Building on evidence for embodied representations, we investigated whether Spanish spatial terms map onto the NEAR/FAR perceptual division of space. Using a long horizontal display, we measured congruency effects during the processing of spatial terms presented in NEAR or FAR space. Across three experiments, we manipulated the task demands in order to investigate the role of endogenous attention in linguistic and perceptual space mapping. We predicted congruency effects only when spatial properties were relevant for the task but not when attention (...) was allocated to other features. Results showed faster responses for words presented in Near-space in all experiments. Consistent with our hypothesis, congruency effects were observed only when a reaching estimate was requested. Our results add important evidence for the role of top-down processing in congruency effects from embodied representations of spatial terms. (shrink)

If Unamuno had been able to choose how to be remembered, he would have wanted him to be a poet. This book wants to do justice to that happy possibility. But above all because Unamuno was a poet in the highest sense: he was while writing the same essay as a novel, or theater, letter or verse, and he was also a poet when he passionately lived all the facets of his intense existence. His intellectual work was poetic and his (...) personal relationships, as well as his political activity, also responded to that peculiar Unamunian aesthetic in which the vital horizon is inescapably confused with the tasks of thought." --Translated from back cover. (shrink)

En el presente trabajo se intenta ilustrar con ejemplos de la historia y de la actualidad constitucional de América Latina la paradójica actitud de no pocos juristas y políticos latinoamericanos que simultáneamente profesan una fe inconmovible en el poder de conformación social del ordenamiento jurídico a la vez que aceptan su precaria eficacia. La Constitución se convierte en un mito político y la impunidad en sinónimo de poder. En tales condiciones, parece aventurado establecer una relación causal entre orden constitucional y (...) democracia. Sólo una política jurídica que tome en serio los derechos y deberes constitucionales podrá quizás revertir esta situación. Desgraciadamente la probabilidad de que tal sea el caso a fines del siglo XX es menor que a comienzos de la centuria. (shrink)

Tienen razón Francisco Lara y Olga Campos en afirmar en la introducción de su libro que “un mérito importante de este libro es que, de manera muy divulgativa, pretende dar respuestas filosóficas al debate sobre nuestra relación con los animales al aplicar ideas bási- cas a cuestiones prácticas como si debemos ser o no vegetarianos, si hay que experimentar con animales o hasta qué punto son justifica- bles las corridas de toros” (p. 15). Y efectivamente, de una manera muy (...) clara, el libro no sólo pretende, sino que en efecto da respuestas a cuestiones centrales sobre nuestra relación con los animales, en particular a la cuestión acerca de cuál es su estatus o su valor moral y, por ende, sobre si tenemos obligaciones morales hacia ellos. Su tesis es que los animales sí tienen un estatus moral independiente de los intereses humanos, que tienen derechos y que es nuestra obligación moral respetarlos. Parte de ese respeto consiste en no tratarlos como meros instrumentos o recursos al servicio de los inte- reses de los humanos. (shrink)

I offer in this discussion a critical reconstruction of the main arguments that Francisco Lara and Olga Campos expound in their book Sufre, luego importa. Reflexiones éticas sobre los animales, recently released. This writing is divided into two chief sections: in the first one, I provide a brief summary of each chapter´s main thesis and lines of reasoning; in the second section, I make some suggestions regarding the authors´ ethical perspective and also raise certain objections, especially connected to classical (...) utilitarianism. (shrink)

Reseña de: Arenas-Dolz, Francisco y Gallegos Salazar, Daniela (eds.) (2009), El ciudadano democrático. Reflexiones éticas para una educación intercultural, Madrid, Plaza y Valdés.

The Ohlone, the original settlers of the San Francisco region, were violently dispossessed by successive colonial regimes, first Spanish, then US American. The colonial trauma was written out of history, and by the 20th century anthropologists pronounced the Ohlone to be ‘extinct’. In this article, I explore how the dispossession of the Ohlone haunt one of the greatest movies of all time: Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958). Although Vertigo is one of the most-analysed films ever, no one has noticed that (...) Carlotta Valdes – the dispossessed woman who comes back from the dead to take possession of the living – would have been Native American. A hauntological reading reveals Vertigo as an unwitting witness of colonial dispossession. (shrink)

Machines and Biology have been, since antiquity, closely related. From the zoological figures present in astronomical simulacra, through renaissance mechanical imitations of animals, through Decartes' wind pipe nerves, to present day discussions on the computer and the brain, runs a continuous thread. In fact, the very name of mechanism for an attitude of inquiry throughout the history of Biology reveals this at a philosophical level. More often than not, mechanism is mentioned in opposition to vitalism, as an assertion of the (...) validity of the objectivity principle in biology: there are no purposes in animal nature; its apparent purposefulness is similar to the purposefulness of machines. Yet, the fact that one picks machines as a set of objects comparable to living systems, deserves a closer look. What in machines makes it possible to establish such a connection? (shrink)

The question whether ethical behavior is biologically determined may refer either to thecapacity for ethics (e.i., the proclivity to judge human actions as either right or wrong), or to the moralnorms accepted by human beings for guiding their actions. My theses are: (1) that the capacity for ethics is a necessary attribute of human nature; and (2) that moral norms are products of cultural evolution, not of biological evolution.Humans exhibits ethical behavior by nature because their biological makeup determines the presence (...) of the three necessary, and jointly sufficient, conditions for ethical behavior: (i) the ability to anticipate the consequences of one's own actions; (ii) the ability to make value judgements; and (iii) the ability to choose between alternative courses of action. Ethical behavior came about in evolution not because it is adaptive in itself, but as a necessary consequece of man's eminent intellectual abilities, which are an attribute directly promoted by natural selection. (shrink)

The question whether ethical behavior is biologically determined may refer either to the capacity for ethics (i.e., the proclivity to judge human actions as either right or wrong), or to the moral norms accepted by human beings for guiding their actions. I herein propose: (1) that the capacity for ethics is a necessary attribute of human nature; and (2) that moral norms are products of cultural evolution, not of biological evolution. Humans exhibit ethical behavior by nature because their biological makeup (...) determines the presence of three necessary conditions for ethical behavior: (i) the ability to anticipate the consequences of one’s own actions; (ii) the ability to make value judgments; and (iii) the ability to choose between alternative courses of action. Ethical behavior came about in evolution not because it is adaptive in itself, but as a necessary consequence of man’s eminent intellectual abilities, which are an attribute directly promoted by natural selection. That is, morally evolved as an exaptation, not as an adaptation. Since Darwin’s time there have been evolutionists proposing that the norms of morality are derived from biological evolution. Sociobiologists represent the most recent and most subtle version of that proposal. The sociobiologists' argument is that human ethical norms are sociocultural correlates of behaviors fostered by biological evolution. I argue that such proposals are misguided and do not escape the naturalistic fallacy. The isomorphism between the behaviors promoted by natural selection and those sanctioned by moral norms exist only with respect to the consequences of the behaviors; the underlying causations are completely disparate. (shrink)

The second decade of the 21st century has seen the emergence and establishment of a series of movements that have led to the rise of Eurosceptic parties in France and Germany and the departure of the United Kingdom from the European Union. Considering the current political context and given the lack of studies addressing this object of study, this paper analyses the role of metaphor and metonymy in Eurosceptic discourse in French and Spanish. To this end, once the theoretical fundamentals (...) of this research has been submitted, the compiled textual corpus is presented. This corpus consists of documents, political programmes and manifestos drafted by a number of openly Eurosceptic political parties in France, Switzerland and Spain. From this corpus, the underlying conceptual metaphors have been analyzed, as well as the orientational metaphors and the documented metonymies from the metaphorical expressions used. This study concludes that metaphor is, in political discourse, an effective means of transmitting a certain ideology. Thus, the most used conceptual metaphors have been THE EXIT FROM THE EUROPEAN UNION IS A WAY, THE EXIT FROM THE EUROPEAN UNION IS A FIGHT and POLITICS ARE A FIGHT. It is also concluded that the use of metaphor is capable of changing the citizen’s perception and conception of European Community policies and the European Union. (shrink)

La presente obra ofrece la primera historia completa de toda la filosofía novohispana desde 1521 hasta 1821. Se trata de una visión unitaria y completa de toda la filosofía de la época colonial de México, única en su género y con muchas aportaciones valiosas y originales, con método y bases de verdadera investigación histórico-filosófica. Se abre el libro con una hermenéutica de la historia de la filosofía novohispana en la cual el autor, siguiendo las orientaciones más modernas, comprende e interpreta (...) la historia de las ideas en México a partir de sus verdaderos comienzos: desde la polémica entablada por Agustín Rivera y Agustín de la Rosa sobre la validez o no de la acción de España en la enseñanza de la filosofía y de la ciencia en la Nueva España. En su conjunto la obra, estructurada cronológicamente, estudia las actividades y manifestaciones filosóficas de las órdenes religiosas en los tres siglos clásicos, estableciendo una división entre humanistas y escolásticos. Entre los humanistas, destacan fray Juan de Sumárraga, fray Bartolomé de Las Casas, Vasco de Quiroga y Francisco Hernández. En la exposición de los escolásticos, y atendiendo a las diversas órdenes, traza un resumen de las obras principales de los autores más destacados: Diego Valdés, Alonso de la Vera Cruz, Pedro de Hortigosa, Antonio Rubio y Antonio Arias, así como sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. (shrink)

Spin is a fundamental and distinctive property of the electron, having far-reaching implications. Yet its purely formal treatment often blurs the physical content and meaning of the spin operator and associated observables. In this work we propose to advance in disclosing the meaning behind the formalism, by first recalling some basic facts about the one-particle spin operator. Consistently informed by and in line with the quantum formalism, we then proceed to analyse in detail the spin projection operator correlation function \=\left\langle (...) \left \left \right\rangle \) for the bipartite singlet state, and show it to be amenable to an unequivocal probabilistic reading. In particular, the calculation of \\) entails a partitioning of the probability space, which is dependent on the directions \.\) The derivation of the CHSH- or other Bell-type inequalities, on the other hand, does not consider such partitioning. This observation puts into question the applicability of Bell-type inequalities to the bipartite singlet spin state. (shrink)

Este artículo examina el significado del desarrollo humano integral propugnado por Benedicto XVI en Caritas in veritate, destacando su continuidad con Populorum progressio y, en general, con el magisterio social precedente. Tras dar razón del vínculo existente entre la economía, la ética y la antropología, el autor trata de espigar las principales orientaciones ético-económicas que han sido propuestas en esa última encíclica social con vistas a un tal desarrollo, articulándolas a partir de dos concepciones antropológicas de honda raigambre en la (...) doctrina social de la Iglesia, a saber, la dignidad humana y el personalismo comunitario.Comenta, finalmente, la relevancia económica de la antropología cristiana y su potencial crítico frente al homo oeconomicus, así como la capacidad de interlocución con diversas corrientes de pensamiento contemporáneas que dicha antropología proporciona a la doctrina social de la Iglesia.This article examines the meaning of the human, complete development defended by Benedict XVI in Caritas in veritate, emphasizing its continuity with Populorum progessio and with the previous social teaching in general. After stating the existing link between economy, ethics and anthropology, the author tries to select the main ethic-economic orientations proposed in that last social encyclical in relation to a such development, and structures them beginning with two anthropological conceptions deep-rooted in the social doctrine of the church, that is, human dignity and personalism of the community. Finally, the article comments on the economic importance of Christian anthropology and its critical potential against the homo oeconomicus, as well as the capacity of being an interlocutor with several contemporary trends of thought that anthropology provides the social doctrine of the church with. (shrink)

O humor é hoje um dos principais atrativos turísticos do Ceará, sendo divulgado lado a lado com as belezas naturais do Estado. Trata-se de um humor muito peculiar e com características próprias e distintas: a molecagem, a irreverência e a linguagem popular. Sete dias por semana, ao longo de todo o ano, grande número de profissionais se apresentam em bares, restaurantes e barracas de praia bem como fazem participação nos meios de comunicação de massa locais. Esta forma relativamente nova de (...) entretenimento-turismo tem como protagonistas os chamados ‘humoristas do Ceará’, denominação que se refere à geração que surgiu a partir de um movimento artístico inovador de apresentações cômico-teatrais nos bares da cidade em meados dos anos 1980. A hipótese deste trabalho é que foi a partir de sua aparição bem como da apropriação de uma linguagem e estilo ditos bregas que a produção artístico-cultural de humor no estado passou a ser encarada com uma característica local, sendo então agregada ao próprio espírito da cidade e passando, posteriormente, a integrar o pacote turístico do estado do Ceará. (shrink)

Certamente Sto. Agostinho jamais se propôs a escrever um tratado sistemático de Ética, ainda que o opúsculo sobre os costumes da igreja cristã e dos maniqueus possa representar um projeto desta ordem. Todavia, há em sua obra todos os elementos de uma ética, desde que se veja nesta a face humana do Deus Unitrino, isto é, a expressão de sua participação na Trindade, nos termos de uma indissociável unidade que abrange desde os princípios do humano à sua sobreelevação, a perfazer-se (...) no amor que unifica e une. Eis por que um tratado à parte seria inexequível se colocado no registro da vontade qual instância estanque em relação à inteligência e à memória. (shrink)

Este artigo apresenta um estudo sobre alguns elementos históricos na problemática da Filosofia da História. A finalidade é a de problematizar questões que servem de referencial para a discussão de algumas tendências em filosofia da história, dentro de um ponto de vista histórico-crítico, para demonstrar como a razão instrumental e calculadora anula o pensar crítico e transformador na compreensão da Filosofia da História. A investigação parte da análise do confronto entre as concepções dos antigos e dos modernos acerca da filosofia (...) da história até culminar em uma análise de algumas teorias na filosofia contemporânea, a partir da teoria-crítica da Escola de Frankfurt. (shrink)

The critic against subject-predicate propositions is a Russell’s feature. See for example A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz. However, in The Principles of Mathematics Russell goes back to the subject-predicate form but in the context of his contribuition to the development of Modern Logic and his philosophy of mathematics.

En el presente artículo se busca dilucidar cómo Axel Honneth aborda el problema de la dominación en Crítica del poder y La lucha por el reconocimiento. En la primera obra, el autor analiza de qué forma los sujetos sociales construyen prácticas de dominación y no se limitan a legitimarlas a posteriori. Esta concepción del dominio pone a Honneth ante el siguiente problema: ¿comprendería su planteo, además de la construcción activa de los marcos institucionales que regulan las relaciones sociales, el hecho (...) de que los distintos grupos den asentimiento a “formas superfluas de dominación”? El primer objetivo de mi trabajo es desarrollar este problema tal y como se presenta en Crítica del poder, el segundo, apunta a retraducir esa cuestión según los términos teóricos que Honneth introduce en trabajos posteriores al hablar de una lucha por el reconocimiento. Estos trabajos buscan comprender el conflicto que se suscita en torno al reconocimiento entre los diferentes grupos sociales y del que depende que sean considerados miembros legítimos de una comunidad. (shrink)