aristotle closes the second common book of his ethical treatises by considering a number of puzzles about wisdom and φρόνησις,1 devoting the bulk of his attention to a puzzle about the usefulness of the latter. Briefly, the puzzle is that if φρόνησις is useful insofar as it enables us to act virtuously, it will be useless both to the virtuous person, who naturally acts well without possessing it, and to the non-virtuous person, so long as someone else tells her (...) how to act. Either way, it would seem, possessing φρόνησις is useless. There is agreement among scholars that Aristotle’s reply depends on the following biconditional claim: Virtue-Φρόνησις... (shrink)

Scholarship on Aristotle’s theory of action has recently veered toward an intellectualist position, according to which reason is in charge of setting the goals of action. This position has recently been criticized by an anti-intellectualism revival, according to which character, and not reason, sets the goals of action. I argue that neither view can sufficiently account for the complexities of Aristotle’s theory, and suggest a middle way that combines the strengths of both while avoiding their pitfalls. The key (...) problem for intellectualism is that Aristotle explicitly states reason cannot set the goals of action. The key problem for anti-intellectualism is that he also holds that the soul’s rational part must guide and prescribe over the non-rational part. I propose indirect intellectualism, a promising middle path. (shrink)

Interpretation of Aristotle’s theory of action in the last few decades has tended toward an intellectualist position, according to which reason is in charge of setting the goals of action. This position has recently been criticized by the revival of anti-intellectualism (particularly from J. Moss’ work), according to which character, and not reason, sets the goals of action. In this essay I argue that neither view can sufficiently account for the complexities of Aristotle’s theory, and propose an intermediate (...) account, which I call indirect intellectualism, that preserves the merits of both traditional interpretations and is able to dispel the problems that trouble each. There is very strong textual evidence for the claim that goal-setting is the task not of reason but of character (and in this anti-intellectualists are right); but reason is able to set goals indirectly by carefully shaping the processes of habituation that constitute a person’s character (and in this intellectualists are right). I argue for this position through a study of the division of labour between character and reason, and through a reconstruction of Aristotle’s conception of habituation. (shrink)

This paper studies the notion of self-knowledge in Aristotle and principally in Aquinas. According to Aristotle, sensitive operations like seeing or hearing can be perceived by the knower (sensitive consciousness), while there can be also an understanding of the understanding, mainly attributed to God, but not exclusively. In his ethical writings, Aristotle acknowledges the human capacity of understanding and perceiving one’s life and existence, extended also to other persons in the case of friendship. Aquinas receives this heritage (...) and includes also the habitual self-awareness of the mind which was held by Augustine. A more ontological view is taken from the Neoplatonic notion of complete reflexivity of the intellectual soul upon its own essence as a manifestation of total immateriality and self-possession, which is a higher way of existing and living. Thus, the modern idea of self-consciousness is not absent in the Thomistic account of self-understanding, though the term “conscience” was reserved to the moral judgment upon one’s actions as right or wrong. The Thomistic distinction between habitual existential self-knowledge, which is an intellectual experience including perception and judgment, and scientific and abstract human self-knowledge, is useful and provides insight to the ontological value of existential self-knowledge. The last part of the paper argues that according to Aquinas there is a deep connection between self-knowledge and self-love, provided they are rooted on truth and virtue. This point has many consequence in the notion of shared self-awareness and mutual joy in friendship. The author concludes as well that a genuine self-understanding is possible only in friendship based upon virtue. (shrink)

Resumen: Una de las nociones más controvertidas dentro de las interpretaciones contemporáneas de la Crítica de la facultad de juzgar, es la de “sentido común”. Junto a éste, Kant propuso un nuevo modelo de validez normativa calificada como “ejemplar”, cuyo planteamiento resulta bastante problemático. El presente artículo propone una lectura y una interpretación de este tipo de validez, a partir de la reactualización realizada por Alessandro Ferrara, y desde el horizonte de la tradición retórica, representada por Aristóteles Con ello se (...) espera un mejor entendimiento del problema en cuestión, y al mismo tiempo, se pretende hacer mucho más comprensibles las posibilidades que Alessandro Ferrara le atribuye a esta forma de la normatividad.: One of the most controversial notions in contemporary interpretations of the Critique of judgment is that of common sense. Along with it, Kant proposed a new model of normative validity called exemplary, whose approach is quite problematic. This article proposes a reading and an interpretation of this type of validity, based on the reinterpretation carried out by Alessandro Ferrara and from the point of view of the rhetorical tradition as represented by Aristotle. It intends to achieve an improved understanding of the problem in question and, at the same time, to make much more understandable the possibilities that Alessandro Ferrara attributes to this form of normativity. (shrink)

This article carries out a systematic exposition of the concept of the body in Jean-Luc Nancy, with all the risks of reduction that such an exposition entails. First it is necessary to return to Western philosophy’s founding text on living corporality, that is, Aristotle’s treatise on the soul. The oppositions that can be established between the Greek thinker’s psyche (soul) and Nancy’s dead Psyche are not so radical as may at first be thought: In both it is a question (...) of thinking the soul as the difference, the retreat or departure in which the exposition of bodies consists. The article continues with an analysis of touch and the self and concludes with an elaboration of the idea of the body within the general program of the deconstruction of Christianity. (shrink)

This books mainly attemps to present and clarify the concept of scientific knowledge and method in Aristotle and Kant. The background is the evlution of the notion of scientific rationality along the centuries. It is considered the passage from the classical scientific rationality to the modern view.

The traditional way of understanding life, as a self-appropriating and self-organizing process of not ceasing to exist, of taking care of one's own hunger, is challenged by today's unprecedented proliferation of discourses and techniques concerning the living being. This challenge entails questioning the fundamental concepts of metaphysical thinking--namely, time, finality, and, above all, being. Garrido argues that today we are in a position to repeat Nietzsche's assertion that there is no other representation of "being" than that of "living." But in (...) order to carry out this deconstruction of ontology, we need to find new ways of asking: What is life? In this study, Garrido establishes the basic elements of the question concerning life through readings of Aristotle, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida; through the discussion of scientific breakthroughs in thermodynamics and evolutionary and developmental biology; and through the reexamination of the notion of hunger in both its metaphysical and its political implications. (shrink)

Much of our know-how is acquired through practice: we learn how to cook by cooking, how to write by writing, and how to dance by dancing. As Aristotle argues, however, this kind of learning is puzzling, since engaging in it seems to require possession of the very knowledge one seeks to obtain. After showing how a version of the puzzle arises from a set of attractive principles, I argue that the best solution is to hold that knowledge-how comes in (...) degrees, and through practice a person gradually learns how to do something. However, the two standard accounts of know-how in the literature, intellectualism and anti-intellectualism, cannot properly account for the distinctive way in which know-how is gradually acquired by practice, a process in which conceptual representations and practical abilities are intimately interwoven. Drawing on Gareth Evans's work, I outline an account that may do so, and use this account to distinguish between two forms of learning to explain why skill generally cannot be learnt through testimony, and requires practice. (shrink)

This paper considers the notion of the present in Aristotle, Heidegger and Polo. The Aristotelian analysis of the "now" is subjected to oscillations between identity and diversity. Heidegger considers that the "now" is related to a special presentation of being. Polo's thesis about the mental presence as an articulation of time entails the overcoming of Heidegger's historicism and appears as the right way for a metaphysical study of time.

Jacques Derrida argues that what constitutes and structures a priori friendship is the death of the friend, his anticipated and originary mourning. From this approach, and in a joint reading with the notion of philia in Aristotle, this article seeks to achieve an in-depth understanding of the Derridian thesis on friendship and advances towards a hypothesis about friendship as survival or incessant affirmation of the to come.

" In this study, Garrido establishes the basic elements of the question concerning life through readings of Aristotle, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida; through the discussion of scientific breakthroughs in thermodynamics and evolutionary ...

In this study first we delineate an overview of the main philosophical positions on the problem of the distinction between mental acts and physical acts in man. There follows an exposition of the topic, inspired by Aristotle’s and Aquinas’s principles. Sensitive operations are physical, but in the sense of an ‘elevated body,’ thanks to a higher formal dimension, which informs the organic basis. Intellectual operations, by contrast, are completely immaterial, though they act united to the sensitive cerebral basis. Accordingly, (...) they have neurological correlations, guided by the intentional causality of the intellect. The intellectual act and its neural basis form a unique act, which is integrated by several cognitive dimensions. Our intelligence uses the brain as an intrinsic instrument, but we also need external ‘cognitive’instruments, namely written texts and computers. The intellectual development of people can be explained by the interaction of these different dimensions. (shrink)

La gran influencia en Platón del pensamiento de Sócrates, el hecho de que a través de aquél nos llegue la mayor parte de la doctrina de éste, así como la ejemplaridad moral de la vida y muerte de Sócrates , a veces nos ocultan la relevancia específica de su filosofía. Aquí queremos atender a ella, haciendo hincapié en especial en el intelectualismo socrático. Vamos a considerar en este trabajo ese intelectualismo y la deriva con que se desplegó a través de (...) Platón hasta Aristóteles. Después, plantearemos alguna cuestión a este devenir del intelectualismo griego con objeto de extraer alguna consecuencia aprovechable hoy en día. The great influence of Sócrates 'thinking on Plato, the f a c t, that through the latter most of the former's doctrine is received, and the moral exemplarity of Sócrates' life and death hide the specific relevance of his philosophy at times. This paper addresses this relevance, emphasizing in particular Socratic i n t e l l e c t u a l i s m, and considers this Íntellectualism and its derivation throughout Plato's works until Aristotle's works. Finally, some useful conclusions for today are drawn from the development of Greek Íntellectualism hereby exposed. (shrink)

In the Middle Age it was tried to show that índex of five predicables that Porfirio proposes in Isagoge was suitable and complete. More recently it is affirmed that chis índex is incomplete, and thal can add a new predicable that also Aristotle would have considered: the accidents per se.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Creativity Belongs to the Person, not to DiseaseJuan J. López-Ibor Jr. (bio) and María-Inés López-Ibor (bio)Keywordscreativity, patho-biography, Saint Teresa, visionsIn the paper, “From the Visions of Saint Teresa of Jesus to the Voices of Schizophrenia,” Cangas, Sass, and Pérez-Álvarez (2008) take an original approach to patho-biography that is very welcome.The temptation to designate historical individuals or characters of fiction as suffering from mental disease has always produced disagreeable feelings (...) in me. This sort of abuse of psychiatry and of the people in question is parallel to the abuse by the media or lay citizens when they describe, say, an especially violent murderer as a schizophrenic—forgetting that the vast majority of people with schizophrenia are not in the least violent. Having read Santa Teresa’s writings during my adolescence, well before I even considered entering medicine, I reacted to comments about her alleged psychiatric illnesses with uneasiness, to put it mildly. The Santa Teresa of La Vida de la Santa Madre Teresa de Jesús (her autobiography), of the Camino de Perfección, and of the El Castillo Interior was surely not a mental patient, it seemed to me. The same would apply to San Juan de La Cruz, Jean D’Arc, Don Quijote, Sancho Panza, Edipus, and Clitemnestra, to mention a few. Even van Gogh’s paintings did not seem to me the productions of a patient with schizophrenia or epilepsy. Of course all of them may have suffered, at certain periods of life, symptoms attributable to a mental disorder, but their creativity rested elsewhere, and was often manifest during healthy periods of their lives. After years spent fighting the stigma of mental diseases, and after organizing several exhibitions of works of art of people with mental diseases, we came to the conclusion that creativity and singularity belong to the person, not to the illness. Some of the diseases of these individuals may have being accidents (van Gogh’s hallucinations and psychotic symptoms, for example, were most probably due to intoxications with absinthe, then rich in hallucinogenic alkaloids such as tujone), or, together with other life circumstances, may have had unspecific influences on the person’s condition. In contrast with many other psychiatric disorders that are represented in ancient Greek and Roman literature, there are no descriptions of individuals with schizophrenia in the Greek and Roman literature dating from the fifth century bc to the beginning of the second century Ad (Evans et al. 2003), and several authors have speculated that schizophrenia did not exist before the eighteenth century (Ellard 1987).Caution is important when dealing with mental health and religious issues in contrast with creativity. The creativity of people suffering from bipolar disorders is well recognized (Jamison 1993) and [End Page 277] the same applies to alcohol and drug intoxication. Tellenbach (1986) has also written on the creativity of depressed persons, although he refers more to the disposition of mood (Schwermut) than to clinical depression as such. The link between melancholia and genius put forward by Aristotle has often been misinterpreted. The philosopher was considering the melancholic temperament and not the melancholic illness as we would understand it today. Of the four temperaments, it is in his view only the melancholic that is gifted with creativity. The sanguine person seeks the immediate pleasures of life, the choleric one considers himself powerful and dedicates himself to manifesting this power, and the phlegmatic individual is disconnected from life and seeks to live without effort or pleasure. The melancholic temperament leads to creativity because of the predominance of doubt, reflection, and dissatisfaction with the miseries of life.Freud’s notion of religiosity as a collective obsessive neurosis is totally mistaken, in my view. The three main themes of obsessions are cleanliness, order, and guilt. In none of these cases is the theme the goal of the action; rather, it is a strategy to contain anxiety. As a consequence, patients with obsessions and compulsions about dirt and cleanliness tend to be dirty themselves, because the real purpose of their compulsions is not in fact to be clean but rather to satisfy a ritual. When order... (shrink)

In this article we defend the idea that hypotheses in science must be understood as a demonstration where a relation between two proofs is established in a dynamic and interactive way. To this end, we appeal to the notion of demonstration by hypothesis that Aristotle outlines in his _Prior Analytics_. In this way, we circumscribe the generation of hypotheses to the realm of dialectical interactions in which human beings and their actions as argumentative agents with purposes and aims play (...) a central role. This demonstration takes the form of a conditional and is constructed by agreement between epistemic agents. We choose the perspective of dialogical pragmatism to formally capture this relationship. (shrink)

In this work we study the suggestive position of some authors who constitute an exception in the history of the philosophy in respect to the interpretation of the agent intellect, the great Aristotle´s discovery: Francisco Canals, Leonardo Polo and his disciples, because these authors put the agent intellect at the level of “ actus essendi hominis ”.

ESPAÑOL: Aunque Aristóteles llegó a calificar como «revolución» el cambio violento de las politeias griegas y Arendt, al revisar el uso moderno del término, ve a ésta como el surgimiento de una inevitable y desconocida forma de gobierno que, a través también de la violencia, busca la libertad e igualdad política de todos los ciudadanos, fue Ortega quien se atrevió a aseverar que lo menos esencial de las revoluciones es la violencia, apuntando con ello a la aparición de un discurso (...) y una narrativa que quebranta y modifica nuestra percepción del mundo. Sin embargo, a pesar de mantener dicha intención quebrantadora, el discurso revolucionario parece haberse convertido en ciertas zonas de Latinoamérica en un arte factus lingüístico —término que usó también Ortega— que sirve a la concentración del poder y la ideología ( en el sentido usado por Teun van Dijk) de un grupo social específico. ENGLISH: Although Aristotle came to qualify as a «revolution» violent change of the Greek polity and Arendt, reviewing the modern use of the term, sees this as the emergence of an inevitable and unknown form of government, also through violence, seek freedom and political equality of all citizens, was Ortega who dared to assert that the least essential of revolutions is the violence, pointing to the emergence of this discourse and narrative breaks and changes our perception of the world. However, despite this intention to keep disruptive, revolutionary discourse seems to have become in parts of Latin America in a language factus art — a term also used by Ortega — serving concentration of power and ideology (in the sense used by Teun van Dijk) of a particular social group. (shrink)

Die Suche nach historischen Quellen für die Leibniz’sche Philosophie scheint zunächst unerschöpflich. Durch alle in diesem Band versammelten Arbeiten wird der Einfluss der Philosophie des Aristoteles auf das Leibniz’sche Denken näher umrissen. Ein wesentliches Ziel ist es hierbei, einen Beitrag zur Analyse dieser philosophischen Beziehung zu leisten und zu zeigen, dass auch Aristoteles’ Philosophie nach Ansicht unserer Autoren entscheidend zum Verständnis des Leibniz’schen Denkens beiträgt. Die Texte befassen sich mit wesentlichen Themen der Leibniz’schen Logik und Metaphysik, z. B. mit den (...) Grundbegriffen „Monade“ (und deren „Körperhaftigkeit“), „Entelechie“, „Nous“, mit dem Problem der Individuation (Individuum, Atomismus, Einheit), mit den substanziellen Formen, mit der Wissenschaft im Allgemeinen und der Technik, mit der Transformation der Logik, mit den Prinzipien (nämlich denjenigen des zureichenden Grundes, der Individuation und der Notwendigkeit), mit Zukunft und Kontingenz sowie Vergänglichkeit, mit der Theorie der syllogistischen Folgerung, usw. Diese Themen werden stets in der Gegenüberstellung von Leibniz und Aristoteles behandelt – sie zeigen daher, wie Leibniz aristotelische Thesen übernahm, veränderte oder kritisierte. The search for the historical sources of Leibniz’s philosphy initially seems to be unending. All the essays in this volume outline more clearly the influence of Aristotle’s philosophy on Leibniz’s thought. In this context a fundamental aim is to contribute to the analysis of this philosophical relationship and to demonstrate that Aristotle’s philosophy, in the opinion of our authors, plays a decisive role in the understanding of Leibniz’s thought. The texts address fundamental themes of Leibniz’s logic and metaphysics, e.g. the basic concepts of ‘monads’ (and their ‘corporality’), ‘entelechy’ and ‘nous; the problem of individuation (individual, atomism, unity); substantial forms; knowledge in general, and technology; the transformation of logic; principles (namely those of sufficient grounds, of individuation and of necesssity); future and contingency and transientness; the theory of syllogistic deduction, etc. These themes are regularly considered in the comparison between Leibniz and Aristotle – they demonstrate how Leibniz took over, treated or criticised Aristotelian theses. (shrink)

In Polo’s anthropology, the personal transcendentals constitute the first act of the human being. To achieve an understanding of the contribution to the natural growth of the person of human actions performed in space and time, it is required to investigate how the intensity of this act can increase naturally in the context of the doctrine of act and potency. Review of the constitution of human beings in Aristotle, Aquinas and Polo and the real distinction between their ontological components, (...) together with the concept of instrumental causality served to propose an explanation of the natural growth of the person. (shrink)

This paper begins with a vignette of Juan Carlos, an immigrant to America who works to support his family, attends classes at a community college, and cares for his ill daughter. It argues that an Aristotelian virtue ethicist could condone a safe, legal, and virtuous use of cognitive enhancements in Juan Carlos’s case. The argument is that if an enhancement can lead him closer to eudaimonia, then it is morally permissible to use it. The paper closes by demonstrating (...) how common objections to cognitive enhancement fail to undermine Juan Carlos’s justifiable use of the technology. The particularities of his case make it morally acceptable for him to use enhancements in certain situations. The paper, thus, constructs a limited, positive case for the virtuous use of pharmaceutical cognitive enhancements. (shrink)

This is the first of a two-volume edition of Alexander of Aphrodisias’ commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics. The new edition, which includes a philosophical and philological introduction, as well as notes to textcritical issues, is based on a critical evaluation of the entire manuscript tradition of the commentary. It also takes into account its indirect tradition and the Latin translation of Juan Ginès Sepúlveda.

After briefly presenting the approaches to price theory developed in American colonial scholasticism by Tomás de Mercado, Bartolomé de Albornoz and Juan de Matienzo, we intend to demonstrate the preponderant role played by Aristotle and the peculiar reception given to him by these authors in their respective works.

ResumenEn el marco intelectual del Renacimiento hubo una serie de pensadores que se mostraron disconformes con el aristotelismo dominante. La variedad de sus posturas así como lo distinto de sus posicionamientos filosóficos ha podido actuar como obstáculo para poder ver las similitudes que, en torno a la crítica aristotélica, presentan. El caso de Juan Luis Vives y de Gianfrancesco Pico puede resultar paradigmático, a estos se suma con fuerza Francisco Sánchez, quien dedicó una parte importante de su obra Quod (...) nihil scitur a criticar a Aristóteles, aunque más aún a sus comentaristas.Palabras claveFilosofía del Renacimiento, Francisco Sánchez, Juan Luis Vives, Gianfrancesco Pico, aristotelismo, historia de la filosofía.AbstractIn the intellectual frame of the Renaissance, there were some thinkers who did not agree with the Aristotelism prevailing at the time. The variety of their philosophical positions and opinions may have been an obstacle for an approach to their similarities regarding the Aristotelian critic. The case of Juan Luis Vives and Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola can be paradigmatic. Also Francisco Sánchez, who strongly joined their position, devoted an important part of his play Quod nihil scitur to criticize Aristotle –although he focused on his commentators above all.KeywordsPhilosophy in the Renaissance, Francisco Sanchez, Juan Luis Vives, Gianfrancesco Pico, Aristotelism, History of Philosophy. (shrink)

In this publication, readers with only a somewhat limited philosophical background will encounter a wonderful and clear introduction to the metaphysics of Aristotle and St. Thomas, while supporters of personalism will become familiar with Burgos’s interesting and original proposal (which is nevertheless deeply rooted in the tradition associated with this current of thought). At the same time, critically minded readers will be able to familiarize themselves with the author’s lucidly presented arguments and reflect on their strength and plausibility. To (...) sum up, it can be said that this is a book worth recommending to a wide audience. (shrink)

Winner of the American Philosophical Association’s 2019 Essay Prize in Latin American Thought | Western imperialism has received many different types of moral-political justifications, but one of the most historically influential justifications appeals to an allegedly universal form of human nature. In the early modern period this traditional conception of human nature—based on a Western archetype, e.g. Spanish, Dutch, British, French, German—opens up a logical space for considering the inhabitants of previously unknown lands as having a ‘less-than-human’ nature. This appeal (...) to human nature originally found its inspiration in the philosophy of Aristotle, whose ethical thought pervaded the work of European philosophers at the outset of the early modern period and the modern age of empire. Indeed some Spanish writers—most famously, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (b. 1494)—explicitly appealed to Aristotle’s moral-political philosophy in order to justify the conquest of the Americas in the early sixteenth century, for instance to justify war against the Aztecs and other indigenous peoples. At the time of European arrival, the Aztec civilization was easily the greatest in Mesoamerica—and yet the Europeans generally considered the Aztec people to be ‘barbaric,’ i.e. less-than-fully-human. (shrink)

A serious attempt to integrate ethics in management was done by Professor Juan Antonio Pérez López (1934–1996). His thought represents a break with current scholarly thinking on these subjects. The purpose of this article is to explain some of the most significant aspects of his theories, relating basically to his recourse to ethics as what defines the characteristic behavior of human beings, considered as individuals and as members of organizations. Pérez López used the anthropological conception underlying the ethics of (...) Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas to build a solid base for that ethics, starting from the decision-making process. He then used that ethical base to point to the kind of action theory and organization theory that could most effectively assist the human development of people and organizations. (shrink)

The present paper intends to draw the conception of language implied in the technique of word embeddings that supported the recent development of deep neural network models in computational linguistics. After a preliminary presentation of the basic functioning of elementary artificial neural networks, we introduce the motivations and capabilities of word embeddings through one of its pioneering models, word2vec. To assess the remarkable results of the latter, we inspect the nature of its underlying mechanisms, which have been characterized as the (...) implicit factorization of a word-context matrix. We then discuss the ordinary association of the “distributional hypothesis” with a “use theory of meaning,” often justifying the theoretical basis of word embeddings, and contrast them to the theory of meaning stemming from those mechanisms through the lens of matrix models (such as vector space models and distributional semantic models). Finally, we trace back the principles of their possible consistency through Harris’s original distributionalism up to the structuralist conception of language of Saussure and Hjelmslev. Other than giving access to the technical literature and state of the art in the field of natural language processing to non-specialist readers, the paper seeks to reveal the conceptual and philosophical stakes involved in the recent application of new neural network techniques to the computational treatment of language. (shrink)

En contraste d’avec la pensée de Spinoza, pour qui la foi n’est qu’un phénomène extérieur et étrange, une notable exception à sa théorie du salut par le control des passions et l’amour intellectuelle à Dieu et par Dieu que l’homme de connaissance peut atteindre seulement grâce à la véritable philosophie, on analyse ici très brièvement la compréhension que de la foi nous proposent, en ayant l’expérience intérieure, surtout Descartes mais aussi Pascal. Pour le premier la foi relève de la volonté, (...) à qui la grâce incline d’embrasser le message révélé à peu près comme la perception claire et distincte incline au jugement dans l’acte deconnaissance. Pour Pascal la foi et la connaissance sont de l’ordre, toutes deux, du coeur, qui comme on sait a des raisons que la raison ne connait pas. (shrink)

Mediante el presente artículo se realiza un recorrido aproximativo a la historia de la Educación Social de forma que se conozcan los elementos que la conforman como práctica socioeducativa emergente en la última década del siglo XX y la importancia que tiene en la sociedad; de la misma forma se acomete una aproximación al proceso de profesionalización de la Educación Social a través del modelo teórico que los autores Sáez y García (2006) proponen, mediante el cual se delimitan los actores (...) que están involucrados en el proceso profesionalizador de la Educación Social y la interacción que existe entre ellos. Finalmente la cuestión que se trata es la idea de la Educación Social como elemento transformador de la ciudadanía a través de la participación, que propicia el cambio de actitudes y motivaciones en los individuos. (shrink)

The biogeographic contributions of Léon Croizat (1894–1982) and the conflictive relationships with his intellectual descendants and critics are analysed. Croizat’s panbiogeography assumed that vicariance is the most important biogeographic process and that dispersal does not contribute to biogeographic patterns. Dispersalist biogeographers criticized or avoided mentioning panbiogeography, especially in the context of the “hardening” of the Modern Synthesis. Researchers at the American Museum of Natural History associated panbiogeography with Hennig’s phylogenetic systematics, creating cladistic biogeography. On the other hand, a group of (...) New Zealand biologists formalized Croizat’s original concepts and soon began arguing with cladistic biogeographers over the relative merits of their approaches. In Latin America, panbiogeography and cladistic biogeography were incorporated as parts of an integrative approach. A recent development, molecular panbiogeography, is based on the use of molecular phylogenetic data. The current practice shows that some authors insist on considering panbiogeography as the only appropriate approach and vicariance as the only relevant process, whereas others accept Croizat’s dictum “Earth and life evolve together” as a useful guide to understanding broad, general patterns, but recognize that dispersal also contributes substantially to biotic assembly. The framework of integrative pluralism allows to explain the complexities of the biogeographic processes involved in biotic assembly without the need of unification on a large scale. This historical analysis intersects with the existing historiography of the Modern Synthesis and may provide some insights on the dynamics of integrative pluralism, which may be especially relevant in the current development of the Extended Synthesis. (shrink)

A favourite discussion topic about Wittgenstein is his concept of philosophy. One of its characterizations takes it as an activity by which we reach a panoramic vision of language. This panoramic vision is neither a theoretical issue nor a theoretical construction, but a state of the philosopher or of those readers who understand Wittgenstein´s thought. He often puts it in terms of a path: "the real discovery is the one that gives philosophy peace", he claims in a famous passage of (...) Philosophical Investigations [133], and he is even more explicit and personal on its Foreword: "The philosophical remarks in this book are, as it were, a number of sketches of landscapes which were made in the course of these long and involved journeyings, which now had to be arranged and sometimes cut down, so that if you looked at them you could get a picture of the landscape" Almost paradoxical: the panoramic vision of the landscape is acquired passing through it.. (shrink)

Ecological psychology (EP) and the enactive approach (EA) may benefit from a more focused view of lived temporality and the underlying temporal multiscalar nature of human living. We propose multiscalar temporality (MT) as a framework that complements EP and EA, and moves beyond their current conceptualisation of timescales and inter-scale relationships in organism-environment dynamical systems. MT brings into focus the wide ranging and meshwork-like interdependencies at play in human living and the questions concerning how agents are intimately entangled in such (...) meshworks, utilising them as resources for skilful living. We develop a conceptual toolkit that highlights temporality: Firstly, we address lived temporality. We use a case study from psychotherapy to show how a person’s skilful engagement with the world is best described as adaptive harnessing of interdependencies of constraints residing across a wide range of timescales. We call this skill time-ranging. Secondly, the case study provides a proof of concept of the integration of an idiographic approach to human conversing and a more general theory of emergent organisation rooted in theoretical biology. We introduce the existing concept of constraint closure from theoretical biology and scale it up to human interactivity. The detailed conceptualisation of constraint interdependencies constitutes the backbone of the proposal. Thirdly, we present a heuristic mapping of what we call organising frames. The mapping guides the conceptualisation of the emergence of inter-scale relationships and serves as an epistemic tool that brings together nomothetic and idiographic approaches. Finally, we combine new ideas with re-interpretations of existing EP and EA concepts and elaborate on the need of a fresh new look at the implicit and sometimes missing conceptualisations of temporality in the EP and EA literature. (shrink)

Se hace una revisión crítica de la hipótesis de Manuel Ocaña Jiménez según la cual parte de los signos lapidarios de la Mezquita Aljama de Córdoba identifican a trabajadores de religión cristiana. Se concluye que tal hipótesis es insostenible.