Este volumen recoge las ponencias, comunicaciones y coloquios que se ofrecieron en la última reunión organizada por la Asociación Interdisciplinar “José de Acosta” (ASINJA). El tema vertebrador, como indica el título, es el sentido del hombre en el Universo. La toma de conciencia de sí mismo y del Universo en el que se encuentra inmerso, hacen platearse al hombre una serie de preguntas sobre el sentido de las cosas, o sobre el por qué y el para qué de la propia (...) exitencia humana. Estas misma preguntas centran los estudios contenidos en este libro. (shrink)

Husserl on the Ego and its Eidos (Cartesian Meditations, IV) ALFREDO FERRARIN THE THEORY OF the intentionality of consciousness is essential for Husserl's philosophy, and in particular for his mature theory of the ego. But it runs into serious difficulties when it has to account for consciousness's transcendental constitution of its own reflective experience and its relation to immanent time. This intricate knot, the inseparability of time and constitution, is most visibly displayed in Husserl's writings from the 192os up (...) to the notion of the eidos ego in the fourth Cartesian Meditation. In this paper I want to dwell on the most problematic aspects of this theory. After a few preliminary remarks about the intentionality of consciousness (sec- tion 1), I try to place the theory of the substrate of habitualities in the context of Husserl's evolution on the issue of the reflection of the ego on itself (section ~). I briefly follow the threads of Husserl's shifting position from the Logical Investi- gat/ons and Ideas I to Ideas II, the Cartesian Meditations and the Cr/s/s. I indicate Husserl's works are quoted with the following abbreviations: CM = Cartesiani.~he Meditationen, Husserliana Bd. I, hrsg. v. S. Strasser (Den Haag, 195o); Carte- s/an M~, trans. D. Cairns (Dordrecht, 196o ) SW = Husserl, Shorter Works, ed. P. McCormick and F. Elliston (Notre Dame, 198a) IZ = Zur Phttnomenologie des inneren Zeilheun~tseim (z 893-z 917), Husserliana Bd. X, hrsg. v. R. Boehm (Den Haag, 1966 ) Ideen I = ldeen zu einer reinen Ph~nomenologie und ph~nomenologischen Philosophic, Husserliana Bd. III, hrsg. v. W. Biemel (Den Haag, t95o); Ideas I, trans. F. Kersten (The Hague, Boston, Lancaster, s983) ldeen// = ld., Hussefliana Bd. IV, hrsg. v. M. Biemel (Den Haag, 1952); Ideas I1, trans. R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer (Dordrecht, Boston, London, x 989) FTL = Forma/e und transzendenta~ Log/k, Husserliana Bd. XVII, hrsg. v. P. Janssen (Den Haag, t974) Kr/sh = Kr/s/s der europ~/schen W/ssen~haften, Husserliana Bd. VI, hrsg. v. W. Biemel (Den Haag, 1954) I wish to express my gratitude to Pierre Kerszberg and Alessandra Fussi for their helpful com- ments on an earlier draft of the paper, and to Graham Harman for checking the final version of my English text. [645] 646 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 32:4 OCTOBER 1994 some historical antecedents, in particular Aristotle, of Husserl's theory of abid- ing properties which, as far as I can see, have not been pointed out before. Husserl's Entwicklungsgeschichte on the topic of the pure ego has already been the object of important scholarly works, of which Kern's 1964 Husserl und Kant seems to me the best example. But what the secondary literature does not do is develop thematically the ambiguities of Husserl's definitions of consciousness and temporality in a unitary and comprehensive way. While I follow the lead of Berger, Broekman, Kern, Marbach,' and others, I find that their work does not sufficiently stress the difficulties at the core ofintentionality and reflective time- consciousness. Therefore, although section 2 is a necessary presupposition for drawing some critical conclusions in the final two sections, it does not exhaust my theme. After clarifying the peculiarity of the notions of essence, intuition, tran- scendental and apriori, as well as their irl:educibility to a Kantian meaning, I turn to the "de facto transcendental ego" resulting from eidetic variation (section 3) in order to introduce an examination of temporality. The difficul- ties in the twofold requirement, namely, that consciousness be the identical subject of its Erlebnisse and be synthetically unified in time, concern the unity, primacy, and mutual relation of time and consciousness in the constitution of our experience. They have been heady pointed out by Ricoeur in his commen- tary on the Cartesian Meditations. But what I want to argue in section 4, going beyond Ricoeur's text, is that the tension between temporally constituted and constitutive consciousness in the ego's reflection on its own retentions and protensions does not simply make the question of time ambiguous, but has crucial and problematic bearings on the very definition of consciousness as intentionality. In this respect... -/- . (shrink)

This text is an interview given by Prof. Dr. Alfredo Pereira Jr. to Leonardo Ferreira Almada, on the occasion of the call for publication of interviews with different Brazilian philosophers. In response to the goal of the Trans/Form/Ação journal call, we sought to carry out an interview in which a PhD professor with an established career presents some elements of his personal and academic stories, as well as clarifies important points of his research, some of his theses and vision (...) of the world based on questions asked by another professor, a historical research partner, and in-depth knowledge of the interviewee’s career. (shrink)

The Critique of Pure Reason—Kant’s First Critique—is one of the most studied texts in intellectual history, but as Alfredo Ferrarin points out in this radically original book, most of that study has focused only on very select parts. Likewise, Kant’s oeuvre as a whole has been compartmentalized, the three Critiques held in rigid isolation from one another. Working against the standard reading of Kant that such compartmentalization has produced, The Powers of Pure Reason explores forgotten parts of the First (...) Critique in order to find an exciting, new, and ultimately central set of concerns by which to read all of Kant’s works. Ferrarin blows the dust off of two egregiously overlooked sections of the First Critique—the Transcendental Dialectic and the Doctrine of Method. There he discovers what he argues is the Critique’s greatest achievement: a conception of the unity of reason and an exploration of the powers it has to reach beyond itself and legislate over the world. With this in mind, Ferrarin dismantles the common vision of Kant as a philosopher writing separately on epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics and natural teleology, showing that the three Critiques are united by this underlying theme: the autonomy and teleology of reason, its power and ends. The result is a refreshing new view of Kant, and of reason itself. (shrink)

Philosophers of perception frequently assume that we see actual states of affairs, or facts. Call this claim factualism. In his book, William Fish suggests that factualism is supported by phenomenological observation as well as by experimental studies on multiple object tracking and dynamic feature-object integration. In this paper, I examine the alleged evidence for factualism, focusing mainly on object detection and tracking. I argue that there is no scientific evidence for factualism. This conclusion has implications for studies on the phenomenology (...) and epistemology of visual perception. (shrink)

The objective of this study is to provide insight into culinary systems. Each culture expresses its own identity through the way in which it transforms food into an elaborated cuisine. The phases of a cooking process start with the choice of ingredients, their preparation, their processing, how they are served, and how they are eaten. Each of these phases makes it possible to understand the semiotic and social behavior of a human group in the moment they choose to prepare and (...) eat a particular food. Therefore, this article contains a contrastive analysis of how Mexican, Texan, and Italian cuisines show how spicy and hot food is interpreted depending on the values that ​​are given to it in regards to being considered a dish, a spice or a vegetable. It bases its analysis on the mechanisms built around the meaning of chile in order to express cultural characteristics and differences. The recipes and their narrative processes, in addition to the use of color, allow the identification of parameters to describe the various cuisines through recipes books. (shrink)

Este articulo pretende brindar elementos sobre el tema de las identidades puestas al servicio de proyectos políticos y económicos. Es, conforme a una costumbre de quien firma este artículo, un diálogo entre el pasado y el presente, a la vez que se hace un esfuerzo de contextualización. El patriotismo emerge como coartada de intereses económicos, dejando una cauda de odios, sobre los que se debe pensar y contribuir a actitudes de hermanamientos. Esta colaboración se centra en el nuevo colonialismo hispano, (...) de índole ultraconservador, aunque no están exentas otras fuerzas del espectro político. El trabajo, sobre todo, se centra en colaboraciones periodísticas críticas del ultraconservadurismo, por lo que se inscribe en un análisis de medios de comunicación. A modo de tipologías de fuentes podemos resaltar el texto de la BBC que muestra la preocupación hispana sobre la postura del Gobierno de Biden que recuerda la vieja pugna hispanismo-panamericanismo; el texto de Miriam Hernández Reina como asiento referencial de los nuevos aires de la ultraderecha española en América Latina; la combinación de los intereses políticos y económicos de dicha tendencia política en clave colonial, así como las preocupaciones del mundo de las izquerdas y ciertas pautas a seguir para contrarrestar la influencia creciente de la extrema derecha en las redes sociales. (shrink)

Friedrich Nietzsche e a crítica da subjetividade cartesiana O nome de Descartes aparece várias vezes nas obras publicadas e nos fragmentos póstumos de Nietzsche. As considerações do filósofo alemão são quase sempre críticas e recuperam, embora com um diferente juízo de valor, a interpretação do pensamento cartesiano fornecida pela tradição idealista. Nesta perspetiva, Descartes é considerado o pai do racionalismo ocidental, o pensador que teria colocado o cogito no centro da representação. A este respeito, analisar criticamente a leitura nietzschiana não (...) significa só questionar a validade da sua interpretação, mas pôr em causa os mesmos cânones da modernidade filosófica. Palavras-chave: Nietzsche; Descartes; Cogito; Idealismo alemão; Heidegger; Modernidade. Friedrich Nietzsche et la critique de la subjectivité cartésienne Résumé: Le nome de Descartes apparait plusieurs fois dans les œuvres publiées et dans les fragments posthumes de Nietzsche. Les considérations du philosophe allemand sont presque toujours critiques et reprennent, même si avec un diffèrent jugement de valeur, l’interprétation de la pensée cartésienne fournie par la tradition idéaliste. Dans cette perspective, Descartes est considéré comme le père du rationalisme occidental, à savoir, le penseur qui aurait placé le cogito au centre de la représentation. À cet égard, analyser de façon critique l’approche de Nietzsche n’implique pas seulement mettre en question la validité de son interprétation, mais aussi remettre en cause les canons de la modernité philosophique. Mots-clés: Nietzsche; Descartes; Cogito; Modernité. Friedrich Nietzsche e the criticism of Cartesian subjectivity Abstract: Descartes’ name appears several times in Nietzsche’s published works and in his posthumous fragments. The considerations of the German philosopher are almost always critical and resume, although with a different value of judgement, the interpretation of Cartesian thought provided by Idealistic tradition. In this perspective, Descartes is considered as the father of Western Rationalism, namely, the author that would place the cogito at the center of representation. In this regard, to critically analyzing Nietzschean approach toward Descartes it does not only imply to questioning the validity of his interpretation, but also to questioning the very same canons of philosophical modernity. Keywords: Nietzsche; Descartes; Cogito; Modernity. (shrink)

This is a reply to Gipps' commentary on my 'The Concept of Mental Disorder'.

One of the most relevant issues of a social robot is its capability of catching the attention of a new acquaintance and empathize with her. The first steps towards a system which can be used by a social robot in order to be empathetic are illustrated in this paper. The system can analyze the Twitter ID of the new acquaintance, trying to detect the IAB Tier 1 categories that possibly can let arise in him/her a joyful feeling. Furthermore, it can (...) retrieve news about that category and report them to the user, hopefully increasing his/her curiosity towards the system, improving the naturalness of the interaction. Moreover, the system is capable of querying Wikipedia in order to clarify any doubts that may arise in the user. A sample of a possible interaction is reported at the end of the paper. (shrink)

LA JUVENTUD CONSUMIDA: REPRESENTACIONES DE LO JUVENIL EN EL DISCURSO PUBLICITARIO.

Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville puts forward a cultural critique of modern capitalism in a poetic form. The film subverts the standard classification of cinematographic “genres” and of cinematographic languages, without separating the content of the criticism from its form of expression. Thus, it uses an original language that integrates both philosophical and poetic referents, putting together elements from the dystopic imagination, the science fiction, the romantic film, and other cinematographic “genres”. Unlike Orwell and Huxley’s dystopias, Alphaville depicts a deeper, insidious, invisible (...) and more efficacious form of totalitarianism that invades the so-called “democratic” societies. This type of totalitarianism is dominated by instrumental rationality and techno-science, which expel art and imagery, the poetic and the possible, emotion, feelings and everything that is free. This paper analyzes the construction of this original form and interprets its critical content from the perspective of Godard’s thought. It is an exercise of looking and knowing how to look. (shrink)

O presente artigo pretende analisar o Speculum doutrinal de Vicente de Beauvais, destacando o modo como o autor busca assimilar materiais de origem árabe, especialmente no que diz respeito à divisão e classificação das ciências. Defenderemos que Vicente de Beauvais manterá em sua obra o espírito que animava as enciclopédias do século do século XII ao mesmo tempo em que recorrerá aos textos árabes para apresentar a estrutura do conhecimento humano. Como resultado, surgirá uma certa tensão entre a metafísica e (...) a teologia como disciplinas supremas. (shrink)

According to the semantic view of computation, computations cannot be individuated without invoking semantic properties. A traditional argument for the semantic view is what we shall refer to as the argument from the cognitive science practice. In its general form, this argument rests on the idea that, since cognitive scientists describe computations (in explanations and theories) in semantic terms, computations are individuated semantically. Although commonly invoked in the computational literature, the argument from the cognitive science practice has never been discussed (...) in detail. In this paper, we shall provide a critical reconstruction of this argument and an extensive analysis of its prospects, taking into account some ways of defending it that have never been explored so far. We shall argue that explanatory considerations support at best a weak version of the argument from the cognitive science practice, according to which semantic properties concur with formal syntactic properties in individuating computations in cognitive science, but not a strong version, according to which computation individuation in cognitive science is semantic as opposed to formal syntactic. (shrink)

Work and its consequences in enterprise is studied. Family as an institution is the basical example of division of work, which is the situation where human being perfecionates himself. Perfection takes place working, as an integrating technique which has no limits.

Uma das particularidades da recepção do pensamento de Algazel entre os pensadores latinos medievais foi o fato de ele ter sido considerado um sequax Avicennae. As críticas que Algazel direcionou a Avicena não foram conhecidas em um primeiro momento de modo que sua obra influenciou positivamente a recepção do pensamento aviceniano. O objetivo do presente artigo é passar em revista o modo como as versões latinas da Lógica e da Metafísica de Algazel transmitem a tese aviceniana da existência como acidente (...) da essência. O presente artigo será divido em duas partes. Na primeira, defenderemos que a Lógica de Algazel oferece uma caracterização da distinção em termos puramente lógicos ao passo que, na segunda, perguntaremos se a distinção recebe, na Metafísica, uma interpretação ontológica, ou seja, se implica uma distinção real entre essência e existência. (shrink)

El transhumanismo es una moda intelectual que propone la transformación de los seres humanos mediante diversas tecnologías. Expondremos brevemente los rasgos más conspicuos del TH, así como las principales críticas que se le han hecho. Pero la intención de este artículo no es entrar en esta polémica; aportaremos tan solo las claves imprescindibles para poder seguir adelante. Y una de las claves más intrigantes del TH es que, por debajo de su pátina tecno-futurista, remite a ciertas ideas filosóficas tan viejas (...) como, en apariencia, incompatibles entre sí. El TH remite al naturalismo radical, tanto como al nihilismo existencialista. La tesis que aquí se defiende es que tanto el naturalismo radical como el nihilismo existencialista son producto de las diversas oleadas del dualismo: del dualismo platónico antiguo, del dualismo cartesiano moderno. Una vez que separamos, a la manera dualista, la libertad por un lado y la naturaleza por el otro, podemos contar hasta dos, como hacen los dualistas, o quedarnos solo en uno, como hacen los existencialistas, que se paran en la libertad, y los naturalistas, que solo cuentan con la naturaleza. En cualquier caso, la imagen del ser humano, que es libertad y naturaleza, sale dañada. Asoma entonces el animal aporético y enfermizo al cual hay que salvar… de sí mismo. ¿Cómo? Siguiendo el método de Procusto, pero ahora con los prefijos bio e info en lugar de sierra y martillo. Hasta que el pobre ser humano encaje en el lecho de la utopía que algunos visionarios han urdido. ¿Y no hay otra vía, otra forma de mejorar la vida humana que sea más respetuosa para con la humana envergadura? Quizá sí, mas para trazar esa tercera vía, entre el naturalismo radical que mutila y el nihilismo existencialista que descoyunta y estira, habría que negar de antemano el dualismo que a los dos engendra, y atenerse a la sensatez común, en línea con la tradición aristotélica, antes que a las ensoñaciones utópicas. En nuestra opinión, el concepto aristotélico de naturaleza humana nos habilita para juzgar las antropotecnias mejor que la normatividad extraída de las visiones futuristas propias del TH. (shrink)

Argument evaluation, one of the central problems in argumentation theory, consists in studying what makes an argument a good one. This paper proposes a formal approach to argument evaluation from the perspective of justification logic. We adopt a multi-agent setting, accepting the intuitive idea that arguments are always evaluated by someone. Two general restrictions are imposed on our analysis: non-deductive arguments are left out and the goal of argument evaluation is fixed: supporting a given proposition. Methodologically, our approach uses several (...) existing tools borrowed from justification logic, awareness logic, doxastic logic and logics for belief dependence. We start by introducing a basic logic for argument evaluation, where a list of argumentative and doxastic notions can be expressed. Later on, we discuss how to capture the mentioned form of argument evaluation by defining a preference operator in the object language. The intuitive picture behind this definition is that, when assessing a couple of arguments, the agent puts them to a test consisting of several criteria. As a result of this process, a preference relation among the evaluated arguments is established by the agent. After showing that this operator suffers a special form of logical omniscience, called preferential omniscience, we discuss how to define an explicit version of it, more suitable to deal with non-ideal agents. The present work exploits the formal notion of awareness in order to model several informal phenomena: awareness of sentences, availability of arguments and communication between agents and external sources. We discuss several extensions of the basic logic and offer completeness and decidability results for all of them. (shrink)

We examine the extent to which host country income inequality influences multinational enterprises’ (MNE) expansion strategy for foreign production investment, depending on their specific strategic objectives. Applying a transaction cost framework, we predict that national income inequality has an inverted U-shaped relationship with foreign production investment. As inequality increases, MNEs accrue lower transaction costs arising from interactions with various local actors, leading to higher probability of investment. As income inequality increases further, its effect on location attractiveness will become negative, as (...) its attraction effect is increasingly offset by additional monitoring, bargaining, and security costs owing to the more fractious nature of high inequality societies. In addition, we suggest that the impact of income inequality is contingent on investment objectives: The inverted U-shaped relationship is stronger for efficiency-seeking investment but weaker for market-seeking and competence-enhancing investments. We find substantial support for our hypotheses through an analysis of 27 years (1986-2012) of data on Japanese MNEs’ overseas production entries. (shrink)

This paper examines the new forms of labour exploitation introduced by delivery platforms and proposes key insights for interpreting the exercise of power in the digital economy. Additionally, it explores the repertoire of democratic counter-conducts that gig economy workers have deployed in Spain and other parts of Europe to counteract the deterioration of their working conditions: practices of ‘savage’ democracy, cooperative associations, and legal struggles for the formalisation of their labour activity. The aim is to apply the conceptual tools from (...) social philosophy and democratic theory to understand one of the most emblematic manifestations of contemporary labour precarity, as well as to dignify the precarious revolutions that attempt to confront it. (shrink)

The sensorimotor theory of vision and visual consciousness is often described as a radical alternative to the computational and connectionist orthodoxy in the study of visual perception. However, it is far from clear whether the theory represents a significant departure from orthodox approaches or whether it is an enrichment of it. In this study, I tackle this issue by focusing on the explanatory structure of the sensorimotor theory. I argue that the standard formulation of the theory subscribes to the same (...) theses of the dynamical hypothesis and that it affords covering-law explanations. This however exposes the theory to the mere description worry and generates a puzzle about the role of representations. I then argue that the sensorimotor theory is compatible with a mechanistic framework, and show how this can overcome the mere description worry and solve the problem of the explanatory role of representations. By doing so, it will be shown that the theory should be understood as an enrichment of the orthodoxy, rather than an alternative. (shrink)

The activism of institutional investors tends more and more toward the supervision and control of the behavior of the managers of big companies. In this article, we present a model based on the creation of an activism index that lets us evaluate such activism's effect on the sensitivity of the investment policies of a company in the face of financial variables and market variables . To test our assertions, we analyze firm-level data for United Kingdom , Germany, France, Denmark, and (...) Spain during the period 1995-2004. Our results point to a significant reduction in the sensitivity of company investment decisions in the face of these variables, especially relative to intangible capital, as a result of the neutralizing effect of activism on the high agency costs of free cash flow and on the information asymmetries of the market. (shrink)

In previous works, we presented a modification of the usual possible world semantics by introducing an independent temporal structure in each world and using accessibility functions to represent the relation among them. Different properties ofthe accessibility functions have been considered and axiomatic systems which define these properties have been given. Only a few ofthese systems have been proved tobe complete. The aim ofthis paper is to make a progress in the study ofcompleteness for functional systems. For this end, we use (...) indexes as names for temporal flows and give new proofs of completeness. Specifically, we focus our attention on the system which defines injectivity, because the system which defines this property without using indexes was proved to be incomplete in previous works. The only system considered which remains incomplete is the one which defines surjectivity, even ifwe consider a sequence ofnatural extensions ofthe previous one. (shrink)

This paper addresses, fundamentally, a single issue: assessing whether the currently very influent approach in cognitive sciences, i.e., Radical Embodied Cognitive Science, is committed to some version of emergentism. The structure of the paper is the following. In the first section I introduce the leading ideas of RECS. In the second section I compare certain standard formulations of emergentism with the main claims of RECS, trying to assess whether the latter involve some emergentist tenets. Some conclusions, in the third section, (...) follow. My conclusion will be that, on the one hand, there are some substantive epistemological analogies between RECS and emergentism, but, on the other hand, the metaphysics of RECS is not of an emergentist kind, in spite of some shallow similarities. Therefore, depending on one’s taking emergentism as an epistemological rather than a metaphysical thesis, RECS will be considered as being committed to emergentism or not. (shrink)

En el artículo se defiende que si se acepta la superación entre fundacionismo y coherentismo que plantea Ernest Sosa y se sostiene una teoría de la justificación epistémica basada en el ejercicio de virtudes intelectuales, esta no es condición suficiente para usar el razonamiento analógico en la investigación arqueológica. Por ende, aunque se puede sostener su necesidad para utilizar la analogía, no es suficiente a menos que se recurra a la virtud de la responsabilidad (Code) como eje de la justificación (...) epistémica. Finalmente se discute su viabilidad e importancia para el caso de la arqueología en México. (shrink)

Whoever has even a superficial familiarity with recent, and not so recent, philosophical debates knows that in the last few decades philosophy of mind has been dominated by physicalist naturalism, and that philosophers of mind who are willing to seriously consider the possibility that materialism might be false are still quite rare. This being the situation, it is somewhat surprising that in the philosophical literature the pro-materialist conviction often seems to float free of the defence of any specific argument in (...) its favour. Yet, some arguments for physicalism have actually been put forward, and in this paper I examine three: the argument from the success of science, the argument from methodological naturalism, and the argument from the causal closure of the physical. They may not exhaust all that has been said to uphold physicalism in the metaphysics of mind, but they do offer, I think, a fair survey of the sorts of reasons that are given in this kind of discussion. If I am right on this point, and if I am right that the arguments I consider are weak and unconvincing, then the most popular form of naturalism concerning the mind cannot be viewed as being well backed up, contrary to what many of its supporters usually think. (shrink)