A previous speaker has compared man's earth with communal quarters. The comparison makes its point but is probably not quite exact. If one were to look for a more accurate simile of the same nature, one might say that mankind is now living in a bus following an exponential highway. In front of it looms either an insurmountable hill or a chasm, and the passengers on the bus see the future through the prism of their emotional mood. Some insist that (...) it stop and that they move into caves, while others urge ascent into outer space or placing hopes on the "perhaps" of self-regulation. These extreme points of view have in common the fact that they are based on a feeling of hopeless helplessness. Terrestrial caves are not much better than those in outer space, while existence on other cosmic bodies requires not only the creation of an earthly environment in the ordinary meaning of the word but of artificial gravitation as well, or else the weakened muscles would be unable to support the mortal bodies of the "lunatics" and "martians." To stop dead or slow things down with a yellow light is also impossible. To stop is the equivalent of death or vegetating anabiotically, since natural systems cannot function under conditions approximating idling speed. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Interactivity and Enaction in Human Cognition” by Matthew Isaac Harvey, Rasmus Gahrn-Andersen & Sune Vork Steffensen. Upshot: To sort out their differences with enactive theory, interactivity theorists would do better to focus on operational closure only insofar as it constitutes a condition of intrinsic normativity or self-regulated coupling.

Material and nonmaterial cultural values are the forms that the social division of labor takes in its results, which embody qualitatively different forms corresponding to various human needs. Therefore, the question of the emergence of the comprehensively developed human being in communist society is also a question of the social division of labor. The conditions of labor of a developed socialist society are the results of the world historical development of social praxis, in which the subject is not the individual (...) standing alone but "the creativity of the masses," social labor in combination. In this connection the social division of labor in the process of development toward communism must be seen not merely as the condition for production of things differing in the way they are consumed but also primarily as the production of individuals themselves: of their capacities and talents for creative, socially useful labor. (shrink)

La psicología contemporánea parece caracterizarse desde sus propios orígenes por la multiplicidad de sus contenidos, además de por su casi infinita fragmentación en corrientes encontradas. Esto crea importantes dificultades, no sólo a quienes quieran tener una primera aproximación, sino también a los especialistas, que muchas veces no llegan a una opinión suficientemente clara sobre la naturaleza epistemológica de la psicología, ni sobre su unidad disciplinar. Esta obra, sin descuidar el problema global, se centra en un aspecto particular: el que presenta (...) la praxis de la psicología, en particular la psicoterapia y sus fundamentos teóricos. Se pone especial interés en una visión crítica del psicoanálisis, punto de referencia inevitable (positivo o negativo) para la mayoría de las corrientes de psicoterapia. Pero este intento de esclarecimiento epistemológico y práctico se lleva a cabo desde un punto de vista original: a la luz del pensamiento de Santo Tomás de Aquino (1225-1274), conocido como uno de los más grandes teólogos y filósofos de la Iglesia Católica. Las calidades del Aquinate como epistemológico son sobradamente conocidas. Menos conocida es su faceta de psicólogo, que esta obra quiere poner de manifiesto con gran detalle para evidenciar la actualidad de las líneas maestras de la psicología de Santo Tomás, como también la posibilidad de practicar hoy la psicología bajo la guía fundamental del Doctor Humanitatis.\n. (shrink)

Turning to the history of philosophical thought, I am surprised by the question what is knowledge? I am surprised because usually we do not reflect on our own knowledge; it appears to us as something obvious. And yet this question has disturbed people since the beginning philosophical thinlung. Moreover, at the time knowledge appeared as a subject full of aporiasintellectual difficulties and obvious contradictions of judgment. This led to the humiliating doubt that man could know anything about the world in (...) which he lived and, thus, exposed, so to speak, the painful nerve of the cognitive aspirations of human reason. (shrink)