This research aimed to examine the agreement between body mass index -based nutritional status and perceived nutritional status overall and by socio-demographic factors and to state the association between the accuracy of weight perception and weight control practices in the Chilean adult population. A population-based cross-sectional study was carried out with 5,192 Chilean adult participants from the Chilean National Health Survey 2016–2017. Agreement between BMI-based weight status and body weight perception for the total sample and across subgroups was determined using (...) the weighted kappa coefficient. The agreement between BMI-based and perceived nutritional status of the total sample was fair. A higher rate of weight perception accuracy was identified in women, younger respondents, and participants with higher education, a higher income, and from urban areas than their counterparts. Respondents with overweight or obesity tended to underestimate their nutritional status. Actions to lose weight were higher in those who had the right perception of their overweight/obesity condition and those who overestimated their body weight, regardless of their nutritional status. In all groups, weight loss behaviors were more related to the perceived than the BMI-based nutritional status. The consequences of accurate perception of the nutritional status are discussed including its effects on body weight and mental health. (shrink)

This article considers Theodor W. Adorno’s thesis of the ‘liquidation of the individual’ as a contribution to the critique of political economy insofar as it links structural economic imperatives o...

Within the debate on the epistemology of aesthetic appreciation, it has a long tradition, and is still very common, to endorse the sentimentalist view that our aesthetic evaluations are rationally grounded on, or even constituted by, certain of our emotional responses to the objects concerned. Such a view faces, however, the serious challenge to satisfactorily deal with the seeming possibility of faultless disagreement among emotionally based and epistemically appropriate verdicts. I will argue that the sentimentalist approach to aesthetic epistemology cannot (...) accept and accommodate this possibility without thereby undermining the assumed capacity of emotions to justify corresponding aesthetic evaluations – that is, without undermining the very sentimentalist idea at the core of its account. And I will also try to show that sentimentalists can hope to deny the possibility of faultless disagreement only by giving up the further view that aesthetic assessments are intersubjective – a view which is almost as traditional and widely held in aesthetics as sentimentalism, and which is indeed often enough combined with the latter. My ultimate conclusion is therefore that this popular combination of views should better be avoided: either sentimentalism or intersubjectivism has to make way. (shrink)

This book explores the morality of compromising. The author argues that peace and public justification are values that provide moral reasons to make compromises in politics, including compromises that establish unjust laws or institutions. He explains how it is possible to have moral reasons to agree to moral compromises and he debates our moral duties and obligations in making such compromises. The book also contains discussions of the sources of the value of public justification, the relation between peace and justice, (...) the nature of modus vivendi arrangements and the connections between compromise, liberal institutions and legitimacy. In exploring the morality of compromising, the book thus provides some outlines for a map of political morality beyond justice. (shrink)

Consider the following objection of Bennett to Kant: The least swallowable part of Kant's whole theory of freedom is the claim that the causality of freedom is not in time. This follows from Kant's doctrine that time is an appearance, and anyway the theory of freedom needs it: it is because the noumenal cause of an event is not in time, and thus is not itself an event, that it escapes the causality of nature. Kant is unembarrassed: ‘Inasmuch as it (...) is noumenon, nothing happens in it; there can be no change requiring dynamical determination in time, and therefore no causal dependence upon appearances … No action begins in this active being itself; but we may yet quite correctly say that the active being of itself begins its effects in the sensible world’ [KrV, A541=B569]. That is indefensible. Something in which ‘nothing happens’ cannot be ‘active’ or ‘begin’ a train of events. (shrink)

Resumen: En este trabajo me propongo analizar, comentar y discutir algunas opcio- nes traductoras adoptadas por F. Duque en su monumental edición de la Ciencia de la lógica. Concretamente, me centraré en la traducción de los términos alemanes: “Daseyn”, “Unwesen”, “Auslegung” y “ausgeführte [Zweck]”, que cotejaré puntual- mente con las principales traducciones extranjeras, así como con la castellana de R. Mondolfo, no tanto para retomar su terminología, cuanto para valorar y calibrar mejor la de Duque, en la idea de que (...) esta retrospectiva permite explorar otras posibilidades.: In this paper I work up to analyze, comment and discuss some translation options adopted by F. Duque in his monumental edition of the Science of Logic. Specifically, I will focus on the translation of the german terms: “Daseyn”, “Unwesen”, “Auslegung” and “ausgeführte [Zweck]”, which I will compare promptly with the main foreign translations, as well as with the one of R. Mondolfo, not so much to resume its terminology, as to assess and calibrate Duque's better, in the idea that this retrospective allows to explore other possibilities. Palabras clave: Hegel, lógica, estar, antiesencia, exhibición, fin cumplido. Keywords: Hegel, logic, being, antiessence, exhibition, fulfilled purpose. (shrink)

En este artículo me propongo discutir algunos puntos de la interpretación de la Ciencia de la lógica delineada por F. Martínez Marzoa en Hölderlin y la lógica hegeliana. La premisa de este opúsculo es que Hölderlin sería el «interlocutor no declarado» de esta obra, la cual habría sido concebida por Hegel como una asunción de su crítica a Fichte en Juicio y ser. En el seno de esta interpretación, la «Doctrina del Concepto» aparece como el lugar lógico de la autosupresión (...) de la reflexión que Hölderlin había considerado originaria e irreductible. A lo largo de estas páginas, me propongo probar: 1) que la mencionada autosupresión no implica la simple negación de la reflexión y la consiguiente afirmación de un absoluto arreflexivo, sino más bien la afirmación de lo absoluto como reflexión; 2) que la negatividad del Concepto se distingue tanto de la nada del Ser, como de la negación de la Esencia, configurando una suerte de «tópica de la reflexión»; 3) que ello no impide entender la reflexión como algo presente en el comienzo mismo de la Lógica, si bien no en la categoría del Ser como tal. Asumir estos tres puntos implica aceptar que la posición de Hölderlin no quedaría simplementeintegrada en la Ciencia de la lógica (convirtiendo al poeta en una suerte de «crítico esencial (no externo) de la obra)», sino superada en el genuino sentido de la Aufhebung hegeliana la Aufhebung hegeliana. (shrink)

Cerezo Galán, Pedro: _Hegel y el reino del espíritu_, Granada, Editorial Universidad de Granada, 2018.

Richard Rorty, a world-renowned American pragmatist, died on 8 June 2007. He left an enduring impact on Western philosophy. Like his predecessors Nietzsche, Dewey, Wittgenstein, and Derrida, Rorty attempted the gargantuan task of redescribing the nature of philosophy in the late twentieth century. This article is a modest personal tribute to a great philosopher who shaped the author’s views about self-creation, metaphysics, and politics. The major themes in Rorty’s philosophy are discussed briefly. It is the author’s hope that this article (...) will serve as a short introduction to Rorty’s neopragmatism. The author likewise hopes that it will stimulate the readers to pursue the philosophical issues that Rorty raised. (shrink)

Graphical AbstractDevelopment, life cycle evolution and immunity were among the topics discussed at a recent meeting in Tutzing dedicated to the biology of the ‘basal’ metazoan taxa Porifera, Ctenophora, Placozoa and Cnidaria.

Around the globe, economists affect markets by saying what markets are doing, what they should do, and what they will do. Increasingly, experimental economists are even designing real-world markets. But, despite these facts, economists are still largely thought of as scientists who merely observe markets from the outside, like astronomers look at the stars. Do Economists Make Markets? boldly challenges this view. It is the first book dedicated to the controversial question of whether economics is performative--of whether, in some cases, (...) economics actually produces the phenomena it analyzes.The book's case studies--including financial derivatives markets, telecommunications-frequency auctions, and individual transferable quotas in fisheries--give substance to the notion of the performativity of economics in an accessible, nontechnical way. Some chapters defend the notion; others attack it vigorously. The book ends with an extended chapter in which Michel Callon, the idea's main formulator, reflects upon the debate and asks what it means to say economics is performative.The book's insights and strong claims about the ways economics is entangled with the markets it studies should interest--and provoke--economic sociologists, economists, and other social scientists.In addition to the editors and Callon, the contributors include Marie-France Garcia-Parpet, Francesco Guala, Emmanuel Didier, Philip Mirowski, Edward Nik-Khah, Petter Holm, Vincent-Antonin Lépinay, and Timothy Mitchell. (shrink)

Please send me an email ([email protected]) if you wish to receive a copy of the book. — 'In this highly ambitious, wide ranging, immensely impressive and ground-breaking work Fabian Dorsch surveys just about every account of the imagination that has ever been proposed. He identifies five central types of imagining that any unifying theory must accommodate and sets himself the task of determining whether any theory of what imagining consists in covers these five paradigms. Focussing on what he takes to (...) be the three main theories, and giving them each equal consideration, he faults the first two and embraces the third, which argues that imagining is a special form of mental agency. The scholarship is immaculate, the writing crystal clear and the argumentation always powerful.' (Malcolm Budd). (shrink)

A growing body of evidence in cognitive psychology and neuroscience suggests a deep interconnection between sensory-motor and language systems in the brain. Based on recent neurophysiological findings on the anatomo-functional organization of the fronto-parietal network, we present a computational model showing that language processing may have reused or co-developed organizing principles, functionality, and learning mechanisms typical of premotor circuit. The proposed model combines principles of Hebbian topological self-organization and prediction learning. Trained on sequences of either motor or linguistic units, the (...) network develops independent neuronal chains, formed by dedicated nodes encoding only context-specific stimuli. Moreover, neurons responding to the same stimulus or class of stimuli tend to cluster together to form topologically connected areas similar to those observed in the brain cortex. Simulations support a unitary explanatory framework reconciling neurophysiological motor data with established behavioral evidence on lexical acquisition, access, and recall. (shrink)

Explaining humans as rational creatures—capable of deductive reasoning—remains challenging for evolutionary naturalism. Schechter 437–464, 2011, 2013) proposes to link the evolution of this kind of reasoning with the ability to plan. His proposal, however, does neither include any elaborated theory on how logical abilities came into being within the hominin lineage nor is it sufficiently supported by empirical evidence. I present such a theory in broad outline and substantiate it with archeological findings. It is argued that the cognitive makeup of (...) any animal is constituted by being embedded in a certain way of life. Changing ways of life thus foster appearances of new cognitive abilities. Finally, a new way of life of coordinated group behavior emerged within the hominins: anticipatory group planning involved in activities like making sophisticated spears for hunting. This gave rise to human logical cognition. It turned hominins into domain-general reasoner and adherents of intersubjective norms for reasoning. However, as I argue, it did not—and most likely could not—give rise to reason by deductive logic. More likely, deductive reasoning entered our world only a few thousand years ago: exclusively as a cultural artifact. (shrink)

In this book Fabian Klinge develops a novel approach for explaining phenomenal consciousness. He defends a version of panpsychism, that is the theory, that (some of) the fundamental physical entities exhibit consciousness. However, in contrast to standard conceptions of the view, the author does not take human consciousness to be grounded in but emergent from the consciousness of elementary particles. In this form, he argues, panpsychism can overcome the doctrine’s Achilles' heel, the combination problem, without running into similarly severe problems—thus (...) rendering panpsychism a strong contender to its problem-ridden rivals physicalism and dualism. In addition, the author provides a thorough analysis of the poorly studied concept of metaphysical emergence. He argues that, by refining some of the major contributions in the literature, emergence can be made intelligible enough to serve as a basis for a credible solution proposal to the mind-body problem. (shrink)

It seems to me that not enough consideration has been given to the fundamental importance of the conditioning to which our physical as well as our mental being have been submitted due to the fact that they develop within a certain gravitational field. All the long evolution of the species seems to proceed from our desire for the impossible abolition of our own gravity, or at least for its partial alleviation. Many centuries before the appearance of man compensatory means were (...) tried and adopted, ranging from the acquatic bladder to the wing and including the simple hopping of the marsupials. (shrink)

Economists, in stressing the prescriptive implications of their analysis, typically have ignored the potential contributions of their theorems and methodological principles to the understanding of human behavior as an end in itself. The purpose of the paper is to establish the principle, by detailed reference to the literature of economics, that the 'deductive pattern of explanation' constitutes a valid approach to the general study of human behavior. As such, it is a potentially useful method of analysis in the other social (...) sciences. Literature from the philosophy of social science bearing on the applicability of deductive theory to the study of human behavior is subjected to detailed critical analysis. (shrink)

Hyppolite y Derrida coinciden en haber subrayado la importancia del lenguaje en la filosofía de Hegel, revelando las importantes implicaciones que la semiología del Espíritu subjetivo tendría en la construcción del idealismo. La dialéctica del signo desarrollada por Hegel en ese lugar revela hasta qué punto el lenguaje debe ser considerado como la puerta de entrada más metódica y natural hacia el interior del sistema, pero también como la puerta de salida más crítica y demoledora del mismo. La cuestión pasa (...) por decidir si dicha dialéctica constituye la condición de posibilidad de la mediación lógica y del cierre del sistema (Hyppolite), o si evidencia más bien su imposibilidad constitutiva y la necesidad de la deconstrucción (Derrida). El presente artículo se propone analizar el fundamento de ambas posiciones, así como su respectivo encaje en la filosofía de Hegel. (shrink)

El objetivo de este trabajo es presentar una objeción a uno de los principios centrales de la Teoría Representacional de la Mente (TRM): la idea de que la noción de representación interna tiene una función primordial en la explicación de la actividad cognitiva. De acuerdo con la TRM, la vida cognitiva de un organismo consiste esencialmente en la formación, procesamiento y almacenamiento de representaciones internas. Tales representaciones son vistas como objetos o eventos concretos capaces de influir causalmente en los procesos (...) cognitivos de los organismos. Expuesta en forma de dilema, la objeción pretende mostrar las dificultades inherentes a la postulación de representaciones internas, dada la manera en que estas representaciones y su operación han sido concebidas en el marco mismo de la TRM. La cuestión que introduce al dilema es: ¿en virtud de qué propiedades una representación interna influye en la actividad cognitiva de un organismo? Dos respuestas son posibles: en virtud de sus propiedades representacionales o en virtud de sus propiedades no representacionales. En la sección 1 se mostrarán las consecuencias problemáticas de cada una de estas respuestas y en la sección 2 se discutirán dos ejemplos que ilustran estas dificultades. El resultado del dilema es que la noción de representación interna es incapaz de satisfacer la función explicativa que le ha sido asignada por la propia TRM. (shrink)

In line with Allen Newell's challenge to develop complete cognitive architectures, and motivated by a recent proposal for a unifying subsymbolic computational theory of cognition, we introduce the cognitive control architecture SEMLINCS. SEMLINCS models the development of an embodied cognitive agent that learns discrete production rule-like structures from its own, autonomously gathered, continuous sensorimotor experiences. Moreover, the agent uses the developing knowledge to plan and control environmental interactions in a versatile, goal-directed, and self-motivated manner. Thus, in contrast to several well-known (...) symbolic cognitive architectures, SEMLINCS is not provided with production rules and the involved symbols, but it learns them. In this paper, the actual implementation of SEMLINCS causes learning and self-motivated, autonomous behavioral control of the game figure Mario in a clone of the computer game Super Mario Bros. Our evaluations highlight the successful development of behavioral versatility as well as the learning of suitable production rules and the involved symbols from sensorimotor experiences. Moreover, knowledge- and motivation-dependent individualizations of the agents’ behavioral tendencies are shown. Finally, interaction sequences can be planned on the sensorimotor-grounded production rule level. Current limitations directly point toward the need for several further enhancements, which may be integrated into SEMLINCS in the near future. Overall, SEMLINCS may be viewed as an architecture that allows the functional and computational modeling of embodied cognitive development, whereby the current main focus lies on the development of production rules from sensorimotor experiences. (shrink)

Taken as a philosophical issue, the idea of representation implies the prior assumption of a difference between reality and its “doubles.” Things are paired with images, concepts, or symbols, acts with rules and norms, events with structures. Traditionally, the problem with representations has been their “accuracy,” the degree of fit between reality and its reproductions in the mind. When philosophers lost the hope of ever determining accuracy , they found consolation in the test of usefulness: a good representation is one (...) that works. The proof of its working is that it enables us to act on the world together.1 In such a frame, science, including anthropology, is conceived as the pursuit of privileged representations, privileged in that, by their nature of by their combination, they establish knowledge of a special kind. In the case of anthropology, “culture” has served as a sort of umbrella concept for representations. The strcuturalists have been most explicit about the need to think of representation in the plural, but their position is shared, in varying degrees, by all those who conceive of knowledge as the selection and combination of signs in systems, patterns, or structures, in short, as some kind of conceptual order ruling perceptual chaos. 1. Remember the connection between the Kantian quest for synthetic forms and Émile Durkheim’s idea of collective representations sustained by the moral authority of a society. Durkheim certainly was one to look for the “ethic” in the “ethnic” primitive, and it makes me wonder whether Stephen A. Tyler’s characterization of postmodern ethnography as a return to “an earlier and more powerful notion of the ethical character of all discourse, as captured in the ancient significance of the family of terms ‘ethos,’ ‘ethnos,’ ‘ethics’” might not signal a return to the Durkheimian fold . Johannes Fabian is professor of cultural anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. His publications include Jamaa: A Charismatic Movement in Katanga , Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object , and Language and Colonial Power: The Appropriation of Swahili in the Former Belgian Congo, 1880-1938 . Two books will appear in 1990: History from Below: The Vocabulary of Elisabethville by André Yav, a commented edition-translation of a colonial history written in Swahili by the colonized for the colonized, and Power and Performance, a study of conceptions of power through popular wisdom and theater in Shaba/Zaire. (shrink)

According to Karen Neander’s causal-informational teleosemantics, the contents of perceptual states depend on the etiological response functions of sensory-perceptual systems. In this paper, I argue that this theory is, despite its virtues, unable to explain how humans and other animals are capable of perceiving properties with which no sensory-perceptual system has ever been confronted. After rejecting Neander’s own proposal in terms of second-order similarity and a proposal inspired by Ruth Millikan in terms of simplicity, I offer a solution which equates (...) functions with manifestations of dispositions that made a difference to evolutionary success. My suggestion is able to generate determinate and plausible contents for new perceptual states while still preserving the idea that etiological functions explain evolutionary success. (shrink)

Adorno notoriously asserted that there is no 'right' life in our current social world. This assertion has contributed to the widespread perception that his philosophy has no practical import or coherent ethics, and he is often accused of being too negative. Fabian Freyenhagen reconstructs and defends Adorno's practical philosophy in response to these charges. He argues that Adorno's deep pessimism about the contemporary social world is coupled with a strong optimism about human potential, and that this optimism explains his negative (...) views about the social world, and his demand that we resist and change it. He shows that Adorno holds a substantive ethics, albeit one that is minimalist and based on a pluralist conception of the bad - a guide for living less wrongly. His incisive study does much to advance our understanding of Adorno, and is also an important intervention into current debates in moral philosophy. (shrink)

Philip Pettit’s republican conception of freedom is presented as an alternative both to negative and positive conceptions of freedom. The basic idea is to conceptualize freedom as non-domination, not as non-interference or self-mastery. When compared to negative freedom, Pettit’s republican conception comprises two controversial claims: the claim that we are unfree if we are dominated without actual interference, and the claim that we are free if we face interference without domination. Because the slave is a widely accepted paradigm of the (...) unfree person, the case of a slave with a non-interfering master is often cited as providing a good argument for the first republican claim and against a negative conception of freedom. One aim of this article is to raise doubts about whether this is true. The other aim of the article is to show that the prisoner—also a paradigm of the unfree person—presents a good argument against the second republican claim and in favour of a negative conception of freedom. This is called the ‘prisoner-argument’. It will be argued that neither Pettit’s distinction between free persons and free choices nor his distinction between compromising and conditioning factors of freedom can help to rebut the charge of the prisoner-argument. (shrink)

Philosophy &Public Affairs, Volume 51, Issue 2, Page 166-190, Spring 2023.

This book offers an original account of a distinctly republican theory of social and global justice. The book starts by exploring the nature and value of Hegelian recognition theory. It shows the importance of that theory for grounding a normative account of free and autonomous agency. It is this normative account of free agency which provides the groundwork for a republican conception of social and global justice, based on the core-ideas of freedom as non-domination and autonomy as non-alienation. As the (...) author argues, republicans should endorse a sufficientarian account of social justice, which focuses on the nature of social relationships and their effects on people's ability to act freely and realize their fundamental interests. On the global level, the book argues for the cosmopolitan extension of the republican principles of non-domination and non-alienation within a multi-level democratic system. In so doing, the book addresses a major gap in the existing literature, presenting an original theory of justice, which combines Hegelian recognition theory and republican ideas of freedom, and applying this hybrid theory to the global domain. Fabian Schuppert creates a grand synthesis uniting neo-republican insights on freedom with Hegelian recognition theory. The result is an account of agency that arises from the idea of non-domination whose aim it is to safeguard individual freedom. When combined with Hegelian recognition theory a social focus also emerges. This amalgam comments on many of the major disputes concerning global justice from a cosmopolitan perspective. Because of the broad scope and the many contemporary discussions engaged this book will be of keen interest to scholars as well as a welcome addition to the classroom. (shrink)

Over the last two decades, Axel Honneth has written extensively on the notion of social pathology, presenting it as a distinctive critical resource of Frankfurt School Critical Theory, in which tradition he places himself, and as an alternative to the mainstream liberal approaches in political philosophy. In this paper, I review the developments of Honneth's writing on this notion and offer an immanent critique, with a particular focus on his recent major work "Freedom's Right". Tracing the use of, and problems (...) internal to, Honneth's concept of social pathology serves to demonstrate his increasing reformism. It also serves to catalogue some of the dead ends that Critical Theory should avoid in taking up the idea of social pathology. The implication is not that this idea should be dropped. Rather, the paper is undertaking the necessary step of clearing the ground for further progress to take place on the question of what role the idea of social pathology can and should play in Critical Theory. The paper is critical in nature (and relentlessly so), but ultimately serves a constructive purpose. (shrink)

The later Rawls attempts to offer a non-comprehensive, but nonetheless moral justification in political philosophy. Many critics of political liberalism doubt that this is successful, but Rawlsians often complain that such criticisms rely on the unwarranted assumption that one cannot offer a moral justification other than by taking a philosophically comprehensive route. In this article, I internally criticize the justification strategy employed by the later Rawls. I show that he cannot offer us good grounds for the rational hope that citizens (...) will assign political values priority over non-political values in cases of conflict about political matters. I also suggest an alternative approach to justification in political philosophy (that is, a weak realist, Williams-inspired account) that better respects the later Rawls’s concern with non-comprehensiveness and pluralism than either his own view or more comprehensive approaches. Thus, if we take reasonable pluralism seriously, then we should adopt what Shklar aptly called ‘liberalism of fear’. (shrink)

In the last ten or fifteen years, realism has emerged as a distinct approach in political theory. Realists are skeptical about the merits of abstract theories of justice. They regard peace, order, and stability as the primary goals of politics. One of the more concrete aims of realists is to develop a realist perspective on legitimacy. I argue that realist accounts of legitimacy are unconvincing, because they do not solve what I call the “puzzle of legitimacy”: the puzzle of how (...) some persons can have the right to rule over others, given that all persons are equals. I focus on the realist accounts of legitimacy developed by Bernard Williams and John Horton. (shrink)

One central fact about hallucinations is that they may be subjectively indistinguishable from perceptions. Indeed, it has been argued that the hallucinatory experiences concerned cannot— and need not—be characterized in any more positive general terms. This epistemic conception of hallucinations has been advocated as the best choice for proponents of experiential (or “naive realist”) disjunctivism—the view that perceptions and hallucinations differ essentially in their introspectible subjective characters. In this chapter, I aim to formulate and defend an intentional alternative to experiential (...) disjunctivism called experiential intentionalism. This view not only enjoys some advantages over its rival but is also compatible with the epistemic conception of hallucinations, as well as with the disjunctivist view that perceptions and hallucinations differ essentially in their third-personal structures (e.g., their causal, informational, or reason-providing links to reality). It also maintains that there are actually two aspects to the subjective indistinguishability of mental episodes: (i) we cannot distinguish their first-personal characters in introspective awareness; and (ii) we cannot distinguish their third-personal structures in experiential awareness—that is, in how they are given to consciousness. While experiential disjunctivism makes the mistake of ignoring (ii) and reducing subjective indiscriminability to (i), experiential intentionalism correctly identifies (ii) as the primary source of the subjective indistinguishability of perception-like hallucinations. Accordingly, the intentional error involved in such hallucinations is due to the fact that we consciously experience them as possessing a relational structure. (shrink)

This paper centers on my interest in certain ideological lines presented in the political work of Bernardo Monteagudo. There are three special aspects: democracy, strong government, and confederacy. The importance of this research is basically in the public relevance of the author in the 1820s as ..

Astrology, its legitimacy, and the limits of its acceptable practice were debated in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. Many of the related arguments were mediated by the work of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and the responses to it. Acknowledging the complexities of the relationship between astrological ideas and Christian teachings, this paper focuses on the Catholic debates by specifically considering the decisions about astrology taken by the Spanish Inquisition. The trials of astrologers are examined with the aim of understanding the role (...) of experts in astrology in early modern Spain. This study brings into view the specific nature of the debate on astrology in Spain, the consequences of the actions of the Inquisition and the social control it exerted. The historical events discussed comprise a particular case and also mirror the general debates about astrology taking place in early modern Europe. The experts’ opinions expressed in trials and in reports about the discipline received by the Inquisition reveal two key traits of the debate: the dispute about who had the authority to decide on the legitimacy of astrology and the disagreement about what constituted natural and judicial astrological practices. These led to different opinions about what was to be done with each defendant and about what content in their books ought to be forbidden. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Jahrbuch für Wissenschaft und Ethik Jahrgang: 21 Heft: 1 Seiten: 171-196.