Identity has been addressed from diverse perspectives that range from a conceptualisation of it as a pre-existing and static notion to a view that regards it as dynamically constructed in interaction. In this work, we take the latter as the guiding principle for our investigation into the ways in which identity is co-constructed by Argentinian university students in casual conversations. The analysis is carried out on the premise that there is an unquestionable relationship between discourse, identity and social processes. Given (...) the nature of the topic, an eclectic theoretical framework has been employed. An exhaustive examination of the data reveals the different types of identities deployed by the participants, the linguistic resources and the discursive functions used in the negotiation of identities. The analysis also shows that the emerging identities can be heavily conditioned by the topics addressed by the interactants. (shrink)

"Cover " -- "Title Page " -- "Copyright " -- "Contents " -- "Preface to the English Edition" -- "Introduction" -- "1. The Substitute" -- "2. Animals, Machines, Cyborgs, and the Taxi " -- "3. Mind, Emotions, and Artificial Empathy " -- "4. The Other Otherwise " -- "5. From Moral and Lethal Machines to Synthetic Ethics " -- "Notes" -- "Works Cited" -- "Acknowledgments" -- "Credits.

Enrique Leff holds that the profound causes of the environmental crisis are founded in dominant ways of knowing; that is to say, the crisis is rooted in the epistemological bases of modernity. Leff has systematically dedicated himself to proposing and constructing concepts that deconstruct modern suppositions, and at the same time, enable new ways of understanding and apprehending the world. His extensive work has succeeded in transcending and forging space for environmental thought, not only in education and environmental philosophy, but (...) also in the areas of economics, sociology, and development. His central argument is that these problems are the result of a crisis of civilization, and he urges all of us to rethink the foundations of modern rationality underlying contemporary global society. (shrink)

Depressive mood can be involved in the moral judgments made by people with depression. Here, we focus on the negative judgments depressed patients have of themselves and the world. Possibly, the alterations in moral judgment in subjects with depression can be understood by taking into account the neural basis of depression.

Argues that affirming the irreducible differences between men and women can lead to more transformative politics than the struggle for abstract equality between the sexes. In The Symbolic Order of the Mother Luisa Muraro identifies the bond between mother and child as ontologically fundamental to the development of culture and politics, and therefore as key to achieving truly emancipatory political change. Both corporeal development and language acquisition, which are the sources of all thinking, begin in this relationship. However, Western (...) civilization has been defined by men, and Muraro recalls the admiration and envy she felt for the great philosophers as she strove to become one herself, as well as the desire for independence that opposed her to her mother. This conflict between philosophy and culture on the one hand and the relationship with the mother on the other constitutes the root of patriarchy’s symbolic disorder, which blocks women’s (and men’s) access to genuine freedom. Muraro appeals to the feminist practice of gratitude to the mother and the recognition of her authority as a model of unconditional nurture and support that must be restored. This, she argues, is the symbolic order of the mother that must overcome the disorder of patriarchy. The mediating power of the mother tongue constitutes a symbolic order that comes before all others, for both women and men. Luisa Muraro is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Verona, Italy. Francesca Novello is an instructor at the University of Oklahoma. Timothy S. Murphy is Houston-Truax-Wentz Professor and Regents Professor of English at Oklahoma State University. (shrink)

Uneasiness is an issue of our time that has strongly resurfaced under the pressure of the pandemic. It is a kind of anxiety which is not caused only by the lack of something: it rather contains a push for change, releasing the power to choose and to act.

Catholicism played a main role in the long and controversial process of constructing the Spanish national identity. as a consequence, the christian creed ended up becoming a condition sine qua non for “being Spanish”. Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo (1856-1912) and his Historia de los Heterodoxos Españoles were to become a basic milestone in the conformation of this peculiar case of Spanish catholicism, to whom we direct our attention at the present study.

An important debate in the current literature is whether “all truth-conditional effects of extra-linguistic context can be traced to [a variable at; LM] logical form” (Stanley, ‘Context and Logical Form’, Linguistics and Philosophy, 23 (2000) 391). That is, according to Stanley, the only truth-conditional effects that extra-linguistic context has are localizable in (potentially silent) variable-denoting pronouns or pronoun-like items, which are represented in the syntax/at logical form (pure indexicals like I or today are put aside in this discussion). According to (...) Recanati (‘Unarticulated Constituents’, Linguistics and Philosophy, 25 (2002) 299), extra-linguistic context can have additional truth-conditional effects, in the form of optional pragmatic processes like ‘free enrichment’. This paper shows that Recanati’s position is not warranted, since there is an alternative line of analysis that obviates the need to assume free enrichment. In the alternative analysis, we need Stanley’s variables, but we need to give them the freedom to be or not to be generated in the syntax/present at logical form, a kind of optionality that has nothing to do with the pragmatics-related optionality of free enrichment. (shrink)

I argue that the debate on the division of labor between grammar and pragmatics, at least as it pertains to pragmatic free enrichment, needs to be better grounded empirically. Often, only a reduced set of facts from English is used to substantiate claims regarding pragmatic free enrichment. But considering a reduced set of facts from a single language can only afford limited (and, sometimes, wrong) results, because we can merely see whatever this one language chooses to express. Two cases studies (...) are presented: adjectival fragments, and implicit indefinite objects. A grammatical analysis is defended for them. (shrink)

In this paper I provide a decompositional analysis of three kinds of plural indefinites in two related languages, European Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese. The three indefinites studied are bare plurals, the unos (Spanish)/uns (Portuguese) type, and the algunos (Spanish)/alguns (Portuguese) type. The paper concentrates on four properties: semantic plurality, positive polarity, partitivity, and event distribution. The logic underlying the analysis is that of compositionality, applied at the subword level: as items become bigger in form (with the addition of morphemes), they (...) also acquire more semantic properties. The paper proposes the “indefinite hierarchy", which establishes a set of components for languages to build their indefinites with, in a particular order. (shrink)

This paper investigates young children's knowledge of scalar implicatures and downward entailment. In previous experimental work, we have shown that young children access the full range of truth-conditions associated with logical words in classical logic, including the disjunction operator, as well as the indefinite article. The present study extends this research in three ways, taking disjunction as a case study. Experiment 1 draws upon the observation that scalar implicatures (SIs) are cancelled (or reversed) in downward entailing (DE) linguistic environments, e.g., (...) in the scope of negation (Chierchia, 2000). Experiment 2 was designed to determine if scalar implicatures are used by children, like adults, to influence the interpretation of disjunction in non-DE contexts, yielding an implicature of exclusivity for disjunction. Whereas adult controls always rejected assertions of the form A or B in positive (non-DE) contexts in which assertions of the form A and B were also true, many children accepted assertions with disjunction in such contexts. To provide an interpretation to the findings from Experiment 2, a new experimental technique was devised and used in Experiment 3. The new technique presents pairs of assertions to children, who are asked to judge which assertion is a ‘better’ description of the context. The findings from Experiment 3 demonstrated children's awareness that A and B is more informative than A or B in positive contexts, where both statements are true. Taken together, the findings of Experiments 2 and 3 are compatible with the view that some children lack the computational resources to apply scalar implicatures when a single assertion is presented alone (see Reinhart, 1999). (shrink)

Social robotics entertains a particular relationship with anthropomorphism, which it neither sees as a cognitive error, nor as a sign of immaturity. Rather it considers that this common human tendency, which is hypothesized to have evolved because it favored cooperation among early humans, can be used today to facilitate social interactions between humans and a new type of cooperative and interactive agents - social robots. This approach leads social robotics to focus research on the engineering of robots that activate anthropomorphic (...) projections in users. The objective is to give robots "social presence" and "social behaviors" that are sufficiently credible for human users to engage in comfortable and potentially long-lasting relations with these machines. This choice of ’applied anthropomorphism’ as a research methodology exposes the artifacts produced by social robotics to ethical condemnation: social robots are judged to be a "cheating" technology, as they generate in users the illusion of reciprocal social and affective relations. This article takes position in this debate, not only developing a series of arguments relevant to philosophy of mind, cognitive sciences, and robotic AI, but also asking what social robotics can teach us about anthropomorphism. On this basis, we propose a theoretical perspective that characterizes anthropomorphism as a basic mechanism of interaction, and rebuts the ethical reflections that a priori condemns "anthropomorphism-based" social robots. To address the relevant ethical issues, we promote a critical experimentally based ethical approach to social robotics, "synthetic ethics," which aims at allowing humans to use social robots for two main goals: self-knowledge and moral growth. (shrink)

Perception and action are tightly coupled. However, there is still little recognition of how individual motor constraints impact perception in everyday life. Here we asked whether and how the motor slowing that accompanies aging influences the sense of visual speed. Ninety-four participants aged between 18 and 90 judged the natural speed of video clips reproducing real human or physical motion. They also performed a finger tapping task and a visual search task, which estimated their motor speed and visuospatial attention speed, (...) respectively. Remarkably, aged people judged videos to be too slow, as compared to younger people: the Point of Subjective Equality, which estimated the speed bias in the SoS task, was +4% in young adults, +12% in old adults and +16% in elders. On average, PSE increased with age at a rate of 0.2% per year, with perceptual precision, adjustment rate, and completion time progressively worsening. Crucially, low motor speed, but not low attentional speed, turned out to be the key predictor of video speed underestimation. These findings suggest the existence of a counterintuitive compensatory coupling between action and perception in judging dynamic scenes, an effect that becomes particularly germane during aging. (shrink)

A sample of college women and men responded to a survey assessing attitudes, beliefs, experiences, and behaviors relevant to sexual harassment and assault. Men were more tolerant of sexual harassment, more likely to believe that heterosexual relationships were adversarial, more likely to subscribe to rape myths, and more likely to admit that they might sexually assault someone under some circumstances. Data from the present study support the proposition that relevant affective, cognitive, and behavioral indices of hostile sexuality directed against women (...) are linked, supporting the assumption of a continuum of misogyny. Significant positive correlations were predicted and found among men's self-reported tolerance for sexual harassment, adversarial sexual beliefs, rape-myth acceptance, likelihood to rape, and experience as a sexual victimizer. Among women, belief and attitude measures were positively correlated but, as predicted, experience of sexual victimization was not reliably related to any other measure, supporting the conclusion that personal characteristics are not relevant to college women's sexual victimization. (shrink)

This article puts forward the following thesis: the legitimation of school subjects stems from an acknowledged epistemic field, from a science in its broadest sense. The more school subjects deviate from the science from which they originate the more they become weaken and disfigured. A focus on the Estado Novo period in Portugal allows for a particular understanding and emphasis placed on the context which legitimises Philosophy as a school subject in middle school. Thus, this article examines the avenues followed (...) by Philosophy as a school subject in this particular historical period, accounting for and explaining the link between educational and instructional plans, the interference of ideology and education policy, and the transformation of school into an instrument of political, ideological education. (shrink)

Every philosophy has a conceptualisation which demarcares it and defines a net of signification, even in the field of filiation or proximity relations. Ricœur’s hermeneutics is admittedly close to Gadamer’s hermeneutics, due to the aim of integrating and rectifying it and to its identical or equivalent conceptualisation (in some cases). My topic concerns the difference between the two hermeneutics, which mainly emerges through the relevance attached to dialogue. The chief question I ask is whether that difference is insignificant and sporadic (...) or, in contrast, is determinant to the description of Ricœur’s hermeneutics, which would mark it out against Gadamer’s. The former establishes a link between dialogue and oralism, which allow us a coherent understanding of not only his opposition to romantic hermeneutics, but also the development of his epistemological project. By analysing these matters we will, therefore, realise the consistency of the hermeneutic paradigm put forward by Ricœur, as well as the progressively clear cut between the two hermeneutical models. (shrink)

This article deals with the fear aroused by a pervasive and intangible disease caused by an imperceptible and indeterminate element: a virus. The author does not investigate the multiple historical-political-psychological aspects of the disease nor the social medicine issues which it arises. She rather wonders if and how this disease is intervening in our lives modifying our relationship with other people.

How a human observer perceives duration depends on the amount of events taking place during the timed interval, but also on psychological dimensions, such as emotional-wellbeing, mindfulness, impulsivity, and rumination. Here we aimed at exploring these influences on duration estimation and passage of time judgments. One hundred and seventeen healthy individuals filled out mindfulness (FFMQ), impulsivity (BIS-11), rumination (RRS), and depression (BDI-sf) questionnaires. Participants also conducted verbal estimation and production tasks in the multiple seconds range. During these timing tasks, subjects (...) were asked to read digits aloud that were presented on a computer screen. Each condition of the timing tasks differed in terms of the interval between the presentation of the digits, i.e., either short (4-s) or long (16-s). Our findings suggest that long empty intervals (16-s) are associated with a relative underestimation of duration, and to a feeling that the time passes slowly, a seemingly paradoxical result. Also, regarding more mindful individuals, such a dissociation between duration estimation and passage of time judgments was found, but only when empty intervals were short (4-s). Relatively speaking, more mindful subjects showed an increased overestimation of durations, but felt that time passed more quickly. These results provide further evidence for the dissociation between duration estimation and the feeling of the passage of time. We discuss these results in terms of an alerting effect when empty intervals are short and events are more numerous, which could mediate the effect of dispositional mindfulness. (shrink)

We propose a method to associate a coalitional interval game with each strategic game. The method is based on the lower and upper values of finite two-person zero-sum games. Associating with a strategic game a coalitional interval game we avoid having to take either a pessimistic or an optimistic approach to the problem. The paper makes two contributions to the literature: It provides a theoretical foundation for the study of coalitional interval games and it also provides, studies, and characterizes a (...) natural method of associating coalitional interval games with strategic games. (shrink)

Richard Rorty nació el 4 de octubre de 1931 y murió el 8 de junio de 2007. Fue profesor de filosofía en la universidad de Wellesley y de Princeton, cargo al que renunció en 1983 para ocupar el puesto de profesor de humanidades en la Universidad de Virginia y posteriormente de literatura comparada en la universidad de Stanford. Murió de cáncer de páncreas igual que Jacques Derrida, uno de sus interlocutores más destacados de la filosofía europea.

The aim of the present study was to investigate the effect of observing other’s movements on subsequent performance in bottlenose dolphins. The imitative ability of non-human animals has intrigued a number of researchers. So far, however, studies in dolphins have been confined to intentional imitation concerned with the explicit request to imitate other agents. In the absence of instruction to imitate, do dolphins (un)intentionally replicate other’s movement features? To test this, dolphins were filmed while reaching and touching a stimulus before (...) and after observing another dolphin (i.e., model) performing the same action. All videos were reviewed and segmented in order to extract the relevant movements. A marker was inserted post hoc via software on the videos upon the anatomical landmark of interest (i.e., rostrum) and was tracked throughout the time course of the movement sequence. The movement was analyzed using an in-house software developed to perform two-dimensional (2D) post hoc kinematic analysis. The results indicate that dolphins’ kinematics is sensitive to other’s movement features. Movements performed for the “visuomotor priming” condition were characterized by a kinematic pattern similar to that performed by the observed dolphin (i.e., model). Addressing the issue of spontaneous imitation in bottlenose dolphins might allow ascertaining whether the potential or impulse to produce an imitative action is generated, not just when they intend to imitate, but whenever they watch another conspecific’s behavior. In closing, this will clarify whether motor representational capacity is a by-product of factors specific to humans or whether more general characteristics such as processes of associative learning prompted by high level of encephalization could help to explain the evolution of this ability. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe Dutch history of the golden century, a formula which had effectively imposed this interpretative paradigm well beyond the seventeenth century, has been analysed in a more conscientious manner by more recent historiography. This has tempered the hagiographic reading and confirmed the fact that, in the second half of the century, the question of tolerance had become primarily a political conquest and a value shared by other nations. A supernational, European value, but which had also begun to cross the Atlantic (...) several decades earlier. It is interesting to explore how writers facing each other across the two shores of the Channel, on one side observed and interpreted and on the other side presented themselves, offering to foreign eyes the concept of tolerance that had been consolidated in the Netherlands. In the appendix to the essay, besides sinignifcative images, is transcribed the rare and meaningful pamphlet titled ‘A LETTER from HOLLAND, touching Liberty of Conscience, &c.’. (shrink)

A course in professional ethics for civil engineers was taught for the first time in Spain during the academic year 2007/08. In this paper a survey on the satisfaction and expectation of the course is presented. Surprisingly the students sought moral and ethical principles for their own ordinary lives as well as for their profession. Students were concerned about the law, but in their actions they were more concerned with their conscience, aware that it can be separate from the law.

En este artículo me propongo una evaluación crítica de la tesis de Alasdair MacIntyre, según la cual, el fracaso del proyecto ilustrado de fundamentación de la moral es una consecuencia del abandono de la tradición de las virtudes. Pretendo mostrar que aunque dicho fracaso se relacione con el desacuerdo moral tan característicos de la cultura pluralista del presente, acudir a una supuesta ‘tradición unificada’ de las virtudes para cuestionar la racionalidad del pensamiento moral moderno, no deja de ser una estrategia (...) filosóficamente inoperante que no permite resolver las insuficiencias del proyecto ilustrado ni mejorar sus sistemas teóricos de justificación. Me detendré a mostrar en primer lugar, por qué el concepto de tradición que utiliza MacIntyre es una consecuencia del pensamiento de la ilustración y no su negación; en segundo lugar, paso a mostrar que el liberalismo al ser considerado también como una tradición, no puede ser evaluado ni deslegitimado acudiendo como lo hace MacIntyre a la tradición de las virtudes. (shrink)