This is an interdisciplinary work product of reflection on the challenges today presented by a biological vision of the world regarding questions, concepts and notions of cosmology. Based on and in dialogue with the current state of biological research, this work deals with certain cosmological problems such as that between the living and the inert, the traditional division between the soul or the vital vegetative principle, sensitive or intellective; the problem of individuation and the concept of species, among others; the (...) solution found within classical philosophy in this paper takes into account the latest discoveries findings of modern biology. (shrink)

RESUMEN El presente estudio está dirigido a establecer coincidencias entre el pensamiento de José Martí y de Carlos Marx en el terreno filosófico. Ambos representan los más altos exponentes del saber filosófico y humanista de la cultura europea y latinoamericana del siglo XIX, respectivamente, con un alcance genuinamente universal. No fue objetivo en modo alguno convertir a Martí en marxista, del mismo modo que sería absurdo afiliar a Marx a las ideas y las concepciones martianas. Sin embargo, no (...) es posible dejar de subrayar la profundidad del ideario martiano en el terreno filosófico, político, social y económico y sus aproximaciones a las concepciones marxistas o al socialismo científico. ABSTRACT The present study is directed to establish coincidences between the thought of José Martí and Carlos Marx in the philosophical area. Both are represented by the highest exponents of the philosophical and humanist knowledge of the European and Latin-American culture of the 19th century, respectively, with an authentically universal scope. It was not objective in any way to turn Martí into Marxist, in the same way that it would be absurd to affiliate Marx to the ideas and the Martí´s conceptions. Nevertheless, it is not possible to stop underlining the depth of the Martí´s ideology in the philosophical, political, social and economic area and his approaches to the Marxist conceptions or to the scientific socialism. (shrink)

Jose Marti contributed greatly to Cuba's struggle for independence from Spain with words as well as revolutionary action. Although he died before the formation of an independent republic, he has since been hailed as a heroic martyr inspiring Cuban republican traditions.

Bravo, F. La dialéctica en Teilhard de Chardin.--Carías, R. El conocimiento de Dios en Max Scheler.--Cappelletti, A. J. El fuego y el logos en la filosofía de Heráclito.--Li Carrillo, V. Estructuralismo y antihumanismo.--Rosales, A. Martín Heidegger y la crisis de la filosofía transcendental.--Rosales, A. La crítica de Heidegger al idealismo moderno.--Rosales, A. El giro del pensamiento de Heidegger.

Current suggestions for capacities that should be targeted for moral enhancement has centered on traits like empathy, fairness or aggression. The literature, however, lacks a proper model for understanding the interplay and complexity of moral capacities, which limits the practicability of proposed interventions. In this paper, I integrate some existing knowledge on the nature of human moral behavior and present a formal model of prosocial motivation. The model provides two important results regarding the most friction-free route to moral enhancement. First, (...) we should consider decreasing self-interested motivation rather than increasing prosociality directly. Second, this should be complemented with cognitive enhancement. These suggestions are tested against existing and emerging evidence on cognitive capacity, mindfulness meditation and the effects of psychedelic drugs and are found to have sufficient grounding for further theoretical and empirical exploration. Furthermore, moral effects of the latter two are hypothesized to result from a diminished sense of self with subsequent reductions in self-interest. (shrink)

An important debate in the current literature is whether “all truth-conditional effects of extra-linguistic context can be traced to [a variable at; LM] logical form” (Stanley, ‘Context and Logical Form’, Linguistics and Philosophy, 23 (2000) 391). That is, according to Stanley, the only truth-conditional effects that extra-linguistic context has are localizable in (potentially silent) variable-denoting pronouns or pronoun-like items, which are represented in the syntax/at logical form (pure indexicals like I or today are put aside in this discussion). According to (...) Recanati (‘Unarticulated Constituents’, Linguistics and Philosophy, 25 (2002) 299), extra-linguistic context can have additional truth-conditional effects, in the form of optional pragmatic processes like ‘free enrichment’. This paper shows that Recanati’s position is not warranted, since there is an alternative line of analysis that obviates the need to assume free enrichment. In the alternative analysis, we need Stanley’s variables, but we need to give them the freedom to be or not to be generated in the syntax/present at logical form, a kind of optionality that has nothing to do with the pragmatics-related optionality of free enrichment. (shrink)

We have witnessed a fundamental change of perspective in the conception of reference. What the proponents of the new approach criticized and what they proposed to abandon is relatively clear; it is much less clear though what is at the heart of the philosophy that inspired the change. The proponents of the new approach all agreed in disagreeing with Frege: natural languages may, and in fact do, contain expressions that refer without the mediation of a Fregean sense. The core motto (...) of the revolution can thus be summarized in a phrase: there are linguistic devices of pure reference. It is difficult though to put one's finger on a clear characterization of what pure reference consists in. This is so, I believe, because, underlying the anti-Fregean slogans, there are two different ideas which are not just two conceptually different ways of characterizing the same phenomenon. The two conflict in the classifications that they generate, because they rely on different conceptions of the essence of pure, genuine reference. (shrink)

Føllesdal (1966 and 1969) claims that modal distinctions collapse, that is that p and Necessarily p are equivalent, in any system of modal logic that incorporates a standard theory of definite descriptions, like the one proposed by Carnap in M&N. I argue that his argument fails.

Obituary. Ruth Barcan Marcus' contributions to modal logic and to semantics are discussed.

This paper proposes a sender-receiver model to explain two large-scale patterns observed in natural languages: Zipf’s inverse power law relating the frequency of word use and word rank, and the negative correlation between the frequency of word use and rate of lexical change. Computer simulations show that the model recreates Zipf’s inverse power law and the negative correlation between signal frequency and rate of change, provided that agents balance the rates with which they invent new signals and forget old ones. (...) Results are robust across a wide range of parameter values and structural assumptions, such as different forgetting rules and forgetting rates. Analysis of the model further suggests that Zipf’s law relating word frequency and rank arises because of language-external factors and that frequent signals change less because frequent signals are less subject to drift than rare ones. The paper concludes with some brief considerations on model-based and data-driven approaches in philosophy. (shrink)

En este trabajo me propongo mostrar, en primer lugar, una interpretación de la distinción kantiana entre juicio de percepción y juicio de experiencia. Posteriormente reconstruiré el proceso de síntesis categorial e intentaré explicar qué papel juegan en dicha acción los conceptos empíricos. En definitiva, la tesis que se va a defender es que en el nivel de constitución de la experiencia tanto los conceptos empíricos como los juicios de percepción hacen posible la síntesis objetiva y, al mismo tiempo, ésta provee (...) a los conceptos involucrados en dicha síntesis, tanto empíricos como puros, sentido y referencia. (shrink)

In this paper I provide a decompositional analysis of three kinds of plural indefinites in two related languages, European Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese. The three indefinites studied are bare plurals, the unos (Spanish)/uns (Portuguese) type, and the algunos (Spanish)/alguns (Portuguese) type. The paper concentrates on four properties: semantic plurality, positive polarity, partitivity, and event distribution. The logic underlying the analysis is that of compositionality, applied at the subword level: as items become bigger in form (with the addition of morphemes), they (...) also acquire more semantic properties. The paper proposes the “indefinite hierarchy", which establishes a set of components for languages to build their indefinites with, in a particular order. (shrink)

This paper presents an interpretation of the paradoxical decision of Abraham done by Søren A. Kierkegaard in his work Fear and Trembling as an ethics of silence. The main idea is to understand ethics not as moral standards or specific duties, but as the responsibility of becoming a single individual in time; singularity as the intimate and personal relationship with the calling of love. In such a way, that silence is the experience of the encounter with the paradox that being (...) human means to be singular in conditions that claim an universal and general transparent manifestation dependent of the dominant rational discourse.Then, silence becomes the fundamental ethical claim to become a human person, as spirit in time, where it becomes a time of trial and examination, a temporality, where the trial is the fidelity to love’s calling, the listening of the possibilities that are presented by the anxiety of the decision. These possibilities are not immanent to the world or to history, they call for a personal choice, always containing a space of revelation; therefore of listening to the interiority of the personal choice that for Kierkegaard is the passion of faith, communicated and lived in silence. Concluding that an ethics of silence by the image of Abraham implies to re-think the role of philosophy in relationship to faith, hope and love in time, as a silent thought. (shrink)

La jurisdicción constitucional nació el 24 de febrero de 1803 en una desangelada sala en la planta baja del Capitolio cedida por el Congreso de los Estados Unidos al Tribunal Supremo cuando su presidente, el Chief Justice John Marshall hizo pública la sentencia en el caso Marbury v. Madison. En ella se establecía la revisión judicial de las leyes (y también de los actos del Gobierno, pero éste es otro tema) sacándosela de la manga de la toga como de una (...) chistera extraen un conejo los prestidigitadores, pues la Constitución del nuevo país, promulgada en 1787 y todavía vigente, no preveía expresamente tal competencia. (shrink)

Estrechamente vinculado a su Historia de la Filosofía (Colección Fundamentos, números 21 y 22), esta Iniciación que nos ofrece ahora Felipe Martínez Marzoa refleja una considerable experiencia docente. No se trata, sin embargo, de un libro que se atenga a las normas de los programas oficiales, ni que pretenda exponer "un poco de todo" a costa de esquivar cuanto hay de dificultoso en un desarrollo, incluso elemental, de los temas de la Filosofía. El autor ha seleccionado premeditadamente una serie de (...) cuestiones básicas para una rigurosa lectura de iniciación -el silogismo y la proposición, el universal, la teoría de las ideas, las categorías, la esencia de las verdades matemáticas, la lógica simbólica, etc.- y las pone al alcance del lector que, deseando algo más que la familiarización con fórmulas definitorias, aspira a dar los primeros pasos en un terreno que no podrá recorrer nunca sin esfuerzo personal. (shrink)

Freedom of Information Acts (FOIA) are valuable legal tools to access information held by public authorities but during the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic time frames to reply to requests were de jure or de facto suspended in many countries. However, the lack of effective legal tools to achieve transparency was not automatically paired with governmental secrecy. This research paper analyses which are the factors that prompted some governments to move from secrecy to transparency while the essential legal tool (...) to achieve disclosure of information was not available. It focuses on the role of ‘ecologies of transparency’, a concept developed by Seth Kreimer to describe how FOIA needs to be understood as functioning within a collection of factors and actors. Yet, can transparency ecologies still force disclosure of information when FOIA is suspended? Research focuses on a comparative case study about transparency of scientific committees advising governments on Covid-19 in the UK and in Spain. In both countries, members and minutes were initially secret, but the British government published information before being forced by FOIA, while the Spanish executive only released partial information when FOIA was reactivated. The paper argues that information disclosure processes can be understood as supply and demand models. On the demand side, it highlights the role of adversarial press, scientific community, whistle-blowers, the opposition and critics within the governing party as decisive factors within the transparency ecology. On the supply side, it focuses on legitimation needs from the government to explain different outcomes. (shrink)

Averroes, un pensador cuyo legado sigue vivo -- Acerca de la felicidad y la amistad -- Sobre el deseo -- La crítica de Averroes al teólogo iraní al-Gazzali -- Los rostros del comentador -- Averroes, el filósofo andalusí que revolucionó Europa -- "Averroes recuperó el racionalismo griego olvidado en Europa" -- Apéndices.