Nuestro tiempo es el de la caída en el presente. Es imposible construir nuevos pactos sociales y, por tanto, las oportunidades para imaginar el futuro son pocas. No hay utopías, sólo un pragmatismo que apuesta por lo útil. Nuestra sociedad sufre el desencanto de la democracia, la lógica del mercado y la globalización, incapaz de producir ideas para el porvenir ¿Cuál es la salida? Richard Rorty diría: no es la razón lo que cambia las cosas, sino la imaginación. A partir (...) de este principio, este libro hace un elogio del optimismo desencantado, donde las preguntas son más importantes que las respuestas ¿Cuál es el papel que las palabras juegan en el actual estado del arte? ¿De qué modo están conectados el mundo y la llamada República de las Letras? ¿Qué idea de generación tienen los escritores nacidos a partir de la década de los setenta? ¿Por qué niegan el concepto de colectivo? ¿Cuál es la relación entre política y literatura? ¿En qué momento el crítico se convirtió en redactor de obituarios? ¿La literatura forma parte del espectáculo? Éste es un ensayo sobre el lenguaje, la idea de generaciones y las estéticas de la literatura contemporánea; pero también es una denuncia que señala los mecanismos que han provocado el distanciamiento entre la creación y la acción, la ética y la estética, la literatura y el espacio público. (shrink)

Developing critical thinking ability is one of the main goals of medical education, in part because it enhances clinical reasoning, a vital competence in clinical practice. However, there is limited evidence suggesting ways to effectively teach critical thinking in the classroom. Here, we describe the use of a drama-based critical thinking classroom scenario. The study used a mixed-methods approach with both quantitative and qualitative analysis of questionnaire responses. Ninety-one medical students in Colombia were asked to identify and evaluate arguments regarding (...) a dilemma between ethics, social responsibility and scientific work presented in the play Should’ve by the Nobel laureate Roald Hoffmann. Chi square analyses of responses to closed-ended questions showed that the drama-based classroom scenario provided learners with opportunities to make decisions, and to identify and evaluate arguments from the play. Qualitative analysis of responses to open-ended questions confirmed these findings and illustrated the processes underlying the decisions. Students were able to evaluate arguments in an impartial way. Our findings support the use of drama-based scenarios in the classroom as an approach to fostering medical students’ critical thinking. This approach could contribute to a classroom pedagogy in which all students have an active role in responding to controversial questions, evaluating arguments and critically responding. This would support the development of critical thinking and promote deeper understanding of the dilemmas involved in scientific work. (shrink)

It is a widespread belief that the Kochen-Specker theorem imposes a contextuality constraint on the ontology of beables in quantum hidden variables theories. On the other hand, after Bell’s influential critique, the importance of von Neumann’s wrongly called ‘impossibility proof’ has been severely questioned. However, Max Jammer, Jeffrey Bub and Dennis Dieks have proposed insightful reassessments of von Neumann’s theorem: what it really shows is that hidden variables theories cannot represent their beables by means of Hermitian operators in Hilbert space. (...) Hereby I show that i) the very same constraint can be derived from Gleason’s theorem, and that ii) if we consider the import of von Neumann’s and Gleason’s theorems, the relevance of the Kochen-Specker theorem for hidden variables theories gets substantially weakened: it does not force them to be contextual in any interesting sense of the term. (shrink)

This paper presents and defends a way to add a transparent truth predicate to classical logic, such that and A are everywhere intersubstitutable, where all T-biconditionals hold, and where truth can be made compositional. A key feature of our framework, called STTT (for Strict-Tolerant Transparent Truth), is that it supports a non-transitive relation of consequence. At the same time, it can be seen that the only failures of transitivity STTT allows for arise in paradoxical cases.

It is common in political theory and practice to challenge normatively ambitious proposals by saying that their fulfillment is not feasible. But there has been insufficient conceptual exploration of what feasibility is, and very little substantive inquiry into why and how it matters for thinking about social justice. This paper provides one of the first systematic treatments of these issues, and proposes a dynamic approach to the relation between justice and feasibility that illuminates the importance of political imagination and dynamic (...) duties to expand agents’ power to fulfill ambitious principles of justice. (shrink)

Ideograms have great communicative value. They refer to concepts in a simple manner, easing the understanding of related ideas. Moreover, ideograms can simplify the often cumbersome notation used in the fields of Physics and physical Chemistry. Nonetheless only a few ideograms—like \ and Å—have been defined to date. In this work we propose that the scientific community follows the example of Mathematics—as well as that of oriental languages—and bestows a more important role upon ideograms. To support this thesis we propose (...) ideograms for essential concepts in Physics and Chemistry. They are designed to be intuitive, and their goal is to make equations easier to read and understand. Our symbols are included in a publicly available package. (shrink)

There has been much written of late on the topic of panentheism. Dissatisfied with many contemporary descriptions of “panentheism” and the related “pantheism,” which we feel arise out of theistic presuppositions, we produce our own definition of sorts, rooted in and paying respect to the term’s etymology and the concept’s roots in Indian religion and western philosophy. Furthermore, we consider and comment on the arguments and comments concerning panentheism’s definition and plausibility put forth by Göcke, Mullins, and Nickel.

What is a duty of justice? And how is it different from a duty of beneficence? We need a clear account of the contrast. Unfortunately, there is no consensus in the philosophical literature as to how to characterize it. Different articulations of it have been provided, but it is hard to identify a common core that is invariant across them. In this paper, I propose an account of how to understand duties of justice, explain how it contrasts with several proposals (...) as to how to distinguish justice and beneficence, respond to some objections and suggest further elaborations of it. The conceptual exploration pursued in this paper has practical stakes. A central aim is to propose and defend a capacious concept of justice that makes a direct discussion of important demands of justice (domestic and global) possible. Duties of justice can be positive besides negative, they can be imperfect as well as perfect, they can range over personal besides institutional contexts, they can include multiple associative reasons such us non-domination, non-exploitation and reciprocity, and they can even go beyond existing national, political, and economic associative frameworks to embrace strictly universal humanist concerns. We should reject ideological abridgments of the concept of justice that render these possibilities, and the important human interests and claims they may foster, invisible. (shrink)

After discussing the transformation of age-old agricultural practices that has been occurring since the mid nineteenth century, and its impact on the natural environment, I identify four features of technology that point to the ambiguity of the idea of "technological progress". These are linked to the intrinsic unpredictability of technological applications and have implications for evaluating technological risks. I then show that large scale technological applications and innovations - such as expanding the practice of smallpox inoculation in the second half (...) of the eighteenth century - occur in states of 'technological exception'. In them, values are suspended and rules, limits and security norms are absent; and, in the face of risks, losses and harm to health and environment that are occasioned by technological applications introduced in the name of economical progress , normal social inhibitions become suspended in the name of furthering the values of capital and market. In addition, I show that maintaining technological exception has favored, on the one hand, the development by large corporations of antiscientific practices that threaten the moral integrity of science by impeding the proper use of the scientific method for evaluating the consequences of using technologies that are protected by patents; and, on the other hand, under the cover of ignorance, continued deterioration of the environment that threatens the very survival of the human species. (shrink)

This article gives an overview of the mereological thought of the medieval philosopher and theologian Saint Thomas Aquinas. Until the 20th century mereology—the study of the relationship of whole and part—was not generally recognized as a distinct domain of philosophy and so Aquinas, like most of his contemporaries, has no single systematic treatment of it as a topic in its own right. However, a cohesive account of part‐whole relations can be pieced together from the various metaphysical, ethical and theological contexts (...) in which Aquinas deals with mereological issues. In this article, I give an account of both Aquinas's conceptual understanding of composition and his taxonomy of the different kinds of wholes and parts that there are. I end with comments on three marginal cases of mereological relationships in Aquinas's philosophy. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss the problem of scientific laws in general and laws of biology in particular. After reviewing the debate about the existence of laws in biology, I examine the subject under the light of the structuralist notion of a fundamental law and argue for the law of matching as the fundamental law of genetics.

We say that a sentence A is a permissive consequence of a set X of premises whenever, if all the premises of X hold up to some standard, then A holds to some weaker standard. In this paper, we focus on a three-valued version of this notion, which we call strict-to-tolerant consequence, and discuss its fruitfulness toward a unified treatment of the paradoxes of vagueness and self-referential truth. For vagueness, st-consequence supports the principle of tolerance; for truth, it supports the (...) requisite of transparency. Permissive consequence is non-transitive, however, but this feature is argued to be an essential component to the understanding of paradoxical reasoning in cases involving vagueness or self-reference. (shrink)

We present a self‐contained analysis of some reduction games, which characterise various natural subclasses of the first Baire class of functions ranging from and into 0‐dimensional Polish spaces. We prove that these games are determined, without using Martin's Borel determinacy, and give precise descriptions of the winning strategies for Player I. As an application of this analysis, we get a new proof of the Baire's lemma on pointwise convergence.

Three ethics program components, a code of ethics, ethics training initiatives and ethics-oriented performance appraisal content, were examined for their relationship to ethical intent using a sample of 525 employees from the Spanish financial services industry. As expected, all three components contributed to the prediction of ethical intent. Importantly, clusters of employees who reported experiencing distinct combinations of the program components were identified and compared for their level of ethical intent. Employees who perceived all three components to be strongly implemented (...) reported significantly higher levels of ethical intent relative to those who viewed the components as either all weakly implemented or not present. Combinations including training initiatives plus one other element had a similar impact to the fully implemented approach. Contrary to expectations, ethics-oriented performance appraisal content did not relate more strongly to ethical intent than codes of ethics. (shrink)

Although the simultaneous presence of multiple ambitions is inherent in hybrid venturing, pursuing social and/or environmental missions while securing commercial viability can generate ambivalence among stakeholders. In this study, we draw on the notion of “holism” to show how venture founders both embrace tensioned ambitions and sustain hybridity during critical venture development phases. Based on 6 years of data on The People’s Supermarket in the United Kingdom, we identify three distinct practices— fantasizing, bartering, and conjuring—used by founders to harness tensions (...) productively, without compromising their venture’s multiple ambitions. These practices demonstrate the founders’ ability to maintain a venture’s hybrid nature throughout the ideation, organizational, and scale-up phases, thereby shedding light on the application of “holism” within the realm of hybrid venturing. (shrink)

La "auralidad" se centra en las propiedades materiales y simbólicas del espacio percibidas a través de la escucha, brindando una perspectiva fértil para entender lo urbano. Este enfoque desafía la dicotomía convencional entre el espacio visual y el acústico al situarse en una intersección compleja entre ambos dominios, lo que implica una revisión crítica de las concepciones tradicionales del espacio. Por un lado, evidencia las relaciones de poder del visuocentrismo de los mapas estatales; por otro, resalta la naturaleza disruptiva y (...) no-euclidiana del espacio acústico. Desde esta perspectiva, se propone explorar la interrelación entre el espacio acústico y el visual, conceptualizando la auralidad de los lugares como una estética relacional y bicultural capaz de enriquecer la descripción del espacio urbano. Para llevar a cabo este objetivo, se utilizarán técnicas como los paseos sonoros, las fonografías y las cartografías reflexivas, mediante una investigación exploratoria centrada en el puerto de La Plata. (shrink)

Este artículo analiza el pesimismo desde una perspectiva ontológica. Para esto se analizan dos concepciones filosóficas que describan un “estado de cosas”, es decir, lecturas de la realidad en donde se manifieste la naturaleza decadente de la realidad: Schopenhauer y Nietzsche, por ejemplo. Para ello, se analizará la estructura ontológica de la realidad y su pertinencia con el suicidio: ¿el suicidio es conclusión necesaria del pesimismo? Luego, se analiza la ontología pluralista de Philipp Mainländer que defiende una postura a favor (...) del suicidio en contraposición de la ontología monista de Schopenhauer y la ontología pluralista de Nietzsche. Para finalizar con un análisis ontológico a partir de las tecnologías involucradas en la afirmación o negación del suicidio. (shrink)

Este trabajo discute una de las objeciones de N. Hall al análisis contrafactual de D. Lewis. Según Hall, los intentos de fortalecer el análisis contrafactual se apoyan en la aceptación de la transitividad, la localidad y el carácter intrínseco de las relaciones causales. Esto es problemático en cuanto el concepto de doble prevención evidencia tensiones entre estas tres tesis y el concepto de dependencia, central en el análisis de Lewis. Revisando uno de los ejemplos de Hall, se defiende que su (...) crítica al análisis contrafactual cumple parcialmente su objetivo en referencia a la localidad, ya que sólo una de las estructuras causales que Hall presenta acepta la dependencia y no la localidad, no tratándose de un típico caso de doble prevención. Finalmente se propone la denominación early doble prevention para los casos que aceptan la dependencia y no la localidad, y late doble prevention para los que aceptan ambas tesis. This paper discusses one of the objections made by N. Hall to D. Lewis's counterfactual analysis. According to Hall, the attempts to strengthen the counterfactual analysis are supported by the acceptance of transitivity, locality and intrinsic nature of causal relationships. This is problematic, as the concept of double prevention demonstrates the tensions existing among these three theses and the concept of dependence which is central in Lewis's analysis. By studying one of the examples given by Hall, we can sustain that his criticism to counterfactual analysis partially fulfills its goal in reference to locality, taking into account that only one of the causal structures exposed by Hall accept dependence but not locality and is not a typical example of double prevention. Finally we suggest the name of early double prevention for those cases that accept the dependency but not the locality, and late double prevention for those accepting both theses. (shrink)

Truthmaking without truthmakers (TWT, for short) is the thesis that although every true proposition is made true by reality, there need not be particular entities (like facts, states of affairs, or tropes) that make these propositions true. The first substantial part of this paper (section 2) is devoted to developing a particular version of TWT and at the same time defending TWT in general from arguments against it that have been advanced by orthodox truthmaker theorists. In the second part of (...) the paper (section 3) I argue that talk about truthmakers within the theory can be understood as metaphoric and as conveying valuable information about something other than the supposed truthmakers: about truthmaking. The aim of this paper is therefore twofold. On the one hand, I intend to present the view on truthmaking, a version of TWT, that I find most plausible in the light of the arguments for and against truthmaker theory. On the other hand, I argue that friends of TWT have good reason to adopt a figuralist approach to truthmaker theory, rather than rejecting it outright. (shrink)

Este trabajo rastrea la presencia de varias temáticas típicas del Barroco en el trabajo de Emmanuel Lévinas, en particular la idea de la vida como sueño y la idea del desengaño, interpretadas en el caso del filósofo francés en clave ontológica la primera y en clave ética la segunda. Igualmente se analiza el discurso levinasiano y su práctica de la fenomenología como estilo o escritura barroca, más en concreto como una «dramática de los fenómenos» o una puesta en escena de (...) los diversos conceptos a los que recurre y que sólo adquieren sentido desde la concreción de la situación fáctica en la que arraigan. Todo ello permitirá mostrar la pertinencia de su filosofía en una época neo-barroca. (shrink)

The bridge between psychiatry and neuroscience is not the only one we have to build; it is also necessary to narrow the gap between neuroscience and philosophy. This does not imply reducing the latter to the former or vice versa, but rather linking each other without eliminating their own characteristics. Taking that into account, Dan Zahavi’s phenomenology of mind can make a great contribution by presenting itself like a different option within philosophy of mind, which up until the last few (...) years was dominated by the analytic tradition. In this chapter I present Zahavi’s proposal in four steps. Firstly, I clarify the term phenomenology. This question is not accidental because nowadays this concept is used by diverse traditions and with different meanings. Secondly, I make the fundamental distinction between first-person-perspective—which corresponds to Phenomenology—and third-person-perspective—compatible with neuroscience. Thirdly, I explain the methodological stages assumed by Zahavi from the Husserlian tradition. These stages enable him to study from the first-person-perspective rigorously: epoché, phenomenological reduction, eidetic variation, and intersubjective verification. Finally, I develop the issue of naturalization of Phenomenology in order to establish a dialogue between science and philosophy. For Zahavi that naturalization does not necessarily imply reductionism, but can be understood as something necessary for a fruitful exchange between those disciplines. (shrink)