The fundamental program of Stein’s philosophy after his conversion was the relationship between modern philosophy and scholasticism. This article deals with new metaphysical and epistemological aspects of Stein’s work that reflect the encounter between both philosophical currents, starting from her reading of Thomas Aquinas’ De veritate, which have not yet been treated in the Edith Stein Forschung. Thus, from the metaphysical point of view, the question of the relationship between unity and multiplicity and the problem of the conditions of possibility (...) of organic development are identified. And from the epistemological point of view, the following relevant aspects are raised: the starting point of philosophizing; the principles of knowledge; the extent to which habit influences knowledge; the question of whether angelic knowledge can serve to clarify human knowledge; the relationship between mathesis universalis and divine knowledge; the relationship between abstraction and intuition; and the critique of the Heideggerian interpretation of the concept of truth in the philosophical tradition. (shrink)

El presente artículo se propone identificar los fundamentos de la teoría de la comunicabilidad de la Obra de Arte que se puede extraer de los escritos de Edith Stein. Tras presentar el problema de la empatía y la base antropológica que afecta a los sujetos y objetos del mundo del arte, además de los posibles problemas en la transmisión de dicho mensaje artístico, se ahonda en las implicaciones de la consideración del arte como objeto y sujeto de empatía y el (...) sistema comunicativo que se puede establecer en el mundo del arte. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with the ambiguities and confusions that arise when studies of the ‘surveillance state’ are contrasted with studies of the ‘service state’. Surveillance studies take a largely negative view of the information capture and handling of personal data by Government agencies. Studies that examine Government service providing take a largely positive view of such data capture as Government is seen to be attempting to enhance service provision to individual citizens. This paper examines these opposing perspectives through a (...) series of case studies and concludes that a new understanding and methodology should be brought forward so as to create a reconciliation of these two points of departure for research. The call is for an holistic appreciation of data capture activities by Government so that researchers and public policy makers alike can appreciate and reconcile these competing perspectives. (shrink)

The rapid growth of cultural evolutionary science, its expansion into numerous fields, its use of diverse methods, and several conceptual problems have outpaced corollary developments in theory and philosophy of science. This has led to concern, exemplified in results from a recent survey conducted with members of the Cultural Evolution Society, that the field lacks ‘knowledge synthesis’, is poorly supported by ‘theory’, has an ambiguous relation to biological evolution and uses key terms (e.g. ‘culture’, ‘social learning’, ‘cumulative culture’) in ways (...) that hamper operationalization in models, experiments and field studies. Although numerous review papers in the field represent and categorize its empirical findings, the field's theoretical challenges receive less critical attention even though challenges of a theoretical or conceptual nature underlie most of the problems identified by Cultural Evolution Society members. Guided by the heterogeneous ‘grand challenges’ emergent in this survey, this paper restates those challenges and adopts an organizational style requisite to discussion of them. The paper's goal is to contribute to increasing conceptual clarity and theoretical discernment around the most pressing challenges facing the field of cultural evolutionary science. It will be of most interest to cultural evolutionary scientists, theoreticians, philosophers of science and interdisciplinary researchers. (shrink)

El presente artículo se propone identificar los fundamentos de la teoría de la comunicabilidad de la Obra de Arte que se puede extraer de los escritos de Edith Stein. Tras presentar el problema de la empatía y la base antropológica que afecta a los sujetos y objetos del mundo del arte, además de los posibles problemas en la transmisión de dicho mensaje artístico, se ahonda en las implicaciones de la consideración del arte como objeto y sujeto de empatía y el (...) sistema comunicativo que se puede establecer en el mundo del arte. (shrink)

Given the ubiquitous nature of love, numerous theories have been proposed to explain its existence. One such theory refers to love as a commitment device, suggesting that romantic love evolved to foster commitment between partners and enhance their reproductive success. In the present study, we investigated this hypothesis using a large-scale sample of 86,310 individual responses collected across 90 countries. If romantic love is universally perceived as a force that fosters commitment between long-term partners, we expected that individuals likely to (...) suffer greater losses from the termination of their relationships—including people of lower socioeconomic status, those with many children, and women—would place a higher value on romantic love compared to people with higher status, those with fewer children, and men. These predictions were supported. Additionally, we observed that individuals from countries with a higher (vs. lower) Human Development Index placed a greater level of importance on romantic love, suggesting that modernization might influence how romantic love is evaluated. On average, participants worldwide were unwilling to commit to a long-term romantic relationship without love, highlighting romantic love’s universal importance. (shrink)

At the beginning of the twentieth century, among the foundational schools of mathematics appeared ‘intuitionism’ by Dutchman L. E. J. Brouwer, who based arithmetic on the intuition of time and all mental constructions that could be made out of it. His pupil Arend Heyting was the first populariser of intuitionism, and he repeatedly emphasised that no philosophy was required to practise intuitionism so that such mathematics could be shared by anyone. Still, stimulated by invitations to humanistic conferences, he wrote a (...) series of notes, preserved in the State Archives, Haarlem, about solipsism. In them, he operated a series of theoretical reflections consisting of the stripping away of the patterns that are part of our consciousness and their subsequent progressive re-introduction, in order to understand the formation of our Self as distinct from the natural world and other humans. In 1996, following a stroke, neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor experienced the deprivation of certain abilities in her brain and their successive regaining. In her experience there are remarkable similarities with what Heyting had hypothesised about the formation of the self. The purpose of this article is to highlight them and point out how Heyting's theoretical construct was found to be embodied in the brain. (shrink)

I would like to challenge this view on various grounds, but before I do so, I wish to provide a broader setting for the problems discussed in this paper.

Mackie famously argued for a moral error theory on the basis that objective moral values, if they existed, would be very queer entities. Unfortunately, his argument is very brief and it is not totally obvious from what he says exactly where the queerness of moral values is supposed to lie. In this paper I will firstly show why a typical interpretation of Mackie is problematic and secondly offer a new interpretation. I will argue that, whether or not we have reason (...) to live in the morally correct way, what seems queer about moral properties is that there is a morally correct way in which to live in the first place. This interpretation makes sense of Mackie’s claim that theism might be able to solve the queerness problem; the notion of an objectively correct way to live may make sense if theism is true, but not otherwise. (shrink)

Kenneth A. Taylor examines the complex relationship between semantic analysis and metaphysical inquiry with the aim of bringing philosophical methodology into closer alignment with total science. He urges philosophers who seek metaphysical insight to interrogate reality itself rather than language and concepts.

It is widely believed that the nature of love and friendship precludes them from being bought or sold. It will be argued in this paper that this view is false: There is no conceptual bar to the commodification of love and friendship. The arguments offered for this view will lead to another surprising conclusion: That these goods are asymmetrically alienable goods, goods whose nature is such that separate arguments must be provided for the views that they can be bought and (...) sold. The possibility of asymmetric alienability has not yet been recognized in the literature on commodification. (shrink)

The situation caused by the 2019 coronavirus disease has been representing a great source of concern and a challenge to the psychological well-being of many individuals around the world. For couples in particular, this extraordinary rise in concern, combined with the stress posed by the virus containment measures, such as prolonged cohabitation and lack of support networks, may have increased the likelihood of couple problems. At the same time, however, COVID-19 concerns may have been a stimulus to activate couples’ stress (...) management processes. A couple’s resource, which may have an important role in dealing with COVID-19 concerns and stress, is dyadic coping, i.e., the process through which partners face stress together. Drawing on a sample of 1,823 Italian individuals involved in a couple relationship, the current study tested a serial mediation model in which concerns about COVID-19 predicted psychological well-being, through both explicit stress communication and perceived partner dyadic coping responses. In addition, the study explored whether this dyadic coping process functioned the same way in satisfied and dissatisfied couples. Results showed that concerns about the situation related to COVID-19 significantly threatened individuals’ psychological well-being. However, these concerns positively predicted explicit stress communication, which in turn positively predicted perceived partner’s dyadic coping responses, which finally positively predicted psychological well-being. In addition, in the group of dissatisfied individuals, the association between explicit stress communication and perceived partners’ dyadic coping responses was not significant. The present study adds to the research on couples’ coping by testing for the first time the whole theoretical model of dyadic coping and does so during a global emergency situation. The study also suggests key components of preventive interventions for individuals in couples. (shrink)

Research has found that both cisgender and transgender androphilic males (i.e., males sexually attracted to and aroused by other adult males) have female-typical occupational preferences when compared with gynephilic males (i.e., males sexually attracted to and aroused by adult females). Moreover, whereas cisgender androphilic males’ occupational preferences tend to be intermediate between those of gynephilic men and androphilic women, transgender androphilic males tend to have occupational preferences that are more similar to androphilic women. No study has directly compared both types (...) of androphilic males within the same culture. The present study investigated occupational preference and its relation to childhood sex-atypical behavior (CSAB), among gynephilic men (_n_ = 208), androphilic women (_n_ = 138), and cisgender (_n_ = 132) and transgender (_n_ = 129) androphilic males from the Istmo region of Oaxaca, Mexico, where androphilic males are recognized as third gender, _muxes_. The study found large sex differences in occupational preferences (_d_ = 2.80). Furthermore, both cisgender _muxe nguiiu_ (_d_ = 2.36) and transgender _muxe gunaa_ (_d_ = 3.44) reported having more sex-atypical occupational preferences compared with men. However, _muxe gunaa_ reported higher female-typical occupational preferences than women (_d_ = 0.59) and _muxe nguiiu_ (_d_ = 0.57), whereas _muxe nguiiu_ and women did not differ (_d_ = 0.08). These findings are consistent with the conclusion that sex-atypical occupational preferences are a cross-culturally universal aspect of male androphilia. Finally, CSAB was associated with sex-atypical occupational preferences among all participants. These findings suggest that a developmental continuity exists between childhood and adulthood sex-atypicality. (shrink)

El presente artículo busca, tras una breve mirada del significado histórico de la ciudad, de situarla en el ámbito de la Teoría de las Necesidades Humanas, argumentando cómo la ciudad ha sido el satisfactor sinérgico más importante de las necesidades. Considerando que las necesidades son universales e identificables, se muestra cómo la ciudad es el lugar donde mejor se han satisfecho éstas, y cómo una de ellas, la participación, obtiene un especial significado dado su carácter sinérgico y transversal. No obstante, (...) el desbordamiento de la ciudad con el desarrollo del capitalismo la ha desmembrado, zonificando sus funciones y segregando a los diferentes grupos sociales, perdiéndose el espacio público como espacio político. Reconstruir una democracia urbana, precisa de una (re)vuelta a la ciudad considerando múltiples dimensiones del cambio que son a su vez condiciones y síntomas práxicos para reconstruir el espacio público como espacio político. (shrink)

En los últimos años y en particular en el primer lustro del siglo XXI hemos asistido a sucesivos e inquietantes acontecimientos de muy distinta naturaleza, pero entrelazados entre sí, de enorme complejidad y gran impacto, que exigen respuestas urgentes e igualmente complejas. Estos acontecimientos (catástrofes naturales, grandes atentados terroristas, guerras globales denominadas “preventivas”, etc.) que se producen en un contexto de globalización, más que otra cosa van confirmando una sociedad del riesgo en la que nos vamos instalando haciéndonos a todos (...) los seres vulnerables. Una sociedad que cabalga en un modelo desbocadamente entrópico e irremediablemente mundial, pero crecientemente injusto, desigual e insostenible. Los movimientos sociales, y particularmente los movimientos antisistémicos, considerados como sujetos históricos de cambio, tienen ante sí múltiples desafíos para reorientar y construir un nuevo paradigma. En este texto, a la luz de las respuestas inteligentes(frente a las respuestas desesperadas), de las nuevas experiencias participativas, de la emergencia de un sujeto ético, de las nuevas alianzas que intuimos en, por ejemplo, los Foros Sociales Mundiales; se quiere dar cuenta de la convergencia posible, probable, necesaria para asumir la complejidad de la acción colectiva. Cuatro son los desafíos que abstraemos de las nuevas experiencias societarias y todas ellas tienen que ver con la calidad de la democracia, de una democracia reflexiva y por tanto compleja: la democracia participativa, la democracia económica sustentada en la economía social y solidaria, la democracia ambiental fundamentada en la sostenibilidad y la democracia cultural expresada en un sentido de la interculturalidad. (shrink)

Although what language users in different cultures say about their own language has long been recognized as of potential interest, its theoretical importance to the study of language has typically been thought to be no more than peripheral. Theorizing Language is the first book to place the reflexive character of language at the very centre both of its empirical study and of its theoretical explanation. Language can only be explained as a cultural product of the reflexive application of its own (...) creative powers to construct, regulate, and give conceptual form to objects of understanding. Language is itself, first and foremost, an object of cultural understanding. Theoretical analyses of language which have neglected its reflexive character, or simply taken its effects for granted, merely impose their own artificial structures on their analytical object. The first part of this book discusses the consequences of neglecting this reflexive character for the technical concepts and methods which are used in analysing different types of communicational phenomena. In the second part, normativity - a crucial aspect of language's reflexive nature - is examined. The book's third and final part focuses on particular issues in the history of linguistic thought which bear witness to the rhetoric of language theorizing as a reflexive form of inquiry. (shrink)

Nicholas of Cusa’s deployment of an omnivoyant image in the De visione Dei has been said to deconstruct Leon Battista Alberti’s mathematical determination of space in single-point linear perspective. While there has been some debate over whether the omnivoyant functions like a medieval icon or instead like a Renaissance painting, what has been neglected is a more careful analysis of what underlies the very structure of omnivoyance, namely the milieu from which its contradictions and paradoxes emerge. In this article, I (...) will show how thinking the milieu of vision, implicit in Cusa’s optics, lets us overcome any overly simple binaries in these debates and deepen our understanding of the meaning of omnivoyance. (shrink)

He maintained that there are two main categories of truth: those that are a result of natural laws and those that are completely necessary since their opposite suggests contradiction. God can dispense solely with the latter rules, such as the law of human mortality. Although a doctrine of faith may conflict with second-type realities, it can never contradict first-type truths. Therefore, reason may not be able to completely understand an article of religion, even though it cannot be self-contradictory. Simply put, (...) mysteries like the Trinity are "above reason." However, how can we balance the odds in favor of a religious belief with those based on natural law and common experience? The presence and character of God, as well as the global harmony that underpins the providential creation and order of the universe, must all be considered when we make these choices. On the other hand, moving from the higher to the lower classes is also feasible. Since goodness has an immediate order to the higher pattern of the universal source of being, rational creatures are able to understand "the meaning of the good as such" (II-IIae q.2, a.3). The last good that theologians and philosophers examine is different; the former is the bonum ultimum, which can only be understood with the help of revelation, while the later is the beatific vision, which reason can understand. Both conceptions of the ultimate good have significant implications since they serve as the foundation for the political division between secular and ecclesiastical authority as well as the moral division between natural and supernatural virtues. (shrink)

The article proposes a theory on which quotations are unstructured, context-insensitive devices that get their referents fixed by a conventional wholesale reference-fixing rule. First, it criticizes recent theories for postulating eccentric or anomalous facts concerning the contribution of noun phrases to truth conditions, the semantics of demonstratives or general syntax. Second, it notes that the proposed theory is not subject to some familiar objections to classical theories, nor to eccentricity or anomalousness complaints. Third, it shows that recent arguments that quotations (...) must be structured or equivalent with demonstrative phrases, or that they cannot get semantic referents via linguistic conventions, are mistaken. It is noted that semantic unstructuredness, non-demonstrativeness, and conventional wholesale reference-fixing exploiting pre-referential term-referent relations are combined in some naturally occurring classes of terms. (shrink)

Taking as premises some reasonable principles about the essences of natural numbers, pluralities and sets, the paper offers two types of argument for the conclusions that the natural numbers could not be the Zermelo numbers, the von Neumann numbers, the “Kripke numbers”, or the positions in the ω-structure, among other things. These conclusions are thus Benacerrafian in form, but it is emphasized that the two kinds of argument offered in the paper are anti-Benacerrafian in substance, as they are perfectly compatible (...) and in fact congenial with some views on which the numbers could be things of certain other kinds. (shrink)

This paper explores the variety of ways that emerging sources of data are being used to re-conceptualize the city, and how these understandings of what the urban is shapes the design of interventions into it. Drawing on work on the performativity of economics, this paper uses two vignettes of the ‘new urban science’ and municipal vacant property mapping in order to argue that the mobilization of Big Data in the urban context doesn’t necessarily produce a single, greater understanding of the (...) city as it actually is, but rather a highly variegated series of essentialized understandings of the city that render it knowable, governable and intervene-able. Through the construction of new, data-driven urban geographical imaginaries, these projects have opened up the space for urban interventions that work to depoliticize urban injustices and valorize new kinds of technical expertise as the means of going about solving these problems, opening up new possibilities for a remaking of urban space in the image of these sociotechnical paradigms. Ultimately, this paper argues that despite the importance of Big Data, as both a discourse and practice, to emerging forms of urban research and management, there is no singular or universal understanding of the urban that is promoted or developed through the application of these new sources of data, which in turn opens up meaningful possibilities for developing alternative uses of Big Data for understanding and intervening in the city in more emancipatory ways. (shrink)

Este artículo presenta un contrapunto entre Edith Stein y Ernst Tugendhat, centrado en la relación entre fe y mística como dos caminos hacia la experiencia trascendente, abordados desde sus respectivas posturas fenomenológicas. El análisis se enfoca en la interpretación de obras clave de ambos autores, ofreciendo una perspectiva contrastiva de sus puntos de partida: la experiencia de la fe cristiana en Stein, orientada a una relación mística con Dios, y la búsqueda de una mística secular en Tugendhat, basada en el (...) autoconocimiento. Este contrapunto metodológico no busca equilibrar sus visiones, sino resaltar sus convergencias y divergencias, visibilizando la complejidad de la experiencia mística. Finalmente, se exploran las limitaciones del análisis y se proyectan posibles aportaciones de ambos autores a una revisión contemporánea de la mística en el contexto religioso. (shrink)

I offer a brief formal exploration of a certain natural extension of the notion of rigidity to predicates, the notion of an essentialist predicate. I show that, under reasonable assumptions, true "identification sentences" involving essentialist predicates are necessary, and hence that the notion of essentiality is formally analogous in this respect to the notion of singular term rigidity. /// El artículo hace una breve exploración formal de una extensión natural de la noción de rigidez a los predicados, la noción de (...) predicado esencialista. Muestro que, dados supuestos razonables, las "oraciones de identificación" verdaderas que contienen predicados esencialistas son necesarias, y por tanto que la noción de esencialidad es formalmente análoga en este sentido a la noción de rigidez para los términos singulares. (shrink)

For global health academics and practitioners, it can feel as though we are living in a tyranny of partnerships. The primary trappings of professional success in global health—funding and publications—increasingly rely on the presence or absence of institutional partnerships. Funders often require letters of support from collaborators, and the literature routinely lauds partnerships as the "secret sauce" necessary to solve intractable problems. Commonly, the term describes relationships between entities in the Global North and the Global South, serving as a euphemism (...) for relationships that, at their core, are premised on a transfer of resources from the former to the latter. Many partnerships... (shrink)

Journal editorials, career features, and the popular press commonly talk of a graduate student mental health crisis. To date, studies on graduate student mental health have employed cross-sectional designs, limiting any causal conclusions regarding the relationship between entry into graduate study and mental health. Here, we draw on data from a longitudinal study of undergraduate students in Aotearoa New Zealand, allowing us to compare participants who did, and did not, transition into PhD study following the completion of their undergraduate degree. (...) Using multilevel Bayesian regression, we identified a difference in mental wellbeing between those who entered PhD study and those who did not. This difference, however, was largely due to those not entering PhD study displaying an increase in mental wellbeing. Participants that entered PhD study displayed a small decrease in mental wellbeing, with the posterior distribution of the simple effect heavily overlapping zero. This latter finding was orders of magnitude smaller than one might expect based on previous cross-sectional research and provides an important message; that a marked drop in mental health is not an inevitable consequence of entering graduate study. (shrink)

The paper offers an account of justified resentment and its importance in preserving human dignity. I situate the argument in the context of Martha Nussbaum's recent work against anger and resentment. Drawing on Enlightenment thinkers, I show the importance of resentment in deterring injury, in creating greater solidarity and humanity, and in preserving human dignity. The paper also offers a preliminary analysis of the norms that help to ensure appropriately expressed resentment.

La Casa de Santiago de Jerusalén, para estudiantes bíblicos y arqueólogos españoles en Tierra Santa, fue erigida, formalmente, en noviembre de 1955. Este trabajo recopila e interpreta algunos de los diplomas que se intercambiaron hasta aquel momento los promotores de esta obra. La relevancia que, con los años, ha adquirido este centro de investigación hace que resulte importante recuperar esta documentación y la información programática que aporta para el análisis y la definición de su historia.