The aim of this paper is to show the unity and consistency of Kant’s reflections throughout all three sections of the Canon of Pure Reason. More specifically, I argue that Section 3, which is devoted to the issue of Fürwahrhalten, or taking-to-be-true, is crucial to achieving the methodological goal of the Canon, which is to justify the legitimacy of the speculative assumptions of pure reason. After examining the historical roots of Kant’s notion of a transcendental doctrine of method, I focus (...) on the methodological role that the practical element plays in the first two sections of the Canon. I then show how the limitations of Kant’s argument necessitate the introduction of a third crucial section, which serves both an analytic and an orientative function. (shrink)

In Part I of this paper, we identified and compared various schemes for trivalent truth conditions for indicative conditionals, most notably the proposals by de Finetti and Reichenbach on the one hand, and by Cooper and Cantwell on the other. Here we provide the proof theory for the resulting logics DF/TT and CC/TT, using tableau calculi and sequent calculi, and proving soundness and completeness results. Then we turn to the algebraic semantics, where both logics have substantive limitations: DF/TT allows for (...) algebraic completeness, but not for the construction of a canonical model, while CC/TT fails the construction of a Lindenbaum-Tarski algebra. With these results in mind, we draw up the balance and sketch future research projects. (shrink)

In recent years, a new dispute has risen to prominence: the dispute between realists and anti-realists about causal powers. Albeit sometimes overlooked, the meta-ontological features of this “question of realism for powers” are quite peculiar. For friends and foes of causal powers have characterized their contrasting views in a variety of different ways; as existence claims, as semantic or truth-making claims, as fundamentality claims, as claims about the nature of certain properties. Not only does this multiplicity of interpretations make it (...) unclear what the genuine bone of contention is, if there is one; some of them appear to be mutually exclusive. Some light can be shed on this apparent yet widespread confusion by distinguishing three degrees of ontological involvement in dispositional truths; viz., three ways, of increasing robustness, to read ontological commitments from dispositional truths. Relatedly, by exploring the literature, and focusing on some selected examples of power realism and anti-realism, we can observe that power realists vastly disagree over the intrinsic nature ad make-up of dispositional properties. Such examples furthermore invite the thought that the question of realism for powers is best understood not as the debate around the existence of properties with a distinctive identity, but rather as a debate about metaphysical hierarchy. Finally, some anti-realists positions are indistinguishable from realist ones, using merely intensional resources: power realism is best appreciated by going hyperintensional. (shrink)

The paper deals with a method of hierarchization of alternatives in a multicriteria environment by means of statistical nonparametric procedures. For each criterion, alternatives are disposed on an ordinal scale. After that a procedure similar to ANOVA is activated on the data. The differences relating to the average ranks of each action are used to build the hierarchical algorithm. The concept of outranking, in a probabilistic meaning, is reached in this way. Thereafter, we arrive at the concept of dominance using (...) pairwise comparisons. A case study is presented which implements the methodological suggestion. (shrink)

There are various forms of teleological thinking central to debates in the early modern and modern periods, debates in which David Hume (1711–1776) is a key figure. In the first section, we shall introduce three levels at which teleological considerations have been incorporated into philosophical accounts of man and nature, and sketch Hume’s criticisms of these approaches. In the second section, we turn to Hume’s non-teleological ‘science of man’. In the third section, we show how Hume has an account of (...) human flourishing that is not dependent on teleology. In the fourth section, we shall speculate as to the relation between Hume’s account of human nature and contemporary evolutionary accounts of morality and reasoning. (shrink)

Worldwide, vulnerable neighbourhoods of large cities are often the scene of collective violent conflicts linked with migration and ethnic minorities’ struggles for social justice. However, urban conflicts of this kind have not taken place in Spanish cities with high immigration rates, even though the country has been deeply affected by two recent socioeconomic crises (2009 and 2020). This article reports findings of a study aimed at understanding what lies behind this apparent social peace. The research methodology was based on an (...) analysis of secondary socio-economic and socio-relational data from the Spanish Institute of Statistics and from key national surveys and reports. Results confirmed that immigrant population living in the country are strongly segregated in the lower strata of the labour and socioeconomic structure and have been disproportionately affected by the crises. However, research findings also pointed to the existence of strong closed support networks where social capital has been effective at palliating members’ disadvantage and unrest. Drawing on the Theory of Rupture Frames, we argue that this is a fragile and unsustainable social peace, rooted in social injustice, and anticipate that unless actively prevented, uncontrolled conflict will eventually emerge in main cities’ neighbourhoods in Spain. (shrink)

We use nonstandard methods, based on iterated hyperextensions, to develop applications to Ramsey theory of the theory of monads of ultrafilters. This is performed by studying in detail arbitrary tensor products of ultrafilters, as well as by characterising their combinatorial properties by means of their monads. This extends to arbitrary sets and properties methods previously used to study partition regular Diophantine equations on. Several applications are described by means of multiple examples.

We characterize (both from a syntactic and an algebraic point of view) the normal K4-logics for which unification is filtering. We also give a sufficient semantic criterion for existence of most general unifiers, covering natural extensions of K4.2⁺ (i.e., of the modal system obtained from K4 by adding to it, as a further axiom schemata, the modal translation of the weak excluded middle principle).

Spirituality is an area of interest for management and business. But two issues confront it: the struggle to be amidst a utilitarian framework where spirituality is reduced as a means to forward profit-oriented goals and difficulty with spirituality’s subjective and multifaceted nature in business management. Challenges abound in determining which spirituality is appropriate. Business scholarship is dominated by a utilitarian view, which some more philosophically oriented scholars have opined to be counterintuitive to the real purpose of workplace spirituality. But some (...) recognize the significance of pragmatic and useful approaches, which this paper views as something integrated into the more philosophic approaches, particularly through virtue ethics. Thus, the authors offer the case for virtue, examined in the person of Corazon C. Aquino, Asia’s first woman president, who successfully bridged the gap between the sacred and secular. To appease both utilitarian and more metaphysical orientations, this research stipulates that for every value-added service rendered to others, there is a corresponding virtue enhancement in the person. (shrink)

The aim of the study is to determine the association between Behavioral Lifestyles and longevity in the elderly. A search strategy was conducted in the PsycInfo, Medline, PubMed, Web of Science, and Scopus databases. The primary outcome was mortality/survival. Four variables were analyzed to evaluate the role of potential moderators. Ninety-three articles, totaling more than 2,800,000 people, were included in the meta-analysis. We found that the lifestyles analyzed predict greater survival. Specifically, doing regular physical activity, engaging in leisure activities, sleeping (...) 7–8 h a day, and staying outside the BMI ranges considered as underweight or obesity are habits that each separately has a greater probability associated with survival after a period of several years. (shrink)

Voces técnicas mínimas que forman el lenguaje filosófico, extraídas de los libros de Filosofía de Bachillerato, Ética y textos de COU.

In this essay, I offer a vindication of pride. I start by presenting the Christian condemnation of pride as the cardinal sin. I subsequently examine Mandeville’s line of argument whereby pride is beneficial to society, although remaining a vice for the individual. Finally, I focus on, and endorse, the analysis of pride formulated by Hume, for whom pride qualifies instead as a virtue. This is because pride not only contributes to making society flourish but also stabilizes the virtuous agent by (...) creating a virtuous circle between our desire for self-appraisal and our aspiration to act morally. I conclude by underscoring the (virtuous) connection between pride and modesty, concomitantly arguing that humility should be discarded as vicious. (shrink)

The Experience Machine The experience machine is a thought experiment first devised by Robert Nozick in the 1970s. In the last decades of the 20th century, an argument based on this thought experiment has been considered a knock-down objection to hedonism about well-being, the thesis that our well-being—that is, the goodness or badness of our … Continue reading The Experience Machine →.

In this paper I would like to reconstruct Patočka’s effort to give a faithful account of the phenomena, without betraying these phenomena with an objectivistic theory of perception. Only by remaining close to the things themselves will we be able to understand them as an appeal, as a call, while understanding ourselves as a response to this call. On the basis of this “ontological rehabilitation of the sensible”, which reveals Patočka’s affinity with Merleau-Ponty as much as his departure from Husserl, (...) I will criticize the idealism of Husserlian phenomenology and reconsider the a priori of correlation in a different fashion. World and subject will then find a different articulation, grounded in the ontological couple of movement and feeling. The analysis will consist of three parts: in the first part I will introduce the problematic of the opposition between phenomenological and physical space; the second part will deal with the notion of movement; the third part will concentrate on Patočka’s new account of subjectivity, the a-subjective cogito, arising precisely from the fundamental coupling of κίνησις and πάθος. Embodiment, qua original phenomenon, will be constantly present in the background of this analysis. (shrink)

L'image de l'écriture est singulièrement fréquente dans des explications cognitivistes du fonctionnement de l'esprit, non seulement comme métaphore mais également comme paradigme conceptuel: la machine de Turing, en particulier, montre un isomorphisme structural complet avec l'utilisation de l'écriture alphabétique. La machine de Turing effectue exactement les mêmes opérations effectuées par un homme écrivant avec le stylo et le papier et cela dépend de deux raisons: 1. il a été conçu dans l'image et la similarité de la pratique concrète humaine de (...) l'écriture ; 2. c'est le produit typique de la rationalité occidentale, dont le développement n'a été rendu possible que par les caractères spécifiques du traitement alphabétique de l'information. Ces aspects sont utiles pour comprendre la raison pour laquelle l'esprit a commencé à être dépeint comme machine d'écriture au moment même où l'alphabet a commencé à se diffuser: une recherche généalogique montrera comment, dans des traités de mnémotechniques et dans la métaphysique de Platon et d'Aristote, nous pouvons trouver la toute première base de chaque modèle logicosymbolique de l'esprit. (shrink)

Our brains make up a series of signs and are engaged in making or manifesting or reacting to a series of signs: through this semiotic activity they are at the same time engaged in “being minds” and so in thinking intelligently. An important effect of this semiotic activity of brains is a continuous process of “externalization of the mind” that exhibits a new cognitive perspective on the mechanisms underling the semiotic emergence of abductive processes of meaning formation. To illustrate this (...) process I will take advantage of the analysis of some aspects of the cognitive interplay between internal and external representations. I consider this interplay critical in analyzing the relation between meaningful semiotic internal resources and devices and their dynamical interactions with the externalized semiotic materiality suitably stocked in the environment. Hence, minds are material, “extended” and artificial in themselves. A considerable part of human abductive thinking is occurring through an activity consisting in a kind of reification in the external environment and a subsequent re-projection and reinterpretation through new configurations of neural networks and chemical processes. I also illustrate how this activity takes advantage of hybrid representations and how it can nicely account for various processes of creative and selective abduction, bringing up the question of how multimodal aspects involving a full range of sensory modalities are important in hypothetical reasoning. (shrink)

A genealogical account of state sovereignty explores the ways in which the concept has emerged, evolved, and is in decline today. Sovereignty has a theological foundation, and is deeply bound up with the idea of God, in particular a voluntarist God, presented as being capable of intervening directly in the world. Religious conflicts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries forced the separation between religion and politics, and opened the space for the emergence of a national state endowed with sovereignty which (...) has dominated the world until now. Today’s rise of international and transnational obligations challenges the conventional understanding of state sovereignty, which cannot account for the normative density of the global order and the corresponding decline of state-based political authority. In order to explain that, I contrast two competing understandings of state sovereignty: a static one and a dynamic one. The static understanding regards sovereignty as absolute within the state territory. The dynamic understanding regards sovereignty as evolutionary: according to this account, the state is just one possible form that sovereignty can take. I conclude by suggesting that the dynamic understanding of state sovereignty is better suited to explaining the decline of state sovereignty. (shrink)

El concepto de virtud de Alasdair MacIntyre ha recibido, por parte de la crítica, un tratamiento no sistemático y poco profundo. En concreto, la virtud de la prudencia ha recibido escasa atención. La prudencia es una virtud muy importante en el pensamiento de MacIntyre, aunque el autor no la haya analizado de manera unitaria y sistemática. Sus principales propuestas sobre el ser humano y la investigación moral no pueden ser comprendidas sin la virtud de la prudencia. El objetivo de este (...) artículo es ofrecer una exposición y un análisis de dicha virtud en el pensamiento de MacIntyre. (shrink)

Alexander Gebharter has recently proposed to use Bayesian network causal discovery methods to identify the constitutive dependencies that underwrite mechanistic explanations. The proposal depends on using the assumptions of the causal Bayesian network framework to implicitly define mechanistic constitution as a kind of deterministic direct causal dependence. The aim of this paper is twofold. In the first half, we argue that Gebharter’s proposal incurs severe conceptual problems. In the second half, we present an alternative way to bring Bayesian network tools (...) to bear on the issue of understanding mechanistic constitution. More precisely, our proposal interprets constitution as the relation explaining why a target phenomenon has its characteristic causal role in terms of the causal roles of some of its spatiotemporal parts---where the notion of causal role is probabilistically understood. (shrink)

Is what psychoanalysis calls the ‘absence of the sexual relationship’ the basic transcendental invariant of the speaking animal? Or should it be understood as a historical product? Also, assuming that language is structurally incomplete, and therefore that Homo sapiens cannot avoid the dialectic of semblance and truth, does this necessarily entail that the absence of meta-language always correspond to the absence of the sexual relationship? In this article I will show how, in his Seminars of the late 1960s and early (...) 1970s, Lacan develops two different narratives. (shrink)

'We are all Greeks. Our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts, have their root in Greece', the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley once wrote. It is in Greek that the questions which shaped the destiny of Western culture were asked, and so were the first attempts at an answer, and the search for a method of investigation. This book tries to rediscover the propulsive force that for over two millennia spread, and still lives in our system of thought. By systematically (...) quoting the very words of the leading actors and by tracing their sources, it leads the reader along a path where they will be able to observe the establishment of philosophical ideas and language, in an updated and balanced picture of archaic lore, of the thought of the classical and hellenistic ages, and of the philosophy of late antiquity. The book looks closely at the progress of scientific thought and at its increasing autonomy, while following the evolution of the fruitful yet problematic relationship between the Greek world and the Near East. (shrink)