Analisarei o método científico da personagem Simão Bacamarte do livro O Alienista de Machado de Assis a partir do pensamento de Nietzsche sobre a moral. Percebo que os estudos comportamentais do protagonista da obra machadiana são semelhantes durante o desenrolar de toda sua história: o que se modifica gradualmente é a intensidade classificatória entre o “certo” e o “errado” através da relativização e do detalhamento dos costumes do louco e do são. Os estudos psicológicos de Bacamarte se baseiam em suas (...) próprias concepções morais permitindo a aproximação filosófica com os textos nietzschianos que estudam a moral cuja “fundamentação” científica a transforma em um discurso normativo. No entanto, a intensificação desse discurso revela que o “certo” e o “errado” procuram abarcar as (des)semelhanças idiossincráticas enquanto método de avaliação comportamental – sem levar em conta que o seu julgamento é apenas uma interpretação, entre muitas, da existência. Dessa forma, a hipótese é a de que, quando levada ao extremo, a delimitação entre a loucura e a sanidade dissolve o seu próprio limite, pois a peculiaridade presente em cada pessoa representa um conjunto único de vivências e costumes que impossibilitam a comparação entre o certo e o errado, o são e o louco. (shrink)

Nietzsche's philosophy unfolds, at all times, in denouncing that the schools and universities in Germany serve, mostly, to domesticate as a modern force in favor of the values administered by the State. Considering this horizon, this article investigates the analytical background of the Nietzschean critique of education (Ersiehung) of his time to show the necessary tension that human formation (Bildung) emerges in the framework of his philosophy as the cultivation of new values. For that, it will be necessary to show (...) that another level of discipline, at the same time cause and effect of a unique and proper formative experience, must be triggered as a creative power of and for other existential values. (shrink)

Grande parte das análises sobre O nascimento da tragédia rodeiam os impulsos apolíneos e dionisíacos que, em comunhão, teriam originado a tragédia grega. Quando se referem ao apolíneo, a explicação tradicional se concentra em algumas características como a beleza, a aparência, a ética e o sonho. No entanto, o primeiro livro de Nietzsche apresenta uma série de períodos relacionados a Apolo que destoa de sua posterior tradição interpretativa. Um dos mais evidentes é o período dórico que utilizo aqui a fim (...) de demonstrar um Apolo desmesurado em O nascimento da tragédia contra sua habitual caracterização como um deus belo e ético. (shrink)

. This paper investigates the mechanisms of knowledge production of twenty-first century robotics-inspired morphology. How robotics influences investigations into the structure, development, and change of organic forms? Which definition of form is presupposed by this new approach to the study of form? I answer these questions by investigating how robots are used to understand and generate new questions about the locomotion of extinct animals in the first case study and in high-performance fishes in the second case study. After having illustrated (...) the landscape of twentieth-century morphology, I will reflect on the definition of form adopted in twenty-first century robotics-inspired morphology as well as on the differences between this approach to the study of form and the so-called nature-inspired disciplines, such as bionics or biomimetics. In the conclusion, I suggest that we are now in a material turn in morphology, characterized by the coexistence of the robotic, the virtual, and the real, which enables an understanding of how the structures and dynamics of shapes change over time. (shrink)

This paper presents two studies on the development and validation of a ten-item scale of epistemic vice and the relationship between epistemic vice and misinformation and fake news. Epistemic vices have been defined as character traits that interfere with acquiring, maintaining, and transmitting knowledge. Examples of epistemic vice are gullibility and indifference to knowledge. It has been hypothesized that epistemically vicious people are especially susceptible to misinformation and conspiracy theories. We conducted one exploratory and one confirmatory observational survey study on (...) Amazon Mechanical Turk among people living in the United States (total _N_ = 1737). We show that two psychological traits underlie the range of epistemic vices that we investigated: indifference to truth and rigidity. Indifference manifests itself in a lack of motivation to find the truth. Rigidity manifests itself in being insensitive to evidence. We develop a scale to measure epistemic vice with the subscales indifference and rigidity. The Epistemic Vice Scale is internally consistent; has good convergent, divergent, and discriminant validity; and is strongly associated with the endorsement of misinformation and conspiracy theories. Epistemic vice explains additional variance in the endorsement of misinformation and conspiracy theories over and above demographic and related psychological concepts and shows medium to large effect sizes across outcome measures. We demonstrate that epistemic vice differs from existing psychological constructs, and show that the scale can explain individual differences in dealing with misinformation and conspiracy theories. We conclude that epistemic vice might contribute to “postfactive” ways of thinking. (shrink)

This book explores the application of dynamical theory to cognitive science. Giunti shows how the dynamical approach can illuminate problems of cognition, information processing, consciousness, meaning, and the relation between body and mind.

Proposition I.1 is, by far, the most popular example used to justify the thesis that many of Euclid’s geometric arguments are diagram-based. Many scholars have recently articulated this thesis in different ways and argued for it. My purpose is to reformulate it in a quite general way, by describing what I take to be the twofold role that diagrams play in Euclid’s plane geometry (EPG). Euclid’s arguments are object-dependent. They are about geometric objects. Hence, they cannot be diagram-based unless diagrams (...) are supposed to have an appropriate relation with these objects. I take this relation to be a quite peculiar sort of representation. Its peculiarity depends on the two following claims that I shall argue for: ( i ) The identity conditions of EPG objects are provided by the identity conditions of the diagrams that represent them; ( ii ) EPG objects inherit some properties and relations from these diagrams. (shrink)

Research on organizational epistemic vice alleges that some organizations are epistemically malevolent, i.e. they habitually harm others by deceiving them. Yet, there is a lack of empirical research on epistemic malevolence. We connect the discussion of epistemic malevolence to the empirical literature on organizational deception. The existing empirical literature does not pay sufficient attention to the impact of an organization’s ability to control compromising information on its deception strategy. We address this gap by studying eighty high-penalty corporate misconduct cases between (...) 2000 and 2020 in the United States. We find that organizations use two different strategies to deceive: Organizations ‘sow doubt’ when they contest information about them or their impacts that others have access to. By contrast, organizations ‘exploit trust’ when they deceive others by obfuscating, concealing, or falsifying information that they themselves control. While previous research has focused on cases of ‘sowing doubt’, we find that organizations ‘exploit trust’ in the majority of cases that we studied. This has important policy implications because the strategy of ‘exploiting trust’ calls for a different response from regulators and organizations than the strategy of ‘sowing doubt’. (shrink)

Integrity is often conceived as a moral virtue that pertains to the coherence between one’s moral convictions and actions, as well as consistency in convictions over time. By contrast, I argue that integrity is primarily an epistemic virtue. To act with integrity, an individual or organisation must engage in responsible inquiry; that is, the collection, processing, sharing, and storage of information in ways that promote truth. Organisational structures such as division of labour and hierarchy present challenges to responsible inquiry, thereby (...) making epistemic integrity in organisations inherently vulnerable and increasing the risk of unintentional unethical behaviour. This epistemic perspective on organisational integrity emphasises the importance of developing virtuous epistemic infrastructure and an ethical epistemic culture. By aligning their beliefs with facts, organisations can also improve moral behaviour and reduce the risk of culpable ignorance. (shrink)

The standard view of classical cognitive science stated that cognition consists in the manipulation of language-like structures according to formal rules. Since cognition is ‘linguistic’ in itself, according to this view language is just a complex communication system and does not influence cognitive processes in any substantial way. This view has been criticized from several perspectives and a new framework (Embodied Cognition) has emerged that considers cognitive processes as non-symbolic and heavily dependent on the dynamical interactions between the cognitive system (...) and its environment. But notwithstanding the successes of the embodied cognitive science in explaining low-level cognitive behaviors, it is still not clear whether and how it can scale up for explaining high-level cognition. In this paper we argue that this can be done by considering the role of language as a cognitive tool: i.e. how language transforms basic cognitive functions in the high-level functions that are characteristic of human cognition. In order to do that, we review some computational models that substantiate this view with respect to categorization and memory. Since these models are based on a very rudimentary form of non-syntactic ‘language’ we argue that the use of language as a cognitive tool might have been an early discovery in hominid evolution, and might have played a substantial role in the evolution of language itself. (shrink)

According to a widely shared view, experience plays only a limited role in children's acquisition of the capacity to pass the false belief test: at most, it facilitates or attunes the development of mindreading abilities from infancy to early childhood. Against the facilitation—and also the maturation—hypothesis, I report empirical data attesting that children and even adults never come to understand false beliefs when deprived of proper social and linguistic interaction. In contrast to the attunement hypothesis, I argue that alleged mindreading (...) abilities in infancy differ significantly from those required to pass the false belief test at age four. I conclude that children's success in the false belief test reflects the acquisition of a novel psychological competence, and argue that social experience in the form of conversation about mental states teaches children to exploit belief reports to predict intelligent behaviour, and induces their acquisition of a capacity to recognize and track others' beliefs across contexts. (shrink)

The present paper attempts to show that a 1915 article by Erich Kretschmann must be credited not only for being the source of Einstein’s point-coincidence remark, but also for having anticipated the main lines of the logical-empiricist interpretation of general relativity. Whereas Kretschmann was inspired by the work of Mach and Poincaré, Einstein inserted Kretschmann’s point-coincidence parlance into the context of Ricci and Levi-Civita’s absolute differential calculus. Kretschmann himself realized this and turned the point-coincidence argument against Einstein in his second (...) and more famous 1918 paper. While Einstein had taken nothing from Kretschmann but the expression “point-coincidences”, the logical empiricists, however, instinctively dragged along with it the entire apparatus of Kretschmann’s conventionalism. Disappointingly, in their interpretation of general relativity, the logical empiricists unwittingly replicated some epistemological remarks Kretschmann had written before General Relativity even existed. (shrink)

This paper argues that the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics suggests a form of holism for which the whole (total ensemble of paths) has properties that are not strongly reducible to the properties of the parts (the single trajectories). Feynman’s sum over histories calculates the probability amplitude of a particle moving within a boundary by summing over all the possible trajectories that the particle can undertake. These trajectories and their individual probability amplitudes are thus necessary in calculating the total (...) amplitude. However, not all possible trajectories are differentiable, thus suggesting that they are not physical possibilities, but only mathematical entities. It follows that if the possible differentiable trajectories are taken to be part of the physical system, they are not sufficient to calculate the total probability amplitude. The conclusion is that the total ensemble is weakly non-supervenient upon the physically possible trajectories. (shrink)

A spatial logic is a formal language interpreted over any class of structures featuring geometrical entities and relations, broadly construed. In the past decade, spatial logics have attracted much attention in response to developments in such diverse fields as Artificial Intelligence, Database Theory, Physics, and Philosophy. The aim of this handbook is to create, for the first time, a systematic account of the field of spatial logic. The book comprises a general introduction, followed by fourteen chapters by invited authors. Each (...) chapter provides a self-contained overview of its topic, describing the principal results obtained to date, explaining the methods used to obtain them, and listing the most important open problems. Jointly, these contributions constitute a comprehensive survey of this rapidly expanding subject. (shrink)

Between 1909 and 1913, Berlin’s Museum für Naturkunde (Berlin Museum of Natural History) unearthed more than 225 tons of fossils in former German East Africa and transported them to Berlin. Among them were the bones of Brachiosaurus brancai, which would eventually become the biggest mounted dinosaur in the world. By analyzing the social and communicative strategies that made this expedition possible, this paper aims to reveal several aspects of natural history knowledge production at the end of the long nineteenth century. (...) Using rhetoric, the director of the Geological–Paleontological Museum in Berlin, Wilhelm von Branca, conducted a highly successful campaign to market the dinosaurs in Prussia and to convince public opinion and the Prussian central state of the value of paleontology. He fired the Prussian imagination and took advantage of the competitive urge to emulate American paleontology and industry. This work examines how his public relations strategies shaped the German biological “landscape” of the first decades of the twentieth century. It asks: when and under what conditions did paleontology successfully appeal to the public? How does communication dictate, shape, and constrain the development of a specific epistemic agenda? And what kind of power do the public and money have? (shrink)

The indispensability argument comes in many different versions that all reduce to a general valid schema. Providing a sound IA amounts to providing a full interpretation of the schema according to which all its premises are true. Hence, arguing whether IA is sound results in wondering whether the schema admits such an interpretation. We discuss in full details all the parameters on which the specification of the general schema may depend. In doing this, we consider how different versions of IA (...) can be obtained, also through different specifications of the notion of indispensability. We then distinguish between schematic and genuine IA, and argue that no genuine sound IA is available or easily forthcoming. We then submit that this holds also in the particularly relevant case in which indispensability is conceived as explanatory indispensability. (shrink)

We address recent interpretations of infant performance on spontaneous false belief tasks. According to most views, these experiments show that human infants attribute mental states from a very young age. Focusing on one of the most clearly worked out, minimalist versions of this idea, Butterfill and Apperly's "minimal theory of mind" framework, we defend an alternative characterization: the minimal theory of rational agency. On this view, rather than conceiving of social situations in terms of states of an enduring mental substance (...) animating agents, infant interpreters parse observed bouts of behavior and their contexts into goals, rational means to those goals, and available information. In other words, the social ontology of infant interpreters consists in goal-directed, informed bouts of behavior, by non-enduring agents, rather than agents animated by states of enduring, unobservable minds. We discuss a number of experiments that support this interpretation of infant socio-cognitive competence. (shrink)

Why, for such a long time, has there been no Kantian point of view among the most influential theories about thought experiments? The primary historical reason – the main trends in the philosophy of science have always rejected the existence of a priori knowledge – fits a theoretical reason. Kant oscillated between two very different views about the a priori: on the one hand, he attributed to it a particular content, whereas on the other hand he insisted on its purely (...) formal character. The first interpretation of the a priori was one-sidedly developed by Ørsted and led to his untenable notion of thought experiment. The other interpretation, however, can be further developed into new Kantian theories of thought experiments in the natural sciences and in philosophy. (shrink)

Munch-Jurisic’s book thoroughly describes several cases of severe distresses reported and expressed by perpetrators of tremendous acts such as mass murders. Arguing against a simplistic reading according to which these signs of distress are straightforward manifestations of some innate moral nature, and against the optimistic reading according to which they will lead to prosocial behaviors, Munch-Jursic offers compelling reasons to adopt a more complex theory of emotion. In this commentary, I aim to stress the implications of her book for the (...) debate on moral enhancement and for emotion theory in general. However, while I concur with Munch-Jurisic that emotion theory must make room for complexity and indeterminacy, I challenge her claim that motivational theories of emotion are ill-equipped to face the challenges she poses. (shrink)

This article gives a practice-based overview of the implementation aspects of Corporate Responsibility. After discussing the success factors for implementing Corporate Responsibility, the article describes a model for implementing Corporate Responsibility. Special attention is given to the success factors in the subsequent phases of implementation (sensitivity to the organizational environment, awareness of core values and clear leadership), to ensure that the most optimal results attainable for the organization can be reached. The implementation-model is clarified by looking at experiences in implementing (...) Corporate Responsibility at Chiquita. (shrink)

In his 1916 review paper on general relativity, Einstein made the often-quoted oracular remark that all physical measurements amount to a determination of coincidences, like the coincidence of a pointer with a mark on a scale. This argument, which was meant to express the requirement of general covariance, immediately gained great resonance. Philosophers such as Schlick found that it expressed the novelty of general relativity, but the mathematician Kretschmann deemed it as trivial and valid in all spacetime theories. With the (...) relevant exception of the physicists of Leiden (Ehrenfest, Lorentz, de Sitter, and Nordström), who were in epistolary contact with Einstein, the motivations behind the point-coincidence remark were not fully understood. Only at the turn of the 1960s did Bergmann (Einstein’s former assistant in Princeton) start to use the term ‘coincidence’ in a way that was much closer to Einstein’s intentions. In the 1980s, Stachel, projecting Bergmann’s analysis onto his historical work on Einstein’s correspondence, was able to show that what he started to call ‘the point-coincidence argument’ was nothing but Einstein’s answer to the infamous ‘hole argument’. The latter has enjoyed enormous popularity in the following decades, reshaping the philosophical debate on spacetime theories. The point-coincidence argument did not receive comparable attention. By reconstructing the history of the argument and its reception, this paper argues that this disparity of treatment is not justified. This paper will also show that the notion that only coincidences are observable in physics marks every critical step of Einstein’s struggle with the meaning of coordinates in physics. (shrink)

In 1909, Ehrenfest published a note in the Physikalische Zeitschrift showing that a Born rigid cylinder could not be set into rotation without stresses, as elements of the circumference would be contracted but not the radius. Ignatowski and Varićak challenged Ehrenfest’s result in the same journal, arguing that the stresses would emerge if length contraction were a real dynamical effect, as in Lorentz’s theory. However, no stresses are expected to arise, according to Einstein’s theory, where length contraction is only an (...) apparent effect due to an arbitrary choice of clock synchronization. Ehrenfest and Einstein considered this line of reasoning dangerously misleading and took a public stance in the Physikalische Zeitschrift, countering that relativistic length contraction is both apparent and real. It is apparent since it disappears for the comoving observer, but it is also real since it can be experimentally verified. By drawing on his lesser-known private correspondence with Varićak, this paper shows how Einstein used the Ehrenfest paradox as a tool for an ‘Einsteinian pedagogy’. Einstein’s argumentative stance is contrasted with Bell’s use of the Dewan-Beran thread-between-spaceships paradox to advocate for a ‘Lorentzian pedagogy’. The paper concludes that the disagreement between the two ways of ‘teaching special relativity’ stems from divergent interpretations of philosophical categories such as ‘reality’ and ‘appearance’. (shrink)

How to demarcate the political units within which democracy will be practiced? Although recent years have witnessed a steadily increasing academic interest in this question concerning the boundary problem in democratic theory, social contract theory’s potential for solving it has largely been ignored. In fact, contract views are premised on the assumption of a given people and so presuppose what requires legitimization: the existence of a demarcated group of individuals materializing, as it were, from nowhere and whose members agree among (...) themselves to establish a political order. In order to fill this gap in social contract theory, a distinction is made between three kinds of contract views: Lockean political voluntarism, contractarianism, and contractualism. Each of these views can be (re)interpreted in such a way that it offers a democratic solution to the boundary problem. Ultimately, however, a Rawlsian interpretation of the contractualist solution is defended. (shrink)

Commercial video games are popular entertainment media and part of students’ media reality. While commercial video games’ main purpose is not learning, they nonetheless could and should serve as objects of reflection in formal educational settings. Teachers could guide student learning and reflection as well as motivate students with commercial video games, but more evidence from formal educational settings is required. We conducted two mixed methods case studies to investigate students’ reflection processes using commercial video games in regular formal high (...) school teaching. In a double lesson, 29 students of a 10th-grade biology course and 17 students of a 12th-grade advanced course on history played and discussed a commercial video game related to the current curricular topic. We examined the reflection processes of students in terms of their reactions to the teachers’ game-related statements and questions. Regarding teachers’ statements, students discussed several topics related to game enjoyment and the games’ representation of topic-related content. Regarding teachers’ questions, students discussed multiple goals in each game, how the games represented topic-related content, and how the games could be appropriate for learning. In Study 2, students additionally discussed emotions, stereotypes, violence, and the narrative related to the digital history game. We found that the discussions provided students opportunities to reflect on their game experiences and the current curricular topic as well as to practice media criticism. We further provide quantitative results on students’ perceived topic knowledge, on several facets of their learning motivation, and on their acceptance of video games. Overall, our findings illustrate the educational value of using commercial video games as objects of reflection. (shrink)

Testing is an effective learning method, and it is the basis of mobile quiz apps. Quiz apps have the potential to facilitate remote and self-regulated learning. In this context, automatized feedback plays a crucial role. In two experimental studies, we examined the effects of two feedback types of quiz apps on performance, namely, the standard corrective feedback of quiz apps and a feedback that incorporates additional information related to the correct response option. We realized a controlled lab setting (n= 68, (...) Study 1) and an unsupervised mobile setting (n= 150, Study 2). In the learning phase, participants used the quiz app and received feedback. They also completed a subsequent test as well as a follow-up test 1 week later by using the same quiz app. Irrespective of feedback type and setting, cognitive outcomes (quiz scores) and metacognitive outcomes (response certainty) increased similarly in the short term and long term. Feedback effects were not moderated by participants' overall response certainty during learning, their prior knowledge, and the difficulty of quiz items. Moreover, we found that participants perceived the quiz app to be similarly attractive, interesting, and enjoyable in both feedback conditions and that they spent slightly more time to process quiz items in the lab setting. We discuss these results in detail, including the role of moderating and mediating factors and prospects for further research and practice. Overall, our results underline that quiz apps are useful and effective tools that can support the acquisition and retention of semantic knowledge in different learning settings. (shrink)

The paper argues that Frege’s primary foundational purpose concerning arithmetic was neither that of making natural numbers logical objects, nor that of making arithmetic a part of logic, but rather that of assigning to it an appropriate place in the architectonics of mathematics and knowledge, by immersing it in a theory of numbers of concepts and making truths about natural numbers, and/or knowledge of them transparent to reason without the medium of senses and intuition.

In his Zur Einstein’schen Relativitätstheorie, Ernst Cassirer presents relativity theory as the last manifestation of the tradition of the “physics of principles” that, starting from the nineteenth century, has progressively prevailed over that of the “physics of models.” In particular, according to Cassirer, the relativity principle plays a role similar to the energy principle in previous physics. In this article, I argue that this comparison represents the core of Cassirer’s neo-Kantian interpretation of relativity. Cassirer pointed out that before and after (...) Kant, the history of physics presents significant instances in which the search for formal conditions that the laws of nature must satisfy preceded and made possible the direct search for such laws. In his earlier years, Cassirer seems to have regarded principles like the energy principle, the relativity principle, and the principle of least action as a constitutive but provisional form of a priori, imposing specific limitations on the form of the allowable laws of nature. Only in his later years, by attributing an autonomous status to these statements of principle, did Cassirer attribute a definitive but merely regulative meaning to the a priori. This does not impose specific requirements on natural laws but only a motivation to search for them. (shrink)

O presente artigo propõe uma interpretação deflacionista para a doutrina da essência absolutamente considerada , apresentada por Tomás de Aquino no opúsculo "De ente et essentia". O norte do trabalho é a análise das expressões reduplicativas que são constantemente utilizadas pelo Doutor Angélico para designar as EAC's. Portanto, pretendo mostrar que a EAC é a consideração dos predicados essenciais, que se predicam das expressões reduplicadas, diferentemente da noção acidental de existência. Por isso, a EAC não existe nem no intelecto nem (...) na realidade, o que, dito em outras palavras, significa apenas que "existir no intelecto" e "existir na realidade" são predicados acidentais em relação às essências apreendidas abstrativamente pela mente. This paper proposes a deflationist interpretation of the doctrine of the Nature as such, which Thomas Aquinas exposes in his work "De ente et essentia". The aim of this paper is to provide an analysis of reduplicative expressions used by Aquinas to refer nature as such. Hence, I will show that the nature as such is the consideration of the essential properties predicated by the reduplicative expressions, diverse from the accidental notion of 'existence'. Consequently, nature as such does not exist in the intellect and do not exist in reality, for in other words 'existing in the intellect' and 'existing in the reality' are accidental predicates when attributed to essences grasped by the mind. (shrink)

Over the past decades, the notions of organic form and morphology—a scientific field historically associated with the eighteenth century polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe —have stealthy re-assumed a central role in various scientific disciplines. Although the study of organic form was apparently excluded from the main stage of evolutionary theory and biological sciences during the second half of the twentieth century, since morphology was considered as a descriptive and ancillary science unable to contribute to the neo-Darwinian synthesis of evolution1, morphological (...) concepts and approaches have now been re-brought onto the central stage of mainstream science.2In fact, several interdisciplinary... (shrink)

Since Darwin proposed that human musicality evolved through sexual selection, empirical evidence has supported intersexual selection as one of the adaptive functions of artistic propensities. However, intrasexual competition has been overlooked. We tested their relative importance by investigating the relationship between the self-perceived talent/expertise in 16 artistic and 2 sports modalities and proxies of intersexual selection and intrasexual competition in heterosexuals. Participants were 82 Brazilian men, 166 Brazilian women, 146 Czech men, and 458 Czech women. Factor analysis revealed five factors: (...) Literary-arts, Visual-arts, Musical-arts, Circus-arts, and Sports. Multivariate General Linear Model showed more associations of the arts to intersexual selection in women and to intrasexual selection in men, and overall more relationships in women than in men. In women, literary and musical-arts were related to elevated inter- and intrasexual selections proxies, visual and circus-arts were related to elevated intersexual selection proxies, and sports were related to intrasexual selection proxies. In men, literary-arts and sports were related to elevated inter- and intrasexual selection proxies, musical-arts were related to intrasexual proxies, and circus-arts were related to intersexual proxies; visual-arts did not have predictors. Although present in both sexes, each sexual selection component has different relative importance in each sex. Artisticality functions to attract and maintain long/short-term partners, and to compete with mating rivals. (shrink)

En el presente artículo damos cuenta pormenorizada de los ejemplos per figuram obtenidos a través de un novedoso método de trabajo plasmado en decotgrel. De esta forma hemos podido sistematizar todos los ‘usos especiales’ documentados en el así llamado Priscianus minor. De esta manera hemos podido encontrar consideraciones que van más allá de lo meramente normativo y que tienen un gran interés tanto para el conocimiento de la lengua en cuestión como para el análisis de la evolución de los conceptos (...) gramaticales y de las teorías lingüísticas desde la Antigüedad hasta la Modernidad. (shrink)

Thought experiments de facto play many different roles in biology: economical, ethical, technical and so forth. This paper, however, is interested in whether there are any distinctive features of biological TEs as such. The question may be settled in the affirmative because TEs in biology have a function that is intimately connected with the epistemological and methodological status of biology. Peculiar to TEs in biology is the fact that the reflexive, typically human concept of finality may be profitably employed to (...) discover mechanical-experimental causal relations in all living beings—with the obvious caveat that we do not hypostatise and interpret this concept as an ontological quality, since this would land one in an implicitly animistic, pre-Galilean view of nature. From a methodical point of view, the concept of finality is an essential assumption as well as a powerful heuristic tool in the practice of biology, that is, in the investigation of living beings in an intersubjectively testable and reproducible way. (shrink)

In 1912, Ernst Cassirer contributed to the special issue of the Kant-Studien that honored Hermann Cohen's retirement—his mentor and teacher, and the recognized founding father of the so-called 'Marburg school' of Neo-Kantianism. In the context of an otherwise rather conventional presentation of Cohen's interpretation of Kant, Cassirer made a remark that is initially surprising. It is “anything but accurate,” he wrote, to regard Cohen's philosophy as focused “exclusively on the mathematical theory of nature,” as is usually done. A reconstruction of (...) the genesis of Cohen's thought, Cassirer continued, would already refute this interpretation. Actually, “[t]he... (shrink)

The ‘species problem’ can be characterized, to a first approximation, as the task of providing a viable species concept —that is, a functional analysis that picks out the ‘right’ kind of biological entities. After decades of debate and centuries of taxonomic practice, no overarching consensus has been reached. The individuation and definition of the units of evolution and classification, species included, remains controversial. If anything, there now seems to be more disagreement than ever before.

This book fills a major gap in the ever-increasing secondary literature on Hannah Arendt's political thought by providing a dedicated and coherent treatment of the many, various and interesting things which Arendt had to say about law. Often obscured by more pressing or more controversial aspects of her work, Arendt nonetheless had interesting insights into Greek and Roman concepts of law, human rights, constitutional design, legislation, sovereignty, international tribunals, judicial review and much more. This book retrieves these aspects of her (...) legal philosophy for the attention of both Arendt scholars and lawyers alike. The book brings together lawyers as well as Arendt scholars drawn from a range of disciplines (philosophy, political science, international relations), who have engaged in an internal debate the dynamism of which is captured in print. Following the editors' introduction, the book is split into four Parts: Part I explores the concept of law in Arendt's thought; Part II explores legal aspects of Arendt's constitutional thought: first locating Arendt in the wider tradition of republican constitutionalism, before turning attention to the role of courts and the role of parliament in her constitutional design. In Part III Arendt's thought on international law is explored from a variety of perspectives, covering international institutions and international criminal law, as well as the theoretical foundations of international law. Part IV debates the foundations, content and meaning of Arendt's famous and influential claim that the 'right to have rights' is the one true human right. (shrink)

Since cognitive neuroscience aims at giving an integrated account of mind and brain, its ontology should include both neural and cognitive entities and specify their relations. According to what we call the standard ontological framework of cognitive neuroscience, the aim of cognitive neuroscience should be to establish one-to-one mappings between neural and cognitive entities. Where such entities do not yet closely align, this can be achieved by reforming the cognitive ontology, the neural ontology, or both. In order to assess the (...) limits and the possibilities of the SOFCN, we will examine a paradigmatic case study: the concept of Broca’s area, which indicates an alleged mapping between the left inferofrontal gyrus and the production of language. We review evidence showing that such a mapping does not hold, thus calling into question either the status of Broca’s area or the validity of the SOFCN. We then propose some strategies for addressing the issue and suggest that it may be solved within the SOFCN by adopting both of the following strategies: first, more accurately defining the relevant neural structures and second, switching the focus of neural ontology from structures to events, individuated by a where conjoint with a how. (shrink)

Doctor–patient communication is a crucial component in any therapeutic encounter. Physicians use words to formulate diagnoses and prognoses, to disclose the risks and benefits of medical interventions, and to explain why, how, and when a therapy will be administered to a patient. Likewise, patients communicate to describe their symptoms, to make sense of their conditions, to report side effects, to explore other therapeutic options, and to share their feelings. Throughout the history of medicine, the ethics of the doctor–patient communication has (...) been traditionally grounded on considerations of paternalistic beneficence and nonmaleficence. In this respect, it was no different from the ethics regulating.. (shrink)