

This text has already been published in Time & Society, 2016, Vol. 25, pp. 613-633. We thank Gonzalo Iparraguirre for the permission to republish it here.: This article presents the introduction and the update of an ethnographic research on temporality among indigenous groups, published in 2011 in its full version as a book in Spanish. It seeks to prove the usefulness of the conceptual distinction between time, defined as the phenomenon of becoming in itself, and - Anthropologie – Nouvel (...) article. (shrink)

En países como Colombia la falta de cobertura, la dispersión geográfica y el conflicto armado se han posicionado como obstáculos que impiden que una parte de la población pueda acceder a la universidad, perpetuando las desigualdades y la vulnerabilidad. Los resultados de este estudio apuntan a que la educación superior virtual puede convertirse en una alternativa útil para ofrecer oportunidades de formación a estas poblaciones si se ofrecen las condiciones adecuadas en cuanto a un contenido útil y actual, atención personalizada (...) e infraestructura accesible. Las conclusiones alcanzadas pueden orientar a las Instituciones de Educación Superior (IES) en el diseño de estrategias virtuales de calidad. (shrink)

El tema principal es la concepción de la política en Julio Irazusta (1899-1982), pensador adherido al nacionalismo argentino. Pero la obra tiene un sentido integral, y trata aspectos de biografía intelectual y analiza las influencias de autores como Maurras, Burke, de Maistre y Croce, que habrían obrado sobre el pensamiento de Irazusta"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 58.

The objective of the article is to problematize the marginal place of the sex trade in the order of mining work, articulated from the psychodynamics of labor policies. We work with critical discourse analysis with individual and group interviews with male miners and with women self-defined as sex workers, from the Antofagasta Region. We conclude that the sex trade and the work of sex workers have a central place in the reproduction of the mining workforce, along with it, the search (...) for psychosexual well-being is satisfied, where sex work enhances the maintenance of the virile image, of a man who is not ready himself to the deconstruction of the hegemonic gender. (shrink)

In this study, we propose considering membership in the Ethics Officer Association (EOA) as a proxy for the firm's commitment to ethical decision making, and we analyze the influence of firm- and CEO-specific characteristics on this commitment. While we observe a positive relationship between membership and firm size, we also document a negative relationship between EOA membership and the executive's time in position and, to a more modest extent, accounting returns. Pursuing this further, we present evidence that firms with past (...) legal issues may seek EOA membership as a signal of their intention to be compliant in the future. (shrink)

This article has two parts. The first one compares the ontological and epistemological implications of two main philosophical stances on how reality relates to appearance. I call the first group the “plane of superficiality,” where reality and appearance are the same; there is no gap between what a thing is and how it manifests itself. I call the second group “volume of representation,” in which reality is beyond appearances; there is an insurmountable gap between the thing and its phenomena. The (...) second part of the article focuses on Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) as the second group’s contemporary position. Within the OOO epistemological model of “knowledge without truth,” Harman’s schema of the observer’s participation in the object’s knowledge production is questioned. Alternatively, based on the notion proposed here of “flat representativity” in which each appearance is equally valuable to represent different aspects of the object, I argue for the full spectrum of the sensual as the basis for “knowledge without truth.” In particular, the aesthetic method, excluded from Harman’s concerns about knowledge, is suggested as another contribution to the episteme. (shrink)

On 16 February 2017, the European Parliament made recommendations to the Commission about civil law rules on robotics, including a proposal to design a specific legal personality for autonomous robots and most sophisticated Artificial Intelligences with the capacity to make decisions and interact with third parties. Although the recent European Union’s Artificial Intelligence Act presents notable advances on supervision, surveillance, control and registration in this field, the question of legal personality remains an open issue. In order to design a specific (...) concept along the lines of the European Parliament’s proposal and to make further progress along this legal line, the classical concept of legal person devised by Sinibaldo Fieschi is an essential reference. (shrink)

Among the various contemporary schools of moral thinking, consequence-based ethics, as opposed to rule-based, seems to have a good acceptance among professionals such as software engineers. But naïve consequentialism is intellectually too weak to serve as a practical guide in the profession. Besides, the complexity of software systems makes it very hard to know in advance the consequences that will derive from professional activities in the production of software. Therefore, following the spirit of well-known codes of ethics such as the (...) ACM/IEEE’s, we advocate for a more solid position in the ethical education of software engineers, which we call ‘moderate deontologism’, that takes into account both rules and consequences to assess the goodness of actions, and at the same time pays an adequate consideration to the absolute values of human dignity. In order to educate responsible professionals, however, this position should be complemented with a pedagogical approach to virtue ethics. (shrink)

Este artículo contrasta el método del abandono del límite con la analogía de Tomás de Aquino, ofreciendo una descripción global de esta última, en orden a la determinación del significado y el estatuto gnoseológico de la noción de ente. Examina en los respectivos planteamientos el valor y el alcance metafísico de la potencia, de la articulación abstracta del tiempo y de la “entelécheia”.

This article aims at contributing to the contemporary reception of Heidegger’s thought in eco-philosophical perspective. Its point of departure is Heidegger’s claim, in his Bremen lectures and The Question Concerning Technology, that today the earth is submitted to permanent requisition and planned ordering, and that, having thus lost sight of its auto-poiesis, we are no longer capable of listening, tuning in, and singing back to what he calls in his course on Heraclitus the “song of the earth.” Accordingly, first we (...) examine how the inherently reciprocal dynamics of “earth” and “world,” as thematised by Heidegger in The Origin of the Work of Art, have become opaque. Second, we analyse whether it is possible to find those same dynamics at play behind Heidegger’s “Fourfold,” which we propose to reread in binary key in dialogue with contemporary anthropology, from Bateson and Lévi-Strauss to Wagner and Viveiros de Castro, and in light of Guattari’s notion of “trans-entitarian generativity.” Third, we stress the need to reposition Heidegger’s thought alongside contemporary concerns on “worlding” and we explore its plausible intersections with today’s object-oriented ethnography. Lastly, we discuss the possibility of rereading Heidegger’s Fourfold afresh against the backdrop of Heidegger’s non-foundational thinking, as a conceptual metaphor for the joint dynamics of Abgrund and Grund. (shrink)

Published in 1998, the main aim of this book is to use a naturalistic, evolutionary approach to solve some of the most important problems in philosophy. The first two problems come from the philosophy of science: the problem of rationality of science and the problem of truth in science. In presenting the first problem, the author argues that the views of Kuhn and Feyerabend do create a very serious challenge to traditional epistemology, however, if the assumption of individual rationality is (...) abandoned in favour of the author's social concept of rationality, a committed naturalism can account for science as a rational activity. In tackling the second problem of truth, the author shows that a committed evolutionary philosophy does not support realism but leads instead to a thorough evolutionary relativism of scientific knowledge. It is nevertheless possible to use this evolutionary relativism to construct a theory of relative truth. The issue of whether science discovers truth has also been tied to absolutism, that a well formulated theory of relative truth is likely to bring about a profound transformation of the way we think about the field. The author explores the notion of relative truth in the philosophy of science, ethics and aesthetics. (shrink)

Estudio de la doctrina del tiempo en Nietzsche en confrontación desde la filosofía de Polo, Se realiza un análisis de la articulación formal del tiempo planteada en términos de eterno retorno y un examen de la argumentación modal que sustenta este planteamiento. Desde esta misma perspectiva se examina la conexión entre eterno retorno y voluntad de poder y el alcance de la libertad humana en relación con el tiempo.

En este texto se describe que este número monográfico de Studia Poliana está dedicado enteramente a la comparación entre la teoría del conocimiento de L. Polo y la Crítica de la razón pura de Kant. Se hace además una valoración filosófica del empleo de dicho procedimiento como método filosófico.

El origen de la escritura china sigue siendo a día de hoy una cuestión que no deja de despertar gran interés. Con el presente trabajo pretendemos exponer ciertos aspectos de dicha escritura, centrando la investigación en sus orígenes y prestando una especial atención a las explicaciones mitológicas que se han dado al respecto. Se exponen cuatro personajes destacados de la mitología china en torno a los cuales se han centrado los mitos sobre el inicio de esta escritura milenaria.

In this article, we aim at presenting a thorough and comprehensive explanation of the mathematical and theoretical relation between all the aspects of Ptolemaic planetary models and their counterparts which are built according to Kepler’s first two laws. Our article also analyzes the predictive differences which arise from comparing Ptolemaic and these ideal Keplerian models, making clear distinctions between those differences which must be attributed to the structural variations between the models, and those which are due to the specific parameters (...) Ptolemy determined in the Almagest. We expect that our work will be a contribution for a better understanding not only of the Ptolemaic theories for planetary longitudes through a clearer perception of the way in which Keplerian features are present—or absent—in Ptolemy’s models, but also for a more balanced judgement of different aspects of the contribution of the first two laws of Kepler to the modern astronomical revolution. (shrink)

The paper gives a model of the sentences that express the core of the doctrine of the Trinity. The new elements in the model are: 1) an underlying map between "Divine Person" and "God"-- in place of set- theoretic inclusion, and 2) the notion of a predicable keeping or not keeping phase in a system of kinds. These elements, which are explained in the text, are common in everyday language. The model requires no tampering with the fundamental laws of logic, (...) nor does it require the use of any such difficult metaphysical notions as substance and essence as distinct from person. (shrink)

Traditionally, “the operator calculus of Born and Wiener” has been considered one of the four formulations of quantum mechanics that existed in 1926. The present paper reviews the operator calculus as applied by Max Born and Norbert Wiener during the last months of 1925 and the early months of 1926 and its connections with the rise of the new quantum theory. Despite the relevance of this operator calculus, Born–Wiener’s joint contribution to the topic is generally bypassed in historical accounts of (...) quantum mechanics. In this study, we analyse the paper that epitomises the contribution, and we explain the main reasons for the apparent lack of interest in Born and Wiener’s work. We argue that they did not solve the main problem for which the tool was intended, that of linear motion, because of their reluctance to use Dirac delta functions. (shrink)

A recent turn in the cognitive sciences has deepened the attention on embodied and situated dynamics for explaining different cognitive processes such as perception, emotion, and social cognition. This has fostered an extensive interest in the social and ‘intersubjective’ nature of moral behavior, especially from the perspective of enactivism. In this paper, I argue that embodied and situated perspectives, enactivism in particular, nonetheless require further improvements with regards to their analysis of the social nature of human morality. In brief, enactivist (...) proposals still do not define what features of the social-relational context, or which kind of processes within social interactions, make an evaluation or action morally relevant or distinctive from other types of social normativity. As an alternative to this proclivity, and seeking to complement the enactive perspective, I present a definition of the process of moral sense-making and offer an empirically-based ethical distinction between different domains of social knowledge in moral development. For doing so, I take insights from the constructivist tradition in moral psychology. My objective is not to radically oppose embodied and enactive alternatives but to expand the horizon of their conceptual and empirical contributions to morality research. (shrink)

El presente artículo consta de dos partes. En la primera trataré de proponer una nueva hipótesis, basada en las distinciones formuladas por A. Ritschl, F. J. A. Hort y M. Simon y en la particularidad del cristianismo asirio, acerca de la naturaleza del judeocristianismo y sus divisiones. En la segunda trataré de ofrecer al lector una mirada al peculiar cristianismo asirio de los primeros siglos de la era común por medio de un resumen de los argumentos esgrimidos por Afraates (fl. (...) ca. 300-350 d.C.) en defensa de la divinidad de Cristo en su Demostración 17: Sobre Cristo en tanto que Hijo de Dios. (shrink)

Las nociones de "uno" y de "múltiple" han sido, históricamente, objeto de tratamiento, a la vez, filosófico y teológico. En el contexto de la filosofía islámica oriental, y en el marco de su vertiente más específicamente neoplatónica, el "Príncipe de los Teósofos", Sadrá Sirázi (ob. 1050/1640), estudia ambas desde una perspectiva ontológica y distanciándose del enfoque consignado al respecto por los filósofos peripatéticos del Islam. Adaptando y continuando, de un lado, la gnosis de 1km aI-'Arabi, y, de otro, la sabiduria (...) iluminativa de Sohravardi, MollA Sadrá discute la distinción aviceniana entre un Ser Necesario y una multiplicidad de seres posibles, así como la posibilidad de considerar accidental la realidad de la existencia. Basado en la eoimplicación de tres conceptos fundamentales: i~álat al-wu9ñd (prioridad del ser), i,vahdat al-wu9i2d (unidad del ser) y tagkik (diferenciación y gradación intensiva del ser), el univocismo monadológico de 5adrá puede, por otra parte, permitirnos reevaluar ciertas cuestiones filosóficas que pugnan por ser examinadas hoy a una nueva luz. (shrink)

The possible linkages among liberty and power is a philosophical issue that gets to special important inside to contemporary political philosophy’s context. During this stage, a notion of legitimacy began to develop on which both freedom and power would be sustained, without being justified in a supposed statalist originin. Neither the legitimate power no the legitime freedom come to be backing by the juristic order up in the first instance, inasmuch up its source would be prior. From Foucault and Marcuse (...) outlooks on this issue, it will treat to inquire on the disquisitions that both their ever speeches propose. (shrink)

BackgroundThe COVID-19 pandemic has hit almost all countries around the globe, seriously affecting the welfare of populations. Spain is especially hard-hit. In this context, the purpose of the present study is to analyze social, demographic, and economic correlates of mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic in the population residing in Spain.MethodThe sample of this cross-sectional study was comprised of 801 participants aged 18 or older and residing in Spain. Data collection was carried out during March and April 2020. Data of (...) mental health and well-being indicators, and those of a wide number of social, demographic, and economic variables were recorded. Linear regression models were built to value associations between mental health and social, demographic, and economic indicators.ResultsMental health morbidity was higher in women, younger people, individuals with medium studies, people with fewer children, singles, students, and unemployed individuals. Positive affect was higher among women, people with a high level of studies, those not co-living with dependent seniors, the self-employed, the employed, and those working outside home. Negative affect was negatively associated with age and number of children and was higher among women, people with basic studies, singles, individuals co-living with dependent seniors, homemakers, and students.ConclusionThe most vulnerable populations were found to be women, younger people, people with basic or medium studies, students and individuals with no remunerated activities, single populations, and those co-living with dependent seniors as well as those with a reduced number of children. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that ecological evolutionary developmental biology accounts of cognitive modernity are compatible with cultural evolution theories of language built upon iterated learning models. Cultural evolution models show that the emergence of near universal properties of language do not require the preexistence of strong specific constraints. Instead, the development of general abilities, unrelated to informational specificity, like the copying of complex signals and sharing of communicative intentions is required for cultural evolution to yield specific properties, such as (...) language structure. We argue that eco-evo-devo provides the appropriate conceptual background to ground an account for the many interconnected genetic, environmental and developmental factors that facilitated the emergence of an organic system able to develop language through the iterated transmission of information. We use the concept of niche construction to connect evolutionary developmental accounts for sensory guided motor capacities and cultural evolution guided by iterated learning models. This integrated theoretical model aims to build bridges between biological and cultural approaches. (shrink)

The distribution of cultural variants in a population is shaped by both neutral evolutionary dynamics and by selection pressures. The temporal dynamics of social network connectivity, that is, the order in which individuals in a population interact with each other, has been largely unexplored. In this paper, we investigate how, in a fully connected social network, connectivity dynamics, alone and in interaction with different cognitive biases, affect the evolution of cultural variants. Using agent‐based computer simulations, we manipulate population connectivity dynamics (...) (early, mid, and late full‐population connectivity); content bias, or a preference for high‐quality variants; coordination bias, or whether agents tend to use self‐produced variants (egocentric bias), or to switch to variants observed in others (allocentric bias); and memory size, or the number of items that agents can store in their memory. We show that connectivity dynamics affect the time‐course of variant spread, with lower connectivity slowing down convergence of the population onto a single cultural variant. We also show that, compared to a neutral evolutionary model, content bias accelerates convergence and amplifies the effects of connectivity dynamics, while larger memory size and coordination bias, especially egocentric bias, slow down convergence. Furthermore, connectivity dynamics affect the frequency of high‐quality variants (adaptiveness), with late connectivity populations showing bursts of rapid change in adaptiveness followed by periods of relatively slower change, and early connectivity populations following a single‐peak evolutionary dynamic. We evaluate our simulations against existing data collected from previous experiments and show how our model reproduces the empirical patterns of convergence. (shrink)

Our purpose in this study – which stands at the crossroads of contemporary philosophy, anthropology, and religious studies – is to assess critically the plea for radical contingency in contemporary thought, with special attention to the work of Meillassoux, in light, among other things, of the symptomatic presence of Pauline motifs in the late twentieth to early twenty first-century philosophical arena, from Vattimo to Agamben and especially Badiou. Drawing on Aristotle’s treatment of τύχη and Hilan Bensusan’s neo-monadology (as well as (...) on the network biology of David George Haskell, Scott Gilbert’s holobiont hypothesis, and Terrence Deacon’s teleo-dynamics), we ask what is missing in such plea, from a theoretical standpoint. Next, we examine the relation between radical contingency and worldlessness in dialogue with Leroi-Gourhan’s theory of biocultural evolution, Lévi-Strauss’s structural anthropology, Pierre Clastres’s ethnography, Heidegger’s philosophy of language, and contemporary authors like Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Patrice Maniglier. These two parallel lines of inquiry help us explore what radical contingency, in turn, prevents us from thinking: the intersection of ontology, cosmopolitics, and modality. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to introduce a new approach to the modal operators of necessity and possibility. This approach is based on the existence of two negations in certain lattices that we call bi-Heyting algebras. Modal operators are obtained by iterating certain combinations of these negations and going to the limit. Examples of these operators are given by means of graphs.

The hypothesis of a theoretical unity between On Sophistical Refutations and Prior Analytics presents a major challenge to scholars attempting to unify the criteria of analysis. This paper examines this problem and proposes a middle ground between the perspectives of Woods and Boger to address this crucial question: If a unitary and coherent theory of deduction exists, why does not the technical apparatus of syllogistic modes for analyzing fallacies appear in SE? This paper makes useful contributions to the discussion on (...) the internal unity of Aristotle's logical writings on around categorical syllogistics and the doctrine of sophistical refutations. (shrink)

This article deals with a modern disease of academic science that consists of an enormous increase in the number of scientific publications without a corresponding advance of knowledge. Findings are sliced as thin as salami and submitted to different journals to produce more papers. If we consider academic papers as a kind of scientific ‘currency’ that is backed by gold bullion in the central bank of ‘true’ science, then we are witnessing an article-inflation phenomenon, a scientometric bubble that is most (...) harmful for science and promotes an unethical and antiscientific culture among researchers. The main problem behind the scenes is that the impact factor is used as a proxy for quality. Therefore, not only for convenience, but also based on ethical principles of scientific research, we adhere to the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment when it emphasizes “the need to eliminate the use of journal-based metrics in funding, appointment and promotion considerations; and the need to assess research on its own merits rather on the journal in which the research is published”. Our message is mainly addressed to the funding agencies and universities that award tenures or grants and manage research programmes, especially in developing countries. The message is also addressed to well-established scientists who have the power to change things when they participate in committees for grants and jobs. (shrink)