The great urbanist Jane Jacobs details how urban planning impacts the social interactions and social networks responsible for the economic death or life of a city. How might urban planning impinge on the moral values that underlie that development? I draw on Jacobs’s work on the moral foundations of commercial society to identify two “urban values” (tolerance and innovation). I then examine how these values support the social networks and processes that facilitate urban-based innovation and how urban planning can strengthen (...) or undermine those values. I use the examples of urban planning in the 15th Ward of Syracuse, New York and of city building in the private development of Cayalá in Guatemala City to illustrate these points. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss the question of what it means to say that a property is socially constructed. I focus on an influential project that many social constructivists are engaged in, namely, arguing against the inevitability of a trait, and I examine several recent characterizations of social construction, with the aim of assessing which one is more suited to the task.

This article investigates the relationship between emotional sharing and the extended mind thesis. We argue that shared emotions are socially extended emotions that involve a specific type of constitutive integration between the participating individuals’ emotional experiences. We start by distinguishing two claims, the Environmentally Extended Emotion Thesis and the Socially Extended Emotion Thesis. We then critically discuss some recent influential proposals about the nature of shared emotions. Finally, in Sect. 3, we motivate two conditions that an account of shared emotions (...) ought to accommodate: Reciprocal Other-awareness and Integration. Consideration of and discussion of relational accounts of joint attention lead us to the proposal that a construal of socially extended emotions in terms of a constitutive integration of the participating individuals’ experiences is more promising than proposals that simply appeal to various forms of social situatedness, embeddedness, or scaffolding. (shrink)

The work of mathematician and logician Alfred Tarski (1901--1983) marks the transition from substantial to deflationary views about truth.

On a widely held characterization, triadic joint attention is the capacity to perceptually attend to an object or event together with another subject. In the last four decades, research in developmental psychology has provided increasing evidence of the crucial role that this capacity plays in socio-cognitive development, early language acquisition, and the development of perspective-taking. Yet, there is a striking discrepancy between the general agreement that joint attention is critical in various domains, and the lack of theoretical consensus on how (...) to account for it. This paper pursues three interrelated aims: (i) it examines the contrast between reductive and non-reductive views of (triadic) joint attention, by bringing into focus the notion of recursive mindreading; (ii) it assembles, advances, and discusses a number of arguments against reductive views; (iii) finally, in dialogue with some prominent non-reductive views, it outlines the case for a non-reductive view that gives pride of place to the idea that co-attenders relate to one another as a ‘you’. (shrink)

This article explores ways in which the Revision Theory of Truth can be expressed in the object language. In particular, we investigate the extent to which semantic deficiency, stable truth, and nearly stable truth can be so expressed, and we study different axiomatic systems for the Revision Theory of Truth.

Are sexual orientations freely chosen? The idea that someone’s sexual orientation is not a choice is very influential in the mainstream LGBT political movement. But do we have good reasons to believe it is not a choice? Going against the orthodoxy, William Wilkerson has recently argued that sexual orientation is partly constituted by our interpretations of our own sexual desires, and we choose these interpretations, so sexual orientation is partly constituted by choice. In this paper I aim to examine the (...) question of whether our interpretations of our own sexual desires are constitutive of our sexual orientations. I will argue that whereas Wilkerson’s argument for the claim that sexual orientations are in part constituted by our chosen interpretations of our sexual desires is not sound, there are good reasons for endorsing a weaker claim, namely, that there are different but equally apt descriptions of the same sexual desires, depending on which concepts we have. (shrink)

A pintura da luz de José Claudino da Nóbrega propõe reflexão heurística: luz indivisa e luz da coisa são refletidas analogicamente na história de doutrinas e artes diversas. O Século de Justiniano tem realce: as ecfrases de panegírico, as articulações de metafísica e, principalmente, os mosaicos de ouro que então se produzem distinguem a téssera. Simultaneamente cubo, senha e jogo, a téssera e o análogo principal da pintura da luz indivisa, oposta à luz determinada.

En el presente escrito se intentará mostrar algunos desafíos que el mundo contemporáneo pone a la educación bajo el influjo de la globalización, procesos que afectan muchos ámbitos del pensar y del actuar humano. Expone una serie de conceptualizaciones sobre dicho tema e invita al análisis serio de ese fenómeno por sus implicaciones sociales.