When we judge an action as morally right or wrong, we rely on our capacity to infer the actor's mental states. Here, we test the hypothesis that the right temporoparietal junction, an area involved in mental state reasoning, is necessary for making moral judgments. In two experiments, we used transcranial magnetic stimulation to disrupt neural activity in the RTPJ transiently before moral judgment and during moral judgment. In both experiments, TMS to the RTPJ led participants to rely less on the (...) actor's mental states. A particularly striking effect occurred for attempted harms : Relative to TMS to a control site, TMS to the RTPJ caused participants to judge attempted harms as less morally forbidden and more morally permissible. Thus, interfering with activity in the RTPJ disrupts the capacity to use mental states in moral judgment, especially in the case of attempted harms. (shrink)

El presente estudio analiza los recientes discursos sobre las guerras actuales. Hemos podido identificar dos tipos de argumentaciones, una proveniente del ámbito belicista y otro del ámbito humanitarista. El primero de estos discursos defiende explícitamente las intervenciones militares y recurre a nociones como el poder y la hegemonía. El segundo en cambio apela a la defensa de valores universales, la democracia y los derechos humanos. No obstante, aun partiendo de posturas teóricas opuestas (incluso enfrentadas), finalmente confluyen en la normalización y (...) legitimación de los conflictos actuales. Así pues, en ambos casos, quedan legitimadas las guerras desde posiciones teóricas opuestas, y además bajo esas teorizaciones quedan relegadas otras opciones no bélicas. Por ello el propósito del presente texto es realizar un repaso y balance de esas teorizaciones, puesto que, aparte de animar el debate intelectual actual, tienen una importante influencia práctica en la forma de concebir los conflictos internacionales (e incluso los conflictos sociales), en los que se juegan la vida de miles de personas. (shrink)

Regularization may be used as an alternative to dimensionality reduction when the number of variables in a model is much larger than the number of available observations. In a recent study from our group regularized regression was employed to quantify brain functional connectivity in a sample of healthy controls using a brain parcellation and resting state fMRI images. Here regularization is applied to evaluate resting state connectivity abnormalities at the voxel level in a sample of patients with schizophrenia. Specifically, ridge (...) regression is implemented with different degrees of regularization. Results are compared to those delivered by the weighted global brain connectivity method, which is based on averaged bivariate correlations and from the non-redundant connectivity method, a dimensionality reduction approach that applies supervised principal component regressions. Ridge regression is able to detect a larger set of abnormally connected regions than both GBC and NRC methods, including schizophrenia related connectivity reductions in fronto-medial, somatosensory and occipital structures. Due to its multivariate nature, the proposed method is much more sensitive to group abnormalities than the GBC, but it also outperforms the NRC, which is multivariate too. Voxel based regularized regression is a simple and sensitive alternative for quantifying brain functional connectivity. (shrink)

Joan Robinson was one of the greatest economists of the twentieth century and a fearless critic of free-market capitalism. A major figure in the controversial 'Cambridge School' of economics in the post-war period, she made fundamental contributions to the economics of international trade and development. In Economic Philosophy Robinson looks behind the curtain of economics to reveal a constant battle between economics as a science and economics as ideology, which she argued was integral to economics. In her customary vivid (...) and pellucid style, she criticizes early economists Adam Smith and David Ricardo, and neo-classical economists Alfred Marshall, Stanley Jevons and Leon Walras, over the question of value. She shows that what they respectively considered to be the generators of value - labour-time, marginal utility or preferences - are not scientific but 'metaphysical', and that it is frequently in ideology, not science, that we find the reason for the rejection of economic theories. She also weighs up the implications of the Keynesian revolution in economics, particularly whether Keynes's theories are applicable to developing economies. Robinson concludes with a prophetic lesson that resonates in today's turbulent and unequal economy: that the task of the economist is to combat the idea that the only values that count are those that can be measured in terms of money. This Routledge Classics edition includes a new foreword by Sheila Dow. (shrink)

La ciudadanía y lo político. Ciudadanía y crisis de la democracia liberal en un mundo en transformación es un texto provocador, que desafía directamente a las esferas de poder económico, político y social en el marco de la corrupción. Deja al descubierto las entrañas cancerígenas de una política enferma de poder, donde priman los intereses particulares o políticos sobre los intereses del pueblo. El libro es una lanza que atraviesa las profundidades que erosionan nuestra sociedad, realizando así un análisis riguroso (...) desde distintas aristas, que tienen un elemento común: la corrupción política. A lo largo de las páginas se ofrece un enorme panorama sobre el papel de la ciudadanía dentro de la sociedad, que reclama a gritos una revolución desalienante frente a la cleptoestructura. Es así como, el papel de la ciudadanía es el centro de la reflexión analítica que nos presenta Joan Lara Amat y León. (shrink)

Anthony Grafton, like Jacob Burckhardt before him, begins his appreciation of Leon Battista Alberti by reviewing how the fifteenth‐century Italian author created a many‐faceted identity through willful self‐fashioning. Grafton, however, offers the reader a much richer Bildungsroman than the older portrait and exposes many forces undercutting the monolithic character of Burckhardt's Renaissance, the same forces that may provide a key to the contrary and doubt‐ridden persona frequenting Alberti's writings. Alberti's ambitions and the leitmotifs of his life from his youthful (...) aspirations to their later glorious fulfillment are laid out in stunning detail.Moving well beyond the unrelenting brightness of Burckhardt's presentation, Grafton also attempts to fuse what have become for scholars the dramatic polarities of Alberti's enigmatic personality. An ambitious scholar and writer on academic subjects, on the visual and practical arts, Alberti was a lover of nature and a sensitive commentator on aesthetic, familial, and cultural ideals. He was also given to irony, despair, and bitter isolation. Grafton makes a strong case for Alberti's dependence on an unwavering determination that compelled him to assume many guises and foster numerous strategies to achieve his literary, social, and economic goals. As his friend Cristoforo Landino once noted, Alberti was like a chameleon. In Grafton's hands, however, Alberti remains dazzlingly inventive and radically humanist, and he endures as appropriately leonine and the hero of his own tale.With a predictable outpouring of references, Grafton evokes Alberti's social, political, and intellectual world and, reprising his earlier writings, develops several themes. These include Alberti's literary erudition and the high price he paid to achieve it; how Alberti applied the lessons of ancient sources to the problems of his own world, and in so doing subverted those lessons to create something new; how the humanist author developed special vocabularies for writing about such novel subjects as the visual arts, instruments of measure, and other current technologies; and, perhaps most surprisingly for a man given to bitterly mocking his contemporaries, how Alberti became involved in the creative energy of early modern life with apparent enthusiasm and accomplished the astonishing feat for a humanist of becoming a practicing architect.Grafton finds Alberti's confidence in a material culture driven by technology, theoretical knowledge, and careful observation expressed forcefully in the dedicatory letter of his essay On Painting addressed to the builder Filippo Brunelleschi. Brunelleschi deserved to be praised not for slavishly drinking from the fountain of the ancients, but for the brilliance of his intelligence and the successful application of his knowledge. Further, by requesting that the architect emend his essay, Alberti, the scholar, is shown to have treated Brunelleschi, the builder, as an equal and thereby to have elevated all technical knowledge. Alberti cleverly places himself within the circle of the ingenious engineers who were masters of practical knowledge based on underlying principles and therefore at the forefront of an intellectual parade led by its most renowned practitioner. One wonders, perhaps, what Brunelleschi at the height of his fame might have desired to learn from the audacious savant.As Alberti masters how to make his way in Florence and among the elegant courts of his day, he is seen to revisit the themes of his youthful writings with ever‐deepening insight. Grafton's reflections on Alberti and Florence, though generally convincing, have been greatly enriched by Luca Boschetto's recent book devoted to that subject . In addition, some of Grafton's notions about the influence of On Painting as centered in courtly art seem to reach beyond the evidence and the explicit directives found in Alberti's writings.The reader interested in Alberti's involvement in science and technology will still want to consult Joan Gadol's Leon Battista Alberti: Universal Man of the Early Renaissance , and the lack of a general bibliography will be an irritation to those who like to follow an author's research trail, the trekker in this case having to stumble through a thicket of footnotes. Nonetheless, Grafton has created a richly drawn portrait of Alberti. Scholar and student alike will garner much that is important about this immensely gifted and mercurial man whose writings continue to influence our understanding of the beginnings of early modernity. (shrink)

Telic monism in logic is the thesis that there is one single philosophically primary goal to logic. A different way to put it is that there is only one canonical application to logic. This thesis is widely present—implicitly or more explicitly—in the literature on the philosophy of logic, yet has not been examined nor argued for extensively. In this paper I will present and critically examine telic monism. One prominent candidate for the canonical application of logic, namely the formal codification (...) of logical consequence in natural language, will be challenged directly. The critique will then be generalized by appealing to a practice-based philosophy of logic. The general argument I put forth here claims that we have no principled reason to assume there to be just one primary goal to logic. Rather, I claim that it is more plausible that there actually is a variety of goals, purposes and applications to logic, without one of them enjoying primacy over the others. If this argument succeeds, at least one of the consequences is that it allows for a kind of logical pluralism that has previously been deemed insignificant, namely logical instrumentalism. (shrink)

A posteriori physicalism is the combination of two appealing views: physicalism (i.e. the view that all facts are either physical or entailed by the physical), and conceptual dualism (i.e. the view that phenomenal truths are not entailed a priori by physical truths). Recently, some philosophers such as Goff (2011), Levine (2007) and Nida-Rümelin (2007), among others, have suggested that a posteriori physicalism cannot explain how phenomenal concepts can reveal the nature of phenomenal properties. In this paper, I wish to defend (...) a posteriori physicalism from this new and interesting challenge, by arguing that a posteriori physicalists have the resources to explain how phenomenal concepts can reveal at least something of what it would take for the corresponding phenomenal property to be instantiated. (shrink)

In this paper, a general perspective on criteria of identity of kinds of objects is developed. The question of the admissibility of impredicative or circular identity criteria is investigated in the light of the view that is articulated. It is argued that in and of itself impredicativity does not constitute sufficient grounds for rejecting a putative identity criterion. The view that is presented is applied to Davidson’s criterion of identity for events and to the structuralist criterion of identity of places (...) in a structure. (shrink)

In this article, we reflect on the use of formal methods in the philosophy of science. These are taken to comprise not just methods from logic broadly conceived, but also from other formal disciplines such as probability theory, game theory, and graph theory. We explain how formal modelling in the philosophy of science can shed light on difficult problems in this domain.

This article aims, first, to describe some of the main features of Latour’s actor network theory. Second, it shows how the practice of writing nature could be seen as a precursor to the actor network theory. Third, some Deleuzian and Harman concepts are outlined, which could be useful for future actor network theories. And finally, this work argues that making an actor network theory implies a series of fundamental changes in the practice of literary and cultural studies, as well as (...) in the practice of the humanities and social sciences in general. (shrink)

The gender-based wage gap in Swedish banks began to increase in 1983 after many years of decline. The growth in the gap between the wages of nonmanagerial women and men employees was particularly high. This article asks, How did this happen? Wage setting, part of the processes of control in capitalist economies, is accomplished through concrete practices under specific historical conditions. The author studied these practices and conditions to understand the increasing wage gap. Through interviews and examination of union and (...) management documents, the author constructs an account of a wage-setting process that, in spite of a strong union and centralized bargaining, allows management to make discretionary wage decisions that favor raises for men over raises for women. Since 1983, competition and deregulation in the banking sector as well as union strategies have created conditions in which an increasing proportion of annual wage increases have been distributed on a discretionary basis. This has led to an increase in the wage gap. The author concludes that policies to raise women's relative wages should pursue general, across-the-board bargaining rather than individualized wage setting. (shrink)

If history is to be taken seriously as a cognitive - not merely literary - discipline to which considerations of truth or falsity are relevant, it is because of the progress made over the course of centuries in the sharpening of the methodology of the infrastructure of history. By not attending to the way in which the historical past actually emerged in the course of work at the level of the infrastructure, philosophical writers, such as Mandelbaum, Pompa, McCullagh, and Gorman, (...) have tended to perpetuate a myth of historians' selection. This has been the basic impediment to epistemology in philosophy of history. There is no selection from an antecedently established stock of fact-containing statements. The facts and the account are constructed in the course of the same intellectual endeavor, within the framework of an historians' tradition that is shaped by their work. (shrink)

In the Introduction to her recent translation of the Poetics, Miss Hubbard astutely recognizes the intellectual orientation of Aristotle's aesthetic theory. She observes that for Aristotle the concept of mimesis is intimately connected with that of mathesis and thus that the basic pleasure of art is the intellectual pleasure involved in learning. She then correctly identifies two levels of the learning process involved in mimesis: on a lower level it signifies the way in which children learn their first lessons but (...) on a much more sophisticated plane it denotes a process by which our understanding of ‘moral facts and moral possibilities’ is deepened. She perceptively concludes that if art is to achieve the goal set for it by Aristotle, it must have a significant relationship to ultimate truth. (shrink)

In this article ideas from Kit Fine’s theory of arbitrary objects are applied to questions regarding mathematical structuralism. I discuss how sui generis mathematical structures can be viewed as generic systems of mathematical objects, where mathematical objects are conceived of as arbitrary objects in Fine’s sense.

Prior studies suggest that firms headquartered in areas with strong religious social norms have higher ethical standards. In this study, we examine whether the ethical standards associated with local religious norms influence the M&A announcement returns. We document that the M&A announcement returns of acquirer firms increase with the strength of religious social norms in the area surrounding firms’ headquarters. We also document that the relationship is attenuated when acquirer firms have strong corporate social responsibility credentials, is amplified when public (...) trust that firms act in the best interest of stakeholders suffers a negative shock and when the M&A deal has greater economic significance for the acquirer, and manifests predominantly in the lower tail of the distribution of M&A returns. Our findings are consistent with investor assessments of firms’ ethical standards driving the relationship between local religious social norms and M&A announcement returns. We find no evidence for the competing explanation—that investor assessments of firms’ risk preferences drive the documented relationship. (shrink)

La correspondance entre Descartes et Huygens, quoique maintenant absorbée dans le corpus général des lettres de Descartes, garde son intérêt et son importance propre. A part son caractère unique, comme série complète de lettres échangées entre deux hommes d’une distinction si différente, elle nous montre avec quelle précaution il nous faut accepter le texte des lettres de Clerselier et le récit de Baillet sur la vie de Descartes en Hollande. Et comme toutes les vies de Descartes reposent finalement sur Clerselier (...) et Baillet, notre Correspondance nous montre qu’il est nécessaire d’examiner à nouveau tout le problème. (shrink)

In this paper I attempt to o f fer a concept of discretion and to an a l yse the forms of control that can be e x ercised in this matte r . F rom the concept of l e g al ce r taint y , w e can obse r v e h o w discretion eme r ges in those cases that are e n visaged b y the norms and in the so called hard cases. (...) F requent l y it is maintained h o w e v e r , that, the on l y limit on discretion can be found in arbitrariness and that, apa r t from that, a n y decision w ould be co r rect. This could result in e xcluding discretiona r y decisions from l e gal control. A g ainst this opinion, there are authors that think that l e gal control of discretionary decisions is possi b le because th e y defend the e xistence of on l y one co r rect an sw e r . Other authors reject the e xistence of on l y one co r rect an sw er or the possibility of f inding it. N e v er theless, e v en accepting that there are some aspects of discretiona r y decisions that do not der i ve from l e gal no r ms bu t from personal preferences, those preferences must be coherent with some theo r y that contains no r mat i v e l y co r rect criteria. These criteria must be as coherent as possi b le with the dominant system of v alues in the socie t y. (shrink)