Nineteenth-century investigations of the deep sea provide a case study for black box science. Naturalists were forced to theorize about a space for which they had no direct sensory observations. This study traces the emergence of bathymetry and deep-sea biology and then analyzes how men of science dealt with the uncertainty associated with their black box practices. I argue that these investigators created multiple types of black boxes based on their uncertainties and that these black boxes did not operate equivalently. (...) Consequently, scholars should be aware of the different categories of black boxes when they describe scientific practices. (shrink)

We study some operations that may be defined using the minimum operator in the context of a Heyting algebra. Our motivation comes from the fact that 1) already known compatible operations, such as the successor by Kuznetsov, the minimum dense by Smetanich and the operation G by Gabbay may be defined in this way, though almost never explicitly noted in the literature; 2) defining operations in this way is equivalent, from a logical point of view, to two clauses, one corresponding (...) to an introduction rule and the other to an elimination rule, thus providing a manageable way to deal with these operations. Our main result is negative: all operations that arise turn out to be Heyting terms or the mentioned already known operations or operations interdefinable with them. However, it should be noted that some of the operations that arise may exist even if the known operations do not. We also study the extension of Priestley duality to Heyting algebras enriched with the new operations. (shrink)

Resumen: Tenemos ante nosotros un trabajo social con pretensiones de disciplina que se ve atrapado entre sus utopías y sus tecnologías integradas en dispositivos de poder y que, consideramos, podría tomar mayor control de sus propias posibilidades si se auto-observa como sistema que produce y reproduce culturas compartidas y relaciones socio-políticas. En el siguiente artículo, deseamos dirigirnos hacia la construcción de epistemologías para la aproximación analítica de las intervenciones y las acciones sociales del trabajo social desde parámetros socio-críticos y complejos, (...) a través de la consideración de las intervenciones sociales como culturas políticas. El fin de esta reflexión es favorecer vías de comprensión de la práctica de intervención de forma integral, en interdependencia con lo macro social, para lograr cumplir con la necesaria tarea de nutrir reflexivamente las dimensiones del trabajo social.: Social work as discipline is trapped between utopias and technologies integrated in devices of power and, we propose, could take more control of its own possibilities if it is self-observed as a system which produces and reproduces shared cultures and socio-political relations. In the following article, we focus on the construction of epistemologies for the analytical approximation of interventions and social actions of social work from socio-critical and complex parameters. We make this approach through the consideration of social interventions as political cultures. The purpose of this paper is proposing ways of understanding intervention as practice in an integral way, in interdependence with the macrosocial context, to achieve the necessary task of to feed, reflexively, the dimensions of social work. (shrink)

La evolución política latinoamericana, particularmente en el cono sur –Uruguay, Chile y Argentina- en los últimos 50 años ha experimentado cambios significativos, desde los tiempos en que los formalismos democráticos eran puestos a prueba por crisis económicas y sociales que desembocaban en crisis políticas, las que por lo general terminaban “resolviéndose” por la vía militar. Agotada esta instancia, los países han tendido a retomar los cauces democráticos. Hoy nos encontramos inmersos en la oleada transicional hacia la democracia. En este artículo (...) se aborda la evolución de un país, la República Oriental del Uruguay, en razón a las particulares características que ha asumido y cuyo rasgo más visible es el ascenso a la cúspide del poder político, la Presidencia de la República, de quien hace menos de 50 años fuera guerrillero, por la vía electoral. (shrink)

Disconcerting findings from nascent sociological research suggest that Western youth are developing subjectivities that reflect neoliberal discursive formations of self-interest, competitiveness, and materialism. However, propositions about: (1) the cognitive-affective mechanisms that explain how youth acquire and reproduce neoliberal ideology, or (2) the dispositions and behaviours that typify a neoliberal subject, remain vague. Therefore, this article provides a novel conceptualization of these two psychosocial facets that can help advance understandings and investigations of the emerging modes and societal consequences of neoliberal subjectification, (...) Specifically, it reviews major theoretical tenets from the respective literatures on neurocognitive development, social cognition, neoliberalism, and neoliberal hegemony. It then synthesizes these tenets within a modified habitus formulation to sketch a testable cognitive-sociological model to explain and explore some of the distinct dispositional values, attitudes, and practices that youth raised in societies with institutionally and culturally prevalent neoliberal norms and discourses potentially may develop and enact. (shrink)

We make a first attempt to axiomatically formulate the Montevideo interpretation of quantum mechanics. In this interpretation environmental decoherence is supplemented with loss of coherence due to the use of realistic clocks to measure time to solve the measurement problem. The resulting formulation is framed entirely in terms of quantum objects without having to invoke the existence of measurable classical quantities like the time in ordinary quantum mechanics. The formulation eliminates any privileged role to the measurement process giving an objective (...) definition of when an event occurs in a system. (shrink)

This paper focuses on an understudied aspect of Hobbes's natural philosophy: his approach to the domain of life. I concentrate on the role assigned by Hobbes to the heart, which occupies a central role in both his account of human physiology and of the origin of animal locomotion. With this, I have three goals in mind. First, I aim to offer a cross-section of Hobbes's effort to provide a mechanistic picture of human life. Second, I aim to contextualize Hobbes's views (...) in the seventeenth-century debates on human physiology and animal locomotion. In particular, I will compare Hobbes's views with the theories put forth by Harvey, Descartes, the Galenic, and Peripatetic traditions. Also, I will show that Hobbes was receptive to advances within contemporary English physiology and chemistry. Third, by means of a comparison with Descartes, I advance some hypothesis to explain why Hobbes indentified the heart, and not the brain (as was increasingly com... (shrink)

We argue that it is fundamentally impossible to recover information about quantum superpositions when a quantum system has interacted with a sufficiently large number of degrees of freedom of the environment. This is due to the fact that gravity imposes fundamental limitations on how accurate measurements can be. This leads to the notion of undecidability: there is no way to tell, due to fundamental limitations, if a quantum system evolved unitarily or suffered wavefunction collapse. This in turn provides a solution (...) to the problem of outcomes in quantum measurement by providing a sharp criterion for defining when an event has taken place. We analyze in detail in examples two situations in which in principle one could recover information about quantum coherence: (a) “revivals” of coherence in the interaction of a system with the measurement apparatus and the environment and (b) the measurement of global observables of the system plus apparatus plus environment. We show in the examples that the fundamental limitations due to gravity and quantum mechanics in measurement prevent both revivals from occurring and the measurement of global observables. It can therefore be argued that the emerging picture provides a complete resolution to the measurement problem in quantum mechanics. (shrink)

El presente artículo trata de mostrar que la filosofía de Ortega contiene elementos modernos más allá de lo que el propio autor declaraba. Así, frente a la Modernidad de cuño matematizante iniciada por Descartes, el filósofo español asimiló ideas propias de otra Modernidad encabezada por Velázquez y Cervantes. Así, la investigación mostrará, en primer lugar, la crítica de Ortega a la filosofía cartesiana; después, la interpretación orteguiana de la pintura velazquina y qué aspectos filosóficos de ésta asimila; y, finalmente, cómo (...) los planteamientos pictóricos del autor de Las Meninas son coherentes, desde el punto de vista de Ortega, con las propuestas de Cervantes en el Quijote. De esta manera, quedará probado que Ortega y Gasset es impreciso al calificarse como “nada moderno”, en la medida en que sólo es una variante del pensamiento moderno la que niega, adoptando en su filosofía ideas extraídas de sus interpretaciones del pensamiento y el arte españoles del Siglo de Oro español. (shrink)

El autor, en el contexto del debate sobre la relación entre la justicia constitucional y el proceso democrático, argumenta a favor de considerar al control jurisdiccional de constitucionalidad como un requisito necesario, pero no suficiente, para la existencia de un Estado democrático de derecho. Tras analizar las posturas y argumentos generales de ese debate, así como aspectos singulares del modo en que se viene desarrollando en Latinoamérica, abogará por un modelo de democracia débil, en el que una serie de derechos, (...) fundamentalmente civiles y políticos, estén atrincherados constitucionalmente y sean considerados precondiciones del proceso democrático. Por este último motivo, estos dos tipos de derechos podrían estar protegidos por la justicia constitucional, incluso frente al legislador mayoritario, sin merma de la dimensión democrática del sistema político. Respecto de los derechos sociales, dada su dimensión distributiva y su relación con el bienestar y las necesidades de la población, su garantía no debería de quedar exclusivamente en manos de los jueces, ya que difícilmente pueden ser considerados precondiciones de la democracia: esto no significa, afirma el autor, que no hayan de ser constitucionalizados ni tampoco que en su garantía por parte de los parlamentarios no participe, de algún modo, la justicia constitucional. (shrink)

There is growing worldwide concern that the rampant spread of digital fake news via new media technologies is detrimentally impacting Democratic elections. However, the actual influence of this recent Internet phenomenon on electoral decisions has not been directly examined. Accordingly, this study tested the effects of attention to DFN on readers’ Presidential candidate preferences via an experimental web-survey administered to a cross-sectional American sample. Results showed no main effect of exposure to DFN on participants’ candidate evaluations or vote choice. However, (...) the perceived believability of DFN about the Democratic candidate negatively mediated evaluations of that candidate—especially amongst far-right ideologues. These results suggest that DFN may at worst reinforce the partisan dispositions of mostly politically conservative Internet users, but does not cause or induce conversions in these dispositions. Overall, this study contributes novel experimental evidence, indicating that the potential electoral impact of DFN, although concerning, is strongly conditional on a reciprocal interaction between message receptibility and a pre-existing right-wing ideological orientation. The said impact is, therefore, likely narrow in scope. (shrink)

Introduction Conatus is a specific concept within Descartes’s physics. In particular, it assumes a crucial importance in the purely mechanistic description of the nature of light – an issue that Des- cartes considered one of the most crucial challenges, and major achievements, of his natural phil- osophy. According to Descartes’s cosmology, the universe – understood as a material continuum in which there is no vacuum – is composed of a number of separate yet interconnected vortices. Each of these vortices consists (...) in a set of bands rotating around their centres. The bands are com- posed of corpuscles of the three elements, each distinguished on the basis of their different shapes and sizes. The small globules of the second element, although impeded by the other parts of heaven, strive to move away from the centre of the vortex around which they revolve, thus exerting a certain force against the surrounding bodies. This striving or conatus, though a mere force rather than a genuine motion, is transmitted instan- taneously and along straight lines from body to body. According to Descartes, then, the nature of light consists in this striving alone. This account must be understood as strictly connected to the fundamental laws that regulate the Cartesian world. It is particularly important to recall that for Descartes the centrifugal force exerted by a rotating body is understood to be a consequence of the intrinsic rectilinearity of every motion. As the second of the three Laws of Nature set forth in Book II of the Principles of Philosophy establishes, “all motion is in itself rectilinear; and hence any body moving in a circle tends to move away from the centre of the circle which it describes as proved by the fact that a stone rotating in a sling tends to move centrifugally along the tangent of each point described by a circle.1 Similarly, each of the globules of the second element “strives to recede with a great force from the centre of the vortex in which it rotates; it is in fact prevented by the other globules placed all around, not differently than a stone in a sling”. Within this framework, as I show later, conatus occurs when a body’s intrinsic tendency to rectilinear motion is impeded by an external constraint. As Stephen Gaukroger notes, the use of the term conatus in the Principles – like “vis” and “ action ” – shows that Descartes “cannot avoid dynamic terminology”, despite his declared intent “to construe motion in a purely kinematic way”. Indeed, Gaukroger observes that the notions of force action and striving are systematically employed in the Principles – appearing 290, 59 and 8 times, respectively. Also noteworthy, conatus was – together with the more familiar concepts of actio and vis – a significant element of the conceptual apparatus of Scholastic natural philosophy. As will be seen later – and this is the first goal of this paper – here the concept of conatus had a very specific function. Indeed, it was a central part of the Aristotelian- Scholastic account of gravitation. Conatus was used to refer to the striving of a body to move towards its natural place – especially in cases where its natural motion was hindered or impeded by an external mover. This specific use of the concept of conatus can be found in texts on natural philosophy from the end of the sixteenth through the late seventeenth century. Notably, it occurs in some of the late -Scho- lastic texts which held special significance for Descartes’s thought. Therefore, Descartes introduces conatus in a context in which this concept already had a very specific meaning, and one of which he was very probably aware. The possible relations between these two apparently very different con- cepts have therefore to be scrutinized. I thereby propose to undertake a comparison between the Scho- lastic and the Cartesian conceptions of conatus. I hope to show that certain traits of the former are indeed echoed by the latter, although adapted to the much changed physical paradigm of Cartesian physics. In fact, Descartes’s conatus, though sharing some important similarities with the old one, underwent significant transformations in terms of both its meaning and its application. However, I hope to show that these concepts are both used to describe the behaviour of bodies in relation to their intrinsic motive tendency, and in particular when this tendency is impeded or prevented. Such a reconstruction offers two main areas of interest. On an immediate level, it furthers the general efforts of scholars over the past decades to reconstruct the full extent of the relations between Descartes’s thought and Scholastic philosophy. However, there is another significant reason for taking an interest in the ties between the Scholastic and the Cartesian conceptions of conatus. Indeed, the Cartesian conatus must be seen as crucial to a proper understanding of the broader, diverse conceptualization that this idea enjoyed in the thought of many of the most important philosophers of the early modern period, namely Spinoza, Hobbes and Leibniz. In particular, Spinoza, were directly influenced by Descartes in their unique formulations of conatus. Thus a reconstruction of the context in which Descartes formulated his conatus and of its relations to a pre-existing Scholastic conception will enable us to better reconstruct the history of this idea in the early modern period. The paper is structured as follows: in the first part, I provide a thorough review of the Scho- lastic employment of the concept conatus – both its meaning and the extent of its usage. I then show that it occurs in some of the most prominent Cartesian sources. Finally, I shall provide an account of Descartes’s theory of circular motion and conatus with the specific aim of empha- sizing the elements of both continuity and discontinuity that justify the claim that Descartes’s con- ception of conatus is reminiscent of the Scholastic one. (shrink)

Contentions about the origin of early modern empiricism have been floating about at least since the 1980s, where its exclusive “Britishness” was initially question, and the name of Gassendi was provocatively put forward as the putative “founder” of the current to the detriment of Francis Bacon. Recent scholarship has shown that early modern empiricism did not derive from philosophical speculation exclusively but had multiple sources and “foundations.” Yet, from a historical viewpoint, the question whether Bacon’s method had any influence on (...) the origin and development of Gassendi’s version of empiricism still carries significance, for its answer may open up different views on how the relation between British and “continental” empiricisms shall be framed. In this paper, I deal with Gassendi’s reception of Bacon. On the basis of a deep examination of Gassendi’s corpus, I contend that there is no trace of a consistent influence of Bacon on Gassendi’s empiricism before 1650s; although I show that an indirect influence can be found through the mediation of Peiresc, I put forward the hypothesis that it was more the empirical attitude characterizing Peiresc’s intellectual figure, rather than his interest in Baconianism, to be relevant, along with Epicurus’ philosophy, for Gassendi’s early empiricism. I then analyze Gassendi’s treatment of Bacon’s logic in Gassendi’s Syntagma philosophicum. I show that despite Gassendi’s sympathy for Bacon’s project, his own logic lays on fundamentally different assumptions. Despite this, I argue for Gassendi’s reception of Bacon’s theory of the idols in Syntagma philosophicum. On this basis, I conclude by restating the untenability of “national” accounts of the rise of empiricism, and the importance of highlighting instead the sharing of ideas between its actors. (shrink)

This study situates Henry Havelock Ellis’s sexological research within the nineteenth-century evolutionary debates, especially the discussion over sexual selection’s applicability to humanity. For example, Ellis’s monograph on sexual behavior, _Sexual Inversion_ (1897), treated inborn homosexuality as a natural variation of evolutionary mechanisms. This book was situated within a longer study of human sexuality in relation to evolutionary selection. His later works dealt even more directly with Charles Darwin’s concept of selection, such as _Sexual Selection in Man_ (1905). Through _Sexual Selection (...) in Man_, Ellis asserted that sexual attraction stemmed from a physical cause rather than an innate aesthetic sense. I argue that Ellis’s best-known historical publications, including his work on sexual inversion, were intended to intervene in the contemporary evolutionary debates. This analysis also identifies a specific point where evolutionary theory informed the foundation of sexology as a scientific discipline. (shrink)

This article aims to provide a brief overview of mental causation problem and its current proposed solutions. Indeed, mental causation turns out as one of the most difficult philosophical conundrums in contemporary philosophy of mind. In the first two sections, we offer an outline of the problem and the philosophical debate about it, and show that mental causation problem is pivotal within the contemporary philosophy of mind. In the third section, we focus on the most popular models of mental causation, (...) namely Kim's and Davidson's accounts, also discussing the objections raised against them. In the final section, we take into consideration some recent proposals poised to solve the mental causation problem, including powerism. Given the logical and metaphysical plausibility of almost all these different options, our conclusion is that mental causation is still an open problem and it is far from being resolved. (shrink)

En la filosofía de J. Rancière es posible poner en evidencia una voluntad recurrente por afirmar y verificar la «igualdad de las inteligencias» que pasa, inicialmente, por el campo de la educación en su investigación sobre los postulados de J. Jacotot, un singular pedagogo francés del siglo XIX, y que desemboca en la política en su vínculo con la estética. En este artículo nos vamos a centrar en sus primeros trabajos, sobre todo, en su libro El maestro ignorante, para plantear (...) de qué manera puede hablarse de una «emancipación estética» en su filosofía para, luego, pasar a dilucidar las relaciones que este filósofo contemporáneo establece entre el arte, la estética y la política.Palabras clave: J. Rancière, Teorías de la emancipación, Estética y política, Educación estética, Políticas estéticas, Arte crítico o político. (shrink)

After reconstructing some features of the Scholastic treatment of contingency in natural philosophy, this paper draws a comparison between Descartes’ treatments of the issue of the laws of nature in Le Monde and in the Principles of Philosophy. On the basis of this comparison, it argues that elements of the Scholastic understanding of contingency as due to the impediment provided by matter are still present in the former. While in the Principles Descartes appears to equate contingency with an epistemological limitation (...) in our understanding of the complexity of natural phenomena, in conclusion I argue that some elements of his previous approach to the issue remains in his treatment of curvilinear motion. (shrink)

The fascination of Velasquez's painting Las Meninas stems largely from the ambiguous relationship between the painting as a whole, viewed by a single perceiver, and the variety of different perceptual viewpoints it invites. This situation resonates strongly with a central puzzle in the study of consciousness: the apparent unity of perceptual experience despite multiple sense modalities. Understanding more of this latter might help to explain the way we respond to the painting.

ABSTRACT One of the many philosophical issues discussed throughout Plutarch's Quaestiones convivales has to do with the origin and inner structure of the universe, i.e., cosmological discussions. It would be impossible to discuss in detail every passage of the treatise that deals with cosmological issues. Therefore, I chose to limit my analysis to the concepts of chance, fate, ‘what depends on us ’, and providence. My purpose is to explain these concepts in the QC and to extract from them a (...) cosmological doctrine. RESUMO Entre os vários problemas filosóficos discutidos ao longo das Quaestiones Convivales de Plutarco, um deles tem que ver com a origem e com a estrutura do universo, isto é, discussões de cariz cosmológico. Seria impossível comentar em detalhe todas as passagens do tratado sobre questões cosmológicas. Por isso, preferi limitar a análise aos conceitos de acaso, destino, 'o que depende de nós' eprovidência. O meu objetivo é explicar estes conceitos nas QC e deles inferir uma doutrina cosmológica. (shrink)

Populist representation is the process by which a body or set of bodies become the signifier of a powerful act of political transgression of the social order. We call this specific type of representative linkage ‘synecdochal representation’. In it, the leader’s body performs three key functions: it mirrors certain popular traits that are characterized as ‘low’, it displays marks of exceptionality, and it appropriates symbols of institutional power. These tasks are performed through particular ways of acting, dressing, talking, eating, and (...) the like, in public. Social media has become a key locus for bodily self-presentation because it is used to create the appearance of intimacy and spontaneity through the distribution of ‘candid’ pictures and videos. This paper will analyze how the self-presentation of populist and non-populist leaders are established through Twitter, what images they choose to disseminate, and how they are re-signified by the audience. To do so, we will focus on the two Latin American politicians: Cristina Fernández (with a populist style) and Mauricio Macri (with a technocratic one). (shrink)

En el trabajo evaluamos el impacto que la crítica de Leibniz a los números infinitos tiene en el desarrollo de su metafísica de los cuerpos. Luego de exponer el vínculo que el filósofo alemán traza entre el cuerpo, la extensión y las cantidades infinitas en su período juvenil (1663-1672), analizamos sus reflexiones del período parisino sobre las paradojas de los números infinitos (1672-1676) y argumentamos que la defensa de la inconsistencia de tales números constituye un punto de inflexión en su (...) comprension de los cuerpos y, asimismo, marca el inicio de su ofensiva contra la res extensa.In this paper we study the impact of Leibniz’s critique of infinite numbers in his metaphysics of bodies. After presenting the relation that the German philosopher establishes in his youth between the notions of body, extension and infinite quantities (1672-1673), we analyze his thoughts on the paradoxes of the infinite numbers (1672-1676) and we claim that his defense of the inconsistency of such numbers is an inflexion point in his conception of body and mark the beginning of his offensive against the res extensa. (shrink)

En este trabajo realizo un examen crítico del reciente libro de Silvana Gabriela Di Camillo sobre la crítica de Aristóteles a la teoría platónica de las Ideas. El libro de Di Camillo es un trabajo muy serio cuya lectura recomiendo ampliamente. Sin embargo, considero que cuatro de las principales tesis que la autora defiende tienen varias dificultades y mi objetivo aquí es presentar argumentos detallados en contra de ellas: la interpretación de la distinción entre argumentos más y menos rigurosos del (...) tratado Sobre las Ideas; la tesis de que la separación es el blanco esencial de las críticas aristotélicas a las Ideas; la interpretación de las opciones que Platón tiene para responder al argumento del tercer hombre, y la tesis de que la separación de las Ideas debe entenderse como homonimia. In this paper I examine Silvana Gabriela Di Camillo's recent book on Aristotle's criticisms of Plato's theory of Ideas. Di Camillo's book is a very serious work that I highly recommend. Nevertheless, I consider that four of the main theses that the author defends face several difficulties and my aim here is to offer detailed arguments against them: the interpretation of the distinction between more and less accurate arguments of the treatise On Ideas; the thesis that separation is the essential target of Aristotle's criticisms against Plato's Ideas; the interpretation of the options available to Plato to reply to the third man argument; and the thesis that the separation of Ideas should be understood as homonymy. (shrink)

Habermas ha elaborado una teoría jurídica a partir de su filosofía de acción comunicativa. Sin alejarse de los fundamentos tradicionales que sustentan al Estado democrático de derecho, ha innovado una posición de legitimación al derecho y a su ejercicio, incluso ofrece nuevas herramientas conceptuales para la función judicial, como es el caso de lo que podría llamarse la adecuación que sustituye a la conocida propuesta de la ponderación de los derechos. El presente artículo pretende servir de guía para adentrase en (...) el territorio de su propuesta. (shrink)