A comienzos del siglo XX, cuando el redescubrimiento de Oriente se había trocado en su colonización tras la I Guerra Mundial, la poesía del viaje y el reencuentro con gentes y paisajes parecían ya imposibles. De hecho, la literatura «clásica» del viaje a Oriente estaba ya más que acabada. Sin embargo, un accidente de la historia de la aviación española haría que el capitán Rafael Martínez Esteve, integrante de la patrulla que emprendió el viaje Madrid-Manila, viviera una trágica aventura (...) en el desierto jordano- iraquí. Fruto de esa experiencia sería un libro que es, al mismo tiempo que emocionante relato, descripción poética del desierto y la vida de los beduinos, sarcástica mirada a los poderes coloniales, y un amable epígono en la historia de la literatura española de viajes a Oriente.…. (shrink)

Joaquín M. Fuster is an eminent cognitive neuroscientist whose research over the last five decades has made fundamental contributions to our understanding of the neural structures underlying cognition and behaviour. This book provides his view on the eternal question of whether we have free will. Based on his seminal work on the functions of the prefrontal cortex in decision-making, planning, creativity, working memory, and language, Professor Fuster argues that the liberty or freedom to choose between alternatives is a function (...) of the cerebral cortex, under prefrontal control, in its reciprocal interaction with the environment. Freedom is therefore inseparable from that circular relationship. The Neuroscience of Freedom and Creativity is a fascinating inquiry into the cerebral foundation of our ability to choose between alternative actions and to freely lead creative plans to their goal. (shrink)

Curso evolutivo -- Anacronismo fehaciente -- La dictadura -- El Estado -- Federalismo -- Evolucion verdadera -- Cataclismo social -- Nuestra labor.

El esfuerzo de relacionar la situación social, política, económica y cultural del inicio del siglo XXI desde ámbitos de una racionalidad intercultural con los valores que emanan del Evangelio lleva a cuestionarnos realidades muy duras de nuestra sociedad actual. Nuestro mundo muestra de una forma evidente que vive en una situación de hechos inde-seables. Así nace una rueda de guerras que anuncian la intención de ser la última de ellas para generar más tarde otra guerra. Y ningún ser humano puede (...) permanecer impasible ante esta situación. Este trabajo se centra en acudir a planteamientos de la interculturalidad a la luz del Evangelio, que ofrece el contenido de valores universalmente reconocidos. Es decir, abordar el análisis de la realidad sin planteamientos culturales hegemónicos que desprecie por in-significante cualquier planteamiento de otra cultura o sólo valorar otra cultura en la medida en que se ajusta a los patrones del etnocentrismo occidental. Lo que exige apostar por valores universales críticos con los poderosos que frecuentemente “aprisionan la verdad con la injusticia”. (shrink)

Aún a falta de la imprescindible perspectiva temporal, se presentan aquí (1) una tesis sobre el movimiento 15M en su fase inicial de las acampadas: su discurso político en su fase de emergencia es un republicanismo cívico democrático de marca blanca sin referencias teóricas o filosóficas; y (2) varias hipótesis: se trata de un fenómeno político en sentido fuerte, producto del civismo bienestarista, sin conexión con movimientos sociales alternativos y sus ideologías, con una concepción novedosa de sí mismo como sujeto, (...) y que desafía el papel de los cuerpos intermedios en el ámbito de la sociedad civil, desde partidos hasta movimientos sociales. (shrink)

Bayesianism has been dubbed as the most adequate and successful theory of scientific rationality. Its success mainly lies in its ability to combine two mutually exclusive elements involved in the process of theory-selection in science, viz.: the subjective and objective elements. My aim in this paper is to explain and evaluate Bayesianism’s account of scientific rationality by contrasting it with two other accounts.

In this essay, I would like to look at two particular attempts of developing a preliminary question that paves the way for establishing a Filipino Philosophy: viz. Rolando Gripaldo’s Historian of Philosophy approach and Napoleon Mabaquiao’s Strict Discipline approach. The former envisages that the first question that needs to be considered in the discussion of Filipino Philosophy must be taken from the perspective of a scholar of the history of philosophy. The latter’s procedure is to take what academic philosophers deem (...) to be the characterization of their discipline. In effect, while the former’s question is a question of a historian of philosophy; the latter’s question is a question of a philosopher. As this essay progresses I will try to make a critical assessment of the two attempts by first showing the strengths and weaknesses of their respective attempts, and secondly by stressing that their attempts, whether successful or not, should already be taken as contributions to the effort of establishing a Filipino Philosophy. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to critically examine Rawls’ discussions of the method of a moral theory spread through his book A Theory of Justice. First, Kant’s reasons for rejecting the attempt to employ in philosophy a method inspired in mathematics, respectively, in geometry are considered. This provides a basis for rejecting the interpretation given by Maria Carolina and Zeljko Loparic, according to which Rawls would have allegedly followed Kant’s indications, and applied methodological developments of the Greek geometry to (...) the solution of philosophical problems. Second, a brief analysis of some passages in Rawls’ book is given from which it becomes clear that despite his references to several methodological guidelines his real inspiration comes from Chomsky’s linguistics. The aims and method of Chomsky’s linguistics is then discussed to show the parallelism between them and Rawls’ own statements on the aims and method of his moral theory. Finally, it is argued that the purported parallelism collapses because, among other things, the data of a philosophical moral theory are completely different in nature from the data in linguistics. (shrink)

According to the muslim faith of Ibn Bâyya (Avempace) and to the aristotelism and neoplatonism of his philosophy, this andalusian author in all his works asks for the first grounds of all reality and being. And Ibn Bâyya finds these grounds in the Agent Intellect (who, probably, is the philosophical version of God) and in the human reason and conscience. Thus, the ideal of the philosophe and of the wise is the union of both together: the reason/conscience and Agent Intellect (...) (i.e. God) by means of an intellectualis mystic or "amor Dei intellectualis". (shrink)

La preocupación por la tierra ocupa actualmente las agendas políticas y culturales de los gobiernos, de las empresas, de los medios de comunicación, de las organizaciones sociales y de las iglesias, a causa de la evolución del clima, la contaminación del aire y del agua, la destrucción de la capa de ozono, el deterioro de los sistemas biológicos, el efecto invernadero, el aumento de inundaciones y el deshielo de los polos. La Conferencia episcopal canadiense habla del "imperativo ecológico cristiano" (2003, (...) 2008). (shrink)

In order to fulfil their essential roles as the bearers of truth and the relata of logical relations, propositions must be public and shareable. That requirement has favoured Platonist and other nonmental views of them, despite the well-known problems of Platonism in general. Views that propositions are mental entities have correspondingly fallen out of favour, as they have difficulty in explaining how propositions could have shareable, objective properties. We revive a mentalist view of propositions, inspired by Artificial Intelligence work on (...) perceptual algorithms, which shows how perception causes persistent mental entities with shareable properties that allow them to fulfil the traditional roles of (one core kind of) propositions. The clustering algorithms implemented in perception produce outputs which are (implicit) atomic propositions in different minds. Coordination of them across minds proceeds by game-theoretic processes of communication. The account does not rely on any unexplained notions such as mental content, representation, or correspondence (although those notions are applicable in philosophical analysis of the result). (shrink)

Nesse artigo, trato da comparatio entre dois personagens, como forma de pôr em evidência qualidades ou defeitos, em comum (simile) ou em pares de contrários (contrarium), partindo do exemplo de Tibério, nos seis primeiros livros dos Annales. Para ajudar a compor o retrato do imperador nessa obra, Tácito emprega o simile, associando Tibério ao cruel Sejano, chefe da guarda, e o contrarium, comparando sua personagem principal ao herói militar Germânico.

: It is often argued that while Kant grounds practical freedom in the idea of transcendental or absolute freedom in the Dialectic of the First Critique, he would have explicitly dissociated these concepts in the Canon. For, in contradiction with the Dialectic, Kant claims in the Canon that through experience we know practical freedom to be one of the natural causes and that the transcendental freedom could be left aside as irrelevant. These claims are usually interpreted in the light of (...) the socalled “patchwork theory” as evidence of an inconsistency between the two sections of the First Critique and of a defense of a mere comparative, compatibilistic or even psychological concept of freedom by Kant in the Canon. In contradistinction to this widespread interpretation, I intend to provide an alternative interpretation of the Canon by showing that the concept of practical freedom contained in it is a genuinely incompatibilistic one and that this section can be reconciled with the Dialectic. Moreover, I intend to show that Henry Allison’s allegedly alternative interpretation is entirely misguided. (shrink)

It is always possible to construct a real function f, given random quantities X and Y with continuous distribution functions F and G, respectively, in such a way that f(X) and f(Y), also random quantities, have both the same distribution function, say H. This result of De Finetti introduces an alternative way to somehow describe the `opinion' of a group of experts about a continuous random quantity by the construction of Fields of coincidence of opinions (FCO). A Field of coincidence (...) of opinions is a finite union of intervals where the opinions of the experts coincide with respect to that quantity of interest. We speculate on (dis)advantages of Fields of Opinion compared to usual `probability' measures of a group and on their relation with a continuous version of the well-known Allais' paradox. (shrink)