El objetivo del presente estudio es analizar algunos aspectos vinculados a la interpretación de la ley humana y su causa final en el pensamiento del teólogo, f ilósofo y jurista Español Francisco Suárez (1548-1617). En algunos autores resulta indudable su pertenencia a un modo de pensar determinado. Ello se observa, por mencionar algunos ejemplos, en los casos de Alberto Magno y Tomás de Aquino —identiicados con la edad media—. Por el contrario otros autores, aún medievales, desarrollaron doctrinas que se constituyeron (...) en preludio de elaboraciones posteriores modernas. Por este motivo tales figuras resultan fuertemente vinculadas a al- gunas corrientes de pensamiento modernas. Aquí puede mencionarse a Escoto, Ockham y Marsilio de Padua. Esta claridad recientemente señalada no se observa en relación a Francisco Suárez quien aparece como un autor controvertido y considerado de transición, por lo menos temporalmente, entre edad media y moderna. Las discusiones actuales en torno a Suárez se deben a la inexistencia de un cierto consenso respecto al lugar que le corresponde a su doctrina, especialmente filosófico-política, entre las concepciones que caracterizan a los períodos antiguo-medieval y moderno. Por estos motivos esta investigación persigue def inir la ubicación del pensamiento suareciano, en relación al tema propuesto, y de acuerdo a lo que nuestro autor expone en su Tratado de la Ley. (shrink)

El presente artículo tiene por objetomostrar la armónca int.egración de las doctrtnas dela Equidad en las Filosofias Prácticas de AlbertoMagno y de Tomás de Aquino. Las soluciones queambos autores ofrecen perrniten extraer importanteselementos de juicio a fin de resolver e! importanteproblema de la Filosofia Política y Jurídicaactual a saber, e! dei modo de determinar la medidade la Justicia que sirve como situación de partidapara la formación y regulación de la ComunidadPolitica. E! texto está compuesto de cuatro partesprincipales. En primer lugar (...) se puntualiza la inclusióndei tema dentro de los problemas de la FilosofiaPráctica actual. En segundo lugar se formulanalgunas presiciones histórico filosóficas que serviránluego de apoyatura para delinear las doctrinasde los autores tratados. Aqui mismo se presentauna sistemática amplia acerca dei concepto deEquldad en la cual quedan int.egrados los rasgoscomunes que las historia de! concepto desde laantigüedad hasta la Edad Media permite bosquejar.En tercer lugar se ofrecen las doctrinas de Alberto yde Tomás, poniendo especial atención tanto a lapresentación de los textos pertientes como a suacuerdo sea entre un autor y e! otro, como tambiénrespecto de la tradición llamada iusnaturalista. Porúltimo se extraen algunas conclusiones mediantelas que se pretende abrir un debate posteriorcentrado en la misma perspectivca de! presetneestudio a saber, revalorizar la inclusión de lasargurnentaciones de Alberto y de Tomás en lascuestiones más actuales de las Filosofias: Políticasy Jurídicas. (shrink)

Objeto del presente estudio es poner en evidencia que a partir de la obra de Descartes, en particular, de su doctrina del ego cogito, es posible articular los moldes de la moderna Teoría del Estado. Lo característico de esa Teoría del Estado es que la misma se torna deudora de las premisas gnoseológicas establecidas por Descartes. En efecto, la Teoría del Estado no formulada explícitamente por Descartes, ni por Kant, fue desarrollada recién por los neo-kantianos de Marburgo en el siglo (...) XIX, haciéndose ellos también deudores del racionalismo cartesiano, a través del apriorismo kantiano. En la base del presente estudio subyace un contraste algunas premisas metafísicas con derivación política, formuladas por Tomás de Aquino. (shrink)

El presente estudio se propone rehabilitar la fundamentación onto-teológica del Justo natural platónico y poner en evidencia su proyección en orden a, en primer lugar, la constitución de la - politike episteme - Ciencia Política, en segundo lugar, la constitución de la polis, y, en tercer lugar, la constitución del - psykhe - alma humana, desde donde nace la polis justa. La misión del verdadero filósofo-político es la de ascender hacia la contemplación del Bien Supremo y posteriormente, una vez lograda (...) la purificación de su alma - katharsis -, iniciar el descenso hacia la polis, a fin de intentar la resolución del conflico existente entre el Poder Político y la Filosofía. Finalmente el propósito será subrayar la originalísima reducción del mundo sensible a la clave suprasensible que ofrece el mundo de las ideas y del Bien Supremo en particular, no sin dejar de poner en evidencia la debilidad de la dialéctica platónica al mantener dicho Bien Supremo en el plano meramente intuitivo. (shrink)

Defeasible argumentation has been applied successfully in several real-world domains in which it is necessary to handle incomplete and contradictory information. In recent years, there have been interesting attempts to carry out argumentation processes supported by massive repositories developing argumentative reasoning applications. One of such efforts builds arguments by retrieving information from relational databases using the DBI-DeLP framework; this article presents eDBI-DeLP, which extends the original DBI-DeLP framework by providing two novel aspects which refine the interaction between DeLP programs and (...) relational databases. First, we expand the expressiveness of dbi-delp programs by providing ways of controlling how the information in databases is recovered; this is done by introducing filters that enable an improved fine-grained control on the argumentation processes which become useful in applications, providing the semantics and the implementation of such filters. Second, we introduce an argument comparison criterion which can be adjusted at the level of literals to model particular features such as credibility and topic expertise, among others. These new tools can be particularly useful in environments such as medical diagnosis expert systems, decision support systems, or recommender systems based on argumentation, where datasets are often provided in the form of relational databases. (shrink)

Reseña de Sebastian Luft. Meditaciones fenomenológicas y (neo)kantianas. Filosofía trascendental, cultura y teoría de las ciencias. Bogotá: Aula de Humanidades, 2019, 334pp.

I conceptualise the role of dualities in quantum gravity, in terms of their functions for theory construction. I distinguish between two functions of duality in physical practice: namely, discovering and describing ‘equivalent physics’, versus suggesting ‘new physics’. I dub these the ‘theoretical’ versus the ‘heuristic’ functions of dualities. The distinction seems to have gone largely unnoticed in the philosophical literature: and it exists both for dualities, and for the more general relation of theoretical equivalence. The paper develops the heuristic function (...) of dualities: illustrating how they can be used, if one has any luck, to find and formulate new theories. I also point to the different physical commitments about the theories in question that underlie these two functions. I show how a recently developed schema for dualities articulates the differences between the two functions. (shrink)

En este artículo se analizan las concomitancias entre las nociones de imaginario de Cornelius Castoriadis y de mundo interno de Hannah Arendt. Estas nociones amplían el horizonte de la política hacia una compresión más profunda del self del ciudadano. a partir de ellas, se advierte la hipertrofia de la lógica identitaria en el pensamiento occidental, debida al miedo al descontrol y la angustia ante la contingencia. El énfasis en la identidad ha dado como resultado una política idolátrica caracterizada por soluciones (...) omnipotentes. Castoriadis y Arendt descubren en su lugar una concepción más rica de la libertad al reconocer la importancia de la democracia in foro interno. Sus teorías políticas, en las que escuchamos ecos de la tradición retórica mediterránea, ponen en evidencia algunas de las ausencias y las deformaciones más graves del pensamiento occidental, perpetuadas por pensadores como Thomas Hobbes. (shrink)

I begin to develop a framework for emergence in the physical sciences. Namely, I propose to explicate ontological emergence in terms of the notion of ‘novel reference’, and of an account of interpretation as a map from theory to world. I then construe ontological emergence as the “failure of the interpretation to mesh” with an appropriate linkage map between theories. Ontological emergence can obtain between theories that have the same extension but different intensions, and between theories that have both different (...) extensions and intensions. I illustrate the framework in three examples: the emergence of spontaneous magnetisation in a ferromagnet, the emergence of masslessness, and the emergence of space, in specific models of physics. The account explains why ontological emergence is independent of reduction: namely, because emergence is primarily concerned with adequate interpretation, while the sense of reduction that is relevant here is concerned with inter-theoretic relations between uninterpreted theories. (shrink)

This chapter argues that Merleau-Ponty’s account of perception should be understood, not as a theory of perception in the usual sense, but as belonging squarely to transcendental philosophy. Contra the interpretation of Phenomenology of Perception as essentially a work in the philosophy of psychology, and the associated naturalistic construal of his ideas, it is suggested that Merleau-Ponty must be seen in the light of the history of transcendental philosophy and that an original form of idealism lies at the heart of (...) his philosophical project. The transcendental turn is presupposed by Merleau-Ponty’s claims regarding perception, and his key notion of ambiguity is a transcendental descendant of Kant’s strategy of establishing idealism by way of antinomy. (shrink)

In the traditional understanding, human dignity is often portrayed as a «final», «inherent», and «absolute» value. If human dignity as the core of the status of a human being did indeed have thos characteristics, this would yield a severe limitation for obligations that stem from the moral status of non-human animals, plants, eco systems and other entities discussed in environmental ethics; for obligations that arise from human dignity standardly take priority over the duties toward entities with non-human moral status. Yet, (...) many theorists of human dignity nowadays have given up the traditional picture in favour of a more «contingent» understanding of human dignity that abandons one or more of its traditional characteristics.In this paper, I argue that to the contrary, we have good reasons to think that the three characteristics of human dignity just mentioned can indeed be attributed to a value that deserves the name «human dignity». In a first part, I argue for a specific understanding of the three value characteristics under consideration. After these preliminaries, I show in a second part that given such an understanding, we have ample evidence that we can indeed say that human dignity is an inherent, absolute and final value; and also that these three characteristics are properties of a single value. (shrink)

En un artículo publicado recientemente en esta revista, Javier Vidal argumenta que toda creencia de primera persona es una creencia consciente, una conclusión que pone en jaque ciertas teorías de la consciencia, como él mismo expone. El razonamiento de Vidal se basa en un argumento que muestra que uno conoce toda creencia de primera persona que tiene y en un principio que vincula conocimiento y consciencia. Mi objetivo en este trabajo es mostrar que el razonamiento de Vidal no es sólido. (...) En particular, hago patente que el argumento depende de rechazar la relación ampliamente aceptada en epistemología entre creencia y conocimiento. Además, argumento que SC* o bien prejuzga la cuestión o bien involucra una noción de consciencia no relevante para la discusión. (shrink)

: We offer a response to four themes that result from the commentators’ inquiries and critiques: the psychodynamic perspective in contemplative research; the limitations of self-….

The 'late' Foucault and his purported 'return to the subject' is a much discussed issue. Over the past twenty years, various suggestions have been made as to how to integrate Foucault's ethics into his oeuvre as a whole. This paper holds that there is a 'conceptual continuity', rather than a break, between Foucault's earlier works on normalizing power, and his later works on ethical self-constitution. On the basis of a conceptual framework, which is developed in Section II, a reading of (...) two themes concerning certain practices of the self is offered in the following sections (namely, dietetics and spiritual guidance). The material, drawn from the recently published lecture series L'herméneutique du sujet as well as from other published works, is related back to Foucault's ideas on the process of 'subjectivation', in order to support the claim that 'fabrication' and 'self-constitution' are but two aspects of subjectivation. Keywords: late Foucault, ethics, practices of the self, self-constitution, discipline, power, surveillance, spiritual guidance, meditation, parrhesia, dietetics, art of living, aesthetics of existence, return of the subject, subjectivation, relation to self. (shrink)

In recent years, personalized medicine (PM) has become a highly regarded line of development in medicine. Yet, it is still a relatively new field. As a consequence, the discussion of its future developments, in particular of its ethical implications, in most cases can only be anticipative. Such anticipative discussions, however, pose several challenges. Nevertheless, they play a crucial role for shaping PM’s further developments. Therefore, it is vital to understand how the ethical discourse on PM is conducted, i.e. on what (...) – empirical and normative – assumptions ethical arguments are based regarding PM’s current and future developments. (shrink)

In this article, I deal with the phenomenon, known to today’s philosophers, as the split between analytic and continental philosophy. I provide a historical-institutional explanation for this split and then a propose a type of doing philosophy beyond the divide, which I call “synthetic philosophy.” Synthetic philosophy should take and synthesize the best of both traditions into a new form of philosophy, which I recommend for the future.

Critics have standardly regarded Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason as an abortive attempt to overcome the subjectivist individualism of his early philosophy, motivated by a recognition that Being and Nothingness lacks ethical and political significance, but derailed by Sartre’s Marxism. In this paper I offer an interpretation of the Critique which, if correct, shows it to offer a coherent and highly original account of social and political reality, which merits attention both in its own right and as a reconstruction of (...) the philosophical foundation of Marxism. The key to Sartre’s theory of collective and historical existence in the Critique is a thesis carried over from Being and Nothingness: intersubjectivity on Sartre’s account is inherently aporetic, and social ontology reproduces in magnified form its limited intelligibility, lack of transparency, and necessary frustration of the demands of freedom. Sartre’s further conjecture – which can be formulated a priori but requires a posteriori verification – is that man’s collective historical existence may be understood as the means by which the antinomy within human freedom, insoluble at the level of the individual, is finally overcome. The Critique provides therefore the ethical theory promised in Being and Nothingness. (shrink)

Whistleblowing is regularly identified as corporate control mechanism to prevent and uncover fraud. We review and compare the legal situation for whistleblowers in the People’s Republic of China and India. In a survey of 942 employees from private companies in both countries, we take a look at the status quo of whistleblowing system implementation, explore preference of channels to disclose fraud or corruption, and analyze under which conditions and what kind of employees prefer external over internal whistleblowing. We find that (...) provisions for mandatory whistleblowing systems can be found in the law of both countries. In China in particular, protection is scattered across many different laws in the private sector. Indian companies seem to have systems in place more often, although this difference becomes smaller the larger the company. The general preference of internal over external channels is similar across countries. Our regression models suggest that external channels are preferred over internal ones when fear of retaliatory measures is higher, the company is smaller, and the whistleblower is female. In line with prior literature, the effect of fear of retaliation is moderated by gender: women are less influenced by retaliation. All in all, implementation of whistleblowing systems seems ubiquitous in both countries; legal protection and comprehensive measures to decrease retaliation are lacking. Additional implications of findings are discussed. (shrink)

This paper draws lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic for the relationship between data-driven decision making and global development. The lessons are that users should keep in mind the shifting value of data during a crisis, and the pitfalls its use can create; predictions carry costs in terms of inertia, overreaction and herding behaviour; data can be devalued by digital and data deluges; lack of interoperability and difficulty reusing data will limit value from data; data deprivation, digital gaps and digital divides (...) are not just a by-product of unequal global development, but will magnify the unequal impacts of a global crisis, and will be magnified in turn by global crises; having more data and even better data analytical techniques, such as artificial intelligence, does not guarantee that development outcomes will improve; decentralised data gathering and use can help to build trust – particularly important for coordination of behaviour. (shrink)

The aim of this work is to discuss "Darwinism: its past, its present, its future", a lecture given in 1875 by Miranda Azevedo as one of the "Popular Lectures of the Gloria Neighborhood, Rio de Janeiro". In this lecture Azevedo elaborates the concepts of evolution, human evolution, progress and the idea of man as the pinnacle of evolution and the master of the selective laws governing nature. We will analyze the article, published in 1876, that contains the full text of (...) Azevedo's lecture. Of particular importance is his affiliation to Haeckel, something already commented on in Brazilian historiography. But, unlike other studies devoted to the theme, I will examine in detail Azevedo's text, attempting to show how he relates hereditary and selective evolutionary processes to thinking about how future Brazilian generations could progress. (shrink)

Singer’s much-discussed replaceability argument states that non-self-conscious animals may be killed and replaced by new animals that will lead equally valuable lives. If sound, this argument can be used to justify the cycle of raising and killing animals for food. Thus, many have argued that Singer’s theory, and utilitarianism in general, while committed to this argument, offers inadequate protection to animals. However, some utilitarians reject the argument and Singer himself was rather tentative in preventing its additional application to self-conscious beings. (...) This tension, within utilitarianism, about how to best deal with the argument is the core of what I call ‘the problem of replaceability’. My main goal here is to provide a precise description of this problem. Firstly, I distinguish between the general question of replacement permissibility and the specific question of whether (a certain version of) utilitarianism implies the replaceability argument. Focusing on the specific question I set the problem apart from other known objections to utilitarianism, like the value receptacles objection and some replacement-like difficulties. I also compare two versions of the replaceability argument and advance a better one. Finally, I point out how different interpretations of the argument affect the way out of the problem. I hope this understanding of the problem offers helpful insight to possible solutions and to further investigate its importance to animal food production and animals’ moral status. (shrink)

Context: Research in the contemplative field has focused on trainable capacities that foster self-regulation and integration. From a psychological perspective, mindfulness and personality research ….

Pretendemos mostrar um aspecto pelo qual a leitura que Habermas faz de Rousseau, em Mudança estrutural da esfera pública (1962), é levemente revisada em Direito e democracia (1992). Essa pequena mudança, por sua vez, reestrutura toda a concepção habermasiana da política de Rousseau. We intend to show how Habermas' reading of Rousseau in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962) is slightly revised in Between Facts and Norms (1992). This small change restructures the entire Habermasian conception of Rousseau's politics.