Abortion is largely accepted even for reasons that do not have anything to do with the fetus' health. By showing that (1) both fetuses and newborns do not have the same moral status as actual persons, (2) the fact that both are potential persons is morally irrelevant and (3) adoption is not always in the best interest of actual people, the authors argue that what we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion (...) is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled. (shrink)

Using the optical ether as a case study, this article advances four lines of consideration to show why synchronic versions of the divide et impera strategy of scientific realism are unlikely to work. The considerations draw from the nineteenth-century theories of light, the rise of surprising implication as an epistemic value from the time of Fresnel on, assessments of the ether in end-of-century reports around 1900, and the roots of ether theorizing in now superseded metaphysical assumptions. The typicality of the (...) case and its impact on diachronic versions of the strategy are briefly discussed. (shrink)

In this paper, we suggest that personalized LLMs trained on information written by or otherwise pertaining to an individual could serve as artificial moral advisors (AMAs) that account for the dynamic nature of personal morality. These LLM-based AMAs would harness users’ past and present data to infer and make explicit their sometimes-shifting values and preferences, thereby fostering self-knowledge. Further, these systems may also assist in processes of self-creation, by helping users reflect on the kind of person they want to be (...) and the actions and goals necessary for so becoming. The feasibility of LLMs providing such personalized moral insights remains uncertain pending further technical development. Nevertheless, we argue that this approach addresses limitations in existing AMA proposals reliant on either predetermined values or introspective self-knowledge. (shrink)

In considering the possibility that the fundamental particles of matter might violate Leibniz's Principle, one is confronted with logical proofs that the Principle is a Theorem of Logic. This paper shows that the proof of that theorem is not universal enough to encompass entities that might not be unique, and also strongly suggests that photons, for example, do violate Leibniz's Principle. It also shows that the existence of non-individuals would imply the breakdown of Quine's criterion of ontological commitment.

Many scholars claimed that, according to Immanuel Kant, some judgements lack a truth-value: analytic judgements, judgements about items of which humans cannot have experience, judgements of perception, and non-assertoric judgements. However, no one has undertaken an extensive examination of the textual evidence for those claims. Based on an analysis of Kant's texts, I argue that: (1) according to Kant, only judgements of perception are not truth-apt. All other judgements are truth-apt, including analytic judgements and judgements about items of which humans (...) cannot have experience. (2) Kant sometimes states that truth-apt judgements are actual bearers of truth or falsity only when they are taken to state what is actually the case. Kant calls these judgements assertoric. Other texts ascribe truth and falsity to judgements, regardless of whether they are assertoric. Kant's views on truth-aptness raise challenges for correspondentist and coherentist interpretations of Kant's theory of truth; they rule out the identification of Kant's crucial notion of objective validity with truth-aptness; and they imply that Kant was not a verificationist about truth or meaning. (shrink)

GRW models of the physical world are criticized in the literature for involving wave function "tails" that allegedly create fatal interpretive problems and even compromise standard arithmetic. I find such objections both unfair and misguided. But not all is well with the GRW approach. One complaint I articulate in this paper does not have to do with tails as such but with the specific way in which past physical structures linger forever in the total GRW wave function. By pushing the (...) total proposal towards either the "Many Worlds" approach or the Bohmian approach, this feature diminishes extant GRW claims to preferability. I suggest, however, that the problem here is just an artifact of the particular and ultimately optional genre of collapse mechanism chosen by GRW. (shrink)

Angelaki, Volume 16, Issue 3, Page 125-136, September 2011.

Today philosophical discussion on indicative conditionals is dominated by the so called Lewis Triviality Results, according to which, tehere is no binary connective '-->' (let alone truth-functional) such that the probability of p --> q equals the probability of q conditionally on p, so that P(p --> q)= P(q|p). This tenet, that suggests that conditonals lack truth-values, has been challenged in 1991 by Goodman et al. who show that using a suitable three-valued logic the above equation may be restored. In (...) this paper it is first analysed a long neglected paper by Bruno de Finetti, written in 1935, where the essentials of Goodman's theory was clearly outlined. It is also stressed that de Finetti anticipated Kleene's as well as Bochvar and Blamey ideas. In the second part of the paper it is argued that the de Finetti-Goodman's original theory is defective and leads to absurd results. However, a new semantics, called semantics of hypervaluations, is here defined, that avoids the defects of the original theory. This appears to be a powerful challenge to Lewis Triviality results and to the thesis by which conditionals lack truth-values as well. (shrink)

A common assumption in non-relativistic quantum mechanics is that self-adjoint operators mathematically represent properties of quantum systems. Focusing on spin, we argue that a natural view considers observables as determinable properties and their eigenvalues as their corresponding determinates. We provide a taxonomy of the different views that one can hold, once it is accepted that spin can be modelled with the determinable-determinate relation. In particular, we present the two main families of views, dubbed Spin Monism and Pluralism, and we show (...) that the current literature does not take a stance between the two. Then we put forward two arguments in favour of the former. Finally, we present a new account of Spin Monism, that is absent in current literature; such a view is worth discussing, or so we contend, because several compelling considerations support it, and it opens new ways of thinking about the ontology of quantum mechanics. (shrink)

Coll clearly advocates the Aristotelian notion that "moral principles are ultimately realized only in specific acts which human beings choose to carry out." He cites Washington, Lincoln, and Churchill as examples of leaders whose moral wisdom in political reasoning led to a statecraft explicitly derived from prudence.

This note makes a contribution to the issue raised in a paper by Popper and Miller (1983) in which it was claimed that probabilistic support is purely deductive. Developing R. C. Jeffrey's remarks, a new general approach to the crucial concept of "going beyond" is here proposed. By means of it a quantitative measure of the inductive component of a probabilistic inference is reached. This proposal leads to vindicating the view that typical predictive probabilistic inferences by enumeration and analogy are (...) purely inductive. (shrink)

In a paper published recently in this journal, Buben attempted to show the philosophical relevance of Unamuno’s philosophical works when addressing the current debate on whether an endless existence would be something desirable—a debate which is nowadays commonly known as “The Makropulos Debate” since it was Bernard Williams’s “The Makropulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality” that aroused interest in this question among contemporary analytic philosophers. Unfortunately, Buben’s paper fails to capture or even outline the reasoning behind Unamuno’s claim (...) that we all naturally long for an endless existence —and consequently it also fails to clarify how Unamuno’s position may contribute to the current philosophical debate on the question as to whether an endless existence would be something desirable. In this paper I will point out that Unamuno’s affirmation that we all, without exception, long for an endless existence is grounded in his metaphysical claim that the most basic and natural inclination of all singular things is to increase their own singularity. In doing so, I will also be showing that Unamuno’s proposal is not philosophically relevant when addressing the current debate on the question as to whether living an endless existence would be something desirable. (shrink)

This text presents a situated reading of Civilizations and its Discontents based on the author’s experience visiting three continents. The reading is traversed by the decolonial, anti-racist, critical feminist and anti-patriarchal movements. In this way, the discontents of which Freud speaks are located in a given civilization and sexuality. Finally, it is argued that Freud’s hope for a communitarian psychoanalysis could only be possible if one recognizes the discontent produced by a culture consolidated in the remnants of the colonial era (...) of which the acute Freudian gaze is nothing more than an unnoticed, even defensive, ethnography. (shrink)

Spanish translation and notes on John Dewey’s The Sources of a Science of Education. Published in Dewey, John. Las fuentes de la ciencia de la educación. Girona: Lapislàtzuli Editorial, September 2015 (ISBN: 978–84–943707–4–8).

El objetivo de este escrito es elucidar el contenido del argumento presentado por el filósofo norteamericano William James (1842-1910) en su “Is Life Worthliving?” [“¿Merece la vida ser vivida?”], conferencia pronunciada el año 1895 en la Harvard Young Men's Christian Association y publicada unos años más tarde, en 1897, en la compilación titulada The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy [La voluntad de creer y otros ensayos en filosofía popular]. Se trata de un argumento de tipo moral (...) cuyo objetivo es defender la obligación moral de la fe religiosa y que, aunque presupone y se construye sobre la supuesta adecuación práctica de la existencia de Dios, es independiente del argumento pragmático defendido en su “The Will to Believe” [“La voluntad de creer”]. (shrink)

Ever since the heyday of the Vienna Circle, scientific realists have worked hard to document and clarify the structure and growth of truth content in theoretical descriptions. Today, this trait is particularly intense among “selective realists” – realists focused on theory parts with high empirical corroboration rather than whole theories. From their perspective, theories with posits systematically deployed in corroborated novel predictions are, with high probability, descriptively true or contain a proper part that is. Unlike traditional realists, selectivists acknowledge that (...) (a) radical conceptual change is a recurring scientific phenomenon and (b) empirical theories have poor reliability records at the most profound ontological level. At the same time, they point to significant descriptive continuities at intermediate theoretical levels between successful theories and their successors – i.e., a false theory can (and often does) contain parts that succeed as correct descriptions. Selectivists seek to identify those parts. Their approaches limit ontological commitment exclusively to highly confirmed theoretical descriptions; unfortunately, the selection criteria they use seemingly support many regrettable choices. One source of trouble is that extant approaches leave unclear the ontology described by the selected parts. Historical cases and scientific practice gesture toward a functional resolution of this difficulty, but the clues could be more transparent and need elaboration. Otherwise, selectivism has improved in consistency over the last three decades. Current projects emphasize the continuity of well-established scientific content (relating to how entities and processes effectively behave within a specific regime or descriptive level) instead of just the continuity of “structure”. This paper provides some clarifications that arguably clear the road for realist commitment toward functional and effective theoretical content. The proposed functional/effective turn is checked against some plausible objections. (shrink)

Este artículo consta de tres partes: 1. La "Exclaustración de Bonaparte", nombre español de la toma de posesión por el Estado de monasterios y conventos, donde se recogen todas las obras de arte anteriores a la invasión, así como la recuperación del edificio y de todos los "murillos" una vez finalizada la invasión. 2. La 'exclaustración' tras los Tres Años de gobierno liberal. 3. La exclaustración de 1835. Este último periodo se alarga un poco para describir la situación de los (...) frailes que fueron expulsados de sus conventos, así como del propio edificio, y la negociación que siguió hasta su definitiva recuperación y restauración. (shrink)

La tesis principal de este artículo se basa en una disanalogía funcional, entre lo que llamaré «derecho internacional basado en la humanidad», constituido por el derecho penal y los derechos humanos, y el rule of law interno. Si se adopta una perspectiva funcionalista, hay que dirigir la atención, para hacer frente a la indeterminación del derecho, tanto hacia el objetivo pragmático del rule of law – una razonable estabilidad – como hacia sus medios – el formalismo y la legalidad. Los (...) actores internacionales clave ¿comparten tales valores, inseparables del proyecto político del rule of law? El derecho internacional basado en la humanidad ¿satisface las exigencias del rule of law? La conclusión de este trabajo es que las instituciones y los mecanismos a los cuales los juristas se refieren usualmente cuando afirman que un orden jurídico constituye un rule of law, están, por lo general, ausentes en el derecho internacional basado en la humanidad. Esto implica que la indeterminación radical es, en los asuntos relacionados con la protección de la humanidad, un obstáculo demasiado grande al momento de cumplir con el ideal del rule of law. (shrink)

The main interpretative challenge set by the Fundamenta Nova Theoriae Functionum Ellipticarum lies in Jacobi’s transformation theory upon which the entire theoretical edifice of the treatise depends. Unfortunately, Jacobi did not convey any indication of how he attained his general formulae for rational transformations of elliptic functions. He limited himself to providing a posteriori verification of the validity of his claims. The aim of this paper is precisely to describe the heuristic path by which in 1827 Jacobi succeeded in finding (...) these transformation formulae. The proposed historical reconstruction will hopefully shed new light upon the emergence in Jacobi’s work of the inversion process of elliptic integrals of the first kind and thus of the elliptic function sinamu\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$u$$\end{document} itself. (shrink)

Selective realist projects have made significant improvements over the last two decades. Judging by the literature, however, antirealist quarters seem little impressed with the results. Section I considers the selectivist case and its perceived shortcomings. One shortcoming is that selectivist offerings are nuanced in ways that deprive them of features that—according to many—cannot be absent from any realism “worth having”. Section II considers eight features widely required of realist positions, none of them honored by selectivist projects. Modulo those requirements, even (...) if selectivists managed to clear other shortcomings of their project selectivism would still not be a position worth considering. Next the historical background and present credentials of the requirements in question are examined. All are found to rest on myths and confusions about science and knowledge. If this is correct, realists and antirealists should reject the requirements. (shrink)

En la oscuridad no se ven las cosas, pero la oscuridad misma sí que es visible, mientras que la luz, bajo la que todo que se ve, es ella misma invisible. La iluminante «luz de noche» es un vacío transparente que puede llegar a conocerse con un tipo de conocimiento, llamado «hábito», que recuerda a la memoria.

For María Zambrano all forms of knowledge are articulated from tradition, because what is essential is located in the past, as if it were a question of a substratum per se which is always known and transmitted. Wisdom increases by accumulation: knowledges add up, they become part of a ..

This paper intends to offer a new supplement to a corrupt passage of the Epicurean inscription of Oenoanda. Smith, in the lacuna of Fr. 6, uses the phrasal term πρῶτα σώματα to indicate the atoms. The supplement is not satisfying as it is based solely on evidence drawn from non-Epicurean texts and Lucretius, who writes in Latin and is not always reliable for reconstructing the Epicurean terminology. In this article, I will try to demonstrate that πρῶτα σώματα is in fact (...) a peripatetic – and subsequently stoic – term indicating the elements in general, which has never been used by any Epicurean author for polemical reasons. Finally, I will propose an alternative supplement. (shrink)

Texto corresponde a la memoria de pruba para optar al grado de doctor en pedagogía Universdad Católica de Lovaina.