The autopoietic theory and the enactive approach are two theoretical streams that, in spite of their historical link and conceptual affinities, offer very different views on the nature of living beings. In this paper, we compare these views and evaluate, in an exploratory way, their respective degrees of internal coherence. Focusing the analyses on certain key notions such as autonomy and organizational closure, we argue that while the autopoietic theory manages to elaborate an internally consistent conception of living beings, the (...) enactive approach presents an internal tension regarding its characterization of living beings as intentional systems directed at the environment. (shrink)

The scale is the most famous emblem of the law, including intellectual property (IP). Because IP rights impose social costs on the public by limiting access to protected work, the law can be justified only to the extent that, on balance, it encourages enough creation and dissemination of new works to offset those costs. The scale is thus a potent rhetorical trope of fairness and objectivity, but also an instrument the law thinks with – one that is constantly invoked to (...) justify or to question the extent of available IP protection. The balancing act that underlies the legitimacy of IP is, however, literally impossible to perform. Because we are unable to measure the benefits that IP has for inventors or the costs it has for the public, the scale has nothing to weigh. It conveys a clear sense that IP law can be balanced, but in fact propagates only a visible simulacrum of balance – one that is as empty as it is powerful. (shrink)

A discussion concerning whether to conceive Artificial Intelligence systems as responsible moral entities, also known as “artificial moral agents”, has been going on for some time. In this regard, we argue that the notion of “moral agency” is to be attributed only to humans based on their autonomy and sentience, which AI systems lack. We analyze human responsibility in the presence of AI systems in terms of meaningful control and due diligence and argue against fully automated systems in medicine. With (...) this perspective in mind, we focus on the use of AI-based diagnostic systems and shed light on the complex networks of persons, organizations and artifacts that come to be when AI systems are designed, developed, and used in medicine. We then discuss relational criteria of judgment in support of the attribution of responsibility to humans when adverse events are caused or induced by errors in AI systems. (shrink)

The many constraints of outer space experience challenge the human ability to coexist. Paradoxically, astronauts assert that on the international space station there are no conflicts or, at least, that they are able to manage their differences, behavioral as well as cognitive, in full respect of human rights and the imperatives of cooperative living. The question is: Why? Why in those difficult, a-terrestrial, and therefore almost unnatural conditions do human beings seem to be able to peacefully and collaboratively live together? (...) What is there beyond terrestrial boundary conditions that allows for such a result? And what can we learn from the astronauts’ experience about the effectiveness of human rights on Earth? My proposal is that the a-terrestrial dimension deeply alters the mind/body indexical framework and, in this way, disentangles the human inclination to semiosis from the cognitive and behavioral habits of categorization and territorialization inherent in the experience on Earth. If analyzed through the spectrum of an interdisciplinary approach involving anthropology, semiology, law, and human geography, I think that outer space enterprises can offer many insights into the cognitive and ethical/political hindrances to the effectiveness of human rights and their intercultural uses. Meanwhile the compulsive greed for a possessive territorialization of outer space and celestial bodies is growing by leaps and bounds. It haunts and imbues both astropolitics and space law. The astronauts’ semio-anthropological experience of human rights and cooperative coexistence seems to have been left in orbit. The future requires awareness and action by anthropologists, semioticians, cognitive scientists, geographers and lawyers, working all together in an interdisciplinary effort to move beyond approaching the experiential with a territorial mindset. The hope is that the “dark dream” of human exploitation/colonization of outer space will not turn from a political and legal speculation into a future reality. (shrink)

Historians of science and technology and STS practitioners have always taken intellectual property very seriously but, with some notable exceptions, they have typically refrained from looking “into” it. There is mounting evidence, however, that they can open up the black box of IP as effectively as they have done for the technosciences, enriching their discipline while making significant contributions to legal studies. One approach is to look at the technologies through which patent law construes its object – the invention – (...) in specific settings and periods by examining procedures, classifications, archives, models, repositories, patent specifications (in both their linguistic and pictorial dimensions), and the highly specialized language of patent claims. More ambitiously, we could treat intellectual property as a technology itself. Patent law does not evolve either by merely articulating its doctrine in response to technological developments. The line between what does and does not count as invention may be redrawn with the emergence of new objects and technologies, but is not determined by them. It is this constructive feature of the law that we are trying to capture with the notion of law as technology. We hope that thinking about the technologies of the law and the law as technology will bring into question what we mean by both “technology” and “law”. (shrink)

Quantum electrodynamics presents intrinsic limitations in the description of physical processes that make it impossible to recover from it the type of description we have in classical electrodynamics. Hence one cannot consider classical electrodynamics as reducing to quantum electrodynamics and being recovered from it by some sort of limiting procedure. Quantum electrodynamics has to be seen not as a more fundamental theory, but as an upgrade of classical electrodynamics, which permits an extension of classical theory to the description of phenomena (...) that, while being related to the conceptual framework of the classical theory, cannot be addressed from the classical theory. (shrink)

This paper considers Carson’s rewriting of Heracles’ tragic madness— through the art of collage, an assembling and disassambling of textual fragments, scraps of papers, drawings, chromatic smears, and sketches—as an imagistic site for theorizing the anti-normative materiality, physical and metaphysical, of par-a-noia. I make a case for a materiality of par-a-noia by proposing a comparison with Alain Badiou’s Marxist political formalism. The distinctive formal trait of H of H, verbal and pictorial juxtaposition, invites us to think of par-a-noia as an (...) aesthetico-political radicality located on the edge of a voiding of thought (noein), a radicality that, as I suggest at the end, can be aligned with modes of non-normate cognition, with neuroqueer countersociality. (shrink)

En este artículo se presenta una exposición sistemática del concepto de ideología que Luis Villoro construye a lo largo de su trayectoria filosófica, como base para plantear la crítica de las ideologías y la crítica de la forma-ideología en tanto tarea práctico-social del pensamiento filosófico, en ..

In 1951 Eric Voegelin dedicated a long and very dense essay to the Utopia of Thomas More, subsequently integrated in a larger portrait of the Renaissance political thought. The critical interpretation of Voegelin focuses on the breakdown of the traditional order and the emerging of a new vision of Man and Politics in the early sixteenth century, and particularly on the risks related to the mundane eschatology of which the work of More is involuntary and somewhat inconsistent anticipation.

In present times, social changes affect our ethos; it is a time plenty of issues and disputes on traditional ethical conceptions as well as on present ones which try to give ethical responses to new situations. With the aim of exploring a possibility of thinking our present, I will here try to explore the interpretation matrix with which modern ethos has been articulated, and which -with some modifications- still finds its way into present times. Starting from this precision, I will (...) move forward along a route of inquiry which opens up to us when we do not place ourselves from the point of view of "God's eye", i.e., when we cease to focus our reflections on what I have called the theological problem of modernity, and instead deal with the problem of the social construction of moral norms. The attempt to give reason of a secular moral position -freed from the presuppositionsof the beginnings of modern times- will lead to the distinction between moral, understood as a human group's customs and habits and ethics as the critique of established moral. I will hold that the construction of moral norms comes into play in the tension between moral and ethics.En nuestro presente, los cambios sociales afectan a nuestro ethos, así como abundan los cuestionamientos y disputas sobre las concepciones éticas tradicionales y también sobre las actuales propuestas que intentan dar respuestas éticas a las nuevas situaciones. Con el objeto de explorar una posibilidad de pensar nuestra actualidad, trataré aquí de precisar la matriz de interpretación con la que se ha articulado el ethos moderno y que perdura con modificaciones hasta nuestros días. A partir de tal precisión, avanzaré por un camino de indagación que se abre cuando no nos ubicamos en la perspectiva del "ojo de Dios", esto es, cuando dejamos de centrar la reflexión en el que he llamado problema teológico de la modernidad, para ocuparnos del problema de la construcción social de las normas morales. El intento por dar cuenta de una moral secular que no quede lastrada con presupuestos de los inicios de la modernidad, llevará a diferenciar entre la moral, entendida como los usos y costumbres de un grupo humano, y la ética como crítica de la moral establecida. En la tensión entre moral y ética sostendré que se juega la construcción de las normas morales. (shrink)

The paper intends to bridge the existing gap between aesthetic knowledge and contemporary society. The first part focuses on the cultural turn in aesthetics, the roots of which can already be found in the English criticism of the eighteenth century. This enterprise is inspired by a methodology that regards aesthetics as a "meeting place" of many disciplines and varying cultural traditions. A second type of cultural turn is carried out by writers (e.g. Baudelaire): the target of their polemic is the (...) concept of aesthetic disinterestedness. According to them, the beautiful, instead, has to create the greatest interest because it is none other than the promise of happiness. However, the two different approaches are not so incompatible as seems at first sight. Finally, the text focuses on the New Age and the culture of performance, which, even if presenting opposite traits, have one thing in common: they translate at the empirical and factual level experiences that originally belonged to another sphere, namely the spiritual and the symbolic. (shrink)

The text is looking for a political explanation of the turn in Western attitude to pornography which has taken place since the sixties and even more so since the seventies. More surprising than the liberalization of pornography itself appears the massive pornographic self-exposure even by minors since the turn of the millennium. In addition to the reasons for this extraordinary permissiveness, the paper questions the role of technical and audiovisual media in this social development.

Discussions about the achievements and limitations of the various approaches to the development of intelligent systems can have an essential impact on empirically based research, and with that also on the future development of computer technologies. However, such discussions are often based on vague concepts and assumptions. In this context, we claim that the proposed `three-world ontology'' offers the most appropriate conceptual framework in which the basic problems concerned with cognition and computation can be suitably expressed and discussed, although the (...) solutions of some of these problems seem to lie beyond the horizon of our current understanding. We stress the necessity to differentiate between authentic and functional cognitive abilities; although computation is not a plausible way towards authentic intelligence, we claim that computational systems do offer virtually unlimited possibilities to replicate and surpass human cognitive abilities on the functional level. (shrink)

This text is based on a reflection on the context and meaning of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s visit to Mexico in February-March 1949 and the lectures he gave at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). I rely on the information, analysis and notes of Merleau-Ponty that Michel Dalissier offers us in his book Inédits I-II. I devote myself particularly to commenting on the cultural experience that this trip represented for Merleau-Ponty – his relationship with (...) the Mexican philosophy of the Hiperión group – as well as his conception of culture and the relationship between cultures that he exhibits at the time and in the general construction of his own work and philosophy. I support the thesis that the question of a plurality of cultures and interculturality can only be thought in a rigorous way – without falling into cultural relativism or an abstract universalism – through a phenomenological-existential reformulation of the « universal, » as Merleau-Ponty outlines it in the Mexico Conferences. (shrink)

In a recent paper, under the auspices of an unorthodox variety of bilateralism, we introduced a new kind of proof-theoretic semantics for the base modal logic \(\mathbf{K}\), whose values lie in the closed interval \([0,1]\) of rational numbers [14]. In this paper, after clarifying our conception of bilateralism – dubbed “soft bilateralism” – we generalize the fractional method to encompass extensions and weakenings of \(\mathbf{K}\). Specifically, we introduce well-behaved hypersequent calculi for the deontic logic \(\mathbf{D}\) and the non-normal modal logics (...) \(\mathbf{E}\) and \(\mathbf{M}\) and thoroughly investigate their structural properties. (shrink)

Iniciamos una aproximación general a la obra de Ken Wilber en relación con la posible formulación de una teoría integral de la comunicación que aborde, sin dejar ningún espacio sin cubrir, los grandes interrogantes que plantean las transformaciones existenciales que estamos viviendo los habitantes del universo digital. Las posibilidades del modelo AQAL de Wilber para analizar los medios de comunicación actuales son fascinantes en aspectos como las fake news o la inteligencia artificial.

A análise dos cânones conciliares e das epístolas pontifícias mostra que os cristãos estiveram diretamente envolvidos com eventos espetaculares e, não obstante as reiteradas proibições por parte da hierarquia, a dança e a música permaneceram centrais seja na vida pública seja na privada, ingressando inclusive nos ritos e nos edifícios cristãos.

La nostra via.--L'esempio dei grandi.--Il "verismo" e la musica.-- Influenze straniere.--Mascagni e il suo stile.--Puccini e la sua maniera.--Gli altri.--Sinfonismo e verismo.--Oltre a "realtà.".

Analyzing the Dialogue between a Philosopher and a Student of the Common Laws of England by Thomas Hobbes, the essay traces the historical tradition and the reasons for its secular underestimation. The Hobbesian text is placed within the history of English law and the controversies that accompanied and followed the revolution of 1640. It is then compared with the political works of Hobbes, showing how the silence of the law is gradually replacing the state of nature as image of the (...) death of the Commonwealth . The Dialogue proves to be a firm position in favor of an universal and equal capacity to understand what the law is. This latter is the product of the will of a sovereign, who however is the institutionalization of the authorization of the individuals who constitute it. (shrink)