Developing World Bioethics, Volume 22, Issue 3, Page 162-169, September 2022.

The purpose of this study was to investigate emotion recognition and processing in patients with mild cognitive impairment in order to update the state of current literature on this important but undervalued topic. We identified 15 papers published between 2012 and 2022 that meet the inclusion criteria. Paper search, selection, and extraction followed the PRISMA guidelines. We used a narrative synthesis approach in order to report a summary of the main findings taken from all papers. The results collected are still (...) ambiguous: some studies did not find any differences between MCI and healthy controls groups in emotion recognition and processing, and other results reported emotion-specific deficits in emotion recognition regarding MCI patients. It is essential to underline that these findings could not be generalized to the whole MCI population due to the heterogeneous use of measures and composition of the sample. This does not allow us to make a comprehensive comparison between the results. Our suggestion for future research is to align the results using the same type of tests and emotion recognition assessment. (shrink)

Palabras de agradecimiento al promotor del Congreso Internacional y a los participantes en él. Asimismo, a la persona que ha trabajado en la labor de transcripción de mis escritos y a otros colaboradores míos. También a quienes han tomado en cuenta mis ideas para elaborar sus tesis doctorales, y a otros colegas cuyos planteamientos filosóficos distan de los míos. Como la filosofía es una actividad interminable, queda abierta la sucesiva investigación en mis propuestas.

This important new editio maior of Aristotle's Poetics is based on all the primary sources and is accompanied by a details critical apparatus. The introductory chapters provide important new insights about the transmission of the text to the present day and especially the significance of the Syro-Arabic tradition.

L'articolo ha come obiettivo quello di dimostrare come il paradigma russelliano risulti più proficuo non soltanto per rendere coerente una teoria semantica per gli atteggiamenti proposizionali ma anche per predire il comportamento di un agente razionale cosa, del tutto innovativa, viste le continue ciritiche nella letteratura contemporanea. Sul finire dell'articolo viene abbozzata una proposta inedita volta alla costruzione di un modello - inquadrato nelle scienze cognitive - coerente per prevedere il comportamento di un agente razionale sulla base di una teoria (...) referenzialista degli atteggiamenti proposizionali. (shrink)

In this paper we criticize the “Ashbyan interpretation” (Froese & Stewart, 2010) of autopoietic theory by showing that Ashby’s framework and the autopoietic one are based on distinct, often incompatible, assumptions and that they aim at addressing different issues. We also suggest that in order to better understand autopoiesis and its implications, a different and wider set of theoretical contributions, developed previously or at the time autopoiesis was formulated, needs to be taken into consideration: among the others, the works of (...) Rosen, Weiss and Piaget. By analyzing the concepts of organization and closure, the idea of components, and the role of materiality in the theory proposed by Maturana and Varela, we advocate the view that autopoiesis necessarily entails self-production and intrinsic instability and can be realized only in domains characterized by the same transformative and processual properties exhibited by the molecular domain. From this theoretical standpoint it can be demonstrated that autopoietic theory neither commits to a sharp dualism between organization and structure nor to a reflexive view of downward causation, thus avoiding the respective strong criticisms. (shrink)

Anno dopo anno miliardi di animali non umani vengono uccisi per diversi scopi: nutrimento, abbigliamento, ricerca e divertimento. Una situazione analoga, ma con gli umani per oggetto, non sarebbe ovviamente tollerata; ma perché tolleriamo - e anzi giustifichiamo - una pratica e non l'altra? La risposta non è per nulla banale e ci spinge a guardare oltre il vivere quotidiano attraverso un percorso filosofico e politico.

The folk Psychology frames propositional attitudes as fundamental theoretical entities for the construction of a model designed to predict the behavior of a subject. A trivial, such as grasping a pen and writing reveals - something complex - about the behavior. When I take a pen and start writing I do, trivially, because I believe that a certain object in front of me is a pen and who performs a specific function that is, in fact, that of writing. When I (...) believe that the object that stands before me is a pen, I am in relation to "believe" with the propositional content: that in front of me is a pen. Philosophers of the proposition, from Frege onwards, have dedicated their studies to the analysis of what kinds of entities are the propositional attitudes. Jerry Fodor says that now, the proper prediction of the psychology of common sense, can not be questioned and that the propositional attitudes represent the most effective way to describe our behavior. What Fodor says, however, is that propositional attitudes function, but not how they work. Most philosophers interested in the issue, we are dedicated to the search for a theory that can account consistently both a semantics for propositional attitudes, both of these entities that seem to cause the behavior of a rational subject. There are two main paradigms in the theory of the proposition that contributed to the discussion of the propositional attitudes. One is the one that begins with Gottlob Frege, the other with Bertrand Russell. Defenders of Frege argue that the paradigm scrub objects and properties can not be constituents of the propositional content which have a purely conceptual. In other words, the philosophers belonging to the paradigm of Frege, but not all, mean that you can test in a rigorous way the truth conditions of propositional attitudes. Who defends the russellian’s paradigm argues that the propositional content are made by the objects and properties on which propositional attitudes relate. The purpose of this article is not to rebuild - in detail - both paradigms, nor to reconstruct one but, in a sense, my work will be a completely partial objective is to demonstrate how the paradigm is more profitable russell not only to make a coherent semantic theory for propositional attitudes2 but also to predict the behavior of a rational subject thing, completely innovative, given the repeated objections in contemporary literature3. At the end of this paper will be drafted a proposal to build a consistent model to predict the behavior,of a rational agent, based on a referential theory of propositional attitudes. (shrink)

A interpretação de Cassirer da dívida intelectual de Kant para com Rousseau é conhecida e estabeleceu um marco real na crítica especializada de ambos os filósofos. No entanto, o exame desta dívida no interior do projeto cassireriano de constituição de uma Antropologia filosófica não foi ainda realizado, devido à rejeição de Cassirer das notáveis antropologias de Kant e Rousseau, que resultou na omissão deste tópico em An Essay on Man. Os manuscritos de Cassirer que testemunham a preparação dessa obra nos (...) ajudam a formar uma outra imagem, que posiciona Rousseau e Kant no centro do álbum de família da Antropologia filosófica. A compreensão da negligência de Cassirer a respeito dos projetos antropológicos de Kant e de Rousseau, bem como das causas possíveis da ausência deles na foto oficial constituem o objetivo do presente artigo. (shrink)

The Wittgenstein’s notion of plain and patent nonsense is fertile because it shows the discovery of the ambiguity of the sense, in particular of the nonsense of contingency at the end of complete clarification. All the reflection of Wittgenstein’s philosophy is a question on the possibility of crossing, from the inside, language as it is to move from the hidden nonsense of the contingency of the language and of the reality to the patent nonsense of the philosophy. But since the (...) clarity of the patent nonsense shows the paradoxical situation of our condition, the limits of the language, the patent nonsense is also the real discovery of the Philosophy that makes me capable of stopping doing philosophy when I want to. This is the aesthetical dimension of the sense, in which the patent nonsense makes a transition to the hidden and enigmatic nonsense. It is on the level of this hidden nonsense that we can find the notion of Satzklang: sound of proposition. When we grasp in a flash, when we hear and we pronounce a word or a proposition, we catch the sound of the word that has directly to do with its meaning or its application, and it brings us back to that preliminary dimension in which we belong to a language that guarantees the possibility of the meaning of what we say, a possibility that reveals itself only in a dimension of non-sense: the echo of the original sounds of the language as it stands as enigmatically senseless because it poses itself as a condition for any language, in a primitive and primeval dimension of language. The paradigmatic aesthetical experiences called understanding a musical theme and understanding a poem, the question about the meaning of the sounds and the meaning of a theme in music show are described from the transiction from patent nonsense to something which is hidden nonsense. The analysis of the sound of proposition shows the sense of nonsense moving toward the inaccessible original place of the language: the place of having the taking-place of language itself. (shrink)

Leo Strauss es considerado por muchos el gran reivindicador de la filosofía política en el siglo XX. Pero esta caracterización resulta insuficiente en tanto no se precise qué entendía él por filosofía política. Para hacer esto último es necesario reconstruir el largo y complejo itinerario intelectual de Strauss. Su punto de partida es la pregunta por la vida buena para el hombre, la cual tiene desde el principio implicaciones teológicas y políticas. La exploración sistemática de esas implicaciones llevará a Strauss (...) a la convicción de que existe una tensión insuperable entre la existencia filosófica y la existencia política. (shrink)

Definition The authors’ definition of the autopoietic system has evolved through the years. One of them states that an autopoietic system is organized (defined as a unity) as a network of processes of production (transformation and destruction) of components that produces the components which: (1) through their interactions and transformations regenerate and realize the network of processes (relations) that produced them; and (2) constitute it (the machine) as a concrete unity in the space in which they exist by specifying the (...) topological domain of its realization as such a network (Varela 1979, p. 13). Nearly the same formula was earlier used to define an autopoietic machine (Maturana and Varela 1973/1980, 1984/1987, p. 135). (shrink)

Organization figures centrally in the understanding of biological systems advanced by both new mechanists and proponents of the autonomy framework. The new mechanists focus on how components of mechanisms are organized to produce a phenomenon and emphasize productive continuity between these components. The autonomy framework focuses on how the components of a biological system are organized in such a way that they contribute to the maintenance of the organisms that produce them. In this paper we analyze and compare these two (...) accounts of organization and argue that understanding biological organisms as cohesively integrated systems benefits from insights from both. To bring together the two accounts, we focus on the notions of control and regulation as bridge concepts. We start from a characterization of biological mechanisms in terms of constraints and focus on a specific type of mechanism, control mechanisms, that operate on other mechanisms on the basis of measurements of variables in the system and its environment. Control mechanisms are characterized by their own set of constraints that enable them to sense conditions, convey signals, and effect changes on constraints in the controlled mechanism. They thereby allow living organisms to adapt to internal and external variations and to coordinate their parts in such a manner as to maintain viability. Because living organisms contain a vast number of control mechanisms, a central challenge is to understand how they are themselves organized. With the support of examples from both unicellular and multicellular systems we argue that control mechanisms are organized heterarchically, and we discuss how this type of control architecture can, without invoking top-down and centralized forms of organizations, succeed in coordinating internal activities of organisms. (shrink)

Com recuerdo y fiel homenaje a nuestro genial compatrinta, el ingeniero e inventar santanderino Leonardo Torres Quevedo, THEORIA quiere reeoger hoy en sus páginas dos breves, claros y luminosostextos -el primero sobre máquinas algébricas (1901) y el segundo sobre el alcance de una nueva ciencia: la Automática (1915)- de aquel español itinerante e infatigable que, como muy contadascompatriotas, supo aliar claridad y rlgor lógico en las definiciones de los conceptos básicos y desbordante inventiva creadora en la estricta y audaz (...) aplicación técnica de los mismos.Acompaña a estos textos la inolvidable imagen del primer ajedrecista automático (electromagnetico) concebido y construido por Torres Quevedo, anticipador también en la era electromecanica de los que habían de seguirle en la electrónica e informática y triunfador póstumo, en 1951, en el primer Congreso Cibernético de París, donde fué examinado por el hijo del inventor español y el padre de la Cibernética, Norbert Wiener, tres años después de la aparición en el M.I.T. de la primera edición inglesa de la obra de éste último Cybemetics, or control and communication in the animal and the machine (1948) que iba a inaugurar la era de la Cibernética, anticipada en tantas ideas, muchos decenios antes, por la Automática de nuestro Torres Quevedo. (shrink)