In the best literature on unilateral secession, for instance, Buchanan, it is usual to distinguish between remedial theories, which require a just cause for conceding a right to secession for the inhabitants of a territory, part of a State; and primary theories, plebiscitary theories and adscriptivist or nationalist theories. In accordance to this view, only the first are capable of justifying a unilateral right to secession. Well then, in this paper, an argument is elaborated in order to show that the (...) remedial strategy is not applicable to Catalonia and, also to show that even if primary theories are applicable to the case of Catalonia —the plebiscitary strategy has given rise to the so-called right to decide—, they are not able to justify a unilateral right to secession. (shrink)

En este artículo, se analiza la cuestión de si la existencia del derecho depende necesariamente de la moralidad. La cuestión que ha enfrentado a las doctrinas del derecho natural con el positivismo jurídico. Se trata de mostrar que dicho debate esconde, al menos tres cuestiones diferentes, que requieren respuestas diversas: 1) La cuestión semántica de si las normas positivas injustas son derecho, 2) la cuestión metafísica de si la existencia del contenido del derecho está fundada en hechos morales y 3) (...) la cuestión epistémica de si el contenido del derecho debe ser identificado sin recurrir a consideraciones morales. Se concluye que la primera cuestión es una mera disputa verbal. Se dan algunos argumentos para aceptar la tesis metafísica. Y una respuesta afirmativa a la tercera cuestión es puesta en duda analizando la doctrina de la autoridad de Joseph Raz y, también, tratando de mostrar que el hecho de que algo sea concebible no conlleva que sea metafísicamente posible. (shrink)

RESUMEN En este trabajo se analizan las principales ideas de John Rawls acerca de la naturaleza del derecho y del razonamiento jurídico. Partiendo de un trabajo de Ronald Dworkin (2004), y básicamente de acuerdo con él, se exponen las críticas dworkinianas a la doctrina rawlsiana de la razón pública, y se presenta un modo en el cual Rawls podría replicarlas. El objetivo del trabajo es mostrar la fecundidad de las ideas rawlsianas para nuestra concepción del derecho en sociedades democráticas, caracterizadas (...) por el hecho del pluralismo. (shrink)

Un texto no siempre puede ser traducido sin traicionar el sentido del original. Una novela juvenil concebida con el propósito de transmitir conocimientos contendrá a menudo informaciones que un público coetáneo que vive en otro país no necesitará, y, al revés, puede haber que añadir en la traducción informaciones específicas para el público destinatario ausentes en la novela original. La reflexión en torno a la resolución de las dificultades encontradas en la traducción de cuatro textos, las distintas tipologías traductivas utilizadas (...) y su generalización aportan al eterno dilema traducción – adaptación las observaciones realizadas desde la novela juvenil con contenido científico. (shrink)

For decades, the ecstatic rituals of the Sufi brotherhood of the ‘Isawa have attracted the attention of European travelers and journalists as they pass through the Maghreb. Through the texts of these external observers, I will show the paradoxes of these images of the ‘Isawa centered on emphasizing the violent and irrational character of their ritual practices, while at the same time awakening a morbid curiosity to find an explanation for what the witnesses presented as pathological extravagances. With the rise (...) of Islamic reformism and the interests of Franco-Spanish colonial policy, rituals were progressively domesticated from the 1930s onwards, and partially converted into spectacle, with the aim of avoiding a corporal and ritual disorder that challenged the new colonial order. (shrink)

Contrariamente a las ideas dominantes sobre la supuesta secularidad de la modernidad, los intentos de conciliación entre ciencia y religión son abundantes. En el ámbito musulmán la pugna entre defensores y detractores de dicha conciliación generó un nuevo episodio en torno a la cuestión de los llamados milagros científicos del Corán. La argumentación de sus defensores se hallaba ya sembrada en los debates del siglo XIX pero es durante el último cuarto de siglo XX cuando esta retórica se reconstituye, coincidiendo (...) con los procesos de revitalización islámica. Esta retórica propone que los descubrimientos ofrecidos por la ciencia ya fueron anticipados en su momento por la revelación coránica, en tanto que expresión de la divinidad. De este modo, numerosos autores, tanto en países de mayoría islámica como en países occidentales, proceden a establecer vínculos entre teorías científicas y versículos coránicos, como en la demostración de la existencia de los genios o las diversas formas de revitalización de la medicina profética. El caso guarda notables parecidos con otros movimientos que desde finales del siglo XIX intentan demostrar fenómenos espirituales por medio de un pensamiento naturalista, en momentos de importantes transformaciones sociales y políticas. (shrink)

The inference systems proposed for solving SAT are unsound for solving MaxSAT and MinSAT, because they preserve satisfiability but not the minimum and maximum number of clauses that can be falsified, respectively. To address this problem, we first define a clause tableau calculus for MaxSAT and prove its soundness and completeness. We then define a clause tableau calculus for MinSAT and also prove its soundness and completeness. Finally, we define a complete clause tableau calculus for solving both MaxSAT and MinSAT, (...) in that the minimum number of generated empty clauses provides an optimal MaxSAT solution and the maximum number provides an optimal MinSAT solution. (shrink)

Quins són els valors que regeixen la nostra vida? I per què vivim amb aquests valors i no amb uns altres? «Els valors van cap a on anem nosaltres perquè van amb nosaltres. ¬I mentre fem camí o mentre el busquem, els valors ens alimenten», diu el filòsof.

This book deals with the theoretical, methodological, and empirical implications of bounded rationality in the operation of institutions. It focuses on decisions made under uncertainty, and presents a reliable strategy of knowledge acquisition for the design and implementation of decision-support systems. Based on the distinction between the inner and outer environment of decisions, the book explores both the cognitive mechanisms at work when actors decide, and the institutional mechanisms existing among and within organizations that make decisions fairly predictable. While a (...) great deal of work has been done on how organizations act as patterns of events for (boundedly) rational decisions, less effort has been devoted to study under which circumstances organizations cease to act as such reliable mechanisms. Through an empirical strategy on open-ended response data from a survey among junior judges, the work pursues two main goals. The first one is to explore the limits of "institutional rationality" of the Spanish lower courts on-call service, an optimal scenario to observe decision-making under uncertainty. The second aim is to achieve a better understanding of the kind of uncertainty under which inexperienced decision-makers work. This entails exploring the demands imposed by problems and the knowledge needed to deal with them, making this book also a study on expertise achievement in institutional environments. This book combines standard multivariate statistical methods with machine learning techniques such as multidimensional scaling and topic models, treating text as data. Doing so, the book contributes to the collaboration between empirical social scientific approaches and the community of scientists that provide the set of tools and methods to make sense of the fastest growing resource of our time: data. (shrink)

La didáctica geográfica en la enseñanza superior incorpora el trabajo de campo como instrumento de primer orden. Las salidas de campo constituyen la base de la investigación geográfica puesto que proporcionan conocimiento sobre los elementos configuradores y procesos del espacio geográfico. Las geotecnologías cuentan con capacidad para recrear virtualmente escenarios análogos a las salidas tradicionales. Se compararon las cualificaciones de dos grupos de alumnos sin encontrarse diferencias significativas entre los que realizaron salidas virtuales y tradicionales. La virtualización de las salidas (...) de campo es un elemento útil y de inclusividad más allá del contexto de pandemia. (shrink)

The causal characters (spacelike, lightlike, timelike) of the coordinate lines, coordinate surfaces and coordinate hypersurfaces of a coordinate system in Relativity define what is called its causal class. It is known that, in any relativistic space-time, there exist one hundred and ninety nine such causal classes. But in Newtonian physics (where only spacelike and timelike characters exist) the corresponding causal classes have not been discussed until recently. Here it is shown that, in sharp contrast with the relativistic case, in Newtonian (...) space-time the different causal classes of coordinate systems are drastically reduced to four. These causal classes admit simple geometric descriptions and physical interpretations. For example, it is shown that one can generate coordinate systems of the four causal classes by means of the sole linear synchronization group, i.e. by coordinate transformations that only change the origin of time linearly. The relativistic analogs of these examples are also considered. (shrink)

Guizot aprendió el oficio de historiador preparando con su esposa,Pauline de Meulan, una edición crítica en francés de _Decline and Fall_ de Gibbon. Las personalidades históricas de Gibbon y Guizot fueron muy distintas. También sus respectivos “estilos de historia”. Pero en las obras de Guizot, en especial en su _Historia de la civilización en Europa_, es reconocible el legado de Gibbon. Así, en la eliminación de la barrera entre historia civil y historia religiosa, en la amplitud temática, en la ambición (...) cronológica y en una idea de Europa concebida como algo más que la suma de sus partes. Asimismo en la adopción de la misma palabra _civilización_ y en el hecho de que la interpretación guizotiana de la historia europea hunda sus raíces en tres factores presentes en Gibbon: lo que sobrevivió de las instituciones romanas, el impacto del cristianismo y el aporte germánico. (shrink)

Obituari en memòria de Josep-Maria Terricabras.

Regularization may be used as an alternative to dimensionality reduction when the number of variables in a model is much larger than the number of available observations. In a recent study from our group regularized regression was employed to quantify brain functional connectivity in a sample of healthy controls using a brain parcellation and resting state fMRI images. Here regularization is applied to evaluate resting state connectivity abnormalities at the voxel level in a sample of patients with schizophrenia. Specifically, ridge (...) regression is implemented with different degrees of regularization. Results are compared to those delivered by the weighted global brain connectivity method, which is based on averaged bivariate correlations and from the non-redundant connectivity method, a dimensionality reduction approach that applies supervised principal component regressions. Ridge regression is able to detect a larger set of abnormally connected regions than both GBC and NRC methods, including schizophrenia related connectivity reductions in fronto-medial, somatosensory and occipital structures. Due to its multivariate nature, the proposed method is much more sensitive to group abnormalities than the GBC, but it also outperforms the NRC, which is multivariate too. Voxel based regularized regression is a simple and sensitive alternative for quantifying brain functional connectivity. (shrink)

Daniel Bensaïd was a Marxist philosopher and author of an extensive body of works about political strategy. His writings combine a diversity of singular influences, such as Marx, Lenin, Trotsky and Che Guevara on the one hand, and Benjamin, Péguy and Blanqui on the other. In his work, religious heresies, Marranos, moles and emblematic figures of the resistance to oppression such as Joan of Arc meet with the classic figures of Marxism. The non-linear concept of time and messianic reason (...) support a strategic reading of history and an understanding of political commitment, following Goldmann’s interpretation of Pascal’s Wager as a wager of uncertain outcome. (shrink)

Josep Maria Capdevila (1892-1972) és un dels intel·lectuals més destacats de la primera meitat del segle XX a Catalunya. L’autor n’ha resseguit el pensament, reconstruint-ne significativament la formació intel·lectual, el món ideològic i les idees estètiques, per acabar amb una digressió sobre el punt de partença de la filosofia.

Los procesos migratorios suponen repensar las relaciones, tránsitos y vivencias de las comunidades receptoras. En este sentido, el análisis de los escenarios de convivencia urbana implica redescubrir las historias viejas y nuevas de la inmigración, de la construcción del barrio, de la conformación de sus actores colectivos y de los espacios urbanos comunes. En el análisis de los escenarios de convivencia más conflictivos, encontramos giros discursivos que buscan responsabilizar a la inmigración reciente de problemáticas estructurales que se viven como irremediables. (...) Otros discursos, tendientes a la indiferencia respecto a la convivencia, muestran un potencial conflicto que vuelve inestables estas posturas. El escenario de convivencia social parece construirse desde acciones que buscan la implicación e interrelación entre los actores, desde el conocimiento y reconocimiento de las diferencias y con acento en los derechos comunes. (shrink)

This article investigates the gender diversity of the corporate board of European Union banks. Employing a large sample of 612 European banks from 20 European countries, it identifies organizational characteristics that could be predictive of women’s presence on bank boards. We identify three factors that play a particularly important role in defining bank board gender diversity. First, the proportion of women on the board is higher for lower-risk banks. We argue that there may be some statistical discrimination behind this relation, (...) although it could also be explained by a real risk-aversion hypothesis. Second, banks with larger boards have a higher proportion of women on their boards, which could be considered a signal of some kind of preference for homogeneity on small boards. Finally, banks that have a growth orientation are more prone to include women on their board, since they may be seen as providers of diverse external resources that are more valued by firms operating under critical circumstances. (shrink)

In Read My Desire, Joan Copjec stages a confrontation between the theories of Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault, protagonists of two powerful modern discourses - psychoanalysis and historicism. Ordinarily, these discourses only cross paths long enough for historicists to charge psychoanalysis with an indifference to history, but here psychoanalysis, via Lacan, goes on the offensive. Refusing to cede historicity to the historicists, Copjec makes a case for the superiority of Lacan's explanation of historical process, its generative principles, and its (...) complex functionings. Her goal is to inspire a new kind of cultural critique, one that would be "literate in desire," that would be able to read what is inarticulable in cultural statements. Choosing a variety of battlegrounds, from historical phenomena - the 40,000 unsettling photographs of Moroccan drapery taken by Lacan's mentor, G. G. de ClA©rambault; the coincidence between vampire literature and the eighteenth-century imperative to breast-feed; the recurrent emptiness of urban spaces in film noir; the rise of democracy and questions of human rights - to theoretical concepts such as the gaze, cause, and sexual difference, Copjec imagines the blows that each contender might strike. Although Lacan emerges the victor, one has a sense that for Copjec the contest is close, that she is interested not in simply dismissing Foucault but in seizing his theory at those moments when its concerns and strategies are similar to Lacan's. She is intent on understanding how two compelling theories come to diverge, how small differences distort common assumptions. Establishing the links between psychoanalysis and critical philosophy, Copjec treats psychoanalysis not as a private language but as the mother tongue of modernity. She thus makes Lacan's famous "return to Freud" a return, as well, to the best principles of the Enlightenment. By this maneuver she forces us to question the historicist dialect that we have been taught to speak and that we all but take for granted and to regret the loss in it of psychoanalysis's more rousing accents. (shrink)

Dirac's approach to gauge symmetries is discussed. We follow closely the steps that led him from his conjecture concerning the generators of gauge transformations {\it at a given time} ---to be contrasted with the common view of gauge transformations as maps from solutions of the equations of motion into other solutions--- to his decision to artificially modify the dynamics, substituting the extended Hamiltonian for the total Hamiltonian. We show in detail that Dirac's analysis was incomplete and, in completing it, we (...) prove that the fulfilment of Dirac's conjecture ---in the ``non-pathological" cases--- does not imply any need to modify the dynamics. We give a couple of simple but significant examples. (shrink)

Este trabajo analiza la huella del estoicismo clásico en el cine de Aki Kaurismäki. Distingue tres tipos de aproximaciones a la obra de Epicteto a lo largo de la trayectoria cinematográfica del director finlandés: películas protoestoicas, dramas antiestoicos que muestran el fracaso del Enquiridión y películas de un estoicismo revisado que lo hacen compatible con la empatía, la solidaridad y el carácter fundamental de las relaciones afectivas para la vida humana en nuestro presente. Frente a la visión triunfante del individuo (...) hecho a sí mismo, preconizada por el «neoestoicismo» en boga, los estoicos perdedores humanos de Aki Kaurismäki nos llevan de regreso al verdadero propósito del arte de vivir epictetiano: aminorar y evitar el sufrimiento humano. (shrink)

Extractive foraging tasks, such as digging, are broadly practiced among hunter-gatherer populations in different ecological conditions. Despite tuber-gathering tasks being widely practiced by children and adolescents, little research has focused on the physical traits associated with digging ability. Here, we assess how age and energetic expenditure affect the performance of this extractive task. Using an experimental approach, the energetic cost of digging to extract simulated tubers is evaluated in a sample of 40 urban children and adolescents of both sexes to (...) measure the intensity of the physical effort and the influence of several anatomical variables. Digging is a moderately vigorous activity for inexperienced girls and boys from 8 to 14 years old, and it requires significant physical effort depending on strength and body size. However, extracting subterranean resources is a task that may be performed effectively without previous training. Sex-specific and age-specific differences in the net energy expenditure of digging were detected, even though both sexes exhibited similar proficiency levels when performing the task. Our results highlight that both boys and girls spend considerable energy while digging, with differences largely driven by body size and age. Other factors beyond ability and experience, such as strength and body size, may influence the proficiency of juveniles in performing certain physically intensive foraging tasks, such as gathering tubers. (shrink)

Resumen: Las normas de propiedad intelectual y copyright prevén un periodo de protección otorgando unos derechos económicos exclusivos y temporales. Pasado un plazo determinado, las obras protegidas entran en lo que se denomina dominio público. Éste suele ser considerado como el momento en el que los bienes culturales pasan a estar bajo el dominio y control de la sociedad en conjunto. El presente trabajo pretende argumentar que, dado nuestro actual sistema económico, en realidad el dominio público funciona más como una (...) posibilidad de negocio para determinadas empresas que como una verdadera opción para que el público pueda acceder a las obras. Abstract: The legislation of continental intellectual property and copyright provide for a period of protection granting exclusive and temporary economic rights. After a certain period, protected works enter into what is called the public domain. This is often considered as the moment in which the cultural goods come under the control and domain of society as a whole. The present paper pretends to argue that, given our current economic system, the public domain actually functions more as a business opportunity for certain companies than as a real option for the public to access artistic and intellectual works. (shrink)