Tratar cuál es el carácter de la relación entre ciencia y tecnología en el complejo mundo de la Ilustración, es lo que plantea este libro. Los historiadores de la ciencia y de la tecnología han venido suponiendo en las últimas décadas que dicha relación se había producido en un único sentido. La presente obra desafía esta visión por simplificadora y replantea la cuestión para ofrecer un análisi más completo de la interacción entre ciencia e industria en este período.

In this study, we examine the influence of senior leadership on firms’ corporate social responsibility. We integrate upper echelons research that has investigated either the influence of the CEO or the top management team on CSR. We contend that functional experience complementarity between CEOs and TMTs in formulating and implementing CSR strategy may underlie differentiated strategies in CSR. We find that when CEOs who have predominant experience in output functions are complemented by TMTs with a lower proportion of members who (...) have experience in output functions, there is a pronounced effect on the community, product, and diversity dimensions of CSR. In turn, when output-oriented CEOs are complemented by output-oriented TMTs, we observe an effect on the employee relations dimension of CSR. Interestingly, we find no influence of CEO-TMT complementarity on the environment dimension of CSR. In general, our empirical results support the relevance of the interaction between CEOs and their TMTs in defining their firms’ CSR profile. (shrink)

The Somatic Mutation Theory has been challenged on its fundamentals by the Tissue Organization Field Theory of Carcinogenesis. However, a recent publication has questioned whether TOFT could be a valid alternative theory of carcinogenesis to that presented by SMT. Herein we critically review arguments supporting the irreducible opposition between the two theoretical approaches by highlighting differences regarding the philosophical, methodological and experimental approaches on which they respectively rely. We conclude that SMT has not explained carcinogenesis due to severe epistemological and (...) empirical shortcomings, while TOFT is gaining momentum. The main issue is actually to submit SMT to rigorous testing. This concern includes the imperatives to seek evidence for disproving one’s hypothesis, and to consider the whole, and not just selective evidence. (shrink)

Este trabajo presenta algunas discusiones preliminares a una reconstrucción de la mecánicacuántica desde una perspectiva estructuralista. Intento responder a la pregunta por lostérminos MQ- no teóricos, es decir, qué magnitudes pueden ser medidas con independenciade la ecuación de Schrödinger y de la regla de Born. Uno de los aspectos relevantes que puedeser analizado una vez que se ha respondido a esta pregunta es el problema de la medición.Dado que el problema de la medición está directamente relacionado con el carácter linealde (...) la evolución temporal del estado dada por la ecuación de Schrödinger, la medición delos valores de aquellos conceptos que no presupongan esta ley no se verá afectada por esteproblema. Si bien esto no responde a todas las preguntas sobre la medición cuántica, indicaun primer paso a dar en la dirección hacia una comprensión más acabada de este problema. (shrink)

Este trabajo representa una búsqueda del rasgo negativo esencial que habría venido caracterizando a la actividad filosófica en nuestra cultura: una lucha sin tregua contra la estupidez humana, entendida en sentido profundo como fracaso de la inteligencia, un fracaso que sería sinónimo y compendio de maldad y de fealdad. Al mismo tiempo se atreve a pronosticar un futuro optimista para la filosofía, a pesar de todas las apariencias, por lo menos en la medida en que al estúpido le resultaría imposible (...) ser humanamente feliz. (shrink)

In developed countries, companies are now substantially reliant on the skills and abilities of their leaders to tackle a variety of complex issues. There is a growing consensus that leadership development training and assessment methods should adopt more holistic methodologies, including those associated with the emotional and neuroendocrine aspects of learning. Recent research into the assessment of leadership competencies has proposed the use of objective methods and measurements based on neuroscience. One of the challenges to be faced in the development (...) of a performance-based methodology to measure leadership skills is how to generate real-life situations with triggers that allow us to study management competencies under controlled laboratory conditions. A way to address this question is to take advantage of virtual environments to recreate real-life situations that might arise in performance-based assessments. We propose virtual reality (VR) as a very promising tool to observe various leadership related behavioral patterns during dynamic, complex and realistic situations. By seamlessly embedding assessment methods into virtual learning environments, VR can provide objective assessment methods with high ecological validity. VR also holds unlimited opportunities for leadership training providing subjects with intelligent tutoring systems that adapts situations in real time according to the observed behaviors. (shrink)

Queer critics talk more and more about a normalization process whereby early lesbian and gay struggles against traditional values and institutions are being replaced by the pursuit of inclusion within mainstream society. The ‘assimilation’ of same-sex practices, critics contend, lowers the critical potential of homosexuals’ claims and marginalizes other less acceptable forms of sexualities. The present article contributes to this literature by tracing the roots and dynamics of normalization. It makes the claim that heteronormative categories infiltrated homosexual culture well before (...) the spread of neoconservative gay movements and produced inner distinctions intended to exclude those who did not fit intergroup classifications. It then maintains that this analysis casts some interesting light on the current quest for gay rights, and in particular for same-sex marriage. By doing so, this article aims to tackle the broader question of how to produce societal changes able to circumvent rearguard reactions from the dominant culture. (shrink)

En este trabajo se estudia la lectura hermenéutica de la obra freudiana que propusieron pensadores como Habermas o Ricoeur, y su continuación en el llamado "psicoanálisis narrativo", no sólo desde el punto de vista epistemológico sino también como una importante contribución a la discusión sobre la identidad personal.

The bumpy road to institutionalism : Schmitt's way-out of decisionism -- Exploring Schmitt's institutionalism : institutions and normality -- Institutionalist decisionism : law as the shelter of society -- Institution and identity : reassessing Schmitt's political theory -- Schmitt vs. Kelsen : the social ontology of legal life -- Schmitt vs. Hauriou : the politicization of institutionalism -- Schmitt vs. Romano : institutionalism without pluralism? -- Schmitt vs. Mortati : the concretization of the concrete order -- The impossibility of legal (...) indeterminacy -- The inconceivability of legal pluralism. (shrink)

La reconstrucción sistemática y el análisis crítico de la teoría husserliana acerca de la felicidad y de su búsqueda no es tarea fácil. Ello se debe tanto a dificultades terminológicas como a la dispersión en las distintas obras del fundador del método fenomenológico. Este trabajo pretende presentar los elementos fundamentales de una teoría tal en el contexto de la teleología de la vida moral. La felicidad entendida como vida dichosa en su totalidad (seliges Gesamtleben) en la cual todas las intenciones (...) –tanto las teóricas como las éticas– son cumplidas, satisfechas, constituye un ideal, inalcanzable de hecho, que guía la vida moral. Sin embargo, según Husserl, es posible acercarse, aunque sea asintóticamente, a dicha felicidad, una felicidad que también tiene una dimensión intersubjetiva que reside en el cumplimiento de los fines de una comunidad ética. (shrink)

We give a version of L´os’ ultraproduct result for forcing in Kripke structures in a first-order language with equality and discuss ultrafilters in a topology naturally associated to a partial order. The presentation also includes background material so as to make the exposition accessible to those whose main interest is Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence and/or Philosophy.

Transhumanism is a scientific and philosophical movement that proposes to overcome, through new technologies, the restrictions imposed on us by our biological condition. Some transhumanists assume that the struggle against natural limits could lead to a radical change in our body or even to its replacement. Other authors, such as Nicholas Agar, propose a moderate enhancement that does not exceed the framework of what we understand to be human. In this article, I will offer a plausible interpretation of the project (...) of human enhancement from a Thomistic perspective. To carry out my analysis, I will focus on three fundamental metaphysical and anthropological questions: How do advocates of radical enhancement understand the relationship between limits, imperfections and evils in human nature? How is this relationship understood from moderate positions? And Is any of these proposals compatible with Aquinas’ anthropology? I will conclude that the identification of limits with imperfections and evils assumed by radical positions is incompatible with Aquinas’ anthropology. Nevertheless, this does not entail that any bio-modification is unacceptable. Aquinas’ peculiar metaphysics, together with its anthropology in which the natural, the supernatural and the preternatural realms intertwine, can offer an interesting framework to assess the human enhancement project. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article offers an unconventional interpretation of Carl Schmitt’s conception of the political. It first identifies two alternative readings – an ‘exceptionalist’ and a ‘concretist’ one – to make the claim that in the late 1920s he laid the foundations for a theory of politics that overcame the flaws of his theory of exception. It then explains why the concretist reading provides an insightful key to Schmitt’s take on the relationship between politics and law as a whole. Despite this, the (...) chief aim of this analysis is not interpretive. Rather, the article claims that such a paradigm change was related to Schmitt’s pondering on the elements that were menacing to draw the experience of modern statehood to an end even more seriously than any upheavals and revolutions. For he came to the conclusion that the mere claim to political self-sufficiency on the part on non-state social entities was able to defy the idea of the state as the political entity par excellence. While these reflections urged Schmitt to reformulate many features of his conception of the political, the article contends that this particular juncture in his production sheds light on a crucial feature of contemporary politics. (shrink)

The corpus of Pyramids Texts expresses in different ways the means by which the pharaoh achieved the transfiguration and integrated himself into the world of the gods. There are numerous references relating the deceased with Osiris, in direct form or indirectly. Among them, the contents of PT 219 reach the most significant degree given the large number of references to Osiris and his circle, integral theological tenor of osirian recomposition, and the references to geography related to Osiris, among others. This (...) study intends to analyze carefully the PT 219, framing the relationship between the Pharaoh and Osiris in the context of a larger liturgy. Then, and as conclusion, I seek to explain how this declaration can be a direct antecedent of the relationship of Re and Osiris in the New Kingdom Books of the Netherworld. (shrink)

The debate between the pure or fundamentalist branch of mathematics and the applied one induces to discuss dispassionately the links between the queen of sciences and the development of technology. To avoid the existing difficulty in separating the concrete daily problems from the conceptual and theoretic reflections, it generally produces good results to show some elements of the relations between mathematics and teehnology. The autonomous position, which characterizes the mathematics of absolute freedom, clashes with the quick development of technology, which (...) creates a new structure of mathematics. This development produces a pennanent interrogation about what is building and developing anyone who calls himself a mathematician. (shrink)

The requirement of mutual justification (MJ) is one or the fundamental ideas shared by some of the most influential deliberative theories of democracy. The aim of the present paper is to defend the plausibility of MJ against two possible objections. The first one states that MJ involves the commitment to a controversial conception of the notion of justification, which is incompatible with what is commonly understood by the epistemic justification of a belief. The second objection claims that satisfying MJ undermines (...) the epistemic quality of political deliberation. (shrink)

We introduce the Profinite Hull functor of special groups, showing that it gives rise to a new local - global principle, the subform reflection property. We also indicate applications of this principle to the abstract algebraic theory of quadratic forms.

The humanist Giovanni Giovano Pontano wrote five dialogues, although only two of them were published during his lifetime. The last one, entitled Aegidius in honor of Giles of Viterbo, represents a conversation held in the context of the “Accademia Pontaniana” between a series of speakers who discuss the role of eloquence, the importance of combining sacred letters with profane ones, astrology, the immortality of the soul and the Aristotelian philosophical lexicon. We present an introduction to the main topics of this (...) dialogue which accompany the Spanish translation of the Aegidiusincluded in this issue. (shrink)

This article problematizes the recent comeback of the exceptionalist jargon as it is conjured by both critics and sympathizers. While in the last decades governments across the globe had recourse to emergency measures to cope with far-reaching emergencies, from terrorism to the COVID-19 pandemic, the received view has it that political power takes advantage of states of emergency as they put themselves in the position to circumvent constitutional limitations. Carl Schmitt is claimed to be the major advocate of this conception (...) of emergency politics in that he elaborated on the concept of the state of exception as the heart of the state political power. This article contends that the received view is doubly wrong. First, soon after his espousal of exceptionalism, Schmitt realized that emergency legislation is an ineffective and costly governmental device that should be transitory and is as unstable as the crisis it is meant to overcome. Second, the received view neglects how Schmitt came to his model of ultraconservative substantive constitutionalism as he maintained that the main task of politics is to protect the normative life of a limited set of state-sponsored institutions as well as the substantive contents they produce. (shrink)

Different cell lineages growing in microgravity undergo a spontaneous transition leading to the emergence of two distinct phenotypes. By returning these populations in a normal gravitational field, the two phenotypes collapse, recovering their original configuration. In this review, we hypothesize that, once the gravitational constraint is removed, the system freely explores its phenotypic space, while, when in a gravitational field, cells are “constrained” to adopt only one favored configuration. We suggest that the genome allows for a wide range of “possibilities” (...) but it is unable per se to choose among them: the emergence of a specific phenotype is enabled by physical constraints that drive the system toward a preferred solution. These findings may help in understanding how cells and tissues behave in both development and cancer. In microgravity, cells undergo spontaneous and reversible transitions between different phenotypes. In the absence of physical constraints, living systems could yield bi-stable decisions. On the contrary, physical ‘boundaries’ constrain cells to acquire only a specific configuration by selecting and shaping different gene expression patterns provided by the intrinsic genetic stochasticity. (shrink)

German lawyer and political scientist Karl Loewenstein is generally regarded as the originator of the militant democracy paradigm. In a series of articles in the mid and late 1930s, he argued that constitutional democracies should pre-emptively defend themselves against movements and parties that were seeking to undermine them. More recently, another father of the paradigm has been identified in the controversial figure of Carl Schmitt. Before his despicable and opportunistic support for the Nazi regime at the end of 1933, he (...) advocated a model of authoritarian democracy based on fundamental constitutional contents that should be made impervious to legislative change. This article examines the different models of disciplined and authoritarian democracy proposed by these authors. While both advocated measures that could inhibit the activity of parliamentary majorities composed mainly of parties opposed to the state constitutional structure, Schmitt, more than Loewenstein, made the point that the defence of democracy requires subscribing to substantive values and principles and entrenching them. The juxtaposition of these models makes it clear that militant democracy not only recommends the protection of certain procedures but also entails a normative standard comprising substantive contents. This helps to highlight the unstated normative burdens of democratic militancy. (shrink)

The guerrilla led by Fidel Castro and the political implications of his triumph in 1959 constitute a widely researched object of study. This text seeks to offer a reading of US responses through the construction of a geopolitical code, which aims to neutralise the revolutionary inspiration produced by the Cuban example in Latin America. The analysis draws on a series of primary sources to highlight the political, economic and diplomatic strands that shape White House foreign policy not only towards Cuba, (...) but also towards the whole of the region. (shrink)

Tomando apoyo en la rotunda sugerencia especulativa de una obra de arte contemporánea, el trabajo examina la aspiración al sentido de la declaración de que «la vida es deseo», un ejemplo cualquiera de Lebensphilosophie, desde la crítica wittgensteiniana del discurso filosófico, con el Tractatus y las Investigaciones como sucesivo telón de fondo. Se llega por este camino a la conclusión de que el vitalismo sería constitutivamente unsinnig. Pero habría otros fragmentos de la obra del filósofo vienés que nos harían ver (...) que podría contener una suerte de «verdad» estética, con lo que terminamos ensayando una apelación al criterio nietzscheano de verdad con la esperanza de poder entender mejor la cuestión. (shrink)

This paper explores the body-schematic and body-imaginative processes that underlie individuals’ participation in the public sphere via religious media ecologies. Utilising embodied cognition and social critique, the authors outline how subaltern counterpublics make use of the body to enact micro-oppositions to mainstream discourses. The paper also discloses the origins of higher objectivities (identity, sense of togetherness, justice, plausibility, opposition and openness) in embodiment. Discussing counterpublics through the prism of embodied cognition, as found in Latin religious media ecologies, constitutes a valuable (...) alternative to the logocentric understanding of public consent. While the dominant discourse privileges abstract formal cognition, Latino subalterns use bodily, affective and enactive affordances given by religious media ecologies. The latter offer affordances and alternative strategies for enacting social imagination, bridging the personal and the public in physically choreographed joint intentions. Embodied participation suggests a constitutive process of public meaning that makes use of the body as the most fundamental medium of communication. (shrink)