Scholars have long been intrigued by the Buddha's defining action (karma) as intention. This book explores systematically how intention, agency, and moral psychology were interpreted in all branches of early Theravada thought, paying special attention to the thought of the 5th-century commentator Buddhaghosa.

'Ethics' was not developed as a separate branch of philosophy in Buddhist traditions until the modern period, though Buddhist philosophers have always been concerned with the moral significance of thoughts, emotions, intentions, actions, virtues, and precepts. Their most penetrating forms of moral reflection have been developed within disciplines of practice aimed at achieving freedom and peace. This Element first offers a brief overview of Buddhist thought and modern scholarly approaches to its diverse forms of moral reflection. It then explores two (...) of the most prominent philosophers from the main strands of the Indian Buddhist tradition – Buddhaghosa and Śāntideva – in a comparative fashion. (shrink)

La autora revisa la historia de Chile del mil novecientos recorriendo la etapa de las Sociedades Obreras de Socorros Mutuos que la historiografía del movimiento obrero ha caracterizado como su “pre-historia. En esta indagación muestra una historia que se comienza a dibujar en el artesanado chileno desde la década de 1840, recorre la historia de la Sociedad de la Igualdad, y tras la guerra civil del ‘51 expone la historia or­ganizativa de las sociedades obreras en su extensión nacional, los periódicos (...) que la expresan, y el logro de su identidad de clase y protagonismo social y político. (shrink)

A fundamental characteristic of human visual perception is the ability to group together disparate elements in a scene and treat them as a single unit. The mechanisms by which humans create such groupings remain unknown, but grouping seems to play an important role in a wide variety of visual phenomena, and a good understanding of these mechanisms might provide guidance for how to improve machine vision algorithms. Here, we build on a proposal that some groupings are the result of connections (...) in cortical area V2 that join disparate elements, thereby allowing them to be selected and segmented together. In previous instantiations of this proposal, connection formation was based on the anatomy (e.g., extent) of receptive fields, which made connection formation obligatory when the stimulus conditions stimulate the corresponding receptive fields. We now propose dynamic circuits that provide greater flexibility in the formation of connections and that allow for top-down control of perceptual grouping. With computer simulations we explain how the circuits work and show how they can account for a wide variety of Gestalt principles of perceptual grouping, texture segmentation tasks, amodal illusory contours, and ratings of perceived groupings. We propose that human observers use such top-down control to implement task-dependent connection strategies that encourage particular groupings of stimulus elements in order to promote performance on various visual tasks. (shrink)

This article rereads some of Kant’s writings considered as pre-critical. It tries to investigate how in them the reflection about knowledge progressively takes a new direction against dogmatic positions. In order to do this, this article focuses on some of its specific aspects. We cannot assimilate these works to the revolution that the KrV will signify but we can read them as a preparation for that critical field. We share those interpretations which think that there is more continuity than breaking (...) off between the Kant considered pre-critical and his deployment clearly critical. (shrink)

Strauss claims that the general crisis in Western world is closely related to the crisis which political philosophy as such is undergoing. Apart from that, the latter is the result of the revolutionary changes introduced by the creators of modern political philosophy, whose conclusions insist that it is necessary to break with tradition in order to construe a new political science. The article examines the straussian’s vision of Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke and finally, Nietzsche. Based on this description, Strauss proposes that (...) a "return" is needed as an adequate response to failure -or maybe triumph?- of the modern utopia. But the “return”, would not take into account the changes which have affected the world and humanity until the present, as it is just impossible to simply reconstruct the past. In this context, the article poses the question about at which moment of history should the "return" begin and, particularly which elements of the complex thinking heritage should be claimed. In this respect, Strauss suggests that the reform of political philosophy (the intent to base it on some new rules, though known in the past) is necessarily equivalent to an amendment of totality. This is so because political philosophy is a part of philosophy which, at the same time, "means the search to know God, the world and the man”, furthermore, it means the search to know the essences of all things. In this way, it is stated here that the great problem about the return lies mainly in that it is not clear where the return aims at. (shrink)

A fundamental characteristic of human visual perception is the ability to group together disparate elements in a scene and treat them as a single unit. The mechanisms by which humans create such groupings remain unknown, but grouping seems to play an important role in a wide variety of visual phenomena. I propose a neural model of grouping; through top-down control of its circuits, the model implements a grouping strategy that involves both a connection strategy (which elements to connect) and a (...) selection strategy (spatiotemporal properties of a selection signal that segments target elements to facilitate identification). With computer simulations I explain how the circuits work and show how they can account for a wide variety of Gestalt principles of perceptual grouping. Additionally, I extend the model so that it can simulate visual search tasks. I show that when the model uses particular grouping strategies, simulated results closely match empirical results from replication experiments of three visual search tasks. In these experiments, perceptual grouping was induced by proximity and shape similarity (Palmer & Beck, 2007), by the spacing of irrelevant distractors and size similarity (Vickery, 2008), or by the proximity of dots and the proximity and shape similarity of line figures (Trick & Enns, 1997). Thus, I show that the model accounts for a variety of grouping effects and indicates which grouping strategies were likely used to promote performance in three visual search tasks. (shrink)

All methodologies used to characterize mother-infant interaction includes mother, infant, and other social factors. The chief difference is how each methodology selects certain elements of this interaction as relevant. I will argue that in the context of the mother-infant interaction a methodology’s results depend on the model’s presuppositions on the nature of communication. These presupposition affects the kinds of questions asked, the kind of data obtained, and how these data are analyzed. I will show this by contrasting two different analysis (...) of separation studies in infant primates: what I call the Ecological-Linear approach vs. Dynamic System Theory (DST) approach. (shrink)

Issues-driven shareholder activism suggests that specific issue characteristics brought by shareholders, a group to which firms are obligated to respond, interact in a way that affects the materiality of the issue in the eyes of the modern corporation. Relevant issue characteristics include: issue type, social significance, and issue life cycle stage.

L’arte della memoria è uno degli archetipi della cultura occidentale fin dall’antica Grecia: è stato Platone ad ‘inventare’ l’immagine dell’anima come blocco di cera, su cui le sensazioni si imprimono come segni di sigilli; ed è stato poi Aristotele a riprendere in parte questo modello, arricchendolo però di temi fondamentali. Ma anche in epoche successive l’arte della memoria ha svolto una funzione fondamentale intrecciandosi a temi sia epistemologici che di schietta natura metafisica. Questo volume, frutto di un seminario tenuto alla (...) Scuola Normale nel settembre 2006, intende ripercorrere alcune delle principali stazioni della riflessione sulla memoria fra antichità e mondo moderno chiedendosi se, e in quale misura, questa relativa continuità di approccio si debba ad un consapevole attingere alla tradizione platonica e aristotelica; se, e in quale misura, elementi comuni o varianti del modello iniziale siano riportabili alle metafore adottate, sin da subito, per la descrizione dei processi mentali – riconducibili in ogni caso all’idea comune di ‘tracce’ che la sensazione imprime nell’anima. (shrink)

Leading scholars examine the relation between Irigaray’s early writings and her later, more political work.

De repente, la religión recobra una relevancia que parecía olvidada en Europa. Sin embargo, no había dejado de desempeñar un papel en las sociedades europeas, pero era un papel discreto que vuelve al primer plano debido a la llegada de inmigrantes que profesan creencias diferentes a las mayoritarias y llevan a los europeos a identificarse como parte de sociedades postseculares. En este contexto, se cuestiona el modelo liberal de la libertad de conciencia y la construcción de la idea de tolerancia, (...) cuyo paradigma normativo es el liberalismo político de John Rawls. Autoras como Martha Nussbaum plantean la importancia de primar la idea de respeto sobre la de tolerancia. En este trabajo se tratan algunos problemas que pueden derivar de ciertas concepciones de respeto. (shrink)