It’s constitutive of classical theism that there is a necessarily existent personal god who is also the creator of the universe, where the latter claim includes at least the following three theses: (i) God is wholly distinct from the natural world; (ii) God is the originating or sustaining cause of the natural world; and (iii) God created the natural world ex nihilo, i.e., without the use of pre-existing materials. Call this tripartite component of classical theism the classical view of creation. (...) In this paper, I offer a new argument against classical theism. In particular, I argue that creation ex nihilo is prima facie impossible, and that since the doctrine of creation ex nihilo is constitutive of classical theism, classical theism is false. (shrink)

Giving an essential and accessible overview of social theories of space, this books shows why it matters to understand these theorists spatially.

Christopher Hom has recently argued that the best-overall account of the meaning of pejorative terms is a semantic account according to which pejoratives make a distinctive truth-conditional contribution, and in particular express complex, negative socially constructed properties. In addition, Hom supplements the semantic account with a pragmatic strategy to deal with the derogatory content of occurrences of pejorative terms in negations, conditionals, attitude reports, and so on, according to which those occurrences give rise to conversational implicatures to the effect that (...) the pejorative terms are non-empty, which explains the offensiveness of those occurrences. In this paper, I aim to defend this semantic strategy from several recent objections, and I will also present a novel objection, which in my view shows that we should understand the semantic account as a version of inferentialism, rather than radical externalism. (shrink)

In this paper, I focus on an influential account of phenomenal concepts, the recognitional account, and defend it from some recent challenges. According to this account, phenomenal concepts are recognitional concepts that we use when we recognize experiences as “another one of those.” Michael Tye has argued that this account is viciously circular because the relevant recognitional abilities involve descriptions of the form “another experience of the same type,” which is also a phenomenal concept. Tye argues that we avoid the (...) circularity worry if we explain the reference-fixing of phenomenal concepts in terms of dispositions to re-identify tokens of the same type without appealing to any further phenomenal concepts. However, he argues, this account is incompatible with the intuitive claim that phenomenal concepts seem to involve rich modes of presentation of their referents. Philip Goff and others have similarly argued that a recognitional account of phenomenal concepts would make phenomenal concepts opaque, that is, unable to reveal anything about their referents, which seems problematic. In this paper, I present a new version of the recognitional account that avoids the circularity worry without entailing that phenomenal concepts are opaque. (shrink)

Leon J. Goldstein critically examines the philosophical role of concepts and concept formation in the social sciences. The book undertakes a study of concept formation and change by looking at four critical terms in anthropology , politics , and sociology.

The "Prisoner's Dilemma" game has been extensively discussed in both the public and academic press. Thousands of articles and many books have been written about this disturbing game and its apparent representation of many problems of society. The origin of the game is attributed to Merrill Flood and Melvin Dresher. I quote from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Puzzles with this structure were devised and discussed by Merrill Flood and Melvin Dresher in 1950, as part of the Rand CorporationÂ’s investigations (...) into game theory (which Rand pursued because of possible applications to global nuclear strategy). The title "prisonerÂ’s dilemma" and the version with prison sentences as payoffs are due to Albert Tucker, who wanted to make Flood and DresherÂ’s ideas more accessible to an audience of Stanford psychologists. The Prisoner's Dilemma is a short parable about two prisoners who are individually offered a chance to rat on each other for which the "ratter" would receive a lighter sentence and the "rattee" would receive a harsher sentence. The problem results from the fact that both can play this game -- that is, defect -- and if both do, then both do worse than they would had they both kept silent. This peculiar parable serves as a model of cooperation between two or more individuals (or corporations or countries) in ordinary life in that in many cases each individual would be personally better off not cooperating (defecting) on the other. (shrink)

Aristote, tout aussi bien que Descartes et Kant, fonde en fait la science sur les exigences ou postulats de la raison. L’idéalisme moderne justifie ces postulats en considérant le monde comme l’expression de l’esprit; c’est là une solution traditionnelle remontant à l'antique théorie du Logos ; seulement les idéalistes nient la dualité de l’être et de la pensée ; à cette doctrine d’immanence, on oppose une doctrine ou l’etre et la pensée tirent leur unité ou homogénéité relative d’une unité transcendante, (...) qui n’est pas du même ordre. Les postulats de la raison ont alors une valeur objective parce que la raison est expression d’être. (shrink)

There is some cost to you in voting. While it may be small for some, it is significant for others. Some people go to a great deal of effort just to vote. What return do they get for this effort? Zilch! A single vote can only impact an election when there is a tie, which has essentially zero chance of happening in a state or national election. The typical response to this is "Well, what if everyone did that?" Of course, (...) that would be a disaster. But we are not talking about everyone, we are talking about ONE individual. (shrink)

"For that which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it. Every one thinks chiefly of his own, hardly at all of the common interest; and only when he is himself concerned as an individual. For besides other considerations, everybody is more inclined to neglect the duty which he expects another to fulfill; as in families many attendants are often less useful than a few. Each citizen will have a thousand sons who will not be (...) his sons individually but anybody will be equally the son of anybody, and will therefore be neglected by all alike.". (shrink)

Recent debates on the validity of Aesthetic Testimony and the centrality of the so-called Acquaintance Principle suggest that there is more to the proper exercise of aesthetic judgement than mere endorsement of allegedly correct aesthetic judgements. For example, although it is reasonable to follow experts’ judgements in certain matters of fact, it seems less acceptable to simply endorse or adopt experts’ judgements in the aesthetic domain. That reliance on testimony, by contrast to some other areas of judgement, is not sufficient (...) for aesthetic judgement has encouraged scholars to focus in turn on the importance of the personal involvement and autonomy of the aesthetic agent. This special issue focuses on phenomena related to failed exercises of aesthetic judgement. The choice of the theme is motivated by the belief that a careful analysis of failures in aesthetic judgement can reveal significant aspects of the nature of aesthetic experience itself as well as the roles that perception, imagination, and learning have in its proper exercise. (shrink)

It is said that society is in a moral crisis. And, what is worse, it seems to be deteriorating at an ever increasing rate. We all agree that something needs to be done. Our politicians and preachers say we need to help each other more, we need to have "family values", we need to contribute to society and we need to have high moral standards. But there is a fundamental logical reason why none of this is going to happen. This (...) article will explore that reason in detail. (shrink)

In anticipation of the market introduction of highly and fully automated vehicles, regulations for their behavior in public road traffic are emerging in various countries and regions. Yet, as we show using the example of EU and German regulations, these rules are both incomplete and exceptionally vague. In this paper we introduce three traffic scenarios highlighting conflicting ethical, legal, and utility-related claims, and perform a legal analysis with regards to the expected behavior of AVs in these scenarios. We show that (...) the existing regulatory framework disregards the realities of algorithmic decision-making in automated vehicles, such as the incomplete and imprecise perception of their environment and the probabilistic nature of their predictions. Importantly, the current regulations are written in abstract language addressing human interpreters rather than the precise logical-numerical computer code. We argue that the required interpretation and translation of the abstract legal language into the logical-numerical domain is so ambiguous that the regulations as they stand fail to guide or limit automated vehicle behavior in any meaningful way. This comes with significant ethical implications, as the interpretation and translation is unavoidable and, if not provided by regulatory bodies, will have to be performed by manufacturers. We argue that ethical decisions with significant impact on public safety must not be delegated to private companies, and thus, regulatory frameworks need significant improvements. (shrink)

During the 20th Century, a progressive analysis of the impact of aesthetics on geopolitics and territorial arrangement has been developed. If so far the Renaissance perspective, as a technique that is proper of the measurement of space, had enabled the development of politics as territorial sovereignty, the new technologies of information and communication have provoked a crisis for the very possibility of control and measure over said space of political appearance. Through the writings of Paul Virilio, this article analyzes the (...) crisis of space as a possibility of measuring and organizing production in the information age, identifying the major consequences of the decay of politics over social and urban relations. (shrink)

Resumen: A fines del siglo XV convergen múltiples experiencias de orden global que contribuyeron a producir una imagen de mundo específica tradicionalmente asociada al recorrido complejo de la modernidad. En este espacio de convergencias global y diferenciado, la Addizione Erculea de 1492 cumple ella misma una función de expresión de conflicto en la transformación del espacio público y de la representación iconográfica del poder hasta entonces vinculado con los frescos del Pallazo Schifanoia. En este artículo analizaremos esa transferencia, sus continuidades (...) y discontinuidades, poniendo especial énfasis en la historia urbana como diálogo con las tensiones entre las nociones teológicas de civitas dei, civitas deorum y città que surgen con su propia conflictividad en la tendencia a la producción de un espacio abstracto de administración del poder en la modernidad. (shrink)

Rapport de la conférence scientifique "Jan Amos KomensKi et les problèmes de la pédagogie contemporaine" (Institut pédagogique de l'Université de Poznan, 19-20 novembre 1970). Série d'articles concernant la théorie du pédagogue sur les plus importants problèmes de la pédagogie contemporaine.

This article is contextualized within the recent evolution of household employment in Spain. In the context of the strong demand for personal care services – due to rapid population ageing, mass incorporation of women into the labour market and insufficient collective provision of care services – the growth of domestic work is closely related to the overall social organization of care and specific migration policies that have eased, both implicitly and explicitly, the labour supply of foreign women into Spanish households. (...) In line with ongoing debates in the academic literature as well as in the political sphere, this article seeks to explain the extent to which domestic work can or should be considered as any other job in terms of social and employment rights and obligations. To that end, it evaluates changes in the regulation of household employment in Spain since the creation of the Special Regime for Household Employees in 1969 until the most recent 2011 reform. Following the recommendations of the ILO Convention for Domestic Workers, this latest reform puts domestic workers on equal footing with other dependent employees. It thus implies a sea change in relation to the discriminatory treatment embedded in previous legal frameworks. The main hindrance to the effective transposition of the norm however remains the strong presence of the informal economy and a dubious political commitment to ensure its application. (shrink)

En comparación con otras emociones, el asco no ha sido exhaustivamente tratado, ni ha gastado tantas páginas y tanta atención por parte de los estudiosos en él. Es por esto que el asco o repugnancia constituye un objeto de estudio privilegiado para la neuroética. En el presente artículo trataré de mostrar cómo el asco no es una mera reacción fisiológica, sino que la evolución biológica y cultural ha hecho de él una emoción enormemente compleja dotada de un gran contenido cognitivo. (...) Veremos qué papel ha jugado el recurso retórico dentro de la repugnancia en distintos procesos de deshumanización y crueldad a lo largo de la historia. Por último, examinaremos cómo funciona la empatía en la agencia moral y analizaremos qué relación tiene este mecanismo psicológico con la repugnancia. (shrink)

A comienzos de la década de los 80, el filósofo Gilles Deleuze aplicó la teoría de la imagen de Bergson expuesta en Materia y Memoria (1896) a la imagen cinematográfica con la intención de desarrollar nuevas herramientas conceptuales que, a través de un análisis de la historia del cine, permitieran poder delinear mejor tanto la relación cognoscitiva más allá de los presupuestos de sujeto-objeto, como una teoría de la comunicación pre-verbal no estructuralizada fonéticamente que superara definitivamente la concepción lacaniana del (...) lenguaje. Si bien dichos análisis pueden ser vistos también como el establecimiento de unos principios alternativos a las teorías del montaje tanto de Vertov como de Eizenshtéin, el interés primario de nuestro paper se centrará en la redefinición de las categorías espacio-temporales que conlleva esta nueva teoría del cine esgrimida por Deleuze. Concretamente analizaremos cómo la nueva tecnología cinematográfica, especialmente en su desarrollo europeo de la segunda postguerra (Godard, Fellini, Syberberg, Tarkovski) supone una comprensión temporal por completo ajena a cualquier comprensión de causalidad lineal, teleológica o no, de corte cronológico. En su lugar, el cine en tanto que medio de comunicación propio del mundo metropolitano contemporáneo emplea unas categorías temporales más cercanas a conceptos como “acontecimiento” o “haecceitas”, que en algunos puntos lo acercan a la concepción del tiempo desarrollada por Walter Benjamin, pero que por otro lo relacionan directamente con formas aiónicas del mismo ya estudiadas por Deleuze en la década de los 60, y aplicadas al estudio del dadaísmo en la de los 70. (shrink)

Muchas son las diferencias que en cuanto a las características fisiológicas muestran los hombres frente a las mujeres. Estas diferencias fisiológicas afectan a la respuesta al ejercicio, y en consecuencia al diferente rendimiento deportivo. Diferencias en la composición corporal, el metabolismo del calcio y del hierro, el tamaño de órganos y aparatos, así como las diferencias en la edad de maduración afectan al rendimiento y a los patrones de ejercicio físico en las mujeres jóvenes. Otros cambios, como el embarazo y (...) la menstruación modifican también esta respuesta tanto, desde el punto de vista fisiológico, como psicológico. A estas diferencias debemos añadir los factores sociológicos, debido a que la incorporación de la mujer al mundo del deporte de elite es relativamente reciente, y no siempre cuenta con el apoyo de medios técnicos, económicos y de comunicación necesarios. Tanto las diferencias fisiológicas como las psicológicas que caracterizan a las mujeres persistirán, por lo tanto parece necesario un mejor conocimiento de las mismas para comprender y obtener mejores resultados desde el punto de vista del rendimiento deportivo. (shrink)

El presente artículo es producto de un trabajo etnográfico que se realizó durante más de un año en una escuela primaria pública que contaba con apoyo de un servicio de Educación Especial. Los principales hallazgos versan sobre cotidianeidad de los procesos de evaluación de estudiantes con discapacidad. El trabajo es un llamado a humanizar las prácticas docentes.

N’y eut-il pas de femmes artistes dans le symbolisme? Le plus souvent oubliées, ces actrices du mouvement du passage du siècle refont progressivement surface à travers les illustrations et les récits de cet ouvrage. Revendiquant l’apport des études culturelles et des gender studies, Charlotte Foucher Zarmanian exhume ce « symbolisme enfoui » (p. 13), point aveugle de l’historiographie des symbolistes comme de celle des femmes artistes. Elle y condense les résultats d’une thèse en histoire de...

v. 1. Testo italiano, note, documenti -- v. 2. Versão portuguesa, bibliografia.

The question of the relation between freedom and determinism elicits contrasting intuitions. It is clear to incompatibilists that freedom requires the falsity of determinism. And it is clear to compatibilists that freedom is compatible with forms of determinism. Compatibilists and incompatibilists differ not only with respect to the content of their accounts, but also with respect to their “method”. Whereas, compatibilists could be represented as elucidating our ordinary notion of freedom, incompatibilists could be represented as offering a revision of that (...) notion. I argue that if we get the methodological point right, we can be free and determined. (shrink)