Este artículo delimita las principales tendencias de la crítica literaria feminista en el periodo 1980-2023. Mediante la investigación bibliográfica y el análisis documental, se caracterizan y analizan cinco modalidades específicas del trabajo crítico, realizado en el marco de los estudios literarios centroamericanos contemporáneos, a saber: (a.) las biografías y los estudios históricos sobre escritoras centroamericanas, (b.) las antologías de literatura escrita por mujeres, (c.) las traducciones de literatura femenina (d.) los trabajos monográficos, comparativos y de análisis de casos concretos y (...) (e.) las entradas de diccionarios a propósito de autoras regionales. (shrink)

Many current problems surrounding science revolve around the complex epistemological framework that shapes a new vision of knowledge about reality. The traditional epistemological positions are characterized by the explanation of nature by means of concatenated facts; that is, as bricks attached to each other giving shape to the edifice of science. A conception of this nature showed that the idea of certainty was nothing more than a mere illusion, opening the way, on the contrary, to the idea of the uncertainty (...) of knowledge based on the descriptions of quantum physics, also a product of the non-reductionist conception of reality, thus criticizing the specular representation. This article addresses the main problems surrounding the critical conceptions that the emerging epistemology reveals about knowledge, pointing towards a much more complex vision of reality. (shrink)

Patients with advanced Alzheimer's disease experience cognitive impairment and physical disabilities in daily life. Currently, there are no treatments available to slow down the course of the disease, and limited treatments exist only to treat symptoms. However, deep brain stimulation of the nucleus basalis of Meynert has been reported to improve cognitive function in individuals with AD. Here, we report the effects of NBM-DBS on cognitive function in a subject with severe AD. An 80-year-old male with severe AD underwent surgery (...) for bilateral NBM-DBS electrode placement. After 10 weeks of stimulation, Mini-Mental State Examination assessment improved from a score of 5 to 9 points, and assessment using the Alzheimer's Disease Assessment Scale–Cognitive Subscale showed a marked reduction in total score from 43 to 33 points, suggesting cognitive benefits from NBM-DBS. The patient's postoperative course was complicated by a subdural effusion that occurred several days after surgery, with complete recovery. Interestingly, the subject also displayed abnormal thermoregulation with stimulation initiation and stimulation parameter modifications. NBM-DBS may serve as a potential therapy for severe AD patients.Clinical Trial Registration: ChiCTR1900022324. (shrink)

In diagnosing and treating mental health conditions, various explanatory frameworks have been proposed to explain their nature, identify causes, and facilitate appropriate therapies needed to treat...

Justice has a high status in Islamic societies, and as one of the most important human ideals, has long been the focus of thinkers and researchers. In fact, when the citizens do not understand the presence of justice in the behaviour of the officials of their society, their trust in the current procedures, and consequently the public participation will be affected. Considering the importance of the subject, the present study has been conducted with the aim of investigating the effect of (...) perception of justice on citizens’ trust and participation in the creation of a democratic Islamic society. The statistical population of this research included 3578 Indonesian Muslim citizens in 2022, and the research questionnaires were distributed among them. Data analyses were done using Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) and Linear Structural Relations (LISREL) statistical software. The results of statistical analyses indicated that the perception of Islamic justice does not have a significant effect on the participation of Muslims in creating a democratic Islamic society. In addition, the perception of Islamic justice has a positive effect on the trust in officials of the Islamic society. Moreover, trust in the officials of the Islamic society positively affects the citizens’ participation in creating a democratic Islamic society.Contribution: According to the results of this research, it is necessary for the officials of the Islamic society to use all their efforts in creating a justice-oriented Islamic society in order to create trust among the citizens, and to involve Muslims in development decisions and to establish democratic Islamic society. (shrink)

On March 27, 2020, an amendment to the Official Mexican Standard NOM-051 was published in the Official Gazette of the Federation. The amendment addresses general labeling specifications for food and non-alcoholic beverages. The new regulation introduces three significant changes, which came into force on October 1, 2020. These are warning labeling, nutrient profile, and persuasive elements on the packaging. This study assesses the impact of the regulation on the consumer at three levels: the extent to which consumers understand the five (...) labels, their perception of the image of the product categories and companies, and the potential for shifts in consumption patterns. Similar regulations have been implemented in some other Latin American countries, such as Chile and Ecuador, but the results thus far are inconclusive concerning the actual impact of a long-term change in consumer behavior. With respect to studies conducted in Mexico, this research represents a pioneering investigation into the subject matter. A survey comprising 14 questions was administered, to elucidate the respondents' perceptions and attitudes. The survey was conducted online through convenience sampling with the Google Forms tool. The study was conducted on a sample of 210 individuals, comprising both male and female participants aged 18 and above, who were consumers of mass-produced products that were subject to the provisions of NOM-051. The findings indicate that the majority of respondents lacked clarity regarding the significance of the five black labels on the packaging. Furthermore, the new regulation did not exert a considerable influence on their consumption of processed foods and non-alcoholic beverages. It is anticipated that this research will serve as a reference for companies, government entities, marketing professionals, academics, and all those with an interest in the subject, given that it demonstrates notable findings in several aspects of the regulation's implementation, slightly over a year after its enactment, and the consequences it has had on Mexican consumers and their consumption habits. (shrink)

The Mexican Network of Women Philosophers has devoted its 2024 Permanent Seminar to reflect upon the slogan “Decentering the Canon to think ourselves today”. The idea supporting the slogan is partly motivated by a concern regarding how the necessary critiques to the Philosophical Canon have often been formulated in terms of the indispensability to add voices to it, or as a recommendation to stop reading some of the texts that have traditionally made it up. Even while these positions have a (...) lot going on for their plausibility, we claim that it is essential not to give it up, and that subverting it requires more than just adding voices to it. The Philosophical Canon is part of our inheritance. If we accept that we are partly constituted by what we inherit, then canceling it means eliminating part of who we are. We claim that a better option to overturn the Canon is to Decenter it. That is, to acknowledge that there is not a single way of dealing with it, that it is mobile and open, that it is there to be transformed, to help us think of those problems that actually matter to us in our present lives. (shrink)

The INBIOSA project brings together a group of experts across many disciplines who believe that science requires a revolutionary transformative step in order to address many of the vexing challenges presented by the world. It is INBIOSA’s purpose to enable the focused collaboration of an interdisciplinary community of original thinkers. This paper sets out the case for support for this effort. The focus of the transformative research program proposal is biology-centric. We admit that biology to date has been more fact-oriented (...) and less theoretical than physics. However, the key leverageable idea is that careful extension of the science of living systems can be more effectively applied to some of our most vexing modern problems than the prevailing scheme, derived from abstractions in physics. While these have some universal application and demonstrate computational advantages, they are not theoretically mandated for the living. A new set of mathematical abstractions derived from biology can now be similarly extended. This is made possible by leveraging new formal tools to understand abstraction and enable computability. [The latter has a much expanded meaning in our context from the one known and used in computer science and biology today, that is "by rote algorithmic means", since it is not known if a living system is computable in this sense (Mossio et al., 2009).] Two major challenges constitute the effort. The first challenge is to design an original general system of abstractions within the biological domain. The initial issue is descriptive leading to the explanatory. There has not yet been a serious formal examination of the abstractions of the biological domain. What is used today is an amalgam; much is inherited from physics (via the bridging abstractions of chemistry) and there are many new abstractions from advances in mathematics (incentivized by the need for more capable computational analyses). Interspersed are abstractions, concepts and underlying assumptions “native” to biology and distinct from the mechanical language of physics and computation as we know them. A pressing agenda should be to single out the most concrete and at the same time the most fundamental process-units in biology and to recruit them into the descriptive domain. Therefore, the first challenge is to build a coherent formal system of abstractions and operations that is truly native to living systems. Nothing will be thrown away, but many common methods will be philosophically recast, just as in physics relativity subsumed and reinterpreted Newtonian mechanics. -/- This step is required because we need a comprehensible, formal system to apply in many domains. Emphasis should be placed on the distinction between multi-perspective analysis and synthesis and on what could be the basic terms or tools needed. The second challenge is relatively simple: the actual application of this set of biology-centric ways and means to cross-disciplinary problems. In its early stages, this will seem to be a “new science”. This White Paper sets out the case of continuing support of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) for transformative research in biology and information processing centered on paradigm changes in the epistemological, ontological, mathematical and computational bases of the science of living systems. Today, curiously, living systems cannot be said to be anything more than dissipative structures organized internally by genetic information. There is not anything substantially different from abiotic systems other than the empirical nature of their robustness. We believe that there are other new and unique properties and patterns comprehensible at this bio-logical level. The report lays out a fundamental set of approaches to articulate these properties and patterns, and is composed as follows. -/- Sections 1 through 4 (preamble, introduction, motivation and major biomathematical problems) are incipient. Section 5 describes the issues affecting Integral Biomathics and Section 6 -- the aspects of the Grand Challenge we face with this project. Section 7 contemplates the effort to formalize a General Theory of Living Systems (GTLS) from what we have today. The goal is to have a formal system, equivalent to that which exists in the physics community. Here we define how to perceive the role of time in biology. Section 8 describes the initial efforts to apply this general theory of living systems in many domains, with special emphasis on crossdisciplinary problems and multiple domains spanning both “hard” and “soft” sciences. The expected result is a coherent collection of integrated mathematical techniques. Section 9 discusses the first two test cases, project proposals, of our approach. They are designed to demonstrate the ability of our approach to address “wicked problems” which span across physics, chemistry, biology, societies and societal dynamics. The solutions require integrated measurable results at multiple levels known as “grand challenges” to existing methods. Finally, Section 10 adheres to an appeal for action, advocating the necessity for further long-term support of the INBIOSA program. -/- The report is concluded with preliminary non-exclusive list of challenging research themes to address, as well as required administrative actions. The efforts described in the ten sections of this White Paper will proceed concurrently. Collectively, they describe a program that can be managed and measured as it progresses. (shrink)

Auditory-guided vocal learning is a mechanism that operates both in humans and other animal species making us capable to imitate arbitrary sounds. Both auditory memories and auditory feedback interact to guide vocal learning. This may explain why it is easier for humans to imitate the pitch of a human voice than the pitch of a synthesized sound. In this study, we compared the effects of two different feedback modalities in learning pitch-matching abilities using a synthesized pure tone in 47 participants (...) with no prior music experience. Participants were divided into three groups: a feedback group receiving real-time visual feedback of their pitch as well as knowledge of results; an equal-timbre group receiving additional auditory feedback of the target note with a similar timbre to the instrument being used ; and a control group practicing without any feedback or knowledge of results. An additional fourth group of violin experts performed the same task for comparative purposes. All groups were posteriorly evaluated in a transfer phase. Both experimental groups improved their intonation abilities with the synthesized sound after receiving feedback. Participants from the equal-timber group seemed as capable as the feedback group of producing the required pitch with the voice after listening to the human voice, but not with the violin. In addition, only participants receiving real-time visual feedback learned and retained in the transfer phase the mapping between the synthesized pitch and its correspondence with the produced vocal or violin pitch. It is suggested that both the effect of an objective external reward, together with the experience of exploring the pitch space with their instrument in an explicit manner, helped participants to understand how to control their pitch production, strengthening their schemas, and favoring retention. (shrink)

The INBIOSA project brings together a group of experts across many disciplines who believe that science requires a revolutionary transformative step in order to address many of the vexing challenges presented by the world. It is INBIOSA’s purpose to enable the focused collaboration of an interdisciplinary community of original thinkers. This paper sets out the case for support for this effort. The focus of the transformative research program proposal is biology-centric. We admit that biology to date has been more fact-oriented (...) and less theoretical than physics. However, the key leverageable idea is that careful extension of the science of living systems can be more effectively applied to some of our most vexing modern problems than the prevailing scheme, derived from abstractions in physics. While these have some universal application and demonstrate computational advantages, they are not theoretically mandated for the living. A new set of mathematical abstractions derived from biology can now be similarly extended. This is made possible by leveraging new formal tools to understand abstraction and enable computability. [The latter has a much expanded meaning in our context from the one known and used in computer science and biology today, that is "by rote algorithmic means", since it is not known if a living system is computable in this sense (Mossio et al., 2009).] Two major challenges constitute the effort. The first challenge is to design an original general system of abstractions within the biological domain. The initial issue is descriptive leading to the explanatory. There has not yet been a serious formal examination of the abstractions of the biological domain. What is used today is an amalgam; much is inherited from physics (via the bridging abstractions of chemistry) and there are many new abstractions from advances in mathematics (incentivized by the need for more capable computational analyses). Interspersed are abstractions, concepts and underlying assumptions “native” to biology and distinct from the mechanical language of physics and computation as we know them. A pressing agenda should be to single out the most concrete and at the same time the most fundamental process-units in biology and to recruit them into the descriptive domain. Therefore, the first challenge is to build a coherent formal system of abstractions and operations that is truly native to living systems. Nothing will be thrown away, but many common methods will be philosophically recast, just as in physics relativity subsumed and reinterpreted Newtonian mechanics. -/- This step is required because we need a comprehensible, formal system to apply in many domains. Emphasis should be placed on the distinction between multi-perspective analysis and synthesis and on what could be the basic terms or tools needed. The second challenge is relatively simple: the actual application of this set of biology-centric ways and means to cross-disciplinary problems. In its early stages, this will seem to be a “new science”. This White Paper sets out the case of continuing support of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) for transformative research in biology and information processing centered on paradigm changes in the epistemological, ontological, mathematical and computational bases of the science of living systems. Today, curiously, living systems cannot be said to be anything more than dissipative structures organized internally by genetic information. There is not anything substantially different from abiotic systems other than the empirical nature of their robustness. We believe that there are other new and unique properties and patterns comprehensible at this bio-logical level. The report lays out a fundamental set of approaches to articulate these properties and patterns, and is composed as follows. -/- Sections 1 through 4 (preamble, introduction, motivation and major biomathematical problems) are incipient. Section 5 describes the issues affecting Integral Biomathics and Section 6 -- the aspects of the Grand Challenge we face with this project. Section 7 contemplates the effort to formalize a General Theory of Living Systems (GTLS) from what we have today. The goal is to have a formal system, equivalent to that which exists in the physics community. Here we define how to perceive the role of time in biology. Section 8 describes the initial efforts to apply this general theory of living systems in many domains, with special emphasis on crossdisciplinary problems and multiple domains spanning both “hard” and “soft” sciences. The expected result is a coherent collection of integrated mathematical techniques. Section 9 discusses the first two test cases, project proposals, of our approach. They are designed to demonstrate the ability of our approach to address “wicked problems” which span across physics, chemistry, biology, societies and societal dynamics. The solutions require integrated measurable results at multiple levels known as “grand challenges” to existing methods. Finally, Section 10 adheres to an appeal for action, advocating the necessity for further long-term support of the INBIOSA program. -/- The report is concluded with preliminary non-exclusive list of challenging research themes to address, as well as required administrative actions. The efforts described in the ten sections of this White Paper will proceed concurrently. Collectively, they describe a program that can be managed and measured as it progresses. (shrink)

El trabajo tiene como objetivo fundamentar teórica y metodológicamentela educación del adulto mayor en el contexto de la educación permanente. Para ello, se describe conceptualmente el carácter de la educación a lo largo de la vida, su integración a la existencia humana. Los métodos del nivel teórico empleados fueron el análisis y síntesis para la construcción del marco teórico-metodológico. Quedan argumentados tres modelos pedagógicos necesarios por su importancia en el estudio desarrollado. La educación del adulto mayor se inscribe en el (...) proceso íntegro de educación permanente, al proveer conocimientos, habilidades y actitudes valiosas para el crecimiento personal como respuesta a la dinámica de los cambios científicos, tecnológicos y sociales. The objective of the paper is to provide a theoretical and methodological basis on old people's education in the context of permanent education. To that end, the character of education throughout life and its integration to human existence is described. Theoretical level methods such as analysis and synthesis were used in order to construct the theoretical-methodological framework. Three pedagogical models, which are necessary because of their importance for the study, are argued. Old people's education forms part of the whole permanent education process, as it provides knowledge, skills and valuable attitudes towards personal growth as an answer to scientific, technological and social changes dynamics. (shrink)

Building on the original formulation of the autopoietic theory (AT), extended enactivism argues that living beings are autopoietic systems that extend beyond the spatial boundaries of the organism. In this article, we argue that extended enactivism, despite having some basis in AT’s original formulation, mistakes AT’s definition of living beings as autopoietic entities. We offer, as a reply to this interpretation, a more embodied reformulation of autopoiesis, which we think is necessary to counterbalance the (excessively) disembodied spirit of AT’s original (...) formulation. The article aims to clarify and correct what we take to be a misinterpretation of AT as a research program. AT, contrary to what some enactivists seem to believe, did not (and does not) intend to motivate an extended conception of living beings. AT’s primary purpose, we argue, was (and is) to provide a universal individuation criterion for living beings, these understood as discrete bodies that are embedded in, but not constituted by, the environment that surrounds them. However, by giving a more explicitly embodied definition of living beings, AT can rectify and accommodate, so we argue, the enactive extended interpretation of autopoiesis, showing that although living beings do not extend beyond their boundaries as autopoietic unities, they do form part, in normal conditions, of broader autopoietic systems that include the environment. (shrink)

Research traditions on cognition and depression focus on relatively unconnected aspects of cognitive functioning. On one hand, the neuropsychological perspective has concentrated on cognitive control difficulties as a prominent feature of this condition. On the other hand, the clinical psychology perspective has focused on cognitive biases and repetitive negative patterns of thinking for emotional information. A review of the literature from both fields reveals that difficulties are more evident for mood-congruent materials, suggesting that cognitive control difficulties interact with cognitive biases (...) to hinder cognitive switching, working memory updating, and inhibition of irrelevant information. Connecting research from these two traditions, we propose a novel integrative cognitive model of depression in which the interplay between mood-congruent cognitive control difficulties, cognitive biases, and rumination may ultimately lead to ineffective emotion-regulation strategies to downregulate negative mood and upregulate positive mood. (shrink)

The use of performance feedback in the workplace has gained popularity over the years, yet school heads have been challenged in providing it to teachers. In the initial interview, they shared that evaluation results can impact teachers’ motivation, and that feedback should be done carefully. However, they failed to clearly articulate a specific mechanism that had been applied in this vital role. Also, no studies have provided clear detail on the feedback mechanism used by school heads in the past. For (...) this reason, a study explored the feedback mechanisms employed by school heads in conveying the performance evaluation results to teachers. This study employed a narrative inquiry, and interviews were conducted with five school heads and five teachers who were chosen purposively for this research. Responses were recorded using a voice recorder. These responses were transcribed and analyzed using thematic narrative analysis. Based on transcripts, the study identified six emergent themes, such as conversational (one-on-one), relational, reflective, technical, reinforcing, and properly situated mechanisms in conveying performance evaluation results to teachers. Thus, a new feedback mechanism framework was developed. (shrink)

In this article, the authors bring two personal journeys together: one author’s liberationist journey, sparked by a search for justice and liberation in the slums of Guatemala City, and the other’s lifelong commitment to practical theology and spatial justice in South Africa. A practical theology of liberation is the result of life experiences in countries of the Global South amidst the search for justice and liberation. The worlds that come together in this article are René Girard’s mimetic theory, liberation theology (...) and practical theology. This article raises the question of the cross-contextuality of practical theology and the theological application of mimetic theory to develop innovative theological methodologies that respond to the collective woundedness of the urban context in the Global South.Contribution: The main contribution of this article is the use of three seemingly different theological approaches in conjunction. This article opens the door to inform practical theology with René Girard’s mimetic theory and liberation theology. (shrink)

This paper examines a fundamental philosophical difference between two radical postcognitivist theories that are usually assumed to offer the same view of cognition; namely the autopoietic theory and the enactive approach. The ways these two theories understand cognition, it is argued, are not compatible nor incompatible but rather incommensurable. The reason, so it is argued, is that while enactivism, following the traditional stance held by most of the cognitive theories, understands cognitive systems as constituting a natural kind, the autopoietic theory (...) understands them as constituting only a conventional kind. Additionally, the paper shows that AT’s conventionalist stance about cognition, far from being an undesirable or useless position, offers some methodological virtues that might be timely and welcome in the agitated and revolutionary climate of current cognitive science. (shrink)

This article analyzes the legal-philosophical situation of Artificial Intelligence and the intelligent robot on being a subject of Law to be considered a creative person or author. The contradiction involved in allowing an object to present the legal duality of being protected as an object that it is and at the same time being considered a subject by the resulting work is analyzed, an impairment or vulgarization for the subject of Law as a moral subject when proposing the fictio legis (...) de a moral object, which is not conceivable. Instead, an alternative to such an aporia is proposed, more fictitious than real. (shrink)

Open Compositionality: Towards a Methodology of Language offers a fresh view into human languages as supermodular, highly interactive cognitive capacities allowing for human unique thought and communication. It is a novel account of semantics as decision-making in tandem with the cognition first methodology.

This introduction to a special issue of Topoi introduces and summarises the relationship between three main varieties of 'enactivist' theorising about the mind: 'autopoietic', 'sensorimotor', and 'radical' enactivism. It includes a brief discussion of the philosophical and cognitive scientific precursors to enactivist theories, and the relationship of enactivism to other trends in embodied cognitive science and philosophy of mind.

In this paper we will demonstrate that a computational system can meet the criteria for autonomy laid down by classical enactivism. The two criteria that we will focus on are operational closure and structural determinism, and we will show that both can be applied to a basic example of a physically instantiated Turing machine. We will also address the question of precariousness, and briefly suggest that a precarious Turing machine could be designed. Our aim in this paper is to challenge (...) the assumption that computational systems are necessarily heteronomous systems, to try and motivate in enactivism a more nuanced and less rigid conception of computational systems, and to demonstrate to computational theorists that they might find some interesting material within the enactivist tradition, despite its historical hostility towards computationalism. (shrink)

Este trabajo plantea un ejercicio de ontología de la música y propone una indagación filosófica more radicale de ésta. Se recorre el camino hacia la poíesis musical a través de tres apartados, buscándose lograr una filosofía que sea capaz de explicar y comprender la música en el contexto ontológico, y no meramente desde el punto de vista estético.This piece poses an exercise of onthology of music and proposes a philosophical inquiry of it more radicale . The path to musical poíesis (...) is reached through three stages, trying to achieve a philosophy that is capable of explaining and comprehending the music in an onthological context, and not merely from an aesthetic point of view. (shrink)

Context: The majority of contemporary enactivist work is influenced by the philosophical biology of Hans Jonas. Jonas credits all living organisms with experience that involves particular “existential” structures: nascent forms of concern for self-preservation and desire for objects and outcomes that promote well-being. We argue that Jonas’s attitude towards living systems involves a problematic anthropomorphism that threatens to place enactivism at odds with cognitive science, and undermine its legitimate aims to become a new paradigm for scientific investigation and understanding of (...) the mind. Problem: Enactivism needs to address the tension between its Jonasian influences and its aspirations to become a new paradigm for cognitive science. By relying on Jonasian phenomenology, contemporary enactivism obscures alternative ways in which phenomenology can be more smoothly integrated with cognitive science. Method: We outline the historical relationship between enactivism and phenomenology, and explain why anthropomorphism is problematic for a research program that aspires to become a new paradigm for cognitive science. We examine the roots of Jonas’s existential interpretation of biological facts, and describe how and why Jonas himself understood his project as founded on an anthropomorphic assumption that is incompatible with a crucial methodological assumption of scientific enquiry: the prohibition of unexplained natural purposes. We describe the way in which phenomenology can be integrated into Maturana’s autopoietic theory, and use this as an example of how an alternative, non-anthropomorphic science of the biological roots of cognition might proceed. Results: Our analysis reveals a crucial tension between Jonas’s influence on enactivism and enactivism’s paradigmatic aspirations. This suggests the possibility of, and need to investigate, other ways of integrating phenomenology with cognitive science that do not succumb to this tension. Implications: In light of this, enactivists should either eliminate the Jonasian inference from properties of our human experience to properties of the experience of all living organisms, or articulate an alternative conception of scientific enquiry that can tolerate the anthropomorphism this inference entails. The Maturanian view we present in the article’s final section constitutes a possible framework within which enactivist tools and concepts can be used to understand cognition and phenomenology, and that does not involve a problematic anthropomorphism. Constructivist content: Any constructivist approach that aims for integration with current scientific practice must either avoid the type of anthropomorphic inference on which Jonas bases his work, or specify a new conception of scientific enquiry that renders anthropomorphism unproblematic. (shrink)

The autopoietic theory and the enactive approach are two theoretical streams that, in spite of their historical link and conceptual affinities, offer very different views on the nature of living beings. In this paper, we compare these views and evaluate, in an exploratory way, their respective degrees of internal coherence. Focusing the analyses on certain key notions such as autonomy and organizational closure, we argue that while the autopoietic theory manages to elaborate an internally consistent conception of living beings, the (...) enactive approach presents an internal tension regarding its characterization of living beings as intentional systems directed at the environment. (shrink)

Es preciso penetrar en los motivos que impulsan a Donoso a su interpretación del pensamiento viquiano, comprender su perspectiva filosófica que le hace recibir a Vico como el fundador de la Filosofía de la Historia. El interés básico se halla en el objeto de esa "filosofía de la historia" que con Vico toma consistencia científica: ciencia del mundo humano. Pero aún más, Vico ofrece a Donoso el método de la filosofía de la historia. Sin embargo, hay que preguntarse por qué (...) el Donoso "maduro" se separa del Vico abrazado por el "joven" Donoso; y con ello se entenderá mejor no sólo el desarrollo del pensamiento histórico donosiano sino también la recepción de Vico en España.It is necessary to find out the causes that impel Donoso to his interpretation to the thought of Vico, to understand his philosophical perspective that makes him consider Vico as the founder of the Philosophy of History. The basic interest lies in the aim of that "philosophy of History" that thanks to Vico receives scientific consistency: science of the human world. But even more, Vico offers Donoso the method of the philosophy of History. Nevertheless, one has to wonder why the "mature" Donoso separates from the Vico embraced by the "young" Donoso and having achieved this, one will fully understand not only the development of the historical thought of Donoso but also Vico's reception in Spain. (shrink)

The recent debate about whether gauge symmetries can be empirically significant has focused on the possibility of 'Galileo's ship' types of scenarios, where the symmetries effect relational differences between a subsystem and the environment. However, it has gone largely unremarked that apart from such Galileo's ship scenarios, Greaves and Wallace (2014) proposed that gauge transformations can also be empirically significant in a 'non-relational' manner that is analogous to a Faraday-cage scenario, where the subsystem symmetry is related to a change in (...) a charged boundary state. In this paper, we investigate the question of whether such non-relational scenarios are possible for gauge theories. Remarkably, the answer to this question turns out to be closely related to a foundational puzzle that has driven a host of recent developments at the frontiers of theoretical physics. By drawing on these recent developments, we show that a very natural way of elaborating on Greaves and Wallace's claim of non-relational empirical significance for gauge symmetry is incoherent. However, we also argue that much of what they suggest is correct in spirit: one can indeed construct non-relational models of the kind they sketch, albeit ones where the empirical significance is not witnessed by a gauge symmetry but instead by a superficially similar boundary symmetry. Furthermore, the latter casts doubt on whether one really abandons Galileo's ship in such scenarios. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Knock at the Door: Utopian Dreams for Post-Covid TimesPedro Mora-Ramírez, María Amo-Hernández, and Paula García-RodríguezAnswering the Knock at the Door, Welcoming Utopian Futures, The Knock at the Door: Utopian Dreams for Post-Covid Times, May 21–24, 2023, University of Huelva, Spain, and University of Calgary, CanadaThe COVID-19 pandemic has fostered new adversities and vulnerabilities, prompting reflection on the economic, social, and political paradigms that endanger human and nonhuman (...) lives. For many, it was anxiety and uncertainty that “knock[ed] at the door”; for others, however, those same feelings of unease prompted one of hopefulness: reflecting on the possibilities for resilience and regeneration in the process of changing our vision of the world.1 The Knock at the Door conference brought contemporary utopianism to the forefront of thinking about how to respond to global crises while remaining attentive to other adversities of daily life. Scholars and artists answered the knock in an attempt to examine paths toward utopia, and to take advantage of the regenerative and resilient potential of the present.The conference was the culmination of author/activist Larissa Lai’s fellowship period at the University of Huelva. The 2022–23 María Zambrano Fellowship for the academic year2 allowed Lai to complete the project “Utopian Dreams for Post-Covid Times,” carried out in collaboration with the Huelva research group led by Professor Pilar Cuder-Domínguez, who hosted a number of online and in-person seminars on speculative fiction with Lai. The Knock at the Door conference, marking the end of Lai’s fellowship, created yet another space for scholars, artists, and critics to discuss the potential of utopian narratives. Lai asks: “What does our cultural moment require, and how can we get where we need to go from where we are? How can literature, especially speculative fiction literature, help us get from here to there?”3 [End Page 641] The intention of the conference was to encourage others to continue Lai’s work on how to imagine futures where human and posthuman beings need to remain vigilant to adversities. Utopian scholars, among others, might find the complications of “getting there from here” closely related to Lai’s conception of “insurgent utopias,” or “emergent insurgency.” They could find Lai’s concept of “insurgent utopianism” interesting as it lays the foundations of futurity in terms of crisis responses.The aim of the conference was to explore the imagination of better futures through utopian thinking and practice. In addition, it focused on “the knock at the door,” which is “a moment of contingent arrival... open to cooptation, destruction, bastardization, incorporation, death, or defusal.” Yet, it presents “the powerful possibility of critique—narratively or discursively, in its very materiality.”4 One way of doing this might be to look back at the past century of utopianism and ask who or what has been missing. The conference took up Lai’s idea of insurgent utopianism as a method of paving a path toward a multitude of dreams and actions, all shaped by the unique circumstances of one’s positionality.After the COVID-19 pandemic, the need for utopian thinking has become more pressing than ever. New horizons of hope must be created in the face of emerging anxieties. In a world where anthropocentrism is showing signs of its deadly potential, conference participants reflected on the relevance of the utopian imagination to political resistance and resilience building.Utopian Visions: Contesting Better Worlds in Neoliberal and Feminist UtopiasThe first two panels of the conference addressed the critique of two dominant theoretical (and interrelated) frameworks: capitalism and neoliberalism. Speakers reflected on both in light of theoretical interventions by theorists Rosi Braidotti and Francesca Ferrando. Panelists Benjamin Ghan and Marc Lynch reflected on how creative writers envision ideal worlds and temporalities. In Ghan’s view, utopian narratives create a symphony of voices historically excluded from the category of “the human”: women; LGBTQ+ people; Indigenous peoples. In a similar vein, Lynch described his own novel, A Wasp’s Waist, as highlighting the impossibility of imagining utopias within the capitalist paradigm—and thus the necessity of imagining futures beyond capitalism, and beyond... (shrink)

Ordinary use of empty names encompasses a variety of different phenomena, including issues in semantics, mental content, fiction, pretense, and linguistic practice. In this paper I offer a novel account of empty names, the cognitive theory, and show how it offers a satisfactory account of the phenomena. The virtues of this theory are based on its strength and parsimony. It allows for a fully homogeneous semantic treatment of names coped with ontological frugality and empirical and psychological adequacy.

Background The prioritization protocols for accessing adult critical care in the extreme pandemic context contain tiebreaker criteria to facilitate decision-making in the allocation of resources between patients with a similar survival prognosis. Besides being controversial, little is known about the public acceptability of these tiebreakers. In order to better understand the public opinion, Quebec and Ontario’s protocols were presented to the public in a democratic deliberation during the summer of 2022. Objectives (1) To explore the perspectives of Quebec and Ontario (...) citizens regarding tiebreakers, identifying the most acceptable ones and their underlying values. (2) To analyze these results considering other public consultations held during the pandemic on these criteria. Methods This was an exploratory qualitative study. The design involved an online democratic deliberation that took place over two days, simultaneously in Quebec and Ontario. Public participants were selected from a community sample which excluded healthcare workers. Participants were first presented the essential components of prioritization protocols and their related issues (training session day 1). They subsequently deliberated on the acceptability of these criteria (deliberation session day 2). The deliberation was then subject to thematic analysis. Results A total of 47 participants from the provinces of Quebec (n = 20) and Ontario (n = 27) took part in the online deliberation. A diverse audience participated excluding members of the healthcare workforce. Four themes were identified: (1) Priority to young patients - the life cycle - a preferred tiebreaker; (2) Randomization - a tiebreaker of last resort; (3) Multiplier effect of most exposed healthcare workers - a median acceptability tiebreaker, and (4) Social value – a less acceptable tiebreaker. Conclusion Life cycle was the preferred tiebreaker as this criterion respects intergenerational equity, which was considered relevant when allocating scarce resources to adult patients in a context of extreme pandemic. Priority to young patients is in line with other consultations conducted around the world. Additional studies are needed to further investigate the public acceptability of tiebreaker criteria. (shrink)

The implementation of COVID-19 vaccine certificates or passports entails many difficult issues, both technical and ethical. Looking at the ethical issues from a decolonial approach to justice, it i...

The green economy redefines the function of economics as the study and management of sustainability for solving economic crisis. This article suggests the existence of economic paradigms, arguing they have no solution. They are the same ones of complexity; in other words, around all living beings who study the system, within the various biological levels: in the bioeconomy. The study of these paradigms is based on the contemporary scientific method conditioned to classical logic. A view towards the non-classical logic particular (...) to the sciences of complexity is proposed as well. (shrink)

Este trabajo esboza una forma de justificar el principio estructurador central de una teoría veritista de la evaluación epistémica, en respuesta a críticas planteadas por Eleonora Cresto a mi defensa del veritismo frente a una serie de objeciones en el sentido de que no es capaz de explicar la naturaleza y el valor del entendimiento. La primera sección presenta el esbozo de justificación del núcleo de una teoría veritista; la segunda responde a críticas más específicas de Cresto. This paper sketches (...) a way to justify the central tenet of a veritistic theory of epistemic evaluation, in response to problems raised by Eleonora Cresto concerning my defense of veritism, against a series of objetions to the effect that veritistic epistemology is uncapable of explaining the nature and value of understanding. The first section presents the sketch of justification of the nucleus of a veritistic theory, the second responds to some of Cresto's more specific criticisms. (shrink)

Le Mystère de la mort de Notre Seigneur Jésus-Christ, by Jacqueline Pascal, constitutes a work of interest, in which not only the literary virtues of Blaise Pascal’s sister are reflected, but also a glimpse of her “phenomenological” capacity. After an approach to the biography of this 17th century author, an analysis of the work and its philosophical and theological scope, in connection with the writings of Blaise Pascal, is presented, as a reference to her genius and the impact of the (...) influence of Port-Royal’s thought. (shrink)

This paper suggests that the enactive approach to ethics could benefit from engaging a dialogue with the phenomenology of Emmanuel Levinas, a philosopher who has given ethics a decisive role in the understanding of our social life. Taking the enactive approach of Colombetti and Torrance as a starting point, we show how Levinas’ philosophy, with the key notions of face, otherness, and responsibility among others can complement and enrich the enactive view of ethics. Specifically, we argue that Levinas can provide, (...) on the one hand, a phenomenological characterisation of ethics itself, of its nature and fundamental meaning, and on the other, an account of how sociality, affectivity and embodiment, as presented in Colombetti and Torrance’s work, combine to bring about the ethical experience. However, we also point out that introducing Levinas to the enactive approach could be challenging. It is not obvious how sense-making and value-making, as centred on the precariousness and potential death of the subject, would account for the ethical experience as grounded on the precariousness and potential death of the other. (shrink)

The strong version of the life-mind continuity thesis claims that mind can be understood as an enriched version of the same functional and organizational properties of life. Contrary to this view, in this paper I argue that mental phenomena offer distinctive properties, such as intentionality or representational content, that have no counterpart in the phenomenon of life, and that must be explained by appealing to a different level of functional and organizational principles. As a strategy, and following Maturana’s autopoietic theory (...) of cognition, I introduce a conceptual distinction between mind and cognition. I argue that cognition corresponds to the natural behaviour that every living being exhibits in the realization of its existence, and that, viewed in that way, cognition is a dynamic process of structural coupling that, unlike mental phenomena, involves no representational contents. On the basis of this distinction, I try to show that while life suffices for cognition, it does not suffice for mind. That is, that the strong continuity is not between life and mind but between life and cognition. (shrink)

Este artículo traza una relación entre tres de los autores más influyentes de la doctrina del atomismo lógico a partir de la noción de análisis lógico, sin embargo, dicha relación busca no solo la constatación de su cercanía doctrinal sino la concepción ontológica que subyace a la posibilidad de dicho análisis, para el caso de Russell y Wittgenstein, o su ausencia, para el caso de Carnap, lo cual, no obstante, no aleja a este de preocupaciones de carácter metafísico, ya que (...) en los tres autores la relación entre lenguaje y mundo, ya sea desde la dimensión ontológica o epistemológica, comporta una reflexión de primer orden. Para exponer lo anterior se recurre a dilucidar la relación entre nombres propios y hechos (Russell), objetos simples y estado de cosas (Wittgenstein) y la postura de la Ciencia Unificada (Carnap) con respecto a la representación de hechos o cosas. (shrink)

«Palabra de Dios» no se dice sólo con referencia a las Sagradas Escrituras; Jesucristo es la Palabra de Dios por antonomasia frente a la cual las demás expresiones de Palabra de Dios, incluyendo la Biblia, lo serán en sentido análogo y dependiente. Esto significa que tras la hermenéutica bíblica cristiana subyace la fe cristológica, de tal modo que lo que se predica de la naturaleza de la Sagrada Escritura, Palabra de Dios puesta por escrito, sea consecuencia directa de lo que (...) se predica de Jesucristo, Palabra de Dios encarnada. Ello, además de incidir en la vida y la fe del creyente, tiene importantes implicaciones epistemológicas, metodológicas y práxicas para la hermenéutica bíblica hoy. «Word of God» doesn’t onlj refer to the Holj Scaptures; Jesús Christ is the Word of God par excellence against which all other expressions of God’s Word, including the Bible, are anahgous and dependent. This means that behind Christian biblical hermeneutics lies faith in Christ, so that what is preached on the nature of the Holj Scripture, the written Word of God, is directlj dependent on what is preached about Jesús Christ, the Word of God incarnate. This, besides influencing the ufe and faith of the beüever, has important epistemological, methodological and practical consequences for current biblical hermeneutics. (shrink)

Este artículo trata el problema de los objetos creados que pueden ser repetidos, como las obras musicales y las literarias. En la sección 2 presentamos una serie de desiderata intuitivos que toda teoría debe satisfacer. En las secciones 3 y 4 presentamos un silogismo disyuntivo extendido. Los objetos en cuestión pueden ser o bien universales concretos, particulares concretos, universales abstractos o particulares abstractos. Mostramos cómo es que las teorías que consideran que son cualquiera de las tres últimas opciones fracasan. Por (...) lo tanto, debemos entender a dichos objetos como universales concretos. En la sección 5 ofrecemos una teoría breve pero detallada de la naturaleza metafísica de los universales concretos para después mostrar cómo esta propuesta permite dar cuenta de los desiderata intuitivos a la vez que se evitan las objeciones presentadas en contra de teorías alternativas. (shrink)