The question of the limit and the difference between man and animal has become a philosophical issue of special relevance. Just look at its political, social, economic, etc. implications. For the first time man can direct his evolutionary process. From that context, the Heideggerian arguments on the subject are analyzed and discussed, taking their Derridian reading as a conductive thread. It reveals the contradiction between the thematic and operational need for a limit and the impossibility of founding it.

El desarrollo de la neurociencia ha permitido, en las últimas décadas, espectaculares avances en torno al mejor conocimiento de diferentes prácticas humanas desde las bases neurofisiológicas del funcionamiento cerebral. A pesar de que aún nos encontramos en la «prehistoria» del descifrado funcional del más complejo órgano que conocemos en el universo, es un momento adecuado para hacer un balance operativo, desterrando algunas falsedades y aprovechando algunos datos consolidados para su aplicación a la enseñanza y a la praxis de la escritura (...) creativa. De manera sintética, abordaremos algunas claves sobre la creatividad en general, para centrarnos en la creatividad verbal estética, tanto en su expresión oral como a través de los cambios cerebrales que se operan en el proceso de aprendizaje de la lectura. Reflexionaremos acerca de la complejidad de nuestras representaciones mentales vinculadas, por ejemplo, con el discurso poético verbal, ofreceremos algunas indicaciones sobre la importancia de la escritura como potenciador de nuestra reserva cognitiva, destacando algunas orientaciones prácticas para potenciar la creatividad en la experiencia de esa misma escritura. Insistiremos en la importancia de la emoción y la atención, así como en la interconexión entre inteligencia racional e inteligencia emocional en los ámbitos de la escritura y la lectura. Finalizaremos con un análisis de las nuevas prácticas de lectura y escritura desarrolladas en el tercer entorno, nuevas narrativas construidas en el nuevo paradigma tecnológico que han posibilitado nuevos ámbitos creativos para la escritura, insistiendo en los conceptos de ‘transmedialidad’, ‘literacidad digital’, ‘hipertextualidad’, ‘multimodalidad’ y su incidencia en nuestra actividad cerebral. (shrink)

Assessing physical fitness has emerged as a proxy of the health status of children and adolescents and therefore as relevant from a public health point of view. DAFIS is a project included in Plan Galicia Saudable of the regional government of Galicia. DAFIS consists of an on-line software devoted to record the results of a standard physical fitness protocol carried out as a part of the physical education curriculum. The aims of this study were: to obtain normative values of physical (...) fitness of the Galician school population evaluated in the DAFIS project, and to identify a reduced number of components and tests able to capture a significant amount of the variability in the physical fitness of children and adolescents. From an initial sample of 27784 records, 15287 cases were considered after filtering. Generalized Additive Models for Location, Scale and Shape were used for obtaining percentile curves and tables for each sex. Furthermore, a principal components analysis was performed, selecting the number of components by applying the Kaiser’s rule and selecting a subset of variables considering the correlation between each variable and the components. Percentile curves and normative values are reported for each test and sex. Physical fitness was better in boys than in girls throughout age groups, except for flexibility that was consistently higher in girls. Two main components were detected throughout age groups: the first one representing body composition and partially cardiorespiratory fitness and the second one muscular fitness. For boys and girls, waist to height ratio had the highest correlations with the first component in four out of six age groups. The highest correlation with the second component, was most frequently observed for the handgrip test both in boys and girls. This study provides evidence about the utility of school community actions like DAFIS aimed to track the health-related fitness of children and adolescents. The results suggest that fat mass distribution and muscular performance concentrate a high proportion physical fitness variance. (shrink)

ENRIQUE BONETE: Neuroética práctica, Desclée de Brouwer, 2011, 192 pp.; JOSÉ MANUEL GIMÉNEZ AMAYA y SERGIO SÁNCHEZ-MIGALLÓN: De la Neurociencia a la Neuroética, Navarra, EUNSA 2010, 192 pp.; KATHINKA EVERS: Neuroética. Cuando la materia se despierta, Argentina- España, Katz, 2011, 208 pp.

Este artículo explora el problema de la síntesis entre vitalismo y racionalismo, dentro de la filosofía contemporánea. Para ello comparamos las trayectorias intelectuales de Georges Canguilhem (1904-1995) y José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955). Se contrastan sus concepciones de la filosofía como saber “híbrido”, vinculado a la ciencia, así como sus puntos de vista sobre el vitalismo, la antropología, la técnica y el perspectivismo. Para evitar que la comparación sea puramente abstracta y ahistórica, se recurre al método de la sociología de (...) la filosofía. Esto obliga a situar ambas trayectorias en sus respectivos campos filosóficos y unidades generacionales, atendiendo también a su procedencia social y a su carrera profesional. (shrink)

La primera recepción española de la obra epistemológica de Gaston Bachelard tuvo lugar en las décadas de 1940 y 1950. José Pemartín y especialmente Carlos París y Roberto Saumells fueron los filósofos españoles más relevantes que leyeron y utilizaron los escritos históricos y epistemológicos de Bachelard. Estos fueron utilizados para respaldar un realismo ontológico más sofisticado pero no incompatible con el realismo escolástico que prevalecía en la filosofía académica española de esa época. En este artículo exploramos el contexto de esta (...) recepción desde una perspectiva sociofilosófica.The first Spanish reception of Gaston Bachelard’s epistemological work took place in the 1940s and 1950s decades. José Pemartín and particularly Carlos París and Roberto Saumells were the most important Spanish philosophers who read and made use of the historical and epistemological writings of Bachelard. These were used in order to support an ontological realism more sophisticated but not incompatible with the scholastic realism prevailing in the Spanish academic philosophy of the time. We explore the context of this reception from a sociophilosophical scope. (shrink)

El texto pretende señalar un recorrido cronológico por algunas de las obras más importantes de Theodor Adorno. Con ello se procura mostrar cómo en su filosofía, desde sus inicios hasta su última gran obra, hubo un desarrollo coherente en el cual el arte llegó a configurarse como un modelo crítico de la razón ilustrada, en tanto que él puede acoger y representar lo excluido, y por ello coartado, por la racionalidad instrumental.

En este artículo se trataría de explorar la formación, durante el tardofranquismo, de una vanguardia filosófica caracterizada por la ruptura explícita con el ethos universitario. A partir de un análisis prácticamente exhaustivo de la producción filosófica de Eugenio Trías y de Fernando Savater en el periodo señalado se trata de mostrar la ruptura -total en el caso de Savater y parcial en el caso de Eugenio Trías- operada por estos autores con la filosofía académica, incluidas las alternativas “modernistas” de ésta. (...) En el caso de Fernando Savater esto se produce a través de una lectura de Nietzsche filtrada por la importación de contenidos teóricos procedentes de la “sociología sagrada”, de la literatura de Cioran y en menor medida de la Teoría Crítica frankfurtiana. En el caso de Trías, la estrategia consiste básicamente en la reconversión vanguardista del ejercicio docto del comentario de textos canónicos mediante la importación de técnicas y principios inspirados en el estructuralismo. El proceso tendría lugar en un contexto marcado por tranformaciones importantes en el campo político, religioso y editorial. La metodología del trabajo se apoyará en la sociología de los campos de producción intelectual inspirada por Bourdieu, en la sociología de las redes filosóficas y rituales de interacción propiciada por Randall Collins y en el análisis microhistórico de las “constelaciones filosóficas” sugerido por los discípulos de Dieter Henrich. (shrink)

En la primera parte de este artículo, presentamos una visión de conjunto de la sociología del neonietzscheanismo español. Consideramos este movimiento intelectual como un “hecho filosófico” (Martin Kustch) inserto en el campo filosófico español en la década de los setenta. En la segunda parte utilizamos el modelo de las “cadenas rituales de interacción” (Randal Collins) para explicar la entronización filosófica de Eugenio Trías.

In this paper we reject the nature–culture dichotomy by means of the idea of affordance or possibility for action, which has important implications for landscape theory. Our hypothesis is that, just as the idea of affordance can serve to overcome the subjective–objective dichotomy, the ideas of landscape and ecological niche, properly defined, would allow us to also transcend the nature–culture dichotomy. First, we introduce an overview of landscape theory, emphasizing processual landscape theory as the most suitable approach for satisfying both (...) cultural and naturalist approaches. After that, we introduce the idea of affordance and we analyze a tension between sociocultural and transcultural affordances (affordances that depend on cultural conventions and affordances that depend on lawful information and bodily aspects of agents). This tension has various implications for landscape theory and ecological niches. Our proposal is that sociocultural and transcultural aspects of affordances could be systematically accommodated if we apply niche construction theory (the theory that explains the process by which organisms modify their selective environments) as a methodological framework for explaining the emergence of ecological niches. This approach will lead us to an integrative account of landscapes as the products of the interaction between human and environmental elements, making it a clear example of a concept that transcends the nature–culture dichotomy. (shrink)

Uncultivated plants are an important part of agricultural systems and play a key role in the survival of rural marginalized groups such as women, children, and the poor. Drawing on the gender, environment, and development literature and on the notion of women’s social location, this paper examines the ways in which gender, ethnicity, and economic status determine women’s roles in uncultivated plant management in Ixhuapan and Ocozotepec, two indigenous communities of Veracruz, Mexico. The first is inhabited by Nahua and the (...) second by Popoluca peoples. Information was gathered through group and individual interviews and a food frequency survey. Results show that the gender ideology prevailing in each community, resulting from distinct ethnic affiliations and economic contexts, shapes women’s plant management. In Ixhuapan, Nahua women are used to leaving their community to generate income, while in Ocozotepec men are considered the main breadwinners and are the mediators between Popoluca households and the larger society. Nahua women gather quelites at the cornfields more often than their men, and more often than their female counterparts in Ocozotepec. They also manage and sell plants from their homegardens at higher percentages than Popoluca women. However, women in both communities use intensely the plants of their homegardens and play a key role in biodiversity conservation and cultural permanence. (shrink)

ABSTRACTWe investigated the time course of selective attention to face regions during judgment of dis/approval by low and high social anxiety undergraduates (with clinical levels on que...

With contributions from some of the key figures in the contemporary debate on relativism this book is about a topic that is the focus of much traditional and ...

In this paper I provide a new account of linguistic presuppositions, on which they are ancillary speech acts defined by constitutive norms. After providing an initial intuitive characterization of the phenomenon, I present a normative speech act account of presupposition in parallel with Williamson’s analogous account of assertion. I explain how it deals well with the problem of informative presuppositions, and how it relates to accounts for the Triggering and Projection Problems for presuppositions. I conclude with a brief discussion of (...) the consequences of the proposal for the adequacy of Williamson’s account of assertion. (shrink)

Since the publication of Hartry Field’s influential paper “Tarski’s Theory of Truth” there has been an ongoing discussion about the philosophical import of Tarski’s definition. Most of the arguments have aimed to play down that import, starting with that of Field himself. He interpreted Tarski as trying to provide a physicalistic reduction of semantic concepts like truth, and concluded that Tarski had partially failed. Robert Stalnaker and Scott Soames claimed then that Field should have obtained a stronger conclusion, namely that (...) Tarski’s failure in his allegedly intended physicalistic reduction was total. From another front, Hilary Putnam argued for an even more sweeping thesis: “[a]s a philosophical account of truth, Tarski’s theory fails as badly as it is possible for an account to fail.” Scott Soames followed suit also on this count, endorsing Putnam’s argument in section iii of the aforementioned paper; and John Etchemendy used a very similar argument to contend that “a Tarskian definition of truth [...] cannot possibly illuminate the semantic properties of the object language.” The paper argues that these contentions are based on several misunderstandings about the nature of a definition like Tarski’s. Regarding the Putnam-Soames-Etchemendy argument, we must apply a distinction Frege found natural to draw—and is natural to draw anyway—between what he called “constructive” definitions, definitions properly so called, which are mere stipulations, and what he described as “analytic” definitions, definitions which aim to make explicit the meaning of a term already in use. Regarding the Field-Soames-Stalnaker criticism, the paper contends that the true aims of a Tarskian truth definition are perfectly well fulfilled without Field’s amendments. (shrink)

The author of this paper contrasts the account he favors for how fictions can convey knowledge with Green’s views on the topic. On the author’s account, fictions can convey knowledge because fictional works make assertions and other acts such as conjectures, suppositions, or acts of putting forward contents for our consideration; and the mechanism through which they do it is that of speech act indirection, of which conversational implicatures are a particular case. There are two potential points of disagreement with (...) Green in this proposal. First, it requires that assertions can be made indirectly. Second, it requires that verbal fiction-making doesn’t consist merely in “acts of speech”, but in sui generis speech acts. (shrink)

Automated Guided Vehicles (AGV) are an essential element of transport in industry 4.0. Although they may seem simple systems in terms of their kinematics, their dynamics is very complex, and it requires robust and efficient controllers for their routes in the workspaces. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of an intelligent controller of a hybrid AGV based on fuzzy logic. In addition, genetic algorithms have been used to optimize the speed control strategy, aiming at improving efficiency and (...) saving energy. The control architecture includes a fuzzy controller for trajectory tracking that has been enhanced with genetic algorithms. The cost function first maximizes the time in the circuit and then minimizes the guiding error. It has been validated on the mathematical model of a commercial hybrid AGV that merges tricycle and differential robot components. This model not only considers the kinematics and dynamics equations of the vehicle but also the impact of friction. The performance of the intelligent control strategy is compared with an optimized PID controller. Four paths were simulated to test the approach validity. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Peacocke (2001) continues an ongoing debate with McDowell and others, providing renewed arguments for the view that perceptual experiences and some other mental states have a particular kind of content, nonconceptual content. In this article I want to object to one of the arguments he provides. This is not because I side with McDowell in the ongoing debate about nonconceptual content; on the contrary, given the way I understand it, my views are closer to Peacocke’s, and (...) have been strongly influenced by him. It is just that I am not persuaded by the particular argument I will be questioning here. (shrink)

There seems to be a distinction between primary and secondary properties; some philosophers defend the view that properties like colours and values are secondary, while others criticize it. The distinction is usually introduced in terms of essence; roughly, secondary properties essentially involve mental states, while primary properties do not. In part because this does not seem very illuminating, philosophers have produced different reductive analyses in modal terms, metaphysic or epistemic. Here I will argue, firstly, that some well-known examples fail, and (...) also that there are deep reasons why such approaches should do so. Secondly, I will argue that it is acceptable to remain satisfied with the non-reductive account in terms of essence. To that end, I will indicate how such an explication could be put to use to support the claim that properties like colours and values are secondary. In a series of recent writings, Kit Fine has argued that essence cannot be reductively analysed in modal terms. Fine offers some examples to motivate his claim. I suggest that the primary/secondary distinction constitutes a philosophically interesting illustration. (shrink)

RESUMENEn la obra del pensador gallego Francisco Sánchez (1551-1623), titulada Que nada se sabe, existen una serie de características que nos obligan a relacionarla directamente con el pensamiento judío. Entre estas cuestiones se hallan: las citas bíblicas recogidas por su autor, siendo la gran mayoría de ellas procedentes del Antiguo Testamento; la falta de la dedicatoria a la virgen María o la relación entre el alma y el cuerpo que recoge Sánchez y que es de claro origen judío.PALABRAS CLAVEESCEPTICISMO, PENSAMIENTO (...) JUDÍO, FRANCISCO SÁNCHEZABSTRACTIn the work of the thinker Francisco Sanchez (1551-1623), entitled That nothing is known, there are some characteristics that force us to directly relate it to the Jewish thought. Some of these questions are: the Biblical quotations gathered by its author, coming the great majority of them from the Old Testament; the lack of the dedication to Virgin Mary or the relation between the soul and the body that Sanchez shares with the Jewish tradition. All these topics point at the importance of this tradition in the work That nothing is known.KEYWORDSSCEPTICISM, JEWISH THOUGHT, FRANCISCO SANCHEZ, RENAISSANCE. (shrink)

The paper reviews proposals by Abell, Predelli, and others on the semantics of fiction, focusing on the discourse through which fictions are created. Predelli develops the radical fictionalism of former writers like Kripke and van Inwagen, on which that discourse is contentless and does not express propositions. This paper offers reasons to doubt these claims. It then explores realist proposals like Abell’s in which singular terms in fictions refer to fictional characters, understood as socially created representational artifacts, and irrealist alternatives (...) in which the discourse is fully meaningful even though those terms fail to refer. (shrink)

Some speech acts are made indirectly. It is thus natural to think that assertions could also be made indirectly. Grice’s conversational implicatures appear to be just a case of this, in which one indirectly makes an assertion or a related constative act by means of a declarative sentence. Several arguments, however, have been given against indirect assertions, by Davis (1999), Fricker (2012), Green (2007, 2015), Lepore & Stone (2010, 2015) and others. This paper confronts and rejects three considerations that have (...) been made: arguments based on the distinction between lying and misleading; arguments based on the ordinary concept of assertion; and arguments based on the testimonial knowledge that assertions provide. (shrink)

Frédéric Chopin is the epitome of the romantic artist; he had a chronic pulmonary disease that ultimately caused his death at the age of 39. An overlooked neurological condition is discussed in this paper. We consider the possibility of a temporal lobe epilepsy, as throughout his life Chopin had hallucinatory episodes, which can accompany seizure disorders.

The paper distinguishes between two conceptions of kinds defined by constitutive rules, the one suggested by Searle, and the one invoked by Williamson to define assertion. Against recent arguments to the contrary by Maitra, Johnson and others, it argues for the superiority of the latter in the first place as an account of games. On this basis, the paper argues that the alleged disanalogies between real games and language games suggested in the literature in fact don’t exist. The paper relies (...) on Rawls’s distinction between types of practices and institutions defined by constitutive rules, and those among them that are actually in force, and hence are truly normative; it defends along Rawlsian lines that a plurality of norms apply to actual instances of rule-constituted practices, and uses this Rawlsian line to block the examples that Maitra, Johnson and others provide to sustain their case. (shrink)

Software vulnerabilities are the root cause for a multitude of security problems in computer systems. Owing to their efficiency and tight control over low-level system resources, the C and C++ programming languages are extensively used for a myriad of purposes, from implementing operating system kernels to user-space applications. However, insufficient or improper memory management frequently leads to invalid memory accesses, eventually resulting in memory corruption vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities are used as a foothold for elaborated attacks that bypass existing defense methods. (...) In this paper, we summarise the main memory safety violation types (i.e. memory errors), and analyse how they are exploited by attackers and the main mitigation methods proposed in the research community. We further systematise the most relevant techniques with regards to memory corruption identification in current programs. (shrink)

According to a Reichenbachian treatment, indexicals are token-reflexive. That is, a truth-conditional contribution is assigned to tokens relative to relational properties which they instantiate. By thinking of the relevant expressions occurring in “ordinary contexts” along these lines, I argue that we can give a more accurate account of their semantic behavior when they occur in indirect contexts. The argument involves the following: (1) A defense of theories of indirect discourse which allows that a reference to modes of presentation associated with (...) expressions occurring in indirect contexts can be made depending on contextual aspects. (2) A defense of the “doubleindexing” theories proposed by Stalnaker and others in order to account for the difference between metaphysical and epistemological modalities. (3) The claim that a Reichenbachian view improves upon the theories defended in (1) and (2). (shrink)

En este artículo se trata de analizar cómo Jeremy Bentham afronta el problema de la compatibilidad entre libertad sexual y felicidad pública. Se considera entonces el amplio _corpus _benthamiano sobre la cuestión de las relaciones homoeróticas, estableciendo su cronología y examinando sus argumentos. Desde el principio de utilidad, Bentham defiende la despenalización de las relaciones homoeróticas y los efectos beneficiosos de esta práctica sobre la felicidad pública. Finalmente, se explora el contexto de la propuesta benthamiana: el debate ilustrado acerca de (...) las relaciones homoeróticas y la denominada “anomalía inglesa”. (shrink)

I provide a variation on ideas presented by Walton and Currie, elaborating the view that fictive utterances are characterized by a specific form of illocutionary force in the family of directives – a proposal or invitation to imagine. I make some points on the relation between the proposal and the current debates on intentionalist and conventionalist views, and I discuss interesting recent objections made by Stacie Friend to the related, but crucially different, Gricean view of such force advanced by Currie (...) and others. (shrink)