What enables individually simple insects like ants to act with such precision and purpose as a group? How do trillions of individual neurons produce something as extraordinarily complex as consciousness? What is it that guides self-organizing structures like the immune system, the World Wide Web, the global economy, and the human genome? These are just a few of the fascinating and elusive questions that the science of complexity seeks to answer. In this remarkably accessible and companionable book, leading complex systems (...) scientist Melanie Mitchell provides an intimate, detailed tour of the sciences of complexity, a broad set of efforts that seek to explain how large-scale complex, organized, and adaptive behavior can emerge from simple interactions among myriad individuals. Comprehending such systems requires a wholly new approach, one that goes beyond traditional scientific reductionism and that re-maps long-standing disciplinary boundaries. Based on her work at the Santa Fe Institute and drawing on its interdisciplinary strategies, Mitchell brings clarity to the workings of complexity across a broad range of biological, technological, and social phenomena, seeking out the general principles or laws that apply to all of them. She explores as well the relationship between complexity and evolution, artificial intelligence, computation, genetics, information processing, and many other fields. Richly illustrated and vividly written, Complexity : A Guided Tour offers a comprehensive and eminently comprehensible overview of the ideas underlying complex systems science, the current research at the forefront of this field, and the prospects for the field's contribution to solving some of the most important scientific questions of our time. (shrink)

Lakebrink, B. La interpretación existencial del concepto tomista del acto de ser.--Inciarte, F. El problema de la verdad en la filosofía actual y en Santo Tomás.--Millán Puelles, A. El ser y el deber.--Beck, H. Dialéctica materialista y acto de ser tomista.--Pieper, J. La criatura humana.--García López, J. Armonía entre lo natural y lo sobrenatural en Tomás de Aquino.--Gherardini, B. La tradición agustiniana en la síntesis tomista.--Illanes, J. L. La sabiduría teológica.--Clavel, L. La metafísica como instrumento de la ciencia teológica.--García de (...) Haro, R. La noción teológica de ley natural.--Mateo Seco, L. F. Muerte y pecado original en la doctrina de Santo Tomás de Aquino.--Rodríguez, P. La resurrección de Cristo en el pensamiento teológico de Santo Tomás de Aquino.--Haerdelin, A. Dos caminos para aproximarse a la teología sacramentaria de Santo Tomás de Aquino.--Miralles, A. La noción de sacramento en Santo Tomás. (shrink)

This article deals with public manifestations of Catholic religious officials, members of the hierarchy and recognized laity, in the context of the discussion of the National Education Plan - PNE. The focus of the analysis is a condemnation of what they call "gender ideology", present in the proposal document. Such manifestations are the reaffirmation of a conception of human beings as subject to the inexorable "laws of nature" that determine a social order marked by the rigid distinction of roles assigned (...) to women and men. The texts published at the time reveal changes and continuities in the Catholic discourse in its reference to "nature", understood in its biological materiality, as an unswerving fact of human reality, consisting in two sexes must unite under the "natural order". Gender theories are blamed by family disintegration, for providing support to new understandings of humanity, no longer based on bipolarity: men / women. A non extensive dossier of these texts formed the basis for the proposed analyzes. (shrink)

Quine’s criticism of the notion of analyticity applies, at best, to Carnap’s notion, not to those of Frege or Husserl. The failure of logicism is also the failure of Frege’s definition of analyticity, but it does not even touch Husserl’s views, which are based on logical form. However, some relatively concrete number-theoretic statements do not admit such a formalization salva veritate. A new definition of analyticity based not on syntactical but on semantical logical form is proposed and argued for.

As we become more aware of the potential causes and consequences of climate change we are left wondering: who is responsible? Climate change has the potential to harm large portions of the global population and, arguably, is already doing so. Further, climate change is argued to be human-caused. If this is true, then it seems to be the case that we can analyze climate change in terms of responsibility. I argue that we can approach environmental harms, such as climate change, (...) through a theory of collective responsibility. I propose an account of reductive collective responsibility that can apply to the unstructured collective causing climate change and determine what we are each individually morally responsible for. To avoid the critiques of reductive collective responsibility for large unstructured harms, I propose we separate the determination of membership and eligibility for responsibility from the attribution of responsibility. Through this method, I can speak to the individual responsibility of each member who contributes to climate change without holding them responsible for that which is outside their control. (shrink)

While the Web Ontology Language (OWL) provides a mechanism to import ontologies, this mechanism is not always suitable. Current editing tools present challenges for working with large ontologies an...

Research studying the effects of non-financial goals on stakeholder relationships remains inconclusive, with scholars disagreeing on which goals increase or decrease a firm’s proactive stakeholder engagement (PSE). Instead of examining which goals act as forces for good or evil, we shift the focus of recent discussions by emphasizing the mechanisms that can explain the positive and negative stakeholder outcomes of non-financial goals under the umbrella of one theoretical lens. We do so by introducing an ethics of care perspective. Specifically, we (...) first show that four of the five most distinctive non-financial goals of family owners jointly stipulate care-based morality, which likely enhances PSE. However, we subsequently argue that one goal, namely, the wish to exert power and influence, interacts with other goals and related care-based morality to lower PSE. Finally, we show how female family directors temper these interactions. Our insights into the additive and interactive effects of non-financial goals on PSE contribute to corporate social responsibility research, to the organizational goal literature, to family business studies and to work drawing on care ethics in management studies. (shrink)

This book sets out to generate new ways of reflecting ethically about the purposes and values of contemporary higher education in relation to agency, learning, public values and democratic life, and the pedagogies which support these.

We examine the relation between worker substance abuse and workplace fraud in a sample of medical doctors. Relative to their peers, we observe that doctors engaging in substance abuse are between 50 and 100 times more likely to commit fraud in a given year. This result is consistent with research suggesting that substance abuse both creates financial pressures and impairs the functioning of cognitive self-regulatory mechanisms. Our results are robust in within-subject tests and between-subject tests, as well as in tests (...) using instrumental variables that exploit exogenous variation in the state-level availability of opioids, a commonly abused substance. (shrink)

Nishitani deems Nietzsche a nihilist, but they both sought to overcome idealism. This shared commitment has normative and descriptive implications for the relationship between affect and history. Normatively, Nishitani praises Nietzsche for thinking history passionately. Descriptively, this praise suggests a shared belief that affectivity is in some significant respect constituted by historical inheritance. For these reasons, Nietzsche’s conception of affect and his genealogical inquiry can be part of the problem of nihilism but also integral to its solution. I make this (...) case through Nishitani’s analysis of Nietzsche’s historical-existential standpoint. From this standpoint, I revisit the nearly thirty-year debate over Nishitani’s critique of Nietzsche to argue that Nishitani’s view of Nietzsche as a consummate nihilist has a bivalent significance. On the one hand, Nishitani needs Nietzsche’s thought to negate nihilistic conceptions of affect derived from Hegel and Feuerbach. On the other hand, Nietzsche’s negation appears to remain limited by an abstract conception of space, which would impede the full liberation of affect from nihilism. (shrink)

This article offers an argument of genocide denial as an injustice perpetrated not only against direct victims and survivors of genocide, but also against future members of the victim group. In particular, I argue that in cases of persistent and systematic denial, i.e. denialism, it perpetrates an epistemic injustice against them: testimonial oppression. First, I offer an account of testimonial oppression and introduce Kristie Dotson’s notion of testimonial smothering as one form of testimonial oppression, a mechanism of coerced silencing particularly (...) pertinent to genocide denialism. Secondly, I turn to the epistemology of genocide denialism and, using the example of Turkey’s denialism of the Armenian genocide, show how it presents what Linda Martín Alcoff calls a substantive practice of ignorance. Thirdly, I apply these considerations to individual practices of genocide denial and analyse the particular characteristics of testimony on genocide, the speaker vulnerabilities involved and the conditions under which hearers will reliably fail to meet the dependencies of a speaker testifying to genocide. Finally, I explore the harms that testimonial oppression perpetrates on members of the victim group, insofar as it systematically deprives them of epistemic recognition. (shrink)

The present collection of seventeen papers, most of them already published in international philosophical journals, deals both with issues in the philosophy of logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of language and epistemology. The first part contains critical assessments and somewhat deviant renderings of the work of two seminal philosophers, Frege and Husserl, as well as of the young Carnap and Kripke. The second part contains analyses of central issues in the philosophy of logic, the philosophy of mathematics and (...) semantics, including arguments on behalf of Platonism in the philosophy of mathematics, a defense of second-order logic, a new definition of analyticity, a sketch of a semantics for mathematical statements and a critique of Kripke s possible world semantics for modal logic.". (shrink)

El presente artículo traza una revisión de lo que actualmente se entiende por ciencia, arte y tecnología para poder mostrar cómo la ingeniería moderna y en particular la ingeniería civil, es un compendio de los tres componentes, siendo el medio necesario para la sostenibilidad ambiental y social hoy requeridas. La ingeniería se enfrenta a problemas y sigue un método, que no es exclusivamente científico. Necesita la aproximación al arte y el ingeniero debe contar con una formación humanística, de contenido humano (...) significativo, que lo proteja del excesivo tecnicismo ya que se mueve en el entorno de lo real, no del laboratorio. La investigación bibliográfica y documental de la historia de los distintos conceptos permite pensar la ingeniería desde la filosofía y tiene como objetivo proponer que la llamada perspectiva CATI3 (Ciencia-Arte-Tecnología-Ingeniería) sea el vehículo de aproximación al concepto de ingeniería e interpretar sus relaciones con la tecnología, el arte y la ciencia en su proyección a la sociedad. (shrink)

The three funtions of vegetative life could serve to understand three gnoseological positions. Knowledge as if -als ob- it were nutrition, growth and generation, these three positions have been held by Kant, scholasticism and idealism respectively.

Rigorously studying the inexpressible expression provoked by the silenced testimony of the Holocaust survivor, in Jean-François Lyotard's The Differend, and the religious faithful, in Pseudo-Dionysius' The Divine Names, proves to dissolve the apparent heterogeneity of postmodernism and Neoplatonist Christian mysticism and open radical new lines of dialogue. Expressing the Inexpressible critically evaluates each thinker and tradition, rethinks witnessing, testimony, sublimity, and apophaticism, and then engages them together to forge a new reading of silence and eros.

The article argues for an alliance of the capability approach developed by Amartya Sen with ideas from critical pedagogy for undergraduate university education which develops student agency and well being on the one hand, and social change towards greater justice on the other. The purposes of a university education in this article are taken to include both intrinsic and instrumental purposes and to therefore include personal development, economic opportunities and becoming educated citizens. Core ideas from the capability approach are outlined, (...) with examples, before possible articulations of capability and Sen's notion of process freedom with critical pedagogy are investigated. It is argued that each approach has something to offer when brought alongside as ‘critical capability pedagogies’, which seek to enhance and expand student experiences of learning and their ‘valuable beings and doings’. Finally core capabilities in a university education are considered and some of the problems of domesticating the capability approach addressed. (shrink)

How does the body influence the way we see the world? _Imagination, Illness and Injury_ examines the psychological factors behind perceptual limitations and distortions and links a broad range of somatic manifestations with their resolution. Melanie Starr Costello applies Jungian theory to a variety of cases, attributing psychosomatic phenomena to cognitive processes that are common to us all. She analyses the role of illness in several life narratives, and interprets the appearance of somatic phenomena during important phases of analytic (...) treatment. Together these case narratives present a significant challenge to established views of psychosomatics. Subjects covered include: archetypal constrictions of identity somatic elements of perception the psyche-soma split. _Imagination, Illness and Injury _brings a fresh perspective to the understanding and treatment of the psychotherapy client as a psycho-somatic unity. Jungian analysts, psychoanalysts, and psychotherapists will greatly benefit from the clinical applications of archetypal theory presented here. (shrink)

Nature, not books Content Type Journal Article Category Book Review Pages 1-3 DOI 10.1007/s11016-011-9564-y Authors Melanie Keene, Homerton College, Hills Road, Cambridge, CB2 8PH UK Journal Metascience Online ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796.

Given the profound influence of social media and emerging evidence of its effects on human behavior and health, bioethicists have an important role to play in the development of professional standards of conduct for health professionals using social media and in the design of online systems themselves. In short, social media is a bioethics issue that has serious implications for medical practice, research, and public health. Here, we inventory several ethical issues across four areas at the intersection of social media (...) and health: the impact of social networking sites on the doctor‐patient relationship, the development of e‐health platforms to deliver care, the use of online data and algorithms to inform health research, and the broader public health consequences of widespread social media use. In doing so, we review discussions of these topics and emphasize the need for bioethics to focus more deeply on the ways online technology platforms are designed and implemented. We argue that bioethicists should turn their attention to the ways in which consumer engagement, bias, and profit maximization shape online content and, consequently, human behavior and health. We also offer a set of recommendations and suggest future directions for addressing ethical challenges in these domains. (shrink)

Within the field of medical ethics, discussions related to public health have mainly concentrated on issues that are closely tied to research and practice involving technologies and professional services, including vaccination, screening, and insurance coverage. Broader determinants of population health have received less attention, although this situation is rapidly changing. Against this backdrop, our specific contribution to the literature on ethics and law vis-à-vis promoting population health is to open up the ubiquitous presence of pets within cities and towns for (...) further discussion. An expanding body of research suggests that pet animals are deeply relevant to people’s health (negatively and positively). Pet bylaws adopted by town and city councils have largely escaped notice, yet they are meaningful to consider in relation to everyday practices, social norms, and cultural values, and thus in relation to population health. Nevertheless, not least because they pivot on defining pets as private property belonging to individual people, pet bylaws raise emotionally charged ethical issues that have yet to be tackled in any of the health research on pet ownership. The literature in moral philosophy on animals is vast, and we do not claim to advance this field here. Rather, we pragmatically seek to reconcile philosophical objections to pet ownership with both animal welfare and public health. In doing so, we foreground theorizations of personhood and property from sociocultural anthropology. (shrink)

Ce texte est écrit à quatre mains : Tamara Dmitrieva est sociologue, spécialiste de l’enfance sourde, qui s’est découverte comme entendante par la rencontre avec des sourd·e·s, et Mélanie Joseph, artiste-chercheuse, sourde signante et implantée, vivant avec le trouble dans sa lutte d’éloignement de la doctrine oraliste. Cet article donne à voir des perspectives de leurs recherches respectives qui s’y entrelacent, en créant un espace de réflexion sur la condition sourde et les possibilités de faire exister les diversités dans la (...) société de demain, selon les perspectives sourdiennes. (shrink)

Melanie Sarzano | : In this paper, I compare cases of self-deception and cases of pragmatic encroachment and argue that confronting these cases generates a dilemma about rationality. This dilemma turns on the idea that subjects are motivated to avoid costly false beliefs, and that both cases of self-deception and cases of pragmatic encroachment are caused by an interest to avoid forming costly false beliefs. Even though both types of cases can be explained by the same belief-formation mechanism, only (...) self-deceptive beliefs are irrational: the subjects depicted in high-stakes cases typically used in debates on pragmatic encroachment are, on the contrary, rational. If we find ourselves drawn to this dilemma, we are forced either to accept—against most views presented in the literature—that self-deception is rational or to accept that pragmatic encroachment is irrational. Assuming that both conclusions are undesirable, I argue that this dilemma can be solved. In order to solve this dilemma, I suggest and review several hypotheses aimed at explaining the difference in rationality between the two types of cases, the result of which being that the irrationality of self-deceptive beliefs does not entirely depend on their being formed via a motivationally biased process. | : Dans cet article, je compare les cas classiques de duperie de soi aux cas que l’on trouve dans les débats sur la question de l’empiètement pragmatique et défends l’idée selon laquelle ces deux types de cas peuvent être compris comme étant produits par un même mécanisme visant à éviter la formation de croyances fausses coûteuses. Cette comparaison nous mène naturellement à former un dilemme à propos de la rationalité des croyances. Le dilemme repose sur l’idée que bien que ce mécanisme mène à la formation de croyances irrationnelles dans les cas de duperie de soi, il ne semble pas affecter la rationa-lité du sujet dans les cas d’empiètement pragmatique : alors que les sujets autodupés sont irrationnels, les sujets décrits dans les cas d’empiètement pragmatique ne le sont pas. Pour résoudre ce dilemme sans rejeter les présupposés selon lesquels les croyances issues de la duperie de soi sont irrationnelles et que les cas sur lesquels repose l’empiètement pragmatique sont rationnels, je propose plusieurs hypothèses visant à expliquer cette différence, prouvant ainsi que ce dilemme n’est qu’apparent et que l’irrationalité de la duperie de soi ne peut uniquement dépendre de ce mécanisme sous l’influence de considérations pratiques. (shrink)

The dynamics/computation debate recalls a similar debate in the evolutionary biology community concerning the relative primacy of theories of structure versus theories of change. A full account of cognition will require a rapprochement between such theories and will include both computational and dynamical notions. The key to making computation relevant to cognition is not making it analog, but rather understanding how functional information-processing structures can emerge in complex dynamical systems.

This article introduces the symposium “Toward a Philosophy of Blockchain,” which provides a philosophical contemplation of blockchain technology, the digital ledger software underlying cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, for the secure transfer of money, assets, and information via the Internet without needing a third-party intermediary. The symposium offers philosophical scholarship on a new topic, blockchain technology, from a variety of perspectives. The philosophical themes discussed include mathematical models of reality, signification, and the sociopolitical institutions that structure human life and interaction. The (...) symposium also investigates the metaphilosophical theme of how to create a philosophy of anything, specifically a new topic such as blockchain technology. Repeated themes are identified, in all areas of philosophical inquiry, and conceptual resources are elaborated to contribute to a philosophical understanding of blockchain technology. Thus, philosophy as a metaphilosophical approach is shown to be able to provide an understanding of the conceptual, theoretical, and foundational dimensions of novelty and emergence in the world, with a particular focus on blockchain technology. (shrink)

In this paper, key concepts from the philosophy of critical realism and meta-Reality are used to develop an art education research project that can enhance the freedom of art students in their art work and, potentially, contribute to the promotion of emancipation beyond the world of art work. In the process of developing this project, the author engages in a two-way interrogation of both concepts and empirical research. The stratified model of reality, the ontological status of absence and the concepts (...) of transcendental identification, transcendental agency and the ground-state have informed decisions about data collection and contributed to the analysis of data in this study. The research results offer some empirical support for the philosophy of critical realism and meta-Reality, whilst also identifying potential inconsistencies. A further original feature of the paper is that it draws on the flow theory of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi to complement Roy Bhaskar's account of the ground-state and of the nature of free-flowing activity; also using neuroscience to provide some neurological evidence for the differences between mindful and spontaneous activity. It is anticipated that the cross-analysis between cases resulting from the two-way interchange between theory and empirical evidence could help to generate a model for ‘unblocking the creative block’, experienced not only by students practising art-making, but also by the wider community. (shrink)