Psychology related to areas such as gender, language, education and violence has provided scientific knowledge that is contributing to reducing coercive social relationships and to expanding freedom in sexual-affective relationships. Nonetheless, today there are new challenges that require additional developments. In the area of consent, professionals from the fields of law, gender, education and others, are in need of evidence about conditions in human communication that produce consent differentiating them from conditions that coerce. Up to now, consent has been focused (...) on verbal language, for example, “no means no” or “anything less than yes is no”. Despite the fact that focusing consent on verbal language is a very important part of the problem, and has meant a huge advance, it does not solve most of the issues currently raised, like the famous case of “La Manada” in Spain. This article presents the most recent results of a new line of research, which places the problem and the solution in communicative acts, and not only in speech acts. Even though there might be a “yes” in a sexual-affective relationship, there might be no consent, and it is indeed a coercive relationship if that “yes” has been pronounced in a relationship determined by institutional power or by interactive power. Institutional power may occur if who made the proposal for the relationship is a person in charge of the process of selecting personnel in a company and one of the candidates is the person who received the proposal. Interactive power may occur if who makes the proposal is situated in an equal or inferior position for instance in the company to the person receiving it, but the former threatens to make sextortion to the latter. The potential social impact of this research has been already shown in the cases analyzed for this study. (shrink)

Dealing with phonological variations is important for speech processing. This article addresses whether phonological variations introduced by assimilatory processes are compensated for at the pre-lexical or lexical level, and whether the nature of variation and the phonological context influence this process. To this end, Swedish nasal regressive place assimilation was investigated using the mismatch negativity component. In nasal regressive assimilation, the coronal nasal assimilates to the place of articulation of a following segment, most clearly with a velar or labial place (...) of articulation, as in utan mej “without me” > [ʉːtam mɛjː]. In a passive auditory oddball paradigm, 15 Swedish speakers were presented with Swedish phrases with attested and unattested phonological variations and contexts for nasal assimilation. Attested variations – a coronal-to-labial change as in utan “without” > [ʉːtam] – were contrasted with unattested variations – a labial-to-coronal change as in utom “except” > ∗[ʉːtɔn] – in appropriate and inappropriate contexts created by mej “me” [mɛjː] and dej “you” [dɛjː]. Given that the MMN amplitude depends on the degree of variation between two stimuli, the MMN responses were expected to indicate to what extent the distance between variants was tolerated by the perceptual system. Since the MMN response reflects not only low-level acoustic processing but also higher-level linguistic processes, the results were predicted to indicate whether listeners process assimilation at the pre-lexical and lexical levels. The results indicated no significant interactions across variations, suggesting that variations in phonological forms do not incur any cost in lexical retrieval; hence such variation is compensated for at the lexical level. However, since the MMN response reached significance only for a labial-to-coronal change in a labial context and for a coronal-to-labial change in a coronal context, the compensation might have been influenced by the nature of variation and the phonological context. It is therefore concluded that while assimilation is compensated for at the lexical level, there is also some influence from pre-lexical processing. The present results reveal not only signal-based perception of phonological units, but also higher-level lexical processing, and are thus able to reconcile the bottom-up and top-down models of speech processing. (shrink)

Cuando se habla de literatura y filosofía, generalmente se hace referencia a campos totalmente distintos, con producciones enteramente diferentes. Algunos textos parecen pertenecer de manera exclusiva ya sea al ámbito de la filosofía o de la literatura, como si no pudiera haber hibridación; como si lo que fuera de un campo no pudiera ser leído en la clave del de otro. En este sentido, cabe preguntarse si una obra considerada literaria podría leerse filosóficamente y cómo.

AI arrival promises to solve the needs of personalization in education. The following paragraphs aim to shed light on the concept of personalization by providing a philosophical conceptualization that enables an analysis of its scope and applications within the framework of the digital transformation of higher education. The paper explains the reasons why the goal of personalization is so deeply rooted in the digital transformation. It also describes the five meanings attributable to the concept and details their philosophical underpinnings. This (...) helps clarify the distinction between the extrinsic and intrinsic orientations of personalization, which, in turn, allows to apply this distinction within the framework of the digital transformation of education. (shrink)

In this book Strawson is again considering topics as the existence of the exterior world, the moral attitudes, the universal... The novelty is not so in his original ideas as in the fact that these are useful to keep on completing the doctrine of a "descriptive" and "naturalist" metaphy-sick against "revisionism" such as the scepticism in its different modalities.

This book is a collection of studies on topics related to subjectivity and selfhood in medieval and early modern philosophy. The individual contributions approach the theme from a number of angles varying from cognitive and moral psychology to metaphysics and epistemology. Instead of a complete overview on the historical period, the book provides detailed glimpses into some of the most important figures of the period, such as Augustine, Avicenna, Aquinas, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz and Hume. The questions addressed include the ethical (...) problems of the location of one's true self and the proper distribution of labour between desire, passion and reason, and the psychological tasks of accounting for subjective experience and self-knowledge and determining different types of self-awareness. (shrink)

A new theoretical approach to Aristotelian Logic based on three axioms has been recently introduced. This formalization of the theory allowed for the unification of its uncommunicated traditional branches, thus restoring the theoretical unity of AL. In this brief paper, the applicability of the three AL axioms to Propositional Logic is explored. First, it is shown how the AL axioms can be applied to some simple PL arguments in a straightforward manner. Second, the development of a proof method for PL (...) inspired by the AL axioms is presented. This method mimics the underlying mechanics of the proof method from AL, and offers a complementary alternative to proof methods such as truth trees. (shrink)

La igualdad de género es para la UNESCO una prioridad mundial estrechamente ligada a los esfuerzos de la Organización para promocionar el derecho a la educación de las niñas para que adquieran las mismas competencias en la educación y mediante ella.Existen, dependiendo del contexto (niveles de enseñanza e instrucción) y de la ubicación geográfica, grandes desigualdades de género en el acceso, el logro del aprendizaje y la continuación de la educación, resultando ser las niñas, en general, las más desfavorecidas. A (...) pesar de los logros alcanzados, existe un mayor número de niñas sin escolarizar que de niños - 16 millones de niñas nunca irá a la escuela (Instituto de Estadística de la UNESCO) - y las mujeres representan dos tercios de los 750 millones de adultos que carecen de conocimientos básicos de lectura y escritura. (shrink)

The article analyzes one of the fundamental rights – the right to maintenance, which proper implementation ensures normal development of the child. This right matches with the duty of parents to maintain their minor children. Paragraph 6 of Article 38 of the Constitution of the Republic of Lithuania states that parents have a duty to educate their children to be honest people and loyal citizens, supporting them until adulthood. The obligation to maintain children is established in the first 3.192 Article (...) paragraph of the Civil Code of the Republic of Lithuania, and the responsibility for avoiding to maintain a child is provided in Article 164 of the Criminal Code. The article discusses the fact that the analysis of criminal law rate is not precise enough. Article 164 of the Criminal Code does not match with the child maintenance methods specified in the CC Article 3.196 paragraph 1. Since criminal liability is only for judgment in default in civil cases, a person shall only be liable for breaking the right to maintain a child, provided in the CC 3.196 paragraph 1. This article deeply analyzes the problematic qualification aspects of the avoidance to maintain a child. Some alternative ways of child maintenance are mentioned, as can be chosen from other law instruments (bailiffs, Guarantee child support fund) and it leads to the ultima ratio principle. On the other hand, it is not required to seek alternative remedies for affected interests, and it is possible to initiate a pre-trial investigation. Therefore, this article seeks to identify specific civil and criminal law rules delimitation. Avoidance of child maintenance is an ongoing crime. The main problem in legal practice is to determine an end of this ongoing criminal conduct. The practice of the Supreme Court of Lithuania is not unanimous. In some cases, the end of this ongoing conduct is considered to be a moment when the past judgment has entered into force, in other cases – the moment of indictment. These positions are criticized by many authors and it is suggested to follow the Supreme Court’s practice, according to which the moment when a judgment of conviction for the criminal act is passed should be considered as an end of an ongoing criminal conduct. (shrink)

This article introduces an agent-based and a system-dynamics model investigating the cultural transmission of frequent collective rituals. It focuses on social function and cognitive attraction as independently affecting transmission. The models focus on the historical context of early Christian meals, where various theoretically inspiring trends in cultural transmission of rituals can be observed. The primary purpose of the article is to contribute to theorizing about cultural transmission of rituals by suggesting a clear operationalization of their social function and cognitive attraction. (...) Furthermore, the article challenges recent trends in the field by providing a theoretically feasible model for how, under certain conditions, cognitive attraction can influence the transmission to a relatively greater extent than social function. In the system dynamics model we reproduce the results of our agent-based model while putting some of our basic operational assumptions under scrutiny. We consider approaching social function and cognitive attraction in isolation as a preliminary but necessary step in the process of creating more complex models of the cultural selection of rituals, where the two aspects will be combined to produce ritual forms with greater correspondence to real-world religious rituals. (shrink)

It has been lately proposed that laws of nature are causal powers. The conditions of identity of universals are the causal powers that those universals give to their instantiations. One of the main objections against this conception of laws of nature and universals is that it would lead to, either an infinite regress, or a vicious circularity. In effect, if the conditions of identity of a universal are the causal powers that the universal gives to its instantiations, then it seems (...) that the conditions of identity of a universal depend on other universals, because a causal power is the power to produce the instantiation of some universal or other. In this work it is considered if this problem can be tackled by a relaxation of some of the formal characteristics of ontological dependence, but this strategy appears inconvenient. Another more promising alternative is to suppose that universals are ontologically dependent on the network of nomological relations to which they belong. Under certain formal assumptions about the graph-theoretical structure of the nomic network the identity of a universal can be grounded by its sole position in it. The conception here defended results a form of nomic holism. (shrink)

Alonso Briceño, el primer filósofo chileno, sostuvo que, para todo x, el ser de x = la haecceitas de x y –además– que hay una distinción ‘formal’ entre el ser de x y la esencia de x. En general, hay una distinción ‘formal’ entre los ítems z y v si y solo si: (i) z  v, y (ii) z y v son mutuamente inseparables. Se sigue de estas tesis que el ‘ser’ debe tomarse como un componente ontológico específico en (...) los objetos particulares y que es idéntico con la haecceitas del objeto. Esto se denomina aquí “la intuición de Briceño”. En este trabajo se considera la relevancia que la intuición de Briceño podría tener para dos de las teorías más importantes acerca de la naturaleza de los objetos particulares: las teorías en las que los objetos particulares están constituidos por un sustrato y sus propiedades, y las teorías en las que los objetos particulares son cúmulos de tropos. Se argumenta que en ambos casos la intuición de Briceño, esto es, la idea de que hay un tropo específico de ser en el objeto particular, trae consigo ventajas sistemáticas importantes y, lo que es más, permite la unificación teórica de ambas perspectivas, normalmente consideradas como incompatibles entre sí. (shrink)

The articles included in this Volume represent a broad and highly qualified view on the present state of general relativity, quantum gravity, and their cosmological and astrophysical implications. As such, it may serve as a valuable source of knowledge and inspiration for experts in these fields, as well as an advanced source of information for young researchers. The occasion to gather together so many leading experts in the field was to celebrate the centenary of Einstein's stay in Prague in 1911-1912. (...) It was in fact during his stay in Prague that Einstein started in earnest to develop his ideas about general relativity that fully developed in his paper in 1915. Approaching soon the centenary of his famous paper, this volume offers a precious overview of the path done by the scientific community in this intriguing and vibrant field in the last century, defining the challenges of the next 100 years. The content is divided into four broad parts: (i) Gravity and Prague, (ii) Classical General Relativity, (iii) Cosmology and Quantum Gravity, and (iv) Numerical Relativity and Relativistic Astrophysics. (shrink)

Groove—defined as the pleasurable urge to move to a rhythm—depends on a fine-tuned interplay between predictability arising from repetitive rhythmic patterns, and surprise arising from rhythmic deviations, for example in the form of syncopation. The perfect balance between predictability and surprise is commonly found in rhythmic patterns with a moderate level of rhythmic complexity and represents the sweet spot of the groove experience. In contrast, rhythms with low or high complexity are usually associated with a weaker experience of groove because (...) they are too boring to be engaging or too complex to be interpreted, respectively. Consequently, the relationship between rhythmic complexity and groove experience can be described by an inverted U-shaped function. We interpret this inverted U shape in light of the theory of predictive processing and provide perspectives on how rhythmic complexity and groove can help us to understand the underlying neural mechanisms linking temporal predictions, movement, and reward. A better understanding of these mechanisms can guide future approaches to improve treatments for patients with motor impairments, such as Parkinson’s disease, and to investigate prosocial aspects of interpersonal interactions that feature music, such as dancing. Finally, we present some open questions and ideas for future research. (shrink)

During the 2007–2008 global food crisis, the prices of primary foods, in particular, peaked. Subsequently, governments concerned about food security and investors keen to capitalize on profit-maximizing opportunities undertook large-scale land acquisitions (LASLA) in, predominantly, least developed countries (LDCs). Economically speaking, this market reaction is highly welcome, as it should (1) improve food security and lower prices through more efficient food production while (2) host countries benefit from development opportunities. However, our assessment of the debate on the issues indicates critical (...) voices in both the media and academic discourse. This article aims to provide a philosophical law and economics analysis. We draw on John Rawls’s Theory of Justice, focusing on Rawls’s background institutions for distributive justice (§43) to evaluate LASLA form an ethical angle. Approaching LASLA into Sub Saharan LDCs as a socio-economic reform redistributing land from the local population of LDCs to investors, we acknowledge that they bear a highly desirable potential. Often, though, they cannot be regarded as ethically correct in practice as the insignificant improvements for local populations and sometimes even human rights violations contradict Rawls’s principles of justice. Then investigating whether and how international law can help overcome the shortcomings, we conclude that even though respective mechanisms exist in the current state of international law, it is hardly possible that it will produce more just outcomes in the near future. (shrink)

Varios filósofos han propuesto un enfoque “algebraico” de los universales de acuerdo con el cual hay operaciones de universales a universales. No es obvio, sin embargo, cómo estas operaciones deban ser interpretadas y qué impacto tengan para las condiciones de identidad de los universales. Hay dos interpretaciones principales del álgebra de universales. Por una parte, se ha interpretado como formas de “construir” universales complejos. Por otra, ha sido interpretada como “morfismos” o “mapeos” entre universales, pero no como algo que “construye” (...) universales complejos desde otros más básicos. En este trabajo se evalúan las ventajas comparativas de las dos concepciones, y se ofrecen razones para preferir la segunda. (shrink)

Este trabajo presenta y discute varias formas de especificar el espacio ontológicomodal, asumiendo que los mundos posibles son universales estructuralesmáximos y asumiendo también que no hay forma de representar medianteuniversales estructurales los hechos sobre identidad y diferencia deobjetos entre diferentes mundos posibles. Dos grandes opciones teoréticasdeterminan la configuración que podría tener el espacio modal: (a) la introducciónde haecceitates de individuos actuales como componentes de losuniversales estructurales máximos, y (b) la introducción de contrapartidas.En el caso (a), los hechos sobre identidad de (...) objetos meramente posibles endiferentes mundos queda indeterminada. Se argumenta que no es razonablesuplementar esta configuración del espacio modal con contrapartidas. En elcaso de que las haecceitates no sean introducidas, todos los hechos sobreidentidad y diferencia de objetos entre diferentes mundos posibles quedanindeterminados, por lo que aquí el suplemento de contrapartidas es bienvenido.Cada una de estas opciones tiene sus propios costos teóricos en relacióncon, por ejemplo, las relaciones de accesibilidad entre mundos posiblesy otras tesis modales cruciales. (shrink)

En una serie de trabajos Carol Cleland ha argumentado por los últimos veinte años que la búsqueda de una definición de la vida es no solo inútil sino contraproducente. Una definición en términos de condiciones necesarias y suficientes nos podría cegar para la tarea mucho más importante de desarrollar una teoría universal de la vida. La principal justificación para este alegato es que la vida es una clase natural. Términos para clases naturales no poseen definiciones ideales, porque pretenden hacer referencia (...) a rasgos objetivos del mundo y no hacer explícito el contenido de nuestro pensamiento o lenguaje. Se argumenta aquí que la vida es, en efecto, una clase natural y, luego, la semántica para el término vida no puede darse por una definición ideal con condiciones necesarias y suficientes. Sin embargo, la semántica del término vida no excluye la posibilidad de hallar una ‘definición real’ adecuada de la esencia de la vida, esto es, de qué es la vida. Una definición real no es la enunciación del significado de un término sino de una esencia. (shrink)

In the half-century that elapsed between 1830 and 1880, the city of Barcelona, while industrializing and tripling its population, saw how rich scientific collections (mainly naturalistic, archeological, and anatomical) could be created or lost, opened to the public or forgotten. The complexity and variety of the movements of these collections go beyond the narrow historiographical framework defined by a supposedly linear evolution towards greater accumulation and openness to the public. On the contrary, the examples examined in this article reveal a (...) variety of paths and vicissitudes. (shrink)

This article reports results of an empirical study of Slovak media coverage of international affairs. The goal of the article is to determine whether the outputs of selected Slovak media correspond to the expectations of the Propaganda Model. In order to accomplish this goal, a content analysis of coverage of two cases of international conflict was performed and two hypotheses were evaluated. The hypotheses amount to an expectation that there will be a quantitative and qualitative difference in the way that (...) selected Slovak media cover civilian casualties and potential breaches of international law based on the relationship of Slovak elites to the perpetrator. The analysis concludes that the degree of quantitative and qualitative inconsistency in the coverage of the selected issues could not be attributed to factors external to Slovak media and therefore have to be attributed to structural factors of Slovak media space, which need to be further examined. (shrink)

In 2012, the international PISA survey reinforced the observation that the French educational system is one of the most unequal among OECD countries. The observation of serious inequalities in access to educational success for pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds could lead to a pessimistic vision suggesting that any possibility of transformation of the system is doomed to failure. Thus, the fight against inequalities in access to educational success is a form of runaway object which constitutes a challenge for research which treats (...) the social context as evolving and susceptible to significant and novel transformations. Developmental work research aims to support the work of professionals in the re-elaboration of their practices by seeking to go beyond the status quo of an unequal school. Drawing on this framework within an institutional network of schools, we seek to show how the intervention has highlighted power issues inscribed in the structures and how the actors, through their commitment in the research collaborative process, seek to go beyond the power issues inscribed in their work routines and enacted during the research process by different kinds of antagonism. We will argue that the fight against educational inequality involves overcoming systemic power relations crystallized in institution. This systemic power is expressed by a form of episodic power. Our results show restrictive and constructive effect on the expansive learning process and on the construction of a collective in the formative interventions. The restrictive side of epistemic power should be linked to systemic power which is historically inherited. We discuss the results in the light of the emergence of a fourth generation of activity theory. Our research makes it possible to make conceptual and methodological progress in the construction of a fourth generation of activity theory by showing the need for analysis and expansively learn about problematic power relations in heterogeneous collectives. (shrink)

Este trabajo profundiza en la legitimación teológica perversa que el falso místico hace de sus actos sexuales. Con tal propósito, se hace una introducción histórica a las prácticas sexuales de carácter gnóstico y se considera el juego discursivo ambiguo entre lo exotérico y esotérico. Como ejemplo, se analizan algunas ambigüedades textuales en la obra de Javier Garrido OFM (condenado canónicamente por “falso misticismo”), a la luz de la investigación sobre los abusos sexuales de los hermanos Philippe OP y Jean Vanier. (...) Asimismo, se exploran tres coincidencias con ideas ajenas al cristianismo que divinizan la pulsión sexual. Y se concluye apelando al discernimiento y la prudencia sobre el lenguaje místico-esponsal, y a la claridad en la moral sexual. (shrink)

Putnam's Model- Theoretic Argument has been generally held as invalid. In this work, attention is addressed to two broad facts understated by critics and commentators: (i) there are, at least, two different model-theoretic arguments. One is directed against realism and the other is directed to naturalistic semantics. The general rejection affects the former, but it is open to discussion if it affects the latter; (ii) on the other hand, the model-theoretic argument construed as a reductio argument has not - prima (...) facia - ontological consequences, but only restrains our methodology to deal with the intentional realm. (shrink)

Este trabajo discute qué razones tenemos para pensar que existe un espacio ontológico modal y por qué debemos pensar que este espacio está constituido por una pluralidad de mundos posibles. Después se presentan tres teorías metafísicas sobre la naturaleza de los mundos posibles: la concepción realista extrema de David Lewis, la concepción realista moderada de Alvin Plantinga y la concepción de los mundos posibles como universales estructurales máximos. Un breve examen comparativo tratará de mostrar por qué la tercea opción es (...) la más prometedora o, al menos, parece serlo. El trabajo finalmente considera el panorama que tiene por delante una defensa plenamente desarrollada de la teoría modal basada en universales. (shrink)

Vrcholným dílem celoživotní teoretické činnosti Karla Engliše měla být Velká logika, která se zachovala v podobě obsáhlého rukopisu (cca 2500 stran) a dosud nebyla publikována. Prvním průběžným výsledkem snahy o publikaci rukopisu je zveřejnění studie "Kritika Schopenhauera". Autoři textu předkládají přepis části rukopisu opatřený poznámkami ke zpřístupnění jeho obsahu. Schopenhauerova filosofie poznání tvoří jednu ze stěžejních inspirací pro Englišovu teorii myšlenkových řádů. Englišova kritika Schopenhauera tak poskytuje vodítko k hlubšímu porozumění vztahu Englišovy teorie a transcendentální filosofie.