La religión es un tema apasionante, aunque sembrado por escollos. Si bien el estudio de su constitución, finalidad y pertinencia ha sido emprendido por diferentes campos de investigación, gran parte de sus más significativos aportes no consiguen más que rebatirse entre sí. Esta investigación, que aborda los planteamientos principales del filósofo estadounidense Daniel Dennett sobre el tema de la religión como fenómeno natural en contraste con los planteamientos de distinguidos filósofos de la religión, tiene como propósito señalar terrenos menos inhóspitos (...) en medio del debate en los que sea posible, haciendo una apuesta interdisciplinar, una comprensión menos conflictiva de la religión que pueda franquear esos límites que se le imponen a veces de manera tan concluyente ya sea por parte de las certezas científicas, de los postulados biologicistas, o incluso de las especulaciones metafísicas de algunas formulaciones teológicas. (shrink)

Foucault denuncia que la espiritualidad cristiana, al plantear que el conocimiento de la verdad se logra en relación con la Palabra de Dios, incurre en una circularidad. Esta circularidad trae como consecuencia que el autoconocimiento no tenga por meta la autoafirmación de sí, sino la renuncia de sí para la afirmación de otro trascendente, generando así un poder pastoral que, en medio de la dinámica de la salvación, exige el sometimiento obediente de la persona a una ley heterónoma. El propósito (...) del texto es argumentar la siguiente hipótesis: la espiritualidad del Barroco Hispano —en la medida en que pone en epojé a Dios, la Palabra Revelada y el mundo humano— ofrece claves significativas para comprender el acceso a la verdad no como una renuncia de sí, sino como el ejercicio espiritual de un sí mismo dinamizado por el amor creativo. En este sentido, el Barroco Hispano da pautas para confrontar la crítica foucaultiana y para caracterizar un modo de espiritualidad alternativa en épocas de crisis. (shrink)

Los análisis del Barroco Hispano-Americano suelen pasar por alto que varios representantes de este movimiento fueron educados a la luz de la espiritualidad de la Contrarreforma, desarrollada particularmente por la Compañía de Jesús. La cuestión que nos ocupa es saber si esta espiritualidad sólo reacciona «contra» la Reforma y la Modernidad, o si introduce inflexiones novedosas que permitan comprenderla como el ejercicio de una acción comprometida «con» un proyecto moderno alternativo. Nuestra hipótesis es que, frente al espíritu de la modernidad (...) reformista, el Barroco Hispano-Americano, en liza con la «ocasión», promueve una espiritualidad capaz de libertad creativa y co-operativa. El artículo plantea dos propósitos: identificar la espiritualidad jesuita como clave significativa para la lectura de la Modernidad Barroca; y caracterizar esta espiritualidad en dos contextos diferentes: el Barroco Hispano de Gracián; y las Misiones Jesuitas en América Latina. Consideramos que el contrapunto que pone en obra el barroco histórico puede iluminar de manera oblicua una espiritualidad «neobarroca» capaz de hacerle frente a la crisis del presente. (shrink)

Consider a game of blind chess between two chess masters that is recorded in some standard chess notation. The recording is a representation of the game. But what is the game itself? This question is, we believe, central to the entire domain of social ontology. We argue that the recorded game is a special sort of quasi-abstract pattern, something that is: (i) like abstract entities such as numbers or forms, in that it is both nonphysical and nonpsychological; but at the (...) same time, (ii) through its association with specific players and a specific occasion, tied to time and history. We discover other abstract patterns of this sort especially in the domains of law and commerce. This essay draws on the work in social ontology, we of Hernando de Soto and of John Searle to develop an ontology of the social world based on an analysis of the peculiar interdependence between quasi-abstract patterns and their representations in documents of different sorts. (shrink)

James Tully sees the emergence of modern constitutionalism as the intellectual legacy of writers such as Hobbes, Bodin and Locke. For Tully, modern constitutionalism not only centralizes authority, it also excludes diversity. Tully’s work represents a significant part of the growing antipathy towards uniformity and the universalising tendencies of the modern organization, which, he believes, underwrite a loss of local empowerment. In this respect his thinking and that of the communitarians is consistent with contemporary disenchantment with, not to mention resistance (...) to globalization. Globalization, or the tendency to inter‐national uniformity in culture and increasing integration into a global system of economics and power, appears to promote an analogous universalising conformity across borders, while centralizing economic if not political power and control in certain trans‐national corporations. Hernando de Soto, the Peruvian economist, gives us a very different perspective on the motley of overlapping jurisdictions and argues that diversity of systems, customs and rules with respect to property has conspired to maintain the entrenched poverty of the developing world. He argues that it is the unified, codified and integrated systems of the West that have allowed these societies to mobilize capital to escape the endemic widespread poverty of the pre‐capitalist age. In the course of this paper I seek to compare and evaluate the competing claims of Tully and de Soto. (shrink)

This essay is a contribution to social ontology, drawing on the work of John Searle and of Hernando de Soto. At the center of the argument is the proposition advanced by de Soto in his Mystery of Capital to the effect that many of the entities which structure our contemporary social reality are entities which exist in virtue of the fact that there are (paper or digital) documents which support their existence. I here develop de Soto’s (...) argument further, focusing specifically on the ontological problems raised by a family of new types of social phenomena – exemplified most dramatically in the domain of finance for example in the form of what are called ‘structured investment vehicles’ – made possible as a result of the employment of computer technology in entity creation. I address also Searle’s most recent work on social ontology, and conclude with an appendix on the theory of documentality advanced by Maurizio Ferraris. (shrink)

Economists of the Austrian School are supporters of the gold standard because it hinders and restricts arbitrary policies and rulers: it disciplines the behavior of all the agents involved in the democratic process and encourages people to act orderly and morally. It is, in fact, an obstacle to the lies and demagoguery because it spreads and facilitates transparency and truth in social relations. The creation of the euro in 1999 and its final implementation in 2002 assumed the disappearance of monetary (...) nationalism and flexible exchange rates in most of continental Europe. We will discuss the errors committed by the European Central Bank. It is now seen how the different states of the European Monetary Union have given and completely lost their monetary autonomy, that is to say the ability to manipulate their local currency to serve political needs. In this sense, the euro has therefore acted, at least for the countries of the euro area, very similar to that which was, in its time, the gold standard manner. This is why the euro should be considered a real equivalent, albeit imperfect, of the gold standard. (shrink)

Barnett and Block claim that Bagus and Howden support indirectly the concept of market failure. In this paper, we show that maturity mismatching in an unhampered market may imply entrepreneurial error but cannot be considered a market failure. We demonstrate why fractional-reserve banking leads to business cycles even if there is no central bank and why maturity mismatching does not per se lead to clusters of errors in a free market. Finally, in contrast to the examples provided by Barnett and (...) Block, we assure that maturity mismatching does not imply the creation of two incompatible contracts due to the fungible nature of money. (shrink)

The parceling of land into real estate is more than a simple geometrical affair. Real estate is a historical product of interaction between human beings, political, legal and economic institutions, and the physical environment. And while many authors, from Jeremy Bentham to Hernando de Soto, have drawn attention to the ontological (metaphysical) aspect of property in general, no comprehensive analysis of landed property has been attempted. The paper presents such an analysis and shows how landed property differs from (...) other types of property in a way which implies a special role for political and economic philosophy of property rights in land. This is the Chinese translation of "The Metaphysics of Real Estate", Topoi, 20: 2 (September 2001), 161–172. (shrink)

This paper argues that information should be made transparent as a means to close the global digital divide problem. The usual conception of the digital divide as a bifurcation between the information rich and poor in fact does a poor job at describing the reality of the situation, which is characterized by multiple dimensions of digital divides in many contexts. Taking the lead from Albert Borgmann, it is recognized that the so-called information poor do possess a rich resource of information (...) which needs to be fully accounted for in order to solve the global digital divide problem. In addition, making information transparent means, following the theory of development of Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto, that information should be made available and accessible through a system of representation. Floridis account of information ethics thus needs to be supplemented by the realization that members of infosphere, which in his view consist of information objects, should be made transparent in order that the global digital divide be ameliorated. In other words there should be a system of information about information, namely semantic representation of objective information which enables the locals to make full use of their available informational resources. (shrink)

In this paper we begin with a reference to the work of Hernando de Soto The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else, and his characterization of the Western institution of formal property. We note the linkages that he sees between the institution and successful capitalist enterprise. Therefore, given the appropriateness of his analysis, it would appear to be worthwhile for developing and less developed countries to adjust their systems of ownership to (...) conform more closely to the Western system of formal property. However, we go on to point out that property relationships within the Western system have become subject to redefinition through the expansion of Intellectual Property rights in ways that ultimately work to the disadvantage of the developing and less developed countries. We point out that this restructuring has been given global application through the implementation of the TRIPS agreement by the WTO. In the final section of the paper I suggest ways in which IP rights and relevant institutions can be reformed in order to avoid the disadvantages to the developing and less developed countries. (shrink)

Place mouse over image continent. 2.1 (2012): 36–39. From an ethical and political perspective, people and property can hardly be separated. Indeed, the modern political subject – that is, the individual, the person, the self, the autonomous actor, the rational self-interest maximizer, etc. – has taken shape in and through the elaboration, institutionalization, and enactment of that which rightfully belongs to it. This thread can be traced back perhaps most directly to Locke’s notion that the origin of the political state (...) occurs when people rise above the state of nature by ceding the power to prosecute offenses. The rule of law begins then with a defense of the right to property. People become subjects by adhering to the social contract, which they do by deferring the defense of their own property to the state. In this light, the response of the United States federal government to the financial crisis of 2008 appears to many as a breach of the social contract. The chant “banks got bailed out, we got sold out” states the claim plainly. Why exactly did some subjects (e.g., the banks) have their property defended by the state (i.e., through the variety of programs including TARP, the discount window at the US Federal Reserve, etc.), when other subjects (e.g., homeowners) found themselves without protection of their property rights, forced to default on mortgage debts and face dispossession? Even if the rhetoric about “too big to fail” can be believed, and the collapse of the financial system would lead to negative consequences for people who had little or no connection to the activities that brought it about, such consequences need not call into question the notion that everyone stands equally before the law. To occupy, then, appears as a form of civil disobedience, an intentional, retaliatory breach of the social contract by those who feel that they have lost the support of the state to which they ceded their power as sovereign agents. The visible and the invisible The violation of property rights of people who have recognition, protection and power under the law destabilizes their very status as citizens and tests the limit of democracy. Does the financial system force the dematerialized victimization of individuals? Do people become numbers, or worse still, percentages of unemployed, tranches of defaulted mortgages and foreclosures? Are they perhaps instead disenfranchised prospectively from the privileged position occupied by virtual entities and actors such as those involved in the derivatives markets, always already exiled back into the physical, visible realm? The line of conflict appears to be drawn between invisibility/absence/deferral and visibility/presence/realization. The demonstrators occupy an excess property of those subjects, namely, the banks and financial elite, who did receive recognition and protection under the law. By domesticating this excess property, rendering its invisibility visible within the political economy, the protesters raise a new form of threat to the hegemonic order. To occupy, then, involves a rejection of the order under which the “99%” have been subjected to erasure. The occupation seeks creatively to establish a new means of communication and law for its subjects. In the face of an existing power structure that is increasingly disenfranchising the majority of people while consolidating nodes of power and influence, the “occupation”, or the work of the Occupy movement, involves seizing a space that refuses the rules of the existing, allegedly corrupt sovereign state. This refusal of governance extends even to include a steadfast refusal to articulate a strategy, to formulate a list of demands, to converse with the sovereign power on the grounds of its own conventions, to put forth a leader, to resolve the ambiguity of the movement into a discreet identity, face, or voice. Do these tactics provide a resolution to the problem that was its genesis? Not in such a direct and easily resolved manner, but it remains difficult to imagine a direct and simple resolution to the problematic of the breach of the social contract. The ambiguity of the situation has generated significant interest within the broader populace, though many people sympathetic to the cause appear to be frustrated because the movement has not simply put forward a short list of concrete demands, or even a set of leaders and spokespeople, much less a resolution. And yet, this lack of coherence appears as a resolution of a problem generic to protest movements in the past, where individual leaders can be removed or discredited, and lists of demands can be co-opted by others holding more political power. Meanwhile, the ambiguity has compelled imitations on a global scale, with the Occupy Wall Street participants consciously taking actions that can be replicated by anyone anywhere without significant cost. These actions have taken place not in a peripheral location such as a parking lot in New Jersey, but instead close to the centers of power and governance, adjacent to Wall Street, close to the White House, on college campuses, etc. This spontaneous archipelago of protests becomes an irritant, a negation of the accepted order of protests, but when the protesters themselves move outside of their encampments, they are escorted by the police, constantly monitored and maintained so that a permanent state of paranoid persecution takes hold. To occupy, occupying, occupation – these actions involve a variable degree of danger – are you willing to step into a different space, where the rule of law is unclear and evolving? Are you presenting yourself as a representative of the majority, the 99%? Who has a sense of belonging to the 99%? This previously invisible population becomes a focal point of political power, garners increasing public support, infects the public dialogue. The government recognizes this population by forcing it from the occupied space, removing the element of possession of property. It is at this point of conflict, in the struggle to hold the physical property, where the greatest friction and violence occurs. Scaling the rule of law While occupied, the property calls for a redress of grievances, a restoration of the rule of law. The Occupy movement does not select and put forward individuals or leaders, it puts forward places – the occupied property represents the point of conflict, not the individual. And it is this very property that the government then tries to reclaim. The movement remains faceless, anonymous, uncounted, or rather counted only as a mass, the self-labeled mass of 99%. These spaces are like refugee camps or favelas, but constructed to unite the political life and private life of the protesters. This objective is presented as a tactical necessity, as all other means of protest and communication have failed, leaving only the option of seizing, holding, occupying a property. But to what end, exactly? Can anyone deliberately return to the prior social contract, embrace, affirm, and govern in strict accordance with the earlier relationship to property, following the logic of Locke’s arguments? In this respect, the contemporary crisis indicates a new, transitional phase in the way that property operates, or rather, in the balance between real and virtual value. The roots of the crisis lay in the massive overvaluation of property caused by lax lending practices, as more people were encouraged to borrow more money, which drove up the prices of property. At the same time, these individual properties, these mortgages for homes actual families lived in and worked to support, were bundled into securities that could be bought, sold, and speculated on. The reduction of a physical house or piece of real estate to an almost incalculably small element in an investment vehicle appears as a scaling of the hedge that radically diminishes the value of any individually owned property. Moreover, a number of recently-innovated financial products allow investors to hedge in new ways, to deliberately spread risk around a portfolio in hopes of bringing returns even when the individual mortgage defaults. At the level of the ‘free’ market, these virtual negative valuations are designed to balance the physical positive valuation, though many of the biggest lenders are now being investigated for controlling both sides of this valuation, the positive and the negative, to facilitate both the creation and failure of the investments and to profit from both. The ability to benefit from both the negative and positive value of an investment is a result of a technologically enabled capacity to operate within a complex field. These layered and scaled investment vehicles and the simultaneous negation of their value together represent a commingling of the virtual and physical existence that is both complex and multiple. The valuation of a virtual property has tremendous power to change the valuation of the physical - either injecting it with or depriving it of funds, pumping in or draining life and energy. This situation has roots of its own – the notion of property advanced e.g., throughout the enclosure movement in Britain was, from the outset, an imposition of virtuality (i.e., the concept of law, the institutions associated with ownership, etc.) on the physical reality of land. 1 The difference today is that technological trading platforms combined with innovations within the financial services industry have enabled the reduction of each individual property receiving or losing value in scale to an almost atomic level. In turn, the number of properties held simultaneously and valued as a massive, multiple wholes – i.e., the derivatives market in mortgage-backed securities – is a new phenomenon made possible through the application of similar technologies and institutional structures. And those actors who can trade in these layers of complexity can then profit from the new phase of disassociation of the virtual and the physical – unconcerned with and operating at such a virtual distance from the individual residing physically on a particular piece of real estate that they no longer feel the tug of the physical tying them back to the physical, operating literally as in a video game, in a virtually distanced world. What can or should be done about this situation? Answers lie outside the scope of this current essay, but merit consideration in the near future… NOTE 1) Hernando de Soto has emphasized this dimension by empirically demonstrating its non-existence in many countries in The Mystery of Capital. (shrink)

John Searle’s The Construction of Social Reality and Hernando de Soto’s The Mystery of Capital shifted the focus of current thought on capital and economic development to the cultural and conceptual ideas that underpin market economies and that are taken for granted in developed nations. This collection of essays assembles 21 philosophers, economists, and political scientists to help readers understand these exciting new theories.

Polish translation of "John Searle: From Speech Acts to Social Reality", -/- We provide an overview of Searle's contributions to speech act theory and the ontology of social reality, focusing on his theory of constitutive rules. In early versions of this theory, Searle proposed that all such rules have the form 'X counts as Y in context C' formula – as for example when Barack Obama (X) counts as President of the United States (Y) in the context of US political (...) affairs. Crucially, the X and the Y terms are here identical. A problem arises for this theory for cases involving 'free-standing Y terms', as for example in the case of money in a computerized bank account. Here there is no physical X to which a status function might be attached. We conclude by arguing that Searle's response to this problem creates difficulties for his naturalistic framework. (shrink)

At the beginning of 2020, COVID-19 became a global problem. Despite all the efforts to emphasize the relevance of preventive measures, not everyone adhered to them. Thus, learning more about the characteristics determining attitudinal and behavioral responses to the pandemic is crucial to improving future interventions. In this study, we applied machine learning on the multi-national data collected by the International Collaboration on the Social and Moral Psychology of COVID-19 (N = 51,404) to test the predictive efficacy of constructs from (...) social, moral, cognitive, and personality psychology, as well as socio-demographic factors, in the attitudinal and behavioral responses to the pandemic. The results point to several valuable insights. Internalized moral identity provided the most consistent predictive contribution—individuals perceiving moral traits as central to their self-concept reported higher adherence to preventive measures. Similar was found for morality as cooperation, symbolized moral identity, self-control, open-mindedness, collective narcissism, while the inverse relationship was evident for the endorsement of conspiracy theories. However, we also found a non-negligible variability in the explained variance and predictive contributions with respect to macro-level factors such as the pandemic stage or cultural region. Overall, the results underscore the importance of morality-related and contextual factors in understanding adherence to public health recommendations during the pandemic. (shrink)

Objective. To determine the effectiveness of the "I take care of myself" program for self-care in schoolchildren. Methods. Quasi-experimental study with a single pre-post test group, with the participation of 120 sixth grade students of the primary level of the Educational Institution of San Pedro - Huánuco, Peru 2022, in which the "I take care of myself" Program was applied. The data collection instrument was the self-care practices scale. In the hypothesis test, the Wilcoxon statistical test was used. Results. It (...) was found that the average score obtained in self-care before the application of the "I take care of myself" program was 3.7, and after this it was 4.0, finding significant differences in the pretest and posttest with p≤0.000. Likewise, there were significant differences in the dimensions of self-care such as practices related to universal self-care requirements, practices related to development self-care requirements, and practices related to self-care requirements in case of health deviation, all with p≤0.05. Conclusions. There are significant differences in self-care after applying the "I take care of myself" program in schoolchildren of the Educational Institution of San Pedro - Huánuco. (shrink)

In this paper we characterize the join irreducible elements of the free algebras on n free generators in the subvarieties of the variety V0 of pseudocomplemented De Morgan algebras satisfying the identity xx′* = ′*.

The aim of this text is to examine the issue of truth telling in doctor-patient relationships, namely in the case of terminal patients. We analyze the problems and attitudes regarding truth telling that there are present when patients suffer from mortal diseases. We conclude that it is very important to keep a fluent and truthful communication in the doctor-patient relationship. We also examine and stress the role that general practitioners can play in the care of terminal patients at their home (...) and with their friends and/or relatives. (shrink)

This paper studies two aspects of John Duns Scotus’s Prologue to his Questions on the Metaphysics of Aristotle. The a priori argument to prove the nobility and dignity of metaphysics and the treatment of the question about the scientific object of metaphysics and its articulation with the other realities treated in this science. The paper also shows how Scotus’s prologue follows an interpretative tradition whose principal interlocutors are Thomas Aquinas and Avicenna.