In this paper I survey some recent developments in experimental philosophy and discuss their bearing on two leading theories in epistemology: Contextualism and Interest Relative Invariantism. In the first part of the paper, I survey some general issues of how experimental philosophy may be relevant to assessing contextualism and IRI. In the second part, I discuss and critique some of the recent experimental work.

Intersecting systems of inequality are remarkably resistant to change. Many universities, however, seek National Science Foundation Institutional Transformation awards to change processes, procedures, and cultures to make science, technology, engineering, and mathematics departments more inclusive. In this article we describe a case study with observations for eight years of before, five during, and seven after intensive efforts to increase women through reducing barriers and increasing access to women. Finally, we reflect on flawed assumptions built into the proposal, the slow and (...) uneven change in the proportion of women over time, the strengths and weaknesses of numeric assessments, and the value of a longer view for seeing how seeds planted with promising practices initiated during the award may end with the funding but can reemerge and bear fruit when faculty who engage in equity work are in positions of authority later in their careers. (shrink)

The problem of the character in literature is today one of the most pressing in Marxist-Leninist esthetics. Discussions over the category "character" never cease.

In his remarks E. I. Ignat'ev considered a number of economic matters associated with the problem of the environment. Ignat'ev emphasized that environmental protection is becoming a vitally essential field of social activity. Inasmuch as this is the fact, he said, it is natural that, under the conditions existing in our country, this field of activity be planned in a specific way. The financial, material, and human resources needed to implement the program of conservation and improvement of the (...) environment must be planned. Moreover, this planning must be done in close connection with the further development of the country's productive forces. Since a serious basis in science is essential for successful implementation of all the activity associated with maintenance and improvement of the environment on the scale of the country at large, Ignat'ev emphasized the significance of the new resolution of the USSR Supreme Soviet. It provides that measures for conservation, and for protection and improvement of the environment, will henceforth in our country be incorporated into the annual and five-year plans for development of the economy and will also find expression in a special section of the long-term plan now being prepared for the prospective development of the economy. (shrink)

El objetivo principal de este estudio es el de presentar y evaluar una experiencia didáctica realizada en 1.º de Bachillerato sobre el tema de La Retirada, el exilio español en 1939 tras la Guerra Civil. Para ello, se presenta el diseño de esta experiencia en el contexto de un instituto valenciano de secundaria, llevada a cabo en los cursos escolares de 2022-2023 y 2023-2024, así como los resultados de una encuesta realizada al alumnado participante de esta salida de campo. En (...) esta encuesta se confirma la idoneidad de la actividad desde el punto de vista metodológico (movilidad Erasmus e itinerario didáctico), así como por el aprendizaje suscitado en torno al exilio y la memoria democrática. (shrink)

Since ancient Greece’s “megalopolis,” the concept of vast cities has loomed in the urban discourse. A century ago, English planner Patrick Geddes warned about a growing imbalance between traditional society and ever-larger conurbations, an anxiety that Lewis Mumford later invoked to predict that urban hubris would inevitably collapse of its own weight. In 1961, by contrast, the geographer Jean Gottman surveyed the interconnected agglomeration stretching from Washington, D.C. up the east coast of the United States to the cities of southern (...) New England, and more optimistically highlighted this new urban form’s governance potential. Today, the question is not whether urbanism will arrive at the scale that so concerned Geddes and Mumford yet engaged Gottman—it already has. Commentators and scholars increasingly recognize that vast polycentric urban regions are displacing cities and metropolitan areas as the locus of modern growth and development. Eleven distinct urban-centered megaregions, for example, concentrate the bulk of the population and economic activity in the United States, and similar clusters are coalescing globally, from Greater Tokyo, Beijing, and the Pearl River Delta, to the arc from São Paulo to Rio de Janeiro, to the European urban spine running from London to Milan. Grappling with the phenomenon’s legal-institutional dimensions—whether and how to formalize governance to match this scale—requires more than transposing the descriptive and normative discourse on metropolitanism. Crosscurrents around fragmentation, efficiency, inequality, and democratic legitimacy refract, but there are distinct arguments for fostering governance—and equally particular concerns to anticipate—with the rise of the megalopolis. (shrink)

Se propone el uso de la Semiótica como herramienta integradora para investigar los aspectos fundamentales de los seres vivos. Como tal, la Biosemiótica abre nuevas perspectivas metodológicas para integrar un gran numero de fenómenos aparentemente no vinculados o incompatibles entre sí. EI principio básico es que la Biología, desde el nivel molecular al sistemíco, puede ser estudiada como comunicación, y los procesos biológicos como interacciones mediadas por signos. La vida es definida como una propiedad sistemica de la materia. La Biología (...) es, en si misma y en todos sus aspectos, Semiótica Natural próxima al caos determinista. EI paradigma biosemiótico es propuesto como un paso hacia la formulación de una teoría sintética de la vida, que incorpore los componentes mecanistico-moIeculares, interpretaciones semioticas, y Ia historia natural de los sistemas vivientes.Semiotics is introduced as an integrative approach to investigate the intimate features of living systems. As an overarching concept, Biosemiotics offers new methodological perspectives to integrate a vast number of apparently unrelated phenomena. The basic tenet is that Biology, from the molecular to the systemic level, can be investigated as communication, and biological processes as sign-mediated interactions. Life is defined as a systemic property of matter. Biology is then, in all its aspects, Natural Semiotics with a proximity to deterministic chaos. The biosemiotic paradigm is intended as a step toward the establishment of a synthetic theory of life, incorporating the molecular-mechanistic components, the semiotic interpretations, and the natural history of the living systems. (shrink)

According to the “orthodox” version of Parmenides’ Poem, version generally accepted as vox dei, the “Way of Truth” begins in fragment 2 of the Poem (because fragment 1 is only a kind of introduction) and ends at verse 50 of fragment 8. The “Way of the Doxa”, on the other hand, begins at verse 51 of fragment 8 and ends at fragment 19. We believe it will not an be exaggeration to say that this text could be signed by most (...) specialists interested in the Parmenidean philosophy, even the most eminent ones. Now, apart from a few words, this passage implicitly supposes a whole series of hypotheses, generally accepted without prior justification, hypotheses which, once analyzed, necessarily lead one to support the non-existence in Parmenides of either a “Way of Truth” or a “Way of Doxa”. (shrink)

Here we provide an overview of some of the central ethical issues related to the use of surgical robots. Subsequently we introduce an anticipatory ethical analysis of possible consequences for the use of robotic surgery. Anticipatory ethics aims at identifying ethical problems with emerging technologies while they are at the introductory stages for a wide range of stakeholders. Robotic surgery presents a range of positive possibilities, which include treating patients more safely and effectively to caring for patients with telesurgery at (...) remote locations. However, injuries and deaths caused by robotic surgical platforms (RSPs) pose roadblocks to full realization of this technology. Investment in RSPs by for-profits like hospitals requires a detailed stakeholder analysis that takes into account both institutional and patient perspectives. It will take carefully crafted policy and regulation based upon sound technical and ethical analysis to induce the widespread adoption of this surgical method. (shrink)

Shors & Matzel propose that hippocampal LTP increases the effective salience of discrete external stimuli and thereby facilitates the induction of memories at distant places. In line with this suggestion, a neural network model of associative learning and hippocampal function assumes that LTP increases hippocampal error signals to the cortex, thereby facilitating stimulus configuration in association cortex. Computer simulations show that under these assumptions the model correctly describes the effect of LTP induction and blockade in classical discriminations and place learning.

As the popularity of the concept of ideology has waned, its ordinary or everyday usage has mirrored the plight of its scolarly usage, with the postulate of a “negative” and a “positive” sense of the term, and the opposition between an “ideological” and a “pragmatic” perspective, albeit with a recognition that ideology does involve a pragmatic dimension. The underlying anti-Marxism of this approach is evidence of a successful polemical strategy. This is an indication that its polemical thrust is an essential (...) aspect of the concept, and that one of the difficulties of “ideology” is that it is the site of the very struggles for whose analysis it provides a conceptual instrument. (shrink)

La Déesse de Parménide annonce toujours que les δόξαι sont un produit humain. Mais il y a un point qui n'a pas été en général remarqué dans les études consacrées à l'étude des δόξαι: elles décrivent une activité humaine qui consiste a expliquer la réalité par la présence de principes opposés, et qui est toujours en rapport avec la "nomination". Il y avait à l'époque de Parménide une école qui correspondait à ce portrait robot, ou s'agit-il d'un collage de Parménide? (...) Quoi qu'il en soit, il est attesté la présence d'une branche du Pythagorisme qui se caractérisait, précisément, pour "placer" des noms sur les choses. (shrink)

Depuis son invention par Destutt de Tracy et sa réinvention par Marx et Engels, le concept d'idéologie n'a cessé de faire problème. Passé dans le langage courant, largement utilisé par les sciences humaines, bien qu'en des significations souvent exclusives les unes des autres, il hante la philosophie comme une sorte de mauvais génie perturbateur qui lui rappellerait l'impureté de ses origines et de ses usages, et qu'il lui faudrait toujours s'employer à réduire ou à sublimer. Encore faudrait-il en produire une (...) définition cohérente. Mais comment y parvenir sans une enquête systématique, à la fois analytique et épistémologique, qui tienne compte de la multiplicité des usages et dégage une problématique générale, sans éluder pour autant la question du caractère polémique du concept? C'est ce qu'a entrepris Nestor Capdevila en déterminant le jeu de significations pertinentes, bien que potentiellement contradictoires, qui sont à l'œuvre dans les analyses historiques, anthropologiques ou théologiques contemporaines où l'on peut étudier son fonctionnement. Cette approche nouvelle conteste la thèse accréditée par la tradition sociologique d'une modernité de l'idéologie, totalitaire ou non. Elle montre la valeur d'un modèle religieux fondé sur le concept d'hérésie qui, tout en reconnaissant l'exemplarité idéologique de la religion, ne réduit pas l'idéologie à la religion. Elle critique également les définitions de l'idéologie qui par souci d'objectivité prétendent purifier le concept de son aspect intrinsèquement polémique. Celui-ci fait du concept d'idéologie une illustration exemplaire de la dimension politique des concepts de la politique. (shrink)

Marx or Tocqueville : Capitalism or Democracy Marx and Tocqueville were the conceptual icons and rallying-points of the two sides in the cold war.It is common today to consider that the outcome of this confrontation saw the victory of the latterover the former, to the extent that Tocqueville had shown greater prescience in the analysis of theevolution of western societies. However such an evaluation presumes that there is a substantial degreeof overlap between these two competing paradigms, whereas there is in (...) fact a fundamental oppositionbetween them regarding the point of view deemed to be pertinent for the task of the qualificationand conceptualisation of modern societies. Are these societies to be qualified as democratic societies,increasingly subject to the empire of equality, or as capitalist societies which are increasingly subject tothe empire of capital ? The article examines the theoretical consequences stemming form the differencein the problematic that is adopted. Tocqueville’s perspective involves a polemical appropriation of thevocabulary of democracy in order to interpret the “nature” of the latter in what is a liberal perspective.This enables us to understand that the task of examining the relation between Marx and democracydoes not simply mean the attempt to situate his position in relation to a stable and predefined object.It involves the critique of the polemical strategies for the appropriation of the term of democracy, astrategy from which Marx distances himself by way of the reference to communism. (shrink)

Resumen En 1795, un filólogo de origen kantiano, G.G. Fülleborn, agrupó en dos "partes" los fragmentos recuperados del Poema de Parménides: "la Verdad" y "la Doxa". Con pequeñas modificaciones, esta estructura se convirtió en clásica y se acepta hoy en forma unánime. Sin embargo, una lectura de cada fragmento en forma aislada no justifica dicha división, la cual se basa en una interpretación de Simplicio influida por Aristóteles, quien encuentra ya en Parménides un esbozo del dualismo platónico entre lo "sensible" (...) y lo "inteligible", inexistente en éste. Analizo aquí en forma crítica el criterio que emplea Fülleborn, anacrónico para el caso de un pensador preplatónico.In 1795 G.G. Fülleborn, a philologist of Kantian origin, grouped in two "parts" the recovered fragments of the Poem of Parmenides -"the Truth" and "the Doxa". With small modifications, this structure became classic and is accepted unanimously today. However, a reading of each fragment in an isolated way does not justify such division, which is based on an interpretation of Simplicius influenced by Aristotle, who finds already in Parmenides a sketch of the Platonic dualism between the "sensible" and the "intelligible", not actually present in the latter. This work analyzes critically the criterion used by Fülleborn, which is anachronistic in the case of a preplatonic thinker. (shrink)