The argument put forward by this article is not that democratization does not benefit from the activity of a vibrant civil society, but rather that academic research should address this relationship in a critical way. This article maintains that one should take care to distinguish between 'civil society' as an ideal-type concept that embodies the qualities of separation, autonomy and civil association in its pure form, and the factual world of 'civil societies' composed of associations that embody these principles to (...) varying degrees. At the same time, one should avoid a kind of triumphalism about civil society as a necessary source of democratic energy with homogenous goals and principles; in a word, one should avoid a theory of civil society that privileges civil society (Fine 1997). A first problem seems to be mainly definitional: what is meant by civil society? By reviewing the most relevant literature on democratization, the first part of this article discusses the main assumptions regarding the role of civil society as a democratizing power, namely its apolitical nature, its deep 'civil' stand and its relationship with the state. In the second part, the article utilizes the case of South African civil society as a relevant example of how difficult and nuanced the relationship between civil society organizations and democratization can be, with special regard to the process of democratic deepening and social emancipation. (shrink)

What role does habit formation play in the development of sport skills? We argue that motor habits are both necessary for and constitutive of sensorimotor skill as they support an automatic, yet inherently intelligent and flexible, form of action control. Intellectualists about skills generally assume that what makes action intelligent and flexible is its intentionality, and that intentionality must be necessarily cognitive in nature to allow for both deliberation and explicit goal-representation. Against Intellectualism we argue that the habitual behaviours that (...) compose skilful action are accompanied by their specific, non-cognitive form of intentionality: this is motor intentionality, which is purposive and adaptive while involving no explicit deliberation or goal representation. Our account of habit based on Motor Intentionality explains why the formation of motor habits can sometimes act as the sole basis of skilful acquisition: Motor Intentionality is inherently purposeful because it is an embodied source of sensorimotor anticipation, pre-reflective motivation, and pragmatic know-how. Skill development through exercise always builds on a motor intentional component even when it is guided by Deliberate Practice to the point that, pace Intellectualism, Deliberate Practice is disclosed, not constrained, by habit formation. As suggested by the fact that repetitive exercises can play a major role in the development of flexible and intelligent sport skills, automatism is not a drawback for strategic control and improvisation but rather their pragmatic foundation. (shrink)

What is street art? This paper offers a definition of street art as an art kind or art form based on its essential value: its subversiveness. It argues that street art is essentially subversive in virtue of using public space as a technical resource. By hijacking a portion of the urban landscape with its colourful forms and witty designs, street art challenges familiar ways of practising the city, while creating a ‘temporary autonomous zone’ of free expression. There, corporate control over (...) the city’s visible surfaces is ridiculed and people reclaim their right to use the city. In this sense, street art functions as a carnivalesque tactic of social resistance, favouring the emergence of alternative ways to imagine our urban life and our uses of public space. By considering its subversiveness, one can also explain how street art (i) significantly differs from official public art; (ii) includes graffiti as its original and most radical style. (shrink)

Dispositionalism, perhaps the most popular variant of non-Humean metaphysics, submits that dispositions, powers, or capacities, are part of the furniture of the world. In this book I advance an original approach to dispositionalism revolving around the notion of Dispositional Reality; the novelty lies in the fact that the account, unlike most alternatives on the market, does not require the reification of objects, facts, properties, nor their dispositional essences – and is in fact compatible with a far more deflationary approach to (...) dispositions, while still being true to the non-Humean spirit of the proposal. This power metaphysics without powers allows one to dispel several puzzles in recent literature, or recast them under a new light. Albeit with its own peculiarities, this proposal constitutes a variant of explanatory dispositionalism, according to which realism about dispositions ought not to be understood as an ontological inflation, but as an explanatory inversion within the nomic and modal family. Some of these explanations are hereby attempted, and a study of various types of non-causal explanation will be provided. (shrink)

Automatic identification system is a vessel tracking system, which since 2004 has become a global tool for the detection and analysis of seagoing traffic. In this article, we look at how this technology, initially designed as a collision avoidance system, has recently become involved in debates concerning migration across the Mediterranean Sea. In particular, after having briefly discussed its emergence and characteristics, we examine how through different practices of appropriation AIS, and the data it generate, have been seized upon, both (...) to contest and to sustain the exclusionary nature of borders, and the mass dying of migrants at sea to which it leads. We do so by referring to forms of data activism we have contributed to in the frame of our Forensic Oceanography project as well as to situations in which AIS has been mobilized by xenophobic groups to demand even stronger exclusionary measures. At the same time, we point to the multiplicity of actors who participate in the politics of migration through AIS in unexpected ways. We conclude by highlighting the irreducible ambivalence of practices of appropriation and call for persistent attention to one’s own positioning within the global datascape constituted by AIS and other data. (shrink)

The discussion about the relationship between tone at the top and financial reporting practices has been primarily focused on the oversight role played by the board of directors and other structural elements of corporate governance. Another relevant determinant of tone at the top is the corporate narrative language, since it is a fundamental way in which the chief executive officer enacts leadership. In this study, we empirically explore the association between financial reporting aggressiveness and five thematic indicators capturing different traits (...) of ethical leadership from 535 annual letters to shareholders. We find that aggressive financial reporting is positively associated with CEO letters using a language which is resolute, complex, and not engaging. Our empirical findings highlight the importance of examining discretionary corporate narratives for the auditing process and the role of tone at the top in influencing accounting practices. (shrink)

According to the most common interpretation of the simulation argument, we are very likely to live in an ancestor simulation. It is interesting to ask if some families of simulations are more likely than others inside the space of all simulations. We argue that a natural probability measure is given by computational complexity: easier simulations are more likely to be run. Remarkably this allows us to extract experimental predictions from the fact that we live in a simulation. For instance we (...) show that it is very likely that humanity will not achieve interstellar travel and that humanity will not meet other intelligent species in the universe, in turn explaining the Fermi's Paradox. On the opposite side, experimental falsification of any of these predictions would constitute evidence against our reality being a simulation. (shrink)

This study uses a Corpus Assisted Discourse Studies methodology to provide the first systematic analysis of how trust is discursively constructed in crypto-drug markets. The data come from two purpose-built corpora. One comprises all the forum messages posted on the flag ship crypto-drug market Silk Road during the years in which it traded on the hidden net. The other corpus comprises all the reports published by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime during the same period. Our analysis of (...) trust focuses on the identities of those buying and selling drugs. The findings reveal that the Silk Road community members regularly discussed vendors’ identities alongside a continuum of trust–risk calculation, explicitly identifying both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ practices and hence engaging in self-regulatory discourses, and mainly constructed drug users’ identities in relation to values of expertise, integrity and benevolence. The findings also suggest that hard law enforcement activity, such as crypto-drug market closure, may encourage technological innovation within these markets. Moreover, our results show a disconnect between the discursive reality of the policy-making documents we examined and the very crypto-drug markets that they seek to legislate. (shrink)

The “origins” of (geometric) space is examined from the perspective of the so-called “conceptual space” or “semantic space”. Semantic space is characterized by its fundamental “locality” that generates an “implicit” mode of geometrizing. This view is examined from within three perspectives. First, the role that various diagrammatic entities play in the everyday life and pragmatic activities of selected ethnic groups is illustrated. Secondly, it is shown how conceptual spaces are fundamentally linked to the meaning effects of particular natural languages and (...) these are very different from the global and universal aspects of Euclidean spaces. Thirdly, it is contended that these modes of creating body and culture-based spatial frameworks and related cosmogonies and cosmologies can be described as forms of “latent geometry” that initially appear unexplainable in any rational way. Nonetheless, and thanks to the deep mathematical reflections provided by René Thom, it is illustrated how the various ways of generating space can be further analyzed as distortions of mainstream spatialization furnished by Euclidean geometry that established the dominant universality of the ideas of space (and time). (shrink)

The standard representation of the Central Dogma (CD) of Molecular Biology conspicuously ignores metabolism. However, both the metabolites and the biochemical fluxes behind any biological phenomenon are encrypted in the DNA sequence. Metabolism constrains and even changes the information flow when the DNA‐encoded instructions conflict with the homeostasis of the biochemical network. Inspection of adaptive virulence programs and emergence of xenobiotic‐biodegradation pathways in environmental bacteria suggest that their main evolutionary drive is the expansion of their metabolic networks towards new chemical (...) landscapes rather than perpetuation and spreading of their DNA sequences. Faulty enzymatic reactions on suboptimal substrates often produce reactive oxygen species (ROS), a process that fosters DNA diversification and ultimately couples catabolism of the new chemicals to growth. All this calls for a revision of the CD in which metabolism (rather than DNA) has the leading role. (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)

The present collection of essays honours John Woods on the occasion of his eightieth birthday from contributors who wish to pay homage to this remarkable researcher whom they see not only as a scholar of prodigious energy and insight, but as a friend, colleague, collaborator, or former teacher. All of the essays touch upon topics Woods has taken a direct or indirect interest in, ranging from technical problems of mathematical logic and applications of formal methods through philosophical logic, philosophy of (...) language, epistemology and history of ancient and modern logic. The sections themselves of the book cover relevance, paradoxes, inconsistency, fallacies, abduction, fictions, logic naturalized, law, argumentation and narratives, and many other topics: and represent the main research areas which have profited from Woods' reflections. (shrink)

The phenomenological method, characterized by the suspension of judgment (epoché), has helped analyzing the subjective experience of patients affected by mental disorders. Psychiatry, dealing with the human being itself in its complexity and unicity, is placed between the biological positivistic attempt, for which the symptoms of mental illness are a mere consequence of brain dysfunctions and the phenomenological-existential approach, inclined to consider the symptoms as meaningful phenomena of the person’s subjective experience. Eugène Minkowski, Ludwig Binswanger, Arthur Tatossian, Kimura Bin, Henri (...) Maldiney and Hubertus Tellenbach are fundamental authors in the phenomenological psychopathology of depression; they described the alterations of the lived time, space, body and others experienced by the depressed. Starting from the main theoretical contributions of the authors, we will focus on the psychopathology and discuss the key themes of clinical depression: guilt, poverty and hypochondriasis. Finally we will focus on the typus melancholicus construct. (shrink)

We define a direct translation from finite rooted trees to finite natural functions which shows that the Worm Principle introduced by Lev Beklemishev is equivalent to a very slight variant of the well-known Kirby-Paris' Hydra Game. We further show that the elements in a reduction sequence of the Worm Principle determine a bad sequence in the well-quasi-ordering of finite sequences of natural numbers with respect to Friedman's gapembeddability. A characterization of gap-embeddability in terms of provability logic due to Lev Beklemishev (...) is also presented. (shrink)

Complementarity tells us we cannot know precisely the values of all the properties of a quantum object at the same time: the precise determination of one property implies that the value of some other (complementary) property is undefined. E.g. the precise knowledge of the position of a particle implies that its momentum is undefined. Here we show that a Schrödinger cat has a well defined value of a property that is complementary to its “being dead or alive” property. Then, thanks (...) to complementarity, it has an undefined value of the property “being dead or alive”. In other words, the cat paradox is explained through quantum complementarity: of its many complementary properties, any quantum system, such as a cat, can have a well defined value only of one at a time. Schrödinger’s cat has a definite value of a property which is complementary to “being dead or alive”, so it is neither dead nor alive. Figuratively one can say it is both dead and alive. While this interpretation only uses textbook concepts (the Copenhagen interpretation), apparently it has never explicitly appeared in the literature. We detail how to build an Arduino based simulation of Schrödinger’s experiment based on these concepts for science outreach events. (shrink)

It is widely assumed that functional and dispositional properties are not identical to their physical base, but that there is some kind of asymmetrical ontological dependence between them. In this regard, a popular idea is that the former are realized by the latter, which, under the non-identity assumption, is generally understood to be a non-causal, constitutive relation. In this paper we examine two of the most widely accepted approaches to realization, the so-called ‘flat view’ and the ‘dimensioned view’, and we (...) analyze their explanatory relevance in the light of a number of examples from the life sciences, paying special attention to developmental phenomena. Our conclusion is that the emphasis placed by modern-day biology on such properties as variability, evolvability, and a whole collection of phenomena like modularity, robustness, and developmental constraint or developmental bias requires the adoption of a much more dynamic perspective than traditional realization frameworks are able to capture. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The World Of Desire:Lacan Between Evolutionary Biology and Psychoanalytic TheoryLorenzo Chiesa (bio)The primary aim of this paper is to analyse the biological foundations of Lacan's notion of desire as expounded in his first two Seminars (1953-1955). These works provide us with his most detailed discussion of the species-specific preconditions that allow Homo sapiens to speak and establish symbolic pacts among individuals. Despite its irreducibility to the domain of animal (...) instincts, human desire can only be adequately understood against the background of an evolutionary enquiry on the emergence of language, one that problematises both the implicit teleological assumptions of a certain Darwinism and the logical consistency of an investigation of origins. Drawing on organic and anatomical evidence endorsed by natural scientists as different as Stephen Jay Gould and Adolf Portmann, Lacan postulates a primordial biological discord between man and his environment, centred on premature birth and a subsequent disorder of the imagination, from which language and the Symbolic immanently arise.1 Desire is seen in this context as coextensive with what, especially in Seminar I, Lacan repeatedly refers to as "the world of the symbol," or "the symbolic world"—a crucial phrase, rich with philosophical implications, to which critics have not yet [End Page 200] paid sufficient attention.2 The most important point to be grasped here is that the symbolic order is a world in the sense that, in always presenting itself to man as a totality, a uni-verse, it compensates for the failure of a strictly 'natural' relationship between man as animal and his environment. Yet, in performing this function, the Symbolic also amounts to nothing other than 'human nature' tout-court.3 In other words, the Symbolic is an exceptional and to a certain extent autonomous pseudo-environment that must nevertheless be interpreted by means of biological concepts.4 For this reason, the very opposition between nature and culture is as such put into question and re-proposed at a different level.5Lacan's seminars and articles of the early to mid-1950s are usually read from the standpoint of the notions of 'empty' and 'full' speech in their relation to the Kojèvian dialectic of the recognition of desire. While not underestimating the importance of this first formulation of desire as desire of the other, I intend to dwell especially on its biological presuppositions, since Lacan will maintain them—often to the point of taking them for granted—even after abandoning the notions of 'empty' and 'full' speech. This will also enable me to show that the supposedly Hegelian Lacan of this period is already preoccupied with a materialist explanation of language and of human desire as desire for recognition, both of which are framed within the context of a virulent anti-teleological, anti-humanist, and anti-vitalist polemics.It is, however, paramount to pre-emptively specify that my new approach to Seminars I and II does not intend to deny the impasses of Lacan's early notion of desire as a desire for recognition, which I have thoroughly discussed in Subjectivity and Otherness.6 In brief, the problem with Lacan's appropriation of Kojève is that, at this stage, the mutual recognition of one's desire is identified with the subject's fully successful integration into the symbolic order. What is not sufficiently stressed in this way—yet not entirely overlooked—is the incompleteness of the latter, the fact that man's pseudo-environment presents itself as a totality only insofar as it is structurally not-all. The [End Page 201] elaboration of a meticulous theoretical distinction between need, demand, and desire carried out in Seminars IV and V, as well as a direct confrontation with the Real as the not-all of the Symbolic in Seminar VII, will later oblige Lacan to reconsider this harmonic view. By the early 1960s, full integration in the Symbolic will be explicitly regarded as impossible and the dialectic of desire will consequently be focused on the level of the subject's mapping of himself as falling onto the object of the repressed fantasy.IIAccording to Lacan, man is born prematurely, that is, with "foetalised traits,"7 which are especially... (shrink)

Firstly, this contribution proposes to address synthographies – images generated through Text-to-image technologies – by deepening the epistemological shift related to the possibility of transposing the image-creation process from the analogue arts to the notational ones (or, by drawing on Nelson Goodman's terminology, from the “autographic” to the “allographic” forms of art). Secondly, the paper highlights how synthographies can be considered partly autographic and partly allographic, since the linguistic prompts constitute only the notational aspect of the generated images. Furthermore, this (...) contribution argues that the recent critiques around such images, which referenced aspects related to the absence of authorial presence and mechanicality, characterised the history of photography since its beginning. Finally, the contribution explores how the possibility to create synthographies that are almost indistinguishable from photographies easily might further separate the interaction between the detective and the depictive functions to the advantage of the latter, erasing what remains of the visual reliability and documental value of images. (shrink)

Firstly, this contribution proposes to address synthographies – images generated through Text-to-image technologies – by deepening the epistemological shift related to the possibility of transposing the image-creation process from the analogue arts to the notational ones (or, by drawing on Nelson Goodman's terminology, from the “autographic” to the “allographic” forms of art). Secondly, the paper highlights how synthographies can be considered partly autographic and partly allographic, since the linguistic prompts constitute only the notational aspect of the generated images. Furthermore, this (...) contribution argues that the recent critiques around such images, which referenced aspects related to the absence of authorial presence and mechanicality, characterised the history of photography since its beginning. Finally, the contribution explores how the possibility to create synthographies that are almost indistinguishable from photographies easily might further separate the interaction between the detective and the depictive functions to the advantage of the latter, erasing what remains of the visual reliability and documental value of images. (shrink)

Este artigo trata da possibilidade de renovar o entendimento da eugenia no mundo contemporâneo. A biologia e a genética são fontes científicas da eugenia, mas não fazem parte de seu núcleo filosófico. Essa é a razão pela qual vemos a ontologia subjacente à eugenia como nossa principal preocupação. O estatuto da eugenia como uma prática está mudando rapidamente e a vida é tanto o objeto como a dimensão oculta dessa mudança. Entendida por meio da história dos seres, a dispersão da (...) ontologia permite um entendimento renovado tanto da humanidade quanto da animalidade. Como se pode entender que uma ciência completamente reconhecida no início do século XX se tenha tornado uma prática silenciosa no século XXi? A disseminação das novas técnicas genéticas e a discrição atual acerca da eugenia parecem estar ligadas ao avanço de sua reabilitação. Ainda estamos em um estágio inicial de nosso entendimento da genética humana. Não há razão para pensar que esse conhecimento não será explorado pela eugenia. A plasticidade de nossa condição humana encontra nisso uma de suas possibilidades. This article is about the possibility of renewing the understanding of eugenics in contemporary world. Biology and genetics are scientific resources of eugenics, but they are not alone at its philosophical core. This is the reason why we regard the ontology behind eugenics as our main concern. The status of eugenics as a practice is rapidly changing, and life is both the object and the hidden dimension of this change. Understood through the history of being(s), ontology's dispersion allows a renewed understanding of both humanity and animality. How can we understand that a fully recognized science at the beginning of the twentieth century became a silent practice of the twenty-first century? The dissemination of new genetic techniques and today's discretion with respect to eugenics appear to be connected within steps towards its rehabilitation. We are still at an early stage of our understanding of human genetics. There's no reason to think that such knowledge will not be explored through eugenics. After all, the plasticity of our human condition finds in it one of its possibilities. (shrink)

Lars von Trier’s Antichrist (2009) has often been described as a ‘gothic’, if not straightforwardly ‘horror’ movie. While this claim could easily be challenged with regard to strict genre definitions, it is doubtless the case that the film deals very explicitly with fear, first and foremost the female protagonist’s fear of herself, which is placed at the top of the so-called ‘pyramid of fear’ drawn by her therapist/wanna-be-Saviour partner. My opinion is that Antichrist perfectly displays the horrific effects of the (...) direct embodiment, following a true love encounter, of the symbolic positions which Lacan associated with male and female sexuation. If human sexuality relies on the logic for which there is only one mythical man who is truly whole while every real woman is not wholly whole, what happens when He and She (the nameless protagonists of the movie) fully identify with such irreducible asymmetry between the sexes, its fundamental derailment from nature? They short-circuit the material singularity of a specific human animal with the abstract universality of gender. With the same move, they cannot overcome (or sublimate) the realisation that, in the female protagonist’s own words, woman is ‘evil’ – as long as she feels guilty of what man accuses her – and man is a ‘bastard’ – haunted by the phantasm of unifying purity which woman disrupts. Gynocide as male totalizing extermination of universal difference and genital self-mutilation as female reflexive hatred for the supposedly exceptional man mark the sadomasochistic extremes of the scene of the not-two, the frightening ob-scenity ( o-skené ), or off-representation, of human sexuality. (shrink)

1. Introduzione Dalla pubblicazione de La costruzione della realtà sociale di John Searle sono oramai passati più di dieci anni. In questo periodo il dibattito è stato così intenso da arrivare a definire una vera e propria disciplina filosofica: la cosiddetta “ontologia della realtà sociale”. Nonostante gli studi in quest’ambito si siano concentrati su aspetti anche molto distanti fra di loro (dalla normatività degli atti istituzionali alla possibilità d’esistenza dell’intenzionalità colletti...

En el problema filosófico sobre la existencia de Dios se levanta, por la parte negativa, un famoso argumento, conocido ya y contestado desde antiguo, pero que algunos siguen exhibiendo triunfalmente como prueba irrecusable de ateísmo... Es de una forma u otra el argumento que se apoya en la existencia del mal.Pero son muy pocos los que han tomado la molestia de hacer un análisis racional de dicho argumento y de sus nada claras presuposiciones. Es lo que ahora vamos a intentar, (...) con la brevedad que impone este tipo de escritos y con la claridad que la dificultad misma del tema lo permita, aparte de la imbecilidad propia del autor.. (shrink)

A major study of Futurist movement of Marinetti in the Rio de la Plata region (Argentina, Uruguay and the qualities that unite two cultures, in this case, beween Italian Futurism, and the vanguard of the Rio de la Plata (Buenos Aires and Montevideo). With a wide variety of reproductions of photographs, paintings, magazine covers and books and documents in general, the author shows what was meant in this movement and what were their influences and impacts on the Rio de la (...) Plata. (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)

1 Introduzione Per Searle, la realtà sociale è un enorme ontologia invisibile che comprende obblighi, promesse, matrimoni, proprietà, governi e in generale tutti quegli enti che non sono solamente fisici, tangibili, ma neppure esclusivamente mentali, privati. Alla sua base c’è la capacità intrinseca all’uomo di attribuire funzioni agli oggetti che lo circondano. La costruzione della realtà sociale è precisamente un processo attraverso il quale l’intenzionalità umana dispone della possibilità,...

Le volume offre huit articles sur le scepticisme pyrrhonien. Les essais, de la plume de M. Bonazzi, T. O’Keefe, J. Warren, F. Grgić, H. Thorsrud, S. Marchand, D. E. Machuca et O. Bueno, sont tous en anglais. Précédés d’une préface, d’une notice sur les auteurs et d’une brève introduction, ils sont suivis d’index des noms propres, des passages et des sujets. Chaque contribution est munie d’une bibliographie. Les deux premiers articles sont consacrés à la section des Esquisses Pyrrhoniennes (PH...

En Una Teoría de la Justicia (A Theory of Justice, 1971), la justicia —sus dos principios— viene a regular los intereses, fundamento y motor de la sociedad y del individuo ralwsianos. No obstante, tal regulación —individualista— preserva y favorece la libertad máxima individual, de modo que ésta, sin embargo, no llegue a alterar el orden social. Sobre la moralidad que Rawls propone, ante todo, hay que saber que la justicia como imparcialidad (Justice as fairness como él llama a su teoría) (...) no pretende la completa especificación de la conducta, sino más bien aproximarse a unos límites, a un marco dentro de los cuales los individuos y asociaciones son libres de perseguir sus fines (Rawls, 1978: 566). Acaso sean la indefinición o la poca importancia de pensar acerca de dichos fines los que hagan considerar a Rawls la moralidad como una simple preferencia (1978: 244), rasgo común en las tradiciones con las que se relaciona (utilitarismo y contractualismo). El concepto de bien se halla implícito en toda la teoría de la justicia de Rawls y sus conceptos (sociedad, individuo, deber, etc.), y, por tanto, en muchos debates que Rawls ha generado, aunque, a nuestro juicio, no ha sido examinado con suficiente detenimiento. El análisis que se propone discurre por tres temas distintos: el contexto del concepto de bien, la teoría específica (del bien) y la teoría general (del bien), para terminar con la conclusión. (shrink)