More and more frequently, the organisation of design fits into a project organisation where different designers have to cooperate with flexibility and reactivity. In order to help these cooperative design processes, we have to respond to new types of needs: a relatively unformalised coordination that requires permanent mutual adjustment, the fact that members of the team are geographically distant, the difficulty of building a shared reference via design documents and technical and organisational decisions that structure the project. In order to (...) provide computer support for these needs, asynchronous Group Ware is often recommended. However, the efficiency of these tools depends on the models that structure the work processes and the knowledge exchanged. In this paper, we present ABRICo, a new Design Rationale formalism that permits the recording of cooperative decision-making processes in complex design situations. We describe the formalism and explain how we intend to use it to specify cooperative design tools usable via an Intranet for computing projects. (shrink)

Many prominent theories of moral responsibility rely on the notion of “tracing,” the idea that responsibility for an outcome can be located in (i.e., “traced back to”) some prior moment of control, perhaps significantly antecedent to the proximate sources of a considered action. In this article, I show how there is a problem for theories that rely on tracing. The problem is connected to the knowledge condition on moral responsibility. Many prima facie good candidate cases for tracing analyses appear to (...) violate the knowledge condition on moral responsibility. So, either we need to dispense with tracing approaches or we must refine our understanding of the knowledge condition or we are responsible less frequently than we suppose. (shrink)

In mid-twentieth-century Mexican philosophy, there was a peculiar nationalist existentialist project focused on the cultural conditions of agency. This article revisits some of those ideas, including the idea that there is an important but underappreciated experience of one's relationship to norms and social meanings. This experience—something called accidentality—casts new light on various forms of social subordination and socially scaffolded agency, including cultural alienation, biculturality, and double consciousness.

After the great enthusiasm about the moral potentialities of empathy of the last thirty years, this phenomenon has been recently called into question, if not openly criticized, by both philosophers and psychologists among whom we find Jesse Prinz or Paul Bloom. This paper aims to show why empathy should not too easily be regarded as useless or even deleterious for morality and to propose a special role for it. In order to reach this goal, I will briefly sketch what I (...) mean with the term empathy and how is this psychological mechanism different from other akin phenomena like compassion. I will then turn my attention to some criticisms that can be made about the role of empathy for morality which show that empathy seems not a necessary element of the three main dimensions of morality, that is moral judgment, moral development and moral conduct. After that, I will try to defend empathy thanks to the identification of some important roles it can play both at a moral and at an epistemological level, in the attempt to demonstrate that empathy is in fact part of the fundamental features of a moral person. (shrink)

Primitivos relatos cosmogónicos de diferentes culturas en que el agua desempeña un papel fundamental en la creación del mundo. Análisis de los valores fundamentales del agua que se manifiestan en dichos relatos. El culto al agua desde la antigüedad hasta el final de la Edad Media. Relación del agua con la magia.

Explicitly fictional armchair reconstructions of the past are sometimes taken to be informative about philosophical issues. What appeal a counterfactual genealogy has depends on its speculative accuracy, that is, its accuracy in identifying relevant causal, functional, or explanatory particulars. However, even when speculatively accurate, counterfactual genealogies rarely secure more than proofs of possibility. For more ambitious deployments of genealogy – for example, efforts to show what properties the target concept in fact predicates – genealogies are hamstrung by the possibility of (...) predicative drift, or changes over time in what the concept predicates. Still, even when counterfactual genealogies fail to tell us about our current practices or concepts, they may identify appealing successors. Pettit's (2018 Pettit, Philip. 2018. The Birth of Ethics: Reconstructing the Role and Nature of Morality. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.[Crossref], [Google Scholar]) innovative defense of moral realism and his employment of a counterfactual genealogy provides an illuminating instance of the promise and challenges facing accounts employing counterfactual genealogies. (shrink)

In this work we provide a new topological representation for implication algebras in such a way that its one-point compactification is the topological space given in [1]. Some applications are given thereof.

O livro oferece o primeiro estudo sobre o espólio de Edmundo Curvelo (1913-1954), professor da Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa e um dos introdutores dos laboratórios psicotécnicos e psicológicos em Portugal. São publicados pela primeira vez manuscritos filosóficos de Curvelo, bem como a sua correspondência com grandes nomes da Cultura e da Filosofia do século XX (W. V. Quine, Alonzo Church, Stephen Kiss, Joaquim de Carvalho e Delfim Santos). O livro apresenta igualmente um estudo do enquadramento da obra (...) de Curvelo e da sua importância para a história do pensamento e da ciência portuguesa do século XX. This book presents the first study into the collection of Edmundo Curvelo (1913-1954), professor in the Faculty of Letters of the University of Lisbon and co-responsible for the introduction of psychotechnic and psychological laboratories into Portugal. Some of his philosophical manuscripts are published here for the first time, along with his correspondence with great names of 20th century Philosophy (W. V. Quine, Alonzo Church, Stephen Kiss, Joaquim de Carvalho and Delfim Santos). The book also contains a study which contextualizes Curvelo’s oeuvre within the history of 20th-century Portuguese science and thought. (shrink)

La prisión, que hasta finales del siglo XVIII no pasó de ser una medida aseguradora de la presencia del reo en el proceso, fue experimentando a partir de entonces un rápido y progresivo avance como pena en los ordenamientos jurídicos no sólo por considerarse más humana y eficaz que las penas a las que fue sustituyendo -penas de muerte, corporales e infamantes-, sino sobre todo por su adaptabilidad a la gravedad del delito. Además, con la organización de la ejecución de (...) la pena de prisión de acuerdo con diferentes sistemas penitenciarios se va a pretender conseguir con ella algo más que la simple separación del condenado de la sociedad. Se va a intentar reintegrarlo a la sociedad para que en adelante sea capaz de vivir en paz con los demás. (shrink)

In their fine overview of supported decision making for persons with dynamic cognitive and functional impairments “at the margins of autonomy,” Peterson, Karlawish, and Largent query whether...

Both legal and moral theorists have offered broadly “communicative” theories of criminal and moral responsibility. According to such accounts, we can understand the nature of responsibility by appealing to the idea that responsibility practices are in some fundamental sense expressive, discursive, or communicative. In this essay, I consider a variety of issues in connections with this family of views, including its relationship to free will, the theory of exemptions, and potential alternatives to the communicative model. Focusing on Michael McKenna’s Conversation (...) and Responsibility, I argue that communicative accounts, and the conversational model in particular, direct our attention to important and under-appreciated elements of our responsibility practices. However, rather than focusing on a model of conversation-as-address, as McKenna does, we do better to regard gossip as the paradigmatic conversational form that captures the main features of moral responsibility. (shrink)

In today's societies, there are conflicts that cause direct violence in a considerable part of the population. Homelessness is an example of the concealment of a social peace that is not real insofar as it affects those who do not have the minimum socio-economic guarantees to live with dignity. In this article, the authors reflect on some of the issues related to this type of problems that continue to stifle genuine participation and, therefore, the possibility of a more real democratic (...) coexistence. One proposal for tackling this type of context is art focused as a space for participation based on the experiences of the participants. In this case, of those who do not have the same opportunities to tell how they feel about what is happening to them. Specifically, the methodology of theatre is presented, mediating a reality from the representation of bodies as creativity that generates diverse and different interpretations. (shrink)

I intend to show that Aristotle follows some of the main guidelines of the Analytics in his investigation about the nature of the city in Politics I. I assume that Pol. I sets out the causes of the city and that the book responds to the four questions presented in APo. II.1. I demonstrate that Aristotle’s methodology follows a φυσικῶς standard. In addition, I assume that dialectic plays a secondary – refutative – role, as opposed to the opinion of Owen (...) (1961) and Barnes (1980) that dialectic was the main methodology applied in practical philosophy. (shrink)

El electrón introduce en la mecánica subatómica el nuevo concepto de probabilidad cuántica. Este artículo estudia el proceso de esta introducción, de 1916 a 1927. Einstein lo ocasionó, al elaborar un formalismo de emisión y absorción de radiación, que Bohr incluyó en su principio de correspondencia, como «probabilidades a priori». Heisenberg las recogió en su mecánica matricial, mientras Schrodinger introducía en su mecánica ondulatoria una función de onda, que Born convirtió en amplitud de probabilidad. Dirac fundamentó esos conceptos de probabilidad (...) con su teoría de transformaciones, y Heisenberg, inspirado en ella, formuló las relaciones de indeterminación de la nueva física subatómica. (shrink)

En este trabajo se ofrece una introducción a esa área de investigación filosófica de la mente. Se abordarán, en primer lugar, algunos aspectos de su evolución histórica como disciplina diferenciada. En segundo lugar, se describirán las principales opciones existentes a la hora de conceptualizar las relaciones de lo mental con el mundo estudiado por las ciencias naturales. Se precisarán también algunos de los conceptos más recurrentes en la actual filosofía de la mente, proporcionándose a continuación una panorámica general de los (...) autores más representativos en este terreno. Por último, se comentan varios grupos importantes de problemas abiertos. La actual filosofía de la mente nos mostraría, sobre todo, una nueva forma de hacer filosofía que pone constantemente en práctica la inexistencia de fronteras claramente definidas entre filosofía y ciencia. (shrink)

Discussions about physicalism, reduction, special sciences, the layered image of reality, multiple realizability, emergence, downward causation, etc., typically make the ontological presupposition that there is no room for new properties in the physical world. The domain of physical properties would thus have been established once and for all. It is my purpose in this paper to explore the alternative hypothesis that there can be, and that in fact there are, new physical properties. In the first section, I propose a brief (...) analysis of the notions of property, physical property, and new physical property. In the second section, I present four general situations in which it would be plausible to speak of the existence of new physical properties. All of this is used to evaluate the content and scope of the hypothesis of physical novelty. Lastly, I examine certain interesting consequences of such a physical novelty in relation to some of the above mentioned topics. (shrink)

Existen tres grandes estrategias para intentar combinar realismo y antirrealismo: una distinción de niveles, una distinción de aspectos y una distinción de partes. En el trabajo se analizan estas tres estrategias. La primera de ellas ha sido desarrollada por numerosos autores. Comentamos en detalle los planteamientos recientes de José Zalabardo a propósito de ciertas tesis de John McDowell, Crispin Wright y Wittgenstein. Esta estrategia plantea graves dificultades. La segunda estrategia parece poder escapar a ellas. Sin embargo, no puede ser adoptada (...) en un sentido máximamente general. Proponemos una combinación basada en la tercera estrategia. Realismo y antirrealismo podrían combinarse de una manera muy natural cuando son adoptados en un sentido local. (shrink)

There are very few analyses of the structure of points of view. However, we can identify two general approaches. One of them assumes as a paradigm the structure of propositional attitudes. Here, points of view are understood as having an internal structure similar to the one we can find in propositional attitudes. The other approach is based on the notions of location and access. Here, the internal structure of points of view is not directly addressed. The features that are emphasised (...) are related with the role that points of view are intended to have. Points of view would be ways of having access to the world, and to ourselves, from certain emplacements. The paper has three parts. In the first one, we present these two approaches and some interesting developments inside each one of them. In the second one, we examine more closely the relationships between the two approaches. In the third part of the paper, we defend the non-reducible relational nature and modal character of points of view obtaining some conclusions. (shrink)

Este artículo tiene como objetivo presentar, transcribir y contextualizar el texto de las Comunicaciones del obispo Toral, el primer Prelado de Yucatán. Esta es la primera edición completa de este documento importante e interesante para el estudio de la introducción de la Iglesia en América.

Acercándonos a los Santos Padres y dejándonos llevar por ellos queremos en estas páginas reflexionar sobre el ministerio eclesiástico, atendiendo de manera sencilla al pensamiento y a las palabras de los Padres en tanto que recogen el pensar y sobre todo el sentir de las comunidades cristianas de su tiempo. En estas primeras iglesias el ministerio se comprende desde el servicio como entrega confiada y generosa al Padre, y entienden que en Cristo y sólo en Él este servicio alcanza su (...) plenitud. (shrink)

Our democracies presently face a set of unique challenges. In this article we argue that the current crisis needs to be understood as resulting from the convergence of two historical transformations: the paradigm of boundlessness; and what we term “endividualismo”, a novel mutation of individualism in the context of the financial age. The result is a novel political reality where individual rights are ever-expanding and the opportunities for collective action have shrunk to the point of impossibility. The resulting powerlessness of (...) the polity demands new answers: we need to reconfigure the relationship between citizens and political power. (shrink)

Tras una inicial aproximación a la génesis del concepto de responsabilidad, génesis en la que se empiezan a percibir algunos de los rasgos del mismo que terminarán por hacerse explícitos en nuestros días, el trabajo se centra en señalar las implicaciones (y, sobre todo, las consecuencias) que tiene adscribir decididamente la responsabilidad a la época moderna y, en concreto, al surgimiento de la civilización industrial. Acaso una de las más importantes sea la de obligarnos a plantear toda una serie de (...) asuntos en conexión necesaria con otro tema-eje del pensamiento moderno, el de la identidad. Junto a dicho tema, en el texto quedan apuntados otros, como el de la justa escala en la que abordar tales asuntos (o, lo que viene a ser lo mismo, el problema de las presuntas responsabilidades colectivas) o el del mal, por citar sólo dos, cuya envergadura puede servir como indicador de la importancia que presenta el concepto de responsabilidad en el pensamiento contemporáneo. (shrink)