_Objective:_ The present work aims to detect the role of the rate of speech as a mechanism able to give information on patient's intrapsychic activity and the intersubjective quality of the patient–therapist relationship. _Method:_ Thirty clinical sessions among five patients were sampled and divided into idea units ( N = 1276) according to the referential activity method. Each idea unit was rated according to referential activity method and in terms of speech rate (syllables per second) for both patient and therapist. (...) A mixed-effects model was applied in order to detect the relationship between the speech rate of both the patient and the therapist and the features of the patient's verbal production in terms of referential activity scales. A Pearson correlation was applied to evaluate the synchrony between the speech rate of the patient and the therapist. _Results:_ Results highlight that speech rate varies according patient's ability to get in touch with specific aspects detected through referential activity method: patient and the therapist speech rate get synchronized during the course of the sessions; and the therapist's speech rate partially attunes to the patient's ability to get in touch with inner aspects detected through RA method. _Conclusion:_ The work identified speech rate as a feature that may help in the development of the clinical process in light of its ability to convey information about a patient's internal states and a therapist's attunement ability. These results support the intersubjective perspective on the clinical process. (shrink)

Our work aimed to study the relationships between different dimensions of school climate, moral disengagement, empathy, and bullying behaviors (perpetration and victimization). The study sample consisted of 629 students (304 boys and 325 girls) aged 12–14 years (M= 12.55,SD= 0.67). Results showed how different dimensions of school climate predicted moral disengagement, empathy, and victimization, and these, in turn, predicted bullying perpetration. The results show the need to generate favorable educational environments to reduce the levels of moral disengagement and victimization and (...) to increase empathy in students as a strategy to prevent negative consequences related to bullying. (shrink)

Chapter 1 First Person Access to Mental States. Mind Science and Subjective Qualities -/- Abstract. The philosophy of mind as we know it today starts with Ryle. What defines and at the same time differentiates it from the previous tradition of study on mind is the persuasion that any rigorous approach to mental phenomena must conform to the criteria of scientificity applied by the natural sciences, i.e. its investigations and results must be intersubjectively and publicly controllable. In Ryle’s view, philosophy (...) of mind needs to adopt an antimentalist stance to achieve this aim. Antimentalism not only definitively rejects the idea that mind is a substance separated from the body, it also denies that mental phenomena radically differ from physical phenomena by virtue of several unique features. Most problematically, mental phenomena have a conscious character (mental states are related to specific qualitative feelings) and are accessible only to the first-person (only the subject knows directly what s/he is experiencing inside his/her mind). Ryle takes a strong stance on antimentalism going so far as to maintain that an approach to mind which aims to meet the criteria of scientificity set by the natural sciences must avoid any reference to internal, unobservable mental states. In his view (which is considered a specifically philosophical version of psychological behaviorism and also addresses questions put forward in psychological research), mental states can be redescribed in terms of behavioral dispositions. In this chapter, we address the historical roots of the antimentalist view and analyze its relation to the later tradition of research on mind. We show that, compared to the antimentalist stance, functionalism and cognitivism take a step back when they maintain that direct reference to mental states is necessary since mental states cause and therefore explain human behavior. This step backwards is often interpreted as a return to mentalism. However, this is only partially true. Indeed, we suggest that these later traditions retain one important element of Ryle’s antimentalism, i.e. the idea that mental states must be uniquely identified using external and publicly observable criteria, while excluding any reference to introspection and those qualitative dimensions of a mental state, which are accessible only to the first-person. According to the perspective we put forward, this epistemological stance has continued to influence contemporary research on mind and current philosophical and psychological theories which both tend to exclude the subjective qualities of human experience from their accounts of how the mind works. The issue we raise here is whether this is legitimate or whether subjective qualities do play a role with respect to the way our mind works. The conclusion of this chapter anticipates the argument the book makes in in favor of this latter position, starting from a particular angle, i.e. the problem of how we categorize concepts related to our internal states. -/- Chapter 2 The Misleading Aspects of the Mind/Computer Analogy. The Grounding Problem and the Thorny Issue of Propriosensitive Information -/- Abstract. After the crisis of behaviorism, cognitivism and functionalism became the predominant models in the field of psychology and of philosophy, respectively. Their success is mainly due to the new key they use for interpreting mental processes: the mind/computer analogy. On the basis of this analogy, mental operations are seen as cognitive processes based on computations, i.e. on manipulations of abstract symbols which are in turn understood as informational unities (representations). This chapter identifies two main problems with this model. The first is how these symbols can relate to and communicate with perception and thus allow us to identify and classify what we perceive through the senses. Here we limit ourselves to presenting this issue in relation to the classical symbol grounding problem originally put forward by Harnad on the basis of Searle’s Chinese room argument. An attempt to address the problem raised here will be made in chap. 3. The second point we discuss in relation to the mind/computer analogy concerns the idea of information it fosters. Indeed, following this analogy, information is something available in the external world which can be captured by the senses and transmitted to the central system without being influenced or modified by the procedures of transmission. This perspective does not take into account that – unlike computers – in living beings information is acquired by means of the body. As Ulric Neisser has already pointed out, the body is itself an informational source that provides us with additional sensory experience that influences (modifies or complements) the information extracted from the external world by the senses. To develop this line of analysis and to determine exactly what information is provided by the body and how this might influence cognition, we examine Sherrington’s and Gibson’s positions. Moving on from their views, we qualify bodily information in terms of ‘proprioception’. We use ‘proprioception’ in a broad sense to describe any kind of experience we have of our internal states (including postural information as well as sensations related to the general state of the body and its parts). Following Damasio’s and Craig’s studies, we further elaborate this position, arguing that living beings are equipped with an internal propriosensitive monitoring system which maps all the changes that constantly occur in our body and that give us perceptual (‘proprioceptive’ or propriosensitive) information about what happens inside us. Moreover, relying on Goldie’s and Ratcliffe’s view, we show that emotional information can also be considered as a form of ‘proprioception’ which contributes to determining everything we perceive. This analysis leads us to the second main thesis of this book: ‘proprioception’ is a form of internal perception and it is an essential component of the sensory information we can access and use for all cognitive purposes. -/- Chapter 3 Semantic Competence from the Inside: Conceptual Architecture and Composition -/- Abstract. Concepts are essential constituents of thought: they are the instruments we use to categorize our experience, i.e. to classify things and group them together in homogeneous sets. Here we define concepts as the internal mental information (representations) that allows us, among other things, to master words in natural language. By analyzing the way in which individuals master word meanings we explore a number of hypotheses regarding the nature of concepts. Following Diego Marconi’s research, we differentiate between two kind of abilities that underpin lexical competence – so-called ‘referential’ and ‘inferential competence’ – and we suggest that, in order to support these abilities, concepts must also include two corresponding kinds of information, i.e. inferential and referential information. We point out that the most widely used and acknowledged theories of concepts do not make this distinction, instead broadly characterizing the information used for categorization in terms of propositionally described feature lists. However, we show that while feature lists can explain inferential competence, they do not account for referential competence. To address the issue of referential competence we examine Ray Jackendoff’s hypothesis that to account for the possibility of linking perceptual and conceptual information we need to assume the existence of a (visual) representation that encodes the geometric and topological properties of objects and bridges the gap between the percept and the concept. Furthermore, we analyze the extension of this work by Jesse Prinz who introduced the notion of a proxytype, a perceptual representation of a class of objects that incorporates structural and parametric information related to their appearance. However, as we point out, proxytypes can only explain the relationship between perception and concepts with respect to instances that can be perceived through the senses and that belong to the same class by virtue of their physical similarity. We suggest that this notion be extended to include larger conceptual classes. To accomplish this, we further develop Mark Johnson, George Lakoff and Jean Mandler’s idea of a schematic image and argue that conceptual representations include a perceptual schema. Perceptual schemata are non-linguistic, structured experiential gestalts (patterns or maps) that make use of information taken from all sensory modalities, including body perception. They accomplish a quasi-conceptual function: they allow us to recognize and to classify different instances. In this work, we hypothesize that perceptual schemata are an essential component of concepts, but not identical to them. Instead, we suggest that concepts include both perceptual and propositional information with perceptual schemata providing the ‘perceptual core concept’ that grounds related propositional information. -/- Chapter 4 In the Beginning There Were Categories. The Bodily Origin of Prelinguistic Categorical Organization: The Example of Folkbiological Taxonomies -/- Abstract. Studies of categorization in psychology and the cognitive sciences have made use of the notions of ‘category’ and ‘concept’ without precisely defining what is meant by either; in fact, often these terms have been used as synonyms, making it difficult to address specific issues related to conceptual development. This chapter begins by discussing the definitions of, as well as the distinctions between, ‘categories’ and ‘concepts’ in the classical philosophical tradition (Aristotle, Kant and Husserl). We introduce our view of categories with reference to Husserl. Categorization is defined as the way in which our experience is originally (pre-linguistically) organized in a passive and fully unconscious manner on the basis of universal structuring principles. Conceptualization is explained as a later process in which the earlier categorical macro-classes are further subdivided into more specific and detailed sets; this later process also relies on linguistic learning and exposure to culture. On the basis of Ray Jackendoff, Jean Mandler, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s work, we hypothesize that categorization is a two-step process that begins with the formation of homogeneous sets of entities partitioned into regions that describe the ontological boundaries of the objects that humans perceive (categories) and continues at a later stage with the development of more specific classifications (concepts). In this chapter, we mainly address three related issues: Why should we assume that there is categorical organization which precedes the development of a conceptual system? How do categories and concepts relate to each other? Shall we hypothesize that categories are innate or that they are formed before concepts on the basis of information and organizational structure available at a very early developmental stage? We show that categorical partitions are necessary for categorization and, following Mandler, that the general categories we form at an early age do not match our adult superordinate concepts. As for the third issue, we argue that there might be no need to assume that categories are innately present in the human mind, since their formation can be explained – at least in certain cases – by basic mechanisms that work on body (propriosensitive) information. This hypothesis will not be discussed in general, but in relation to a particularly relevant example of categorical partition, i.e. the folk-biological dichotomy between ANIMATE/INANIMATE. This is compared with other dichotomies that derive from it, but are not directly categorical such as LIVING/NON-LIVING and BIOLOGICAL/NON-BIOLOGICAL. -/- Chapter 5 Internal States: From Headache to Anger. Conceptualization and Semantic Mastery -/- Abstract. Here we ask if we can also apply the distinction between referential and inferential competence we introduced in Chapter 3 to words that do not refer to things that are perceived using the external senses, especially to words/concepts that denote bodily experiences (such as pain, thirst, hunger, etc.) or emotions. We introduce and discuss the hypothesis that – even though such words/concepts do not refer to intersubjectively identifiable entities in the external world – they do have a kind of referent that can be accessed via direct perception, more specifically ‘proprioception’, as we have defined it in terms of all propriosensitive information we can consciously access. In the first part of the chapter, we specifically consider terms denoting bodily experiences such as ‘pain’ or ‘hunger’ and argue that their referents are identified and classified from a first-personal point of view on the basis of four main characteristics: their specific intensity, their localization in the body, their co-occurrence with other signals and above all their specific qualitative sensations. Emotions are addressed in the second part of the chapter. We suggest that there is a continuity between bodily experiences and emotions. In particular, we argue for a perceptual theory of emotions in line with that proposed by James and Lange at the end of the 19th century and developed more recently by authors such as Damasio (see also chap. 2§5, §6). The hypothesis we put forward is that the referential information that supports the categorization of emotions and therefore also our mastery of terms referring to emotions consists in the perception (i.e. the ‘proprioception’) of those bodily states and changes in bodily states which constitute our emotional experience. In the context of this discussion we examine some objections to this line of reasoning that arise from a cognitivist perspective and following authors such as Oatley, Johnson-Laird and Frijda, we distinguish between basic emotions that can be identified and classified solely on the basis on how they feel and complex emotions whose identification and classification additionally depends on cognitive factors. To describe how emotions are identified and classified on the basis of how they feel, we rely on Marcel and Lambie’s distinction between an ‘emotion state’ and an ‘emotion experience’. Both notions indicate kinds of feelings that we consciously experience. However, they describe first-order and second order emotion awareness respectively. The emotion state is the feeling we have of the bodily states and changes that occur when we are experiencing an emotion, while the emotion experience is the fully developed and integrated emotion we both experience and are, with reflection, aware of experiencing. On the basis of this differentiation, we also show that the same characteristics that aid in the identification and classification of bodily experiences (specific qualitative sensations; somatic localization; specific intensity; presence/absence of specific concomitant sensations) can also be used for the identification and classification of emotions – at least basic emotions. In the last two sections of the chapter we present some clinical evidence on the semantic competence of people who suffer from Alexithymia and Autism Spectrum Disorder which supports the conclusions of our preceding analyses. -/- Chapter 6 The ‘Proprioceptive’ Component of Abstract Concepts -/- Abstract. In this chapter, we address the issue of whether the mastery of abstract words requires only inferential knowledge and thus, if the concepts that support the mastery of abstract words include only linguistic information. We start by differentiating the notions of ‘abstract’ and ‘general’ which are often erroneously confused. We then identify a strict definition of abstract, as contrasted with ‘concrete’, that applies to words or concepts whose referent cannot be experienced by the senses. We argue that abstract words/concepts would be better described as theoretical, because they are usually conceived as structured sets of inferential knowledge expressed linguistically; that is, as small theories. Pointing out parallels with Carnap’s analysis of this issue in philosophy of science, we hypothesize that words/concepts denoting non-observable entities are not all ‘equally theoretical’, because their link to sensory experience can be stronger or weaker. We revive the distinction, inspired by Quine, between theoretical and intertheoretical concepts/words. This distinction relies on the fact that the former – unlike the latter – retains a strong, although indirect, connection with perception. In Quine’s discussion, perception is understood uniquely in terms of observability, i.e. of external sensory experience. Here we argue, however, that bodily, ‘proprioceptive’ (i.e. propriosensitive) experience can also serve to referentially ground theoretical (i.e. abstract) concepts/words. We frame this issue using the example of the theoretical concept ‘freedom’ and Lakoff’s hypothesis that this concept is developed on the basis of bodily information. We contrast this with the example of ‘democracy’ which more closely resembles an intertheoretical concept/word. Furthermore, we show that one of the classical views put forward in psycholinguistic research to explain how abstract concepts are mentally represented – i.e. Paivio’s Dual Coding Theory – points in the same direction as our analysis. The same is true of Barsalou’s work suggesting that we use internal information to understand at least some abstract words. To sustain this position, we put forward two lines of evidence: the first comes from psycholinguistic studies while the second examines deficits of semantic competence exhibited by people with Autism Spectrum Disorder. On the basis of our analysis, we put forward a classification that distinguishes between different kinds of concreteness and different degrees of abstraction: concepts/words referring to body experiences and basic emotions are described as analogous to concrete concepts/words because they are grounded in perceptual (i.e. propriosensitive) experience, while abstract concepts/words are considered more or less abstract depending on whether they are intratheoretical (and rely entirely on inferential information) or theoretical (and are partially grounded in perceptual – or more often in propriosensitive perceptual – information). In the last section of the chapter we consider two scales that have been used in psycholinguistic research to measure the degree of concreteness vs. abstractness of words and we show that – used conjointly – they can provide a measure of the internal vs. external grounding of specific words. (shrink)

Traducción y notas de Alexander Fidora y Jordi Pardo Pastor . Nuestra traducción sigue el texto latino de Alexander Fidora y Andreas Niederberger, Von Bagdad nach Toledo ? "Das Buch der Ursachen" und seine Rezeption fin Mittelalter. Mainz, Dieterich'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 2001, donde se ofrece una nueva edición del texto latino presentado en su día por Adriaan Pattin revisándolo teniendo en cuenta las importantes sugerencias del arabista Richard Taylor . Éstas, a su vez, resultan, en su mayoría. del cotejo del (...) importante manuscrito latino de Aosta, Seminario Maggiore. Ai° D 20.Como las dos recientes traducciones castellanas del Liber de cau sis tan sólo tienen en cuenta el texto de Pattin, y parecen desconocer las propuestas de Taylon hemos creído conveniente publicar esta tercera traducción, señalando los cambios más importantes respecto a la edición de Pattin siempre y cuando éstos afecten a la traducción. Además, hay que advertir que ambas traducciones dividen el texto del Liber en 219 sentencias; sin embargo. esta división es una ficción editora introducida por Celsao Pera en su edición de la Sancti Thomae de Aquino In Librum de causis expositio, Roma. 1955, que no tiene ningún fundamento en los manuscritos. A pesar de que esta división pueda parecer "pedagógica", como afirma Cruz Cruz en su traducción citada, p. 26, n. 29, prescindimos de ella, ya que sugiere que el texto sigue una lógica puramente axiomática. mientras que su argumentación es harto más compleja. Con todo, ambas traducciones siguen siendo muy útiles y de alta calidad. y también han sido consultadas con gran provecho para esta versión.El texto latino conduce a una aparente paradoja, ya que constata que la causa sigue su efecto . Se trata aquí de un problema de la traducción latina de Gerardo de Cremona quien vierte el término árabe waliya por sequitur, en vez de "estar junto" o "cerca de". Lo que el texto original quiere expresar, por consiguiente, es que la causa acompaña su efecto, no que ésta le siga. No hace falta, pues, cambiar el pronombre ipsum por ipsam? como ha hecho Pattin, refiriéndolo así a la primera causa. (shrink)

Derrida y Agamben proponen el origen del arte en una negatividad: la ceguera en un caso y la potencia-de-no en el otro. Esta confluencia me permite proponer el concepto de potencia oscura de la mirada para dar cuenta del lugar inagotable y siempre abierto de la mirada que no se agota en sus realizaciones históricas. Con ello planteo tres cosas que fundamentan una perspectiva estética y política de la mirada: 1. la mirada es una estructura simbólica y matricial que organiza (...) las formas de ver de una cultura o una sociedad; 2. las formas históricas de ver se encuentran gobernadas por fuerzas estéticas y políticas dominantes del sentido a las que llamo mirada matriz; 3. ante la mirada matriz se erigen, persistentemente, formas de contra mirada y miradas disidentes que propugnan por romper sus hegemonías y que definen la transformación y el dinamismo de la mirada. (shrink)

Este articulo presenta una revisión de la necesidad y situación general del soporte audiovisual para la formación en el ámbito científico técnico universitario dentro del conjunto de las universidades públicas españolas, contextualizado en la exigencia creciente de virtualización, consecuencia de la aceleración continua de la actividad formativa en línea. Revisando los resultados de la aplicación del Modelo de Producción en Red (audiovisual) desarrollado en su día, como soporte a la necesidad de divulgación científica y formativa. Se presenta un ejemplo de (...) su actualización para la producción de material didáctico, objetivo de prácticas universitarias tanto presenciales como remotas. (shrink)

The objective of the article is to problematize the marginal place of the sex trade in the order of mining work, articulated from the psychodynamics of labor policies. We work with critical discourse analysis with individual and group interviews with male miners and with women self-defined as sex workers, from the Antofagasta Region. We conclude that the sex trade and the work of sex workers have a central place in the reproduction of the mining workforce, along with it, the search (...) for psychosexual well-being is satisfied, where sex work enhances the maintenance of the virile image, of a man who is not ready himself to the deconstruction of the hegemonic gender. (shrink)

El aprendizaje de la Historia en Educación Secundaria se relaciona con un proceso memorístico y conceptual que dificulta la formación del pensamiento crítico y reflexivo en el alumnado de esta etapa educativa. Por este motivo, con esta experiencia y desde un enfoque investigativo, hemos fomentado la curiosidad y el interés de los alumnos de 1º de Secundaria por las prácticas religiosas y funerarias que profesaron los romanos. El método de enseñanza-aprendizaje fue activo y participativo, lo que facilitó la indagación y (...) la experimentación del taller “Funus romanorum”. Los resultados mostraron las ventajas de trabajar la arqueología experimental para comprender mejor los hechos acaecidos en la Antigüedad y adquirir contenidos históricos a través de talleres experienciales. (shrink)

This paper describes our solution to the problem of inducing ontological information from metadata provided informally. The metadata is in the form of linguistic tags attached to items in an on-lin...

En general, la tradición ha interpretado la filosofía platónica como una filosofía dualista a propósito de la existencia de dos mundos. Parto de aceptar esta interpretación de la filosofía platónica con especto a los diálogos de madurez, resaltando algunas caracte rísticas del dualismo, el cual resulta de la teoría de las Formas. Posteriormente, pongo en tela de juicio dicha teoría a partir de los argumentos encontrados en el Parménides. Estos sugieren un rechazo por parte de Platón a la teoría de (...) las Formas y al dualismo que esta supone, lo cual podría desembocar un monismo en los diálogos tardíos. Por último, me enfocaré en algunas secciones del Timeo, argumentando que en este, a partir de una reformulación de su filosofía, Platón logra superar las críticas propuestas en el arménidessin dejar de lado una postura dualista. Expondré cómo el dualismo del Timeorechaza dos de las características esenciales de la teoría de las Formas de los diálogos de madurez: la multiplicidad de Formas y el concepto de ‘participación’. Esto introduciendo a un ser viviente, inteligible y unitario; y la relación, a través de la χώρα, de dicho ser con un universo sensible generado. (shrink)

This study is concerned with the use of epistemic legitimising strategies in online newspaper articles dealing with the Scottish referendum. In this sense, we seek to explore cases of epistemic stance that indicate epistemological positioning and persuade readers of the veracity of propositions. Our study covers Scottish journal articles published online within 5 days prior to results day. In this article, we are interested in the way the Scottish newspapers deal with the topic of the independence referendum and the degree (...) of commitment in journalists’ choice of linguistic strategies. We analysed the newspaper articles manually but corpus tools were also used in order to verify initial findings and for statistical purposes. The results of the use of epistemic stance devices in the different categories were contrasted and our conclusions showed the preferred legitimising strategies used by journalists in the Scottish newspapers. (shrink)

Gustav Radbruch’s contributions have significantly shaped our understanding of the science of criminal law. This paper analyzes the most decisive aspects of his work. In particular, his conception of the complex relationship between law, reality, and value, the consequences of his method and relativism for criminal law, his conception of the theory of crime, and the science of criminal law are discussed. Finally, the paper highlights the central aspects of the legacy that Gustav Radbruch has left to the science of (...) criminal law: the return to the value, the teleological orientation, the open system and the bridging of the gap between criminal law doctrine and criminal policy. (shrink)

La Declaración Universal de los Derechos Humanos de 1948 nació y tendió a la expansión del reconocimiento universal de la dignidad humana. Incorporando el pasado, tratando de comprender el sentido de la existencia e incluyendo al mundo en esa búsqueda, aspiró a lo categórico, a conocer la esencia, el valor intrínseco del ser humano, en relación con otros seres. Hoy, en su nombre, dada la actual ruptura con la tradición y la Historia, se ha extendido una nueva y paradójica concepción (...) de lo humano, emancipadora y homogeneizante. Clamando la reivindicación del “yo”, se ha producido una inconsistencia absoluta en la aplicación de la DUDH: no puede seguir llamándose universal una Carta subsumida y aplicada en un contexto radicalmente uniforme. (shrink)

John Locke's religious interests and concerns permeate his philosophical production and are best expressed in his later writings on religion, which represent the culmination of his studies. In this volume, Diego Lucci offers a thorough analysis and reassessment of Locke's unique, heterodox, internally coherent version of Protestant Christianity, which emerges from The Reasonableness of Christianity and other public as well as private texts. In order to clarify Locke's views on morality, salvation, and the afterlife, Lucci critically examines Locke's theistic (...) ethics, biblical hermeneutics, reflection on natural and revealed law, mortalism, theory of personal identity, Christology, and tolerationism. While emphasizing the originality of Locke's scripture-based religion, this book calls attention to his influences and explores the reception of his unorthodox theological ideas. Moreover, the book highlights the impact of Locke's natural and biblical theology on other areas of his thought, thus enabling a better understanding of the unity of his work. (shrink)

A rational approach to the Fermi-Walker transport equation is proposed by deriving it from a condition of “non-rotation”. First, the condition is applied to a tetrad basis and then generalized to an arbitrary space-time four-vector. The method is conceptually simple and apart from the use of tetrad bases in four-dimensional space-time, does not require the effort of visualizing abstract geometrical constructs in spaces of more than three dimensions. The argument develops in the context of the flat space-time of special relativity (...) theory but the final result can be immediately extended to curved space-time. (shrink)

The Cold War, extended from the popularization of its name in 1947 to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, functioned a bipolar order in which the White House and the Kremlin set the pace of events. In accordance with the decentralization of the axis of the shock [1], both superpowers chose to avoid direct confrontation and based their strategy on a kind of tactical movements carried out by third parties. The direct consequence was the creation of a breeding (...) ground in developing countries, victims of the competitiveness of both executives and in the specific case of Latin America, in a succession of political disorders that alternated the birth of revolutionary movements and the imposition of military dictatorships. (shrink)

Human dignity is making a comeback. The essay focuses on the story that this comeback of human dignity presupposes and recasts. In that story, the “human family” is portrayed in terms of aristocratic dignitas. The consequences are twofold: (1) human dignity is co-implicated with the de-animalization of the human being; (2) once de-animalization is introduced, the story of human dignity cultivates an aristocratic sense of elevation of the human over other species, or what I will call “species aristocratism.” The fact (...) that a new kind of aristocratism based on species emerges from the story of human dignity should concern us, I suggest, because it not only confronts us with unintended consequences of relying on human dignity as the foundation of human rights but also invites us to rethink our contemporary egalitarian, democratic ethos, understood as aristocracy for all. (shrink)

En este conciso estudio se explicará la concepción de la luz que encontramos en Francisco Suárez. Si bien distinta, y por cierto distante, de las teorías modernas (corpuscular y ondulatoria), encontramos en Suárez un corpus de principios, de base y raigambre aristotélica, que dan cuenta de una mecánica del todo exótica para nuestra men- talidad, pero abundante y enriquecida en contenido lógico y filosófico: la filosofía natural de Francisco Suárez está basada, en términos generales, en los conceptos de virtud, necesidad, (...) esfera de acción y energía en el sentido originario de esta palabra. Para sorpresa del lector mínimamente aficionado a estos temas, encontraremos en la física de Suárez explicaciones por momentos mucho más naturales, más claras y más satisfactorias sobre la propagación de la luz y sobre la acción a distancia de lo que han propuesto hasta hoy las teorías en vigencia. Francisco Suárez, desde ya, queda excluido del proyecto de Galileo y de Francis Bacon; no ofrece ni persigue resultados mate- máticos, sino un conocimiento ontológico del Universo y una interesante mecánica esencialista. (shrink)

This paper develops two new measures of labor tax avoidance based on social contribution expenses reported in financial statements and tests them and their determinants within a sample of 224 Italian firms defined as legally registered Mafia firms due to having been confiscated at some point by judicial authorities, in relation to alleged connections with Italian organized crime. Overall, our results reveal that before confiscation LMFs engage more in LTAV than lawful firms do, whereas after confiscation there is no significant (...) difference between both types of firm. Furthermore, we find that several factors have a significant influence on the probability of engaging in such a practice. This study can enhance further research on the effectiveness of our measures and on the determinants of LTAV in other contexts and for other types of firms. Moreover, these measures can be added to the other direct and indirect methods commonly employed to measure and detect undeclared work representing a primary means of LTAV. Finally, our study allows inferring conclusions on the relation between corporate social responsibility and tax avoidance, suggesting that socially irresponsible firms, such as LMFs, are more likely to adopt this practice. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Thomism in John Owen by Christopher ClevelandSebastian RehnmanThomism in John Owen. By Christopher Cleveland. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate Publishing, 2013. Pp. 173. $90.00 (cloth). ISBN: 978-1-4094-5579-0.Renaissance Scholasticism generally falls out of the contemporary philosophical and theological canon, and thus this form of argumentation is, and has for a long time, been a severely neglected area of study. However, a renewed interest in this field is increasingly exposing the philosophical (...) and theological stereotypes of the few earlier studies. Although institutional [End Page 160] philosophy and theology throughout Europe between the Reformation and the Enlightenment continued to identify itself as Scholastic, it is now clear that it was far from homogeneous. One of the diverse currents was the Scholasticism in Evangelical Protestantism. Within the reformed Church, academies aimed explicitly at continuing and contributing to the theological and philosophical tradition of the entire Church. Several studies have in particular suggested continuity between Thomas Aquinas and philosophers and theologians of good standing in the reformed Church. The most recent study is Christopher Cleveland’s Thomism in John Owen.The subject of this study is well chosen. John Owen (1616-83) was an influential pastor, scholar, vice-chancellor of the University of Oxford, and chaplain of Oliver Cromwell. He received a first-rate education at Oxford and maintained a wide-ranging scholarship throughout his life. His complete works comprise twenty-four volumes in the critical edition, and these are often thorough and systematic. From his tutor and friend Thomas Barlow, Owen seems to have gained a deep and lifelong appreciation of Aquinas, Alvarez, Bañez, and other Scholastics.Cleveland rightly aims at a focused investigation. His purpose is to “expand the inquiry into Reformed Thomism” (17) and “examine the role of Thomism in the theology of John Owen” (2). By “Thomism” he means “Aquinas” and sometimes “Diego Alvarez and Domingo Bañez.” In the first chapter Cleveland outlines the book and surveys some of the secondary literature. In the second chapter he contends that Owen was influenced by Aquinas’s concept of actus purus in arguing divine simplicity, divine immutability, and divine concurrence. In the third and fourth chapters he asserts that Aquinas’s understanding of infused “habits” strengthened Owen’s explanation of justification and sanctification. In the fifth chapter Cleveland proposes that Owen’s account of the hypostatic union is greatly indebted to Aquinas. Strangely the author concludes that Owen’s thought represents “a Western Trinitarian Theology” although he does not treat Owen’s doctrine of the Trinity.This book is a laudable and well-needed attempt to determine the particular influence of Aquinas on Owen. However, Cleveland’s work would benefit from a greater methodological rigor. Let us first consider Cleveland’s criteria for tracing Aquinas’s influence. He suggests that there are “four categories into which Thomistic influence falls.” These are: (1) quotations or paraphrases of “Thomas or a Thomist author,” (2) the development of a subject by means of similar theological concepts, (3) the “use of similar but not identical principles,” and (4) a coincidence of thought because of a common source. The second criterion is said to identify the most common type of influence, and the fourth the rarest (3). Now, that Owen was influenced by Aquinas is not in contest; the question is: how was Owen influenced? And there are limitations to what can be drawn from the application of these categories. The first category is not decisive, since any [End Page 161] author may be quoted or paraphrased for widely various reasons, and some influential authors may not be quoted or paraphrased. The fourth criterion is somewhat irrelevant, since the coincidental rarely reveals steady influence.Cleveland identifies “three major areas of Thomistic influence upon Owen’s theology” (4; similarly 154). These are God as actus purus, infused dispositions of grace, and the hypostatic union. Yet, the book contains no argument for that conclusion. Having formulated four criteria for the assessment of influence in the first chapter, Cleveland surprisingly does not return to them in the remainder of the book. The reader is thus left to wonder whether these three major areas of influence were determined by applying... (shrink)

One of the central problems of modernity has been the role race plays in politics. However, we are still not sure where the concept of race first emerges in the history of political thought. I argue that the first theorist to lay the grounds for a racial conception in politics is the Spanish Dominican friar Bartolomé de Las Casas. In his effort to defend the 'rights' of the Amerindians, Las Casas constructs racial categories through his rhetorical enterprise. Rather than being (...) a historian, a proto- anthropologist, or a defender of the 'Indians', Las Casas was chiefly a rhetorician of empire. In this enterprise, his account of Amerindian identity, bodies, appearance and culture created a racialized understanding of the newly discovered peoples of the Americas. By examining the birth of race in the writings of Las Casas, we learn of his fundamentally rhetorical project, the centrality of race to modernity, and Las Casas' influence on the early-modern Latin American intellectual tradition. (shrink)

Research on the neurobiology and psychosocial features of Major Depressive Disorder has the ability to extend our understanding of affiliative behavior. In depression, decreased hedonic capacity and hypoactivity in dopaminergic and prefrontal circuitries may decrease the ability to experience affiliative relationships as rewarding. We suggest that neurobiological research on depression can provide a test case for theoretical models of affiliation.

In this book Strawson is again considering topics as the existence of the exterior world, the moral attitudes, the universal... The novelty is not so in his original ideas as in the fact that these are useful to keep on completing the doctrine of a "descriptive" and "naturalist" metaphy-sick against "revisionism" such as the scepticism in its different modalities.

La pandemia producida por el COVID-19 llevó a las instituciones educativas a suspender todo tipo de actividad presencial. La educación superior pasó a desarrollarse en contextos digitales, lo que supuso un rediseño en cuanto a los recursos, instrumentos, modos, estrategias de actuación y medidas a implementar en el proceso de enseñanza-aprendizaje. En este estudio se analiza, desde una mirada cualitativa, las visiones del estudiantado sobre la docencia universitaria en contextos de pandemia. Los resultados evidencian la perspectiva diferencial del alumnado,-entusiasta, crítica, (...) condescendiente y nostálgica- sobre la educacion superior, en atención a su experiencia universitaria, vivida en contextos de profunda excepcionalidad. (shrink)

We present the unification of Riemann–Cartan–Weyl (RCW) space-time geometries and random generalized Brownian motions. These are metric compatible connections (albeit the metric can be trivially euclidean) which have a propagating trace-torsion 1-form, whose metric conjugate describes the average motion interaction term. Thus, the universality of torsion fields is proved through the universality of Brownian motions. We extend this approach to give a random symplectic theory on phase-space. We present as a case study of this approach, the invariant Navier–Stokes equations for (...) viscous fluids, and the kinematic dynamo equation of magnetohydrodynamics. We give analytical random representations for these equations. We discuss briefly the relation between them and the Reynolds approach to turbulence. We discuss the role of the Cartan classical development method and the random extension of it as the method to generate these generalized Brownian motions, as well as the key to construct finite-dimensional almost everywhere smooth approximations of the random representations of these equations, the random symplectic theory, and the random Poincaré–Cartan invariants associated to it. We discuss the role of autoparallels of the RCW connections as providing polygonal smooth almost everywhere realizations of the random representations. (shrink)

Sara Ahmed piensa las emociones, los objetos, los espacios y las orientaciones hacia el mundo a partir de sus efectos. Las emociones son realidades públicas que nos pegan y nos separan de los otros, adquiriendo su significación política en el contacto social. La idea de la pegajosidad y el contacto presupone una subjetividad indisociable de su relación con la alteridad. Para explicar esta relación entre el yo y el mundo, Ahmed hace uso de la fenomenología. Una fenomenología queer consistirá en (...) sacar a la luz el fondo de historias, normas y signos que los espacios normativos y los objetos familiares ocultan al presentarse como atemporales y naturales. En este trabajo propongo que la filosofía de Ahmed permite leer las orientaciones, la subjetividad y las emociones en su dimensión narrativa. El protagonismo que adquieren las historias en la teoría queer de Ahmed es útil para pensar el vínculo entre literatura y política a partir de la recepción y la circulación de las obras. Las narrativas feministas contribuyen a generar extrañamiento respecto del mundo normativo, a dislocar el orden familiar. Estos dislocamientos abren grietas desde las que imaginar, a través de la literatura, maneras no normativas de desear y percibir el mundo. (shrink)

El propósito de este trabajo es explorar la relación entre el principio de eficacia y el imperio de la ley como formalidad legal. Parte sustancial del trabajo se dedica a reconstruir el fundamento que se atribuye a cada noción en las teorías jurídicas preponderantes y cómo se relacionan con el concepto de derecho y con la existencia de los sistemas jurídicos. Este examen muestra que el imperio de la ley como formalidad legal y el principio de eficacia comparten un mismo (...) fundamento, lo que permite trazar ciertas relaciones entre ellas. Los principales resultados de este análisis son dos. Primero, no existe una determinación unánime acerca de la relación entre el principio de eficacia y el imperio de la ley como formalidad legal con el concepto de derecho y con las condiciones de existencia de los sistemas jurídicos. Segundo, dos de las posiciones que mayor influjo ejercen en la literatura acerca de la relación entre ambas nociones, presentes en los trabajos de M. Kramer y J. Raz, tienen problemas importantes. (shrink)

Al cumplirse los 50 años de la publicación de la Populorum Progressio este artículo presenta los orígenes y la evolución del concepto del desarrollo y de la reflexión en torno a las políticas de desarrollo. A continuación, se hace un breve recorrido del Magisterio pontificio sobre la cuestión, desde la Populorum Progressio a la Laudato Si’. Sintetizando lo aprendido en ambos recorridos, el artículo concluye presentando las exigencias y los desafíos con los que se enfrenta el discípulo misionero a propósito (...) del desarrollo. (shrink)