Wherever there is life, there are lies. Slick-suited politicians lie on the podium, ready to tell voters what they want to hear. Cheating lovers, swindling businessmen, double-crossing villains – all liars. But nature lies too – the cheetah crouching in the tall grass waiting to pounce, its spots and straw-coloured fur blending in with its surroundings, the chameleon with its adaptable skin, the octopus hiding in its cave. Juan Jacinto Muñoz-Rengel uncovers the slippery history of lies, some (...) dark and elusive, others thunderous and dazzling. From primeval forests to modern politics, he explores the uncomfortable truths of our white lies, fudged facts and blatant deceptions. For centuries, philosophers, writers and poets have grappled with the paradox of what’s fact and what’s fiction. So who can we really believe? Our friends? Our partners? Our leaders? Can we even trust ourselves? Truly, this is the only book in which the abundance of lies on its pages is a sign of success. Or maybe it isn’t. Who can really tell? (shrink)

Many philosophers hold that if an agent acts intentionally, she must know what she is doing. Although the scholarly consensus for many years was to reject the thesis in light of presumed counterexamples by Donald Davidson, several scholars have recently argued that attention to aspectual distinctions and the practical nature of this knowledge shows that these counterexamples fail. In this paper I defend a new objection against the thesis, one modelled after Timothy Williamson’s anti-luminosity argument. Since this argument relies on (...) general principles about the nature of knowledge rather than on intuitions about fringe cases, the recent responses that have been given to defuse the force of Davidson’s objection are silent against it. Moreover, the argument suggests that even weaker theses connecting practical entities with knowledge are also false. Recent defenders of the thesis that there is a necessary connection between knowledge and intentional action are motivated by the insight that this connection is non-accidental. I close with a positive proposal to account for the non-accidentality of this link without appeal to necessary connections by drawing an extended analogy between practical and perceptual knowledge. (shrink)

A chronicled approach to the notion of computer simulations shows that there are two predominant interpretations in the specialized literature. According to the first interpretation, computer simulations are techniques for finding the set of solutions to a mathematical model. I call this first interpretation the problem-solving technique viewpoint. In its second interpretation, computer simulations are considered to describe patterns of behavior of a target system. I call this second interpretation the description of patterns of behavior viewpoint of computer simulations. This (...) article explores these two interpretations of computer simulations from three different angles. First, I collect a series of definitions of computer simulation from the historical record. I track back definitions to the early 1960s and show how each viewpoint shares similar interpretations of computer simulations—ultimately clustering into the two viewpoints aforementioned. This reconstruction also includes the most recent literature. Second, I unpack the philosophical assumptions behind each viewpoint, with a special emphasis on their differences. Third, I discuss the philosophical implications of each viewpoint in the context of the recent discussion on the logic of scientific explanation for computer simulations. (shrink)

La 'llegada del Señor' es ambigua en cuanto al tiempo y el modo. El presente trabajo trata de analizar el origen de esta forma de entender la acción redentora divina en un momento histórico concreto y "al final de los tiempos". Un primer marco, original y originario, arraiga en las bases culturales, cósmicas y místicas de la escena de Israel y en las primeras composiciones del Antiguo Testamento. Su esquema fue utilizado y adaptado por los profetas y, dentro de la (...) evolución natural de la profecía, acabó en laliteratura apocalíptica. De ahí siguió al Nuevo Testamento, y la catequesis de la Iglesia hizo el resto. El presente trabajo pretende seguir los diferentes momentos de esta evolución. Una vez desvelado el sentido de las formas literarias, debemos aprender a leer en ellas el mensaje revelado: ¿seguimos esperando al Dios que nos redime? o ¿Ese día llegó con Jesús y sólo estamos esperando lacelebración de su victoria? La pregunta está ahí. (shrink)

I argue for a substantive interpretation of Carlos Vaz Ferreira’s account of intellectual flourishing as intellectual liberation. For Vaz Ferreira, I argue, there is an inescapable master-slave dynamic between language and language users, so that flourishing intellectually essentially involves a type of mastery of language that frees up thinking from enslaving linguistic/conceptual confusions and thus facilitates the acquisition of truth. Central to this project are Vaz Ferreira’s most interesting, and radical, views on the nature of language signification and thus on (...) human’s ability to accurately describe and know reality, for failing to keep these linguistic limitations in mind, Vaz Ferreira argues, is a central way for language to enslave humans to confused thinking and thus prevent their intellectual flourishing. (shrink)

¿Podemos llamar madre a Dios? Responder a esta pregunta es lo que tratamos de hacer en las siguientes líneas partiendo del estudio de la raíz hebrea "rhm", cuyo significado original es "útero". Comenzamos haciendo un rápido repaso del significado del término y de sus palabras derivadas en los textos bíblicos. Nos centramos en el uso del término por el profeta Isaías y -especialmente- por el profeta de la Consolación. Así, parece que concebir y entender a Dios como madre es algo (...) que forma parte de la revelación. (shrink)

El Evangelio de Felipe ocupa el tercer lugar en el Códice II de la Biblioteca de Nag Hammadi, compuesto por otros seis tratados que en orden cronológico se disponen de la siguiente manera: Apócrifo (libro secreto) de Juan (versión larga); Evangelio de Tomás; Hipóstasis de los arcontes; Sobre el origen del mundo (primera copia); Exposición sobre el alma y Libro de Tomás, el Atleta. El Evangelio de Felipe es el más “sacramental” de los evangelios gnósticos, ya que los cinco (...) ritos principales: bautismo, unción, eucaristía, redención y cámara nupcial se mencionan de manera directa como componentes de un solo misterio. Sus descripciones están precedidas por antropomorfismos de Dios, tales como “tintorero” y “antropófago”, a la vez que por nombres asignados a las realidades divinas que encierran un sentido esotérico propio de la escuela valentiniana. (shrink)

In recent years, Julien Deonna and Fabrice Teroni have proposed to understand emotions as embodied evaluative attitudes we take towards objects that figure in nonevaluative representational states. Although their account nicely explains some of the key features that emotions are widely taken to have, it runs into a version of what I call the problem of integration. In the case of the attitudinal view, the integration problem takes the form of explaining how, from the point of view of the subject, (...) the bodily responses that make up the attitude part of the emotion and the representational states that provide the particular object of the emotion come to form an intentionally structured unitary experience, that is, one in which the bodily responses are intentionally directed towards the object. I argue that what explains this integration is the way in which the experience of bodily responses and the experience of the representational states interact. This, I propose, produces what I call an experience of convergence. I also suggest that understanding emotional experience in this way not only solves the problem of the integration but also provides a more solid ground for the claim that emotionsquaembodied attitudes are evaluative. (shrink)

There is considerable evidence that the experience of justice is associated with perceived legitimacy of authority, but there has been no research about this association when considering past rather than current fairness. Based on the fairness heuristic theory, we tested the hypothesis that interpersonal justice trajectories positively affect perceived legitimacy of the authority; we also tested whether social class moderated this effect. Community residents rated the authority's fairness on 16 consecutive weeks and rated perceived legitimacy on the 16th week. The (...) results of latent growth modeling showed that the trajectory of interpersonal justice scores leading up to the final week significantly predicted perceived legitimacy, regardless of the current experience of interpersonal fairness. Tests of moderation showed that the legitimacy perceptions of individuals of lower subjective social class were significantly affected by interpersonal justice trajectories, whereas this was not the case among individuals of higher subjective social class. The results are discussed in terms of their implications for research on perceived legitimacy and justice, as well as their implications for understanding social class. (shrink)

The most documented juridical studies about hispanic woman in the late Middle Ages, belong to three specialities: political law, civil or common law (matrimonial), and criminal law. It is in the sphere of matrimonial law where the influence of christian principles has been described as prominent, contributing to the juridical conjugal parity, thus recognizing woman a full civil capability.

The countable sequences of cardinals which arise as cardinal sequences of superatomic Boolean algebras were characterized by La Grange on the basis of ZFC set theory. However, no similar characterization is available for uncountable cardinal sequences. In this paper we prove the following two consistency results:Ifθ = 〈κ α :α <ω 1〉 is a sequence of infinite cardinals, then there is a cardinal-preserving notion of forcing that changes cardinal exponentiation and forces the existence of a superatomic Boolean algebraB such that (...) θ is the cardinal sequence ofB.Ifκ is an uncountable cardinal such thatκ <κ =κ andθ = 〈κ α :α <κ +〉 is a cardinal sequence such thatκ α ≥κ for everyα <κ + andκ α =κ for everyα <κ + such that cf(α)<κ, then there is a cardinal-preserving notion of forcing that changes cardinal exponentiation and forces the existence of a superatomic Boolean algebraB such that θ is the cardinal sequence ofB. (shrink)

El objetivo principal de este artículo es defender, de acuerdo con A. John Simmons, un punto de vista que, normativamente, propone el consentimiento como condición necesaria de legitimidad y fundamento de la obligación política. Pero, descriptivamente, entiende que tal consentimiento, en tanto que autorización personal y voluntaria, todavía no ha tenido lugar en ninguna sociedad, ni siquiera democrática.

Este artículo explora el modo en que Alejo Carpentier (1994), en su novela El arpa y la sombra, cuenta la historia de Colón desde la ironía y la parodia, ayudado por la investigación histórica del siglo xx y por los intertextos a los que acude con regularidad. Se resalta la hermenéutica de Colón que transforma los textos antiguos al hacerlos contemporáneos a su entorno. Este aparece como como un hombre medieval y renacentista, enraizado en el catolicismo e impulsado por la (...) osadía y la creencia de la tierra que está hecha por Dios para ser dominada por el hombre. (shrink)