A documentary review was carried out on the production and publication of research papers related to the study of the variable Social Responsibility, Sustainable Marketing and Consumer Behavior. The purpose of the bibliometric analysis proposed in this document was to know the main characteristics of the volume of publications registered in the Scopus database during the period 2017-2022, achieving the identification of 57 publications. The information provided by this platform was organized through graphs and figures categorizing the information by Year (...) of Publication, Country of Origin, Area of Knowledge and Type of Publication. Once these characteristics have been described, the position of different authors regarding the proposed theme is referenced through a qualitative analysis. Among the main findings made through this research, it is found that the United States, with 10 publications, was the country with the highest scientific production registered in the name of authors affiliated with institutions in that country. The Area of Knowledge that made the greatest contribution to the construction of bibliographic material regarding the scope of Social Responsibility, Sustainable Marketing and Consumer Behavior was Business, Administration and Accounting with 34 published documents, and the most used Type of Publication during the period indicated above were Journal Articles with 67% of the total scientific production. (shrink)

Resilience and digital skills could be considered necessary competencies for the individual of the twenty-first century, which the current social reality suggests. For this reason we carried out a research in the institution of higher education -IES- Corporación Escuela Tecnológica del Oriente, of Bucaramanga-Colombia, which had a dual purpose: to describe resilience and digital competence in 356 of its students and establish a comparison between the values of these two aspects and those reported in other HEIs in Mexico, using a (...) quantitative, non-experimental, cross-sectional design and descriptive scope approach, the SV-RES Resilience Scale instrument and a Questionnaire for the study of the Digital Competence of Higher Education Students. (shrink)

La COVID-19 generó una crisis sanitaria, económica y social de grandes proporciones en casi todos los países del mundo. Colombia sufrió en el 2020 la peor contracción económica de su historia reciente y los logros alcanzados en los últimos años en la lucha contra la pobreza, se han revertido. Bucaramanga y las ciudades que componen su área metropolitana (AMB), no han sido ajenas a esta coyuntura. En este contexto, esta investigación indaga a profundidad sobre los efectos de la pandemia del (...) COVID-19 en AMB y los retos que se derivan de éstos para el desarrollo local, la cual fue seleccionada en el 2015 por el Banco Mundial, como una de las ciudades más competitivas del mundo. (shrink)

Con el presente trabajo se pretende crear una estrategia que posibilite un aprendizaje sólido deltema de potencial eléctrico, a través de una analogía entre los potenciales eléctrico y gravitacional.La actividad que se propone concibe el uso de materiales de bajo costo con el objetivo de aproximarel conocimiento físico al común de los estudiantes. Esto porque se ha percibido en la población focode este estudio, un cierto desinterés por la física, lo que de alguna forma resulta contradictorio, unavez que la presencia (...) de esta ciencia, en nuestro día a día, se manifiesta en las diversas actividadesque desenvolvemos en el contexto en que estamos insertados, así como en el uso extendido delas nuevas tecnologías de información y comunicación (TIC) a que la especie humana ha venidoteniendo acceso en los últimos años. Por su parte, para la creación de la citada estrategia se haconsiderado el uso de una metodología que concibe una revisión de la bibliografía disponible sobreel tema y tiene una tendencia cualitativa-cuantitativa, siendo esta referida al análisis de los datos queserán colectados durante la experiencia. Los resultados muestran que hubo un mejor desempeñode los estudiantes durante la segunda etapa del proceso investigativo. Esto nos permite concluirque la enseñanza de la física a través de analogías elaboradas por los profesores de esta asignaturaposibilita un mejor aprendizaje de esta ciencia en la medida en que se vinculan conocimientoscientíficos y cotidianos. (shrink)

En este artículo postulamos que el trabajo de Kuhn es una revolución filosófica para la filosofía de la ciencia. La búsqueda de revoluciones filosóficas es una extensión de las ideas de Kuhn acerca de las revoluciones científicas. Las revoluciones filosóficas se distinguen de las revoluciones científicas en algunos aspectos que discutimos en este trabajo. Defendemos que la revolución kuhniana consiste en la naturalización de la filosofía de la ciencia que se desprende de sus trabajos y discutimos la analogía biológica que (...) Kuhn empleó como un ejemplo ilustrativo. (shrink)

El conocimiento sobre Fernando el Católico en la actualidad continúa siendo bastante limitado, especialmente en lo referente a sus últimos días y posterior muerte. Tradicionalmente se achacó su deterioro de salud, según los principales historiadores coetáneos y posteriores, al empleo abusivo de afrodisíacos para poder engendrar al ansiado heredero con la reina Germana de Foix. Pedro Mártir de Anglería fue el único que recogió datos de forma continuada en el tiempo, que han sido pasados por alto por la historiografía. (...) Mediante un estudio interdisciplinar, se ha realizado una lectura sistemática de las cartas del Epistolario del humanista lombardo, extrayendo todas las noticias del progreso de su salud para trazar un cuadro clínico. A partir de este, los afrodisíacos quedan definitivamente excluidos como causa del deterioro de la salud del rey. Tomando los edemas y la disnea como principales síntomas, se ofrece una nueva hipótesis sobre el fallecimiento del Rey: el fallo cardíaco. Palabras clave: Fernando el Católico, muerte, enfermedad, insuficiencia cardíaca, afrodisíacosNowadays, the knowledge about Ferdinand the Catholic is quite limited, especially on his last days and his death. According to the main historians, the obit of the king was caused by the massive use of aphrodisiacs due to the desire of fathering an heir with Germaine of Foix. The works of Pedro Mártir de Anglería offers much more data about the evolution of Ferdinand's disease that was never kept in mind. Through an interdisciplinary study, a systematic reading of the Epistolario letters of the lombard humanist has been carried out in order to describe a medical condition. Based on it, the thesis of abuse of aphrodisiacs has to be discard completly. As the oedemas and dyspnoea are the principal sytoms, a new hypothesis about the death of the Catholic King is offered: the heart failure. Key words: Ferdinand the Catholic, death, illness, heart failure, aphrodisiacs. (shrink)

Este estudio explora la formación en investigación educativa y su efecto en la productividad científica, a través de itinerarios y significados. Se entrevistaron y analizaron los relatos de 15 profesores de una facultad de educación en una universidad peruana en proceso de formación investigativa. Los hallazgos destacan diversas vías formativas con impacto directo en la producción científica, subrayando una inclinación por la colaboración en publicaciones y la relevancia de revistas científicas. Esto resalta la estrecha interconexión entre formación e investigación para (...) generar conocimiento que aborda cuestiones educativas. (shrink)

"Knowing how we know" is the subject of this book. Its authors present a new view of cognition that has important social and ethical implications, for, they assert, the only world we humans can have is the one we create together through the actions of our coexistence. Written for a general audience as well as for students, scholars, and scientists and abundantly illustrated with examples from biology, linguistics, and new social and cultural phenomena, this revised edition includes a new afterword (...) by Dr. Varela, in which he discusses the effect the book has had in the years since its first publication. (shrink)

We propose that to understand the biological and neurophysiological processes that give rise to human mental phenomena it is necessary to consider them as behavioral relational phenomena. In particular, we propose that: a) these phenomena take place in the relational manner of living that human language constitutes, and b) that they arise as recursive operations in such behavioral domain. Accordingly, we maintain that these phenomena do not take place in the brain, nor are they the result of a unique operation (...) of a human brain, but arise with the participation of the brain as it generates the behavioral relational dynamics that constitutes language. (shrink)

I do not wish to deal with all the domains in which the word time enters as if it were referring to an obvious aspect of the world or worlds that we human live. Indeed, the very fact that time can be made an issue of reflection shows us that what the word time connotes changes with the circumstances in which it is used. This situation alone, however, would not constitute a problem inviting us to enter in deep reflections if (...) we just accepted that the context defined the meaning of the word in each case. But we do not do that, and we ask the question what is time? as if we thought that the word time referred to some independent entity or dimension of nature that could be properly disclosed or described if we tried hard enough, even if we could not the final essence of it. I consider, however, that the question what is time? is adequate because it implies from the start the view that time can be properly treated as some kind of independent entity or dimension of nature. And I consider that such a view is fully inadequate because I think that all that we human beings talk about are relations that arises in our operation in language as a closed domain of recursive consensual coordinations of behaviors. Let me explain what I say with a few words about living, language, and cognition, and then answer the question what distinctions do we make or connote when we talk of time? (shrink)

The answers to these two questions would have been obvious years ago: Human beings, of course, machines are instruments of human design! But now days when we speak so much of progress, science and technology as if progress, science and technology were in themselves values to be venerated, there are many people that think that machines as they become more and more complex and intelligent through human design, may in fact become alive so that they may supplant us as a (...) natural outcome of that very venerated progress and expansion of intelligence. Also many people seems to think that evolution is changing its nature so that technology is becoming the guiding force in the flow of the cosmic change in relation to us. I do not hold this view. I do not look at progress, science or technology as if they were values in themselves, nor do I think that biological or cosmic evolution is changing its nature or character. I think that the question that we human beings must face is that of what do we want to happen to us, not a question of knowledge or progress. The question that we must face is not about the relation of biology with technology, or about the relation between art and technology, nor about the relation between knowledge and reality, nor even about whether or not metadesign shapes our brains. I think that the question that we must face at this moment of our history is about our desires and about whether we want or not to be responsible of our desires. (shrink)

Our purpose in this essay is to introduce new concepts in a wide and recursive view of the systemic consequences of the following biological facts that I and we have presented that can be resumed as: that as living systems we human beings are molecular autopoietic system; that living systems live only as long as they find themselves in a medium that provides them with all the conditions that make the realization of their living possible, that is, in the continuous (...) conservation of their relation of adaptation to the circumstances in which they find themselves; that as a living system exists only in a relation of adaptation with the medium that operates as its ecological niche, its reproduction necessarily occurs as a process of systemic duplication or multiplication of the ecological organism-niche unity that it integrates; that the worlds of doings that we generate as languaging beings in our conversations, explanations, reflections and theories are part of our ecological niche; and that we human beings as living beings that exist in languaging, are biological–cultural beings in which our cultural and our biological manners of existences can be distinguished but cannot be separated. Of the systemic consequences of these biological facts that we consider in this essay, we wish to mention two as the principal: that the diversification of manners of living produced in biological evolution is the result of differential survival in a changing medium through the conservation of adaptation, and not through competitive survival of the best; and that we in our living as languaging human beings are the epistemological fundament of all that we do and know as such. (shrink)

editorial changes not yet reviewed by author Purpose My intent in this essay is to reflect on the history of some biological notions such as autopoiesis, structural coupling, and cognition, that I have developed since the early 1960’s as a result of my work on visual perception and the organization of the living. No doubt I shall repeat things that I have said in other publications (Maturana and Varela 1980 and 1988), and I shall present notions that once they are (...) said appear as obvious truisms. But the reader it is not invited to attend to the truisms, rather he or she is invited to attend to the consequences that they entail for the understanding of biological processes. After all, explanations or demonstrations always become self evident once they are understood and accepted. KEYWORDS Autopoiesis, structural coupling, cognition, explanations, self consciousness, 1. Autopoiesis 1.1 Origins of the notion In November 1960, a first year medical student asked me the question “What began three thousand eight hundred million years ago so that you can say now that living systems began then?” I realized that I could not properly answer that question, so I said “I cannot answer this question now, but if you come back next year I shall propose an answer then.” Thus I accepted the question of the student to be answered later, and as I did so, I accepted also the question for myself. I realized that to answer this question I had to create a living system, either conceptually or practically, because I had to be able to say what kind of systems were living system to be able to say how they began. While in the attempting to answer the dual questions of what kind of systems are living systems, and of how did they begin so that I could now speak of their origin, it became obvious to me that living systems exist as autonomous entities in the form of self contained closed molecular dynamics of self production, open to the flow of molecules through them. Indeed, one can say that living systems arose in the history of the earth in the moment in which some spontaneous networks of molecular autocatalytic processes became closed upon themselves.. (shrink)

We present a description of the Stern–Gerlach type experiments using only the concepts of classical electrodynamics and the Newton’s equations of motion. The quantization of the projections of the spin (or the projections of the magnetic dipole) is not introduced in our calculations. The main characteristic of our approach is a quantitative analysis of the motion of the magnetic atoms at the entrance of the magnetic field region. This study reveals a mechanism which modifies continuously the orientation of the magnetic (...) dipole of the atom in a very short time interval, at the entrance of the magnetic field region. The mechanism is based on the conservation of the total energy associated with a magnetic dipole which moves in a non uniform magnetic field generated by an electromagnet. A detailed quantitative comparison with the (1922) Stern–Gerlach experiment and the didactical (1967) experiment by J.R. Zacharias is presented. We conclude, contrary to the original Stern–Gerlach statement, that the classical explanations are not ruled out by the experimental data. (shrink)

En este trabajo nos proponemos analizar la doble función que cumple el relativismo: por un lado, constituye una crítica a la visión fundacionista que caracterizó a una parte importante de la filosofía de la ciencia contemporánea, específicamente el Positivismo Lógico y algunos de sus herederos. Por otra parte, ofrece una interpretación sobre los aspectos sincrónicos y diacrónicos de la ciencia, que se presenta como una alternativa a las principales caracterizaciones que se hicieron de la ciencia contemporánea, particularmente de su evolución, (...) en el ámbito de la filosofía. Aunque esta concepción relativista de la ciencia tiene múltiples expresiones, por la extensión de este trabajo, sólo nos ocuparemos de algunos aspectos relacionados con los componentes relativistas de la imagen de la ciencia que ofrece Thomas S. Kuhn. (shrink)

Purpose: To show how is it that that which we connote with notions of self and consciousness are configurations of sensorialities that arise in the flow of our living in recursive coordinations of doings which eventually they guide, and not entities independent of our doings. Approach: Following the consequences of our condition of structure determined systems that do not distinguish in the experience whether what they live is a perception or an illusion. Findings: That we human beings occur as relational (...) dynamics of recursive coordinations of feelings in which self and consciousness occur as configurations of sensorialities in the evanescent continuous present of the the changing flow of our living which they also guide. Practical Implications: Thinking, acting and reflecting in the awareness that self and consciousness are not physical entities or properties. (shrink)

Natura 2000 is a network of natural sites whose aim is to preserve species and habitats of relevance in the European Union. The policy underlying Natura 2000 has faced widespread opposition from land users and received extensive support from environmentalists. This paper addresses the ethical framework for Natura 2000 and the probable moral assumptions of its main stakeholders. Arguments for and against Natura 2000 were analyzed and classified according to “strong” or “weak” versions of the three main theories of environmental (...) ethics – anthropocentrism, biocentrism, and ecocentrism. Weak (intergenerational) anthropocentrism was found to underlie the Natura 2000 network itself and the positions of environmentalists, while strong (traditional) anthropocentrism pervaded the positions of economic developers. Land users seemed to fall somewhere between weak and strong anthropocentrism. The paper discusses the relation between ethics and different attitudes towards Natura 2000, highlighting some of the implications for the network’s ongoing implementation. It is shown that Natura 2000 achieves a strong reversal of the burden of proof from conservation to economic development and land use change under anthropocentrism. It is argued that the alleged theoretical divide between anthropocentrism and non-anthropocentrism in relation to the burden of proof does not seem to hold in practice. Finally, it is predicted that the weak versions of anthropocentrism, biocentrism, and ecocentrism, are likely to converge extensively in respect to nature conservation policy measures. (shrink)

Na medida em que o termo espiritualidade é em si mesmo ambíguo, o desafio específico da pesquisa em espiritualidade e saúde enquanto campo é definir de que maneiras o conceito ‘espiritualidade’ pode ser frutiferamente aplicado à saúde física e mental. Uma vez que a relatividade hermenêutica de um conceito humanístico tem de se relacionar com os resultados mensuráveis das ciências empíricas, algumas dificuldades inevitavelmente surgem. Isso não impediu, contudo, a formação de duas abordagens claramente definidas na pesquisa em espiritualidade e (...) saúde; uma a que poderíamos chamar hermenêutica-existencial e a outa mais relacionada às ciências da natureza. Por falharmos em distinguir essas opções, muitas das interações entre a ciência da religião ou os estudos da religião e a pesquisa em espiritualidade e saúde é prejudicada ao ponto da quase ausência de diálogo. Nosso intuito aqui é apresentar e conceituar as duas alternativas nos termos das ciências humanas. (shrink)

En el presente trabajo se propone un estudio comparativo de las producciones de algunos referentes de la Investigación Participativa. Se revisan algunos de los textos de Orlando Fals Borda, Paulo Freire, João Bosco Guedes Pinto, Michel Thiollent, María Teresa Sirvent y Joel Martí. Este trabajo se inscribe en el proceso reciente de transformación universitaria en Uruguay, en particular, en una de sus iniciativas: la de la integración curricular de la extensión a través de lo que se ha denominado “prácticas universitarias (...) integrales”. En este marco, la reflexión teórico-metodológica sobre la extensión crítica y las prácticas de investigación-acción conectadas con ella resultan fundamentales para dotar las iniciativas en curso de mayor pertinencia académica y potencial transformador. (shrink)

Este artigo pretende mostrar que Platão (427-348 a.C.), ao descrever Sócrates discutindo sobre o que é ser piedoso no diálogo Eutífron, já pensava sobre uma religião em conformidade com um discurso racional orientado pela natureza.

En la formación inicial docente, el estudio de la epistemología constituye una pieza fundamental para que los futuros profesores puedan filosofar sobre la realidad de los diversos contextos educativos y se pregunten cómo mejorarla desde los principios que rigen la investigación científica. De este modo, gracias al sustento epistemológico, los estudiantes de pedagogía pueden formarse como docentes investigadores capaces de analizar los cambios sociales propuestos por las múltiples realidades y conocer cómo se construye el conocimiento científico de una especialidad dada. (...) La finalidad de este trabajo, es presentar una reflexión filosófica-epistemológica sobre la imperiosa necesidad de desarrollar el conocimiento epistemológico en la formación inicial del profesorado de matemática e historia, considerando los fundamentos disciplinares, pedagógicos y cognitivos de dichas áreas. (shrink)

This essay is part of a special issue celebrating 50 years of Political Theory. The ambition of the editors was to mark this half century not with a retrospective but with a confabulation of futures. Contributors were asked: What will political theory look and sound like in the next century and beyond? What claims might political theorists or their descendants be making in ten, twenty-five, fifty, a hundred years’ time? How might they vindicate those claims in their future contexts? How (...) will the consistent concerns of political theorists evolve into the questions critical for people decades or centuries from now? What new problems will engage the political theorists (or their rough equivalents) of the future? What forms might those take? What follows is one of the many confabulations published in response to these queries. (shrink)

Philosophers such as Elizabeth Anscombe and Donald Davidson have explained that we cannot derive predictions from judgments such as "he boasted from vanity." Such judgments are also the source of countless painful mistakes. However, are they necessarily unreliable? Often enough, even if only gradually and partially, we get people right. Assuming that we do is already assuming that there must be a connection, if not causal then at least casual, between what a person is, what she does, and how she (...) acts; and that we may describe it correctly. If no ironclad generalizations can be made that connect the way a person is, her reasons, and her actions, how might we describe correctness in judgments such as this?Anscombe... (shrink)

Here they are revised notions of the Western tradition that conform the discourse of poetic reason, and the way that Maria Zambrano assumed them. Her thought examines the possibilities of the words, either poetic or philosophical, to allow persons to get conscience. She attempts to unify both types of words using a notion of love as essential intent for dealing with the otherness, allowing, also, the human being conscious reflection on the affectivity. To achieve this, she revises culture to find (...) ideas and examples to support the poetic reason as loving and hopeful reflection and as a possibility of the humanity to know about its own feelings. (shrink)

A abordagem deste artigo trata de uma busca pelo sentido ontológico da vida humana em relação ao seu modo de ser e estar no mundo e com o mundo. Partindo de uma breve contextualização sobre a vastidão do cosmos, mostramos, direta e indiretamente, o paradoxal legado da ciência moderna que, de um lado, hoje evidencia nossa insignificância diante da infinitude do universo e, de outro, promoveu antinomias sociais por sua incansável busca pela dominação da natureza. O resultado desse processo é (...) um antropocentrismo desastroso em relação às questões ambientais. O ensaio, eminentemente teórico, promove um diálogo, a múltiplas vozes, na tentativa de angariar fundamentos éticos e epistemológicos para a Educação Ambiental. Trata-se de um estudo de metodologia bibliográfica. Destarte, em nossa abordagem, a filosofia figura com seu papel de buscar permanentemente pelo sentido e significado da vida, dos fenômenos humanos e não humanos. Defenderemos a tese de que é necessário e emergente o reconhecimento da esfera noológica da humanidade, pois se continuarmos a negligenciá-la incorreremos no risco de mantermos sufocado o lado demens do ser humano. Amparados pelas contribuições do pensador francês Edgar Morin, buscamos fundamentos filosóficos para a Educação Ambiental por querermos afirmá-la como campo de saberes e conhecimentos que promovem a busca pelo sentido da vida e a compreensão sobre a condição humana nacontemporaneidade. A ciência moderna promoveu a matematização e o desencantamento do mundo, fazendo com que o epíteto sapiens de nossa nomenclatura taxonômica ganhasse a companhia do epíteto degradandis. Para que seja possível a revitalização dos sentidos sobre a existência humana, é necessário que o epíteto sapiens seja acompanhado, metaforicamente, da desinência demens. Palavras-chave: Educação Ambiental. Ética. Epistemologia. Filosofia. (shrink)

Neste artigo, objetivamos investigar os desafios da compreensão da complexidade imanente às múltiplas realidades. Metodologicamente, dada a natureza teórica do ensaio, fomos acompanhados pelas reflexões de Edgar Morin sobre "O Método". Tomamos como ponto de partida a ruptura entre as ciências da natureza e as ciências do espírito que, por consequência, encerraram a ciência e a filosofia em compartimentos disciplinares aparentemente incomunicáveis. Com vistas à superação deste isolamento, reivindicamos uma hermenêutica da complexidade de modo que possamos compreender as relações, colaborações (...) e complementações intrínsecas aos diferentes conhecimentos e saberes. (shrink)

Diante das presentes dificuldades de fundamentação da ética, ocasionadas pelas cisões necessárias, mas logo extrapoladas, entre natureza e subjetividade, conhecimento e ação, muitos pensadores têm se voltado para a grande síntese tomasiana do pensamento ocidental. Com numerosas releituras nos campos da ética, do direito, da epistemologia e da metafísica, o pensamento tomasiano vive sem exageros uma pequena renascença, particularmente em língua inglesa, ensejando inúmeras abordagens revisionistas, históricas ou adaptações às pesquisas da filosofia e da teologia analíticas. Mais como informativo deste (...) processo do que como análise sistemática, elencamos aspectos centrais da ética tomasiana e seus fundamentos metafísicos de acordo com autores contemporâneos que participam desta renovação do tomismo, buscando evidenciar a importância da disposição natural do ser humano para moralidade neste quadro teórico. (shrink)

Zygon®, Volume 57, Issue 1, Page 46-59, March 2022.

La disolución del poder colonial en la América española creó una serie de interrogantes respecto al ordenamiento jurídico-político de los futuros estados soberanos. En este sentido, Simón Bolívar (1783–1830) insistió en la idea de que el control político de los territorios liberados por él debía estar al mando de un poder central conservador capaz de garantizar los derechos ciudadanos sin menoscabo de la estabilidad sociopolítica del orden republicano. Aunque algunos aspectos del ideario constitucional bolivariano resultaron inaceptables para sus contemporáneos, sus (...) medidas para asegurar el goce de los derechos civiles y políticos de los americanos se ajustaban a la realidad social de su tiempo. Con base en una amplia consulta bibliográfica, el presente artículo examina la concepción bolivariana del cuerpo político a la luz de las circunstancias sociohistóricas a las que el Libertador debió hacer frente. (shrink)

O Brasil foi um dos maiores traficantes de africanos destinados à escravidão nas Américas; e a Bahia um dos seus principais destinos. Porém, juntamente com a escravidão, os africanos trouxeram também a rebelião. Uma das principais formas de negação da escravidão pela revolta trazida pelos negros africanos às Américas foi o quilombo. O artigo discute as mudanças ocorridas na literatura histórica sobre a escravidão e suas formas de negação após o centenário da abolição, em 1988. O quilombo de Palmares surgido (...) no interior de Alagoas em finais do século XIV, veio a se constituir, durante o século XVII, no maior e mais bem organizado quilombo das Américas. Visto de formas diferentes pela historiografia ao longo do tempo, Palmares acabou por se transformar, no imaginário dos explorados de todos os matizes e dos negros de forma especial, num dos maiores símbolos de liberdade e de resistência a qualquer forma de exploração, opressão e discriminação. Palavras-chave: Escravidão; negros; quilombo de Palmares; resistência. (shrink)

This article inquires whether or not religious beliefs are rational, that is to say, whether or not they can be rationally sustained. The point of the article is not to prove the existence of God, but rather simply to show whether or not religious language has real meaning. To do this, we shall examine the concept of belief in general. Then we shall look at religious beliefs in particular from two opposing points of view: on the one hand, from the (...) position of authors who claim that religious beliefs can in fact be sustained by rational evidence, and on the other hand, from the perspective of other authors who affirm that these beliefs cannot be rationally justified, because spiritual discourse refers to the ineffable, which deprives it of the means to verify or deny its propositions. (shrink)

A pesar de los importantes cuestionamientos que han sido realizados a la “Teoría” de la Transición Demográfica, ésta continúa representando el marco interpretativo más usualmente utilizado por los investigadores de la temática poblacional, los cuales tratan de enriquecerla con lo “observado” en diferentes contextos, buscando las regularidades de las problemáticas poblacionales manifestadas en los mismos con lo acontecido en otras regiones, generalmente de países desarrollados. En tal sentido en el presente artículo se analizan aspectos demográficos o sociales poco explorados, en (...) el marco de dicha teoría, que no obstante, pueden haber tenido un peso importante en la explicación de los cambios poblacionales tales como la sexualidad y la nupcialidad y asociado a ello el comportamiento reproductivo de las mujeres así como las relaciones de violencia en el marco de la familia y la afectación de todo ello a grupos vulnerables como son los jóvenes. El interés de análisis se centra en los aspectos referidos, considerando como contexto espacial a los estados limítrofes con los Estados Unidos, en los que los indicadores sociodemográficos sugieren un relativamente avanzado proceso de transición demográfica, lo que pudiera estar vinculado a la influencia norteamericana, escenario que es complejizado por una intensa corriente migratoria desde otras partes del país hacia la región del norte de México. (shrink)

A contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium on xenophilia, this article examines the travelogue of Mirza Abu Taleb ibn Muhammed Isfahani, the Muslim Indo-Persian scholar, poet, and Lucknow nobleman who sympathized with the Irish during his travels to England and Ireland in 1799–1802. Translated from Persian to English by an Irish scholar working for the British East India Company, Charles Stewart, and published in London in two editions, The Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb Khan records the author's love for the (...) Irish and theirs for him. This mutual xenophilia, the article argues, is politically motivated by Abu Taleb's strong, but mostly tacit, reservations about the English, his imperial patrons. He realigns the relationship between metropole and colony by casting Ireland as the bridgehead of a glorious Islamic-Persianate culture that spread westward, a transcultural fantasy that takes two forms. First, the unconditional hospitality Abu Taleb experiences among his Irish and Anglo-Irish hosts leads him to imagine a linguistic-ethnic kinship between ancient Celts and Persians, recalled in the similarities he sees between a subimperial capital, Dublin, and an Indian Mughal city, Lucknow. Second, in his detailed account of a patriotic performance that he attended in Dublin of the British siege of Seringapatam in 1799, he identifies with the skeptical audience who, he assumes, are self-conscious about this propagandistic medium. (shrink)