In his 1994 paper, neuroscientist Benjamin Libet affirmed that he found a way to test the interaction between the mind and the brain. He believed that this procedure would also test the reality of a non-physical mind, emerging from neural activity. In 2000 John Searle objected to Libet’s evident dualism, affirming that the mind is not a hypothesis to test but a datum to be explained. According to Searle, Libet’s problem arose from accepting the Cartesian distinction of ‘mind’ and ‘body’, (...) obsolete categories from an old philosophy. Searle’s solution implied the rejection both of dualism and reductive materialism, suggesting a non-reductive materialism. This first-person ontology, as Searle calls it, aims at preserving, against reductive materialism, the essential features of consciousness, i.e. subjective, qualitative and unified. Searle argued, however, that the nature of consciousness remained biological. Dan Zahavi’s thesis is that a phenomenological approach to the self and consciousness can offer a complementing alternative to the contemporary comprehension of the nature of consciousness. Engaged in an open dialogue with neuroscience and cognitive science in his dealings with consciousness, Zahavi holds, nonetheless, that this notion cannot be completely understood without reference to the notion of the self. Thus, this paper will analyse Zahavi’s ideas about the self and consciousness in Subjectivity and Selfhood as to evaluate whether his phenomenological approach is able to overcome the materialist tones of Searle’s philosophy of mind, opening the possibility of a non-reductive comprehension of human beings. (shrink)

The proposed text reflects on the Muslim community and families in Padua including interviews in order to individuate the practices of the transmission of beliefs within the family and the continuity of the group. Mainly from the development of three main points: religious socialization, community representation as umma, according to the mandate of Give to Islam as well of the dichotomy we Muslims / they Christians discourses. Finally, the meanings of identities governed by ethnicity and / or religion and new (...) generations with current debates and struggles identified as new collective identities. That is, the reinterpretation allows the emergence of a new collective identity that makes use of practices that are in tension with the host society emerging like a political force. (shrink)

En 1954, la Cour d’appel de Buenos Aires acquitte Elena Teotina Haedo de Gaitán et la sage-femme Catalina Fuccia du délit d’avortement en invoquant la figure juridique de la « tentative d’avortement impossible », la grossesse étant scientifiquement et médicalement impossible à vérifier. Cet article examine l’application de la législation anti-avortement dans l’Argentine du milieu du xxe siècle, une Argentine considérée par l’historiographie comme pronataliste. L’analyse des processus judiciaires à l’œuvre permet également d’examiner les formes de tutelle sur le corps (...) et la reproduction des femmes. (shrink)

The objective of this paper is to make evident the political impact of popular sovereignty in the search for a new social structure, in virtue of the crisis that the representative system of party hegemony manifested, in order to point out in the first place the need of the Venezuelan people to ..

El presente artículo se centra en el esclarecimiento de las nociones de percepciones inconscientes («petites perceptions»), percepciones y apercepciones en la teoría de la conciencia en Leibniz con el fin de responder dos preguntas: 1) Ad intra, es decir, intra-sustancialmente: ¿Cómo un evento inconsciente se vuelve consciente dentro de una misma sustancia simple?; 2) Ad extra, es decir, inter-sustancialmente: ¿dónde puede decirse que surge la conciencia en la jerarquía de mónadas? Para responder estas preguntas, seguiré la siguiente metodología. En primer (...) lugar, presentaré la teoría de la conciencia en Leibniz enmarcada en su visión metafísica. Presentaré a su vez los pasajes más conflictivos y el problema que surge al momento de definir la conciencia. En segundo lugar, presentaré las interpretaciones más comentadas que existen actualmente acerca de este problema. Me centraré en las posturas de Rocco J. Gennaro, Larry M. Jorgensen, Christian Barth y Alison Simmons. Finalmente, propondré una interpretación propia de la teoría de la conciencia en Leibniz. (shrink)

Resumen Según el diagnóstico sobre la academia contemporánea del pensador italiano Piero Coda, la teología, disciplina escindida de la filósofa desde la modernidad, se ha reducido a una mera apologética de la fe. En este marco, la Trinidad se vacía de contenido ontológico, dejando de ser principio de interpretación de la realidad. En el presente artículo analizaré las consecuencias antropológicas que posee el hecho de que la creación, específicamente del hombre, sea imago Trinitatis en el pensamiento de Edith Stein. En (...) la primera sección, presentaré brevemente cómo Stein aborda el misterio y las relaciones intra-trinitarias utilizando las imágenes del amor y de la vida. Luego, presentaré brevemente el desarrollo de la noción de persona y como ésta es resignificada a la luz del dogma trinitario para explicar en qué sentido Dios es persona. En la segunda sección, presentaré cómo se da la imagen del Dios Trino en la creación. Este será el primer paso, dado que para Stein el discurso cosmológico es solo la antesala del discurso antropológico. Finalmente, analizaré cómo se da la imagen del Dios trinitario en la persona humana y por ende cómo esta noción es resignificada y enriquecida.According to the diagnosis on the contemporary academy of the Italian thinker Piero Coda, theology, having been cut off from philosophy since modernity, has been reduced to mere apologetics. Within this framework, the doctrine of the Trinity is emptied of any ontological content, ceasing to be a principle of interpretation of reality. In this article I will analyse the anthropological consequences of the fact that creation, specifically of man, is imago Trinitatis in the thought of Edith Stein. In the first section, I will briefly present how Stein approaches mystery and intra-Trinitarian relationships using the images of love and life. Then, I will offer a quick description of the development of the notion of person and how it is re-signified in light of the Trinitarian dogma as to explain in what sense God is a person. In the second section, I will present how the image of the Triune God appears in Creation, a first step in cosmological discourse that will lead, for Stein, to the anthropological discourse. Finally, I will analyse how the image of the Trinitarian God is present to the human person and therefore how this notion is re-signified and enriched. (shrink)

El presente artículo parte de la idea de que para superar la crisis ecológica que estamos viviendo no basta con desarrollar más tecnología y más ciencia, sino que también es necesario repensar y modificar nuestra relación con la naturaleza. Como sostiene la eco-filosofía, es necesario superar una ontología mecanicista centrada en un antropocentrismo fuerte que contrapone dualísticamente al hombre con la naturaleza, viéndola como mera propiedad al servicio del ser humano. Ahora bien, mientras que las eco-filosofías suelen apoyarse en una (...) ontología relacional, la hipótesis que se sostendrá a lo largo de este artículo es que no solo esta ontología puede funcionar de base para repensar y modificar nuestra relación con la naturaleza, sino que también la clásica doctrina metafísica de los grados del ser puede servir como base para un nuevo paradigma ecológico. (shrink)

El siguiente artículo busca presentar una visión fenomenológica de la identidad personal en tanto fenómeno complejo y multidimensional, tomando como punto de partida el pensamiento del filósofo danés Dan Zahavi. Mientras que Zahavi presenta la dimensión experiencial del yo como fundamento y núcleo del yo, y por ende de la identidad, cabe preguntarse si este yo experiencial no puede ser complementado con una noción de yo más fuerte, que yo llamo núcleo personal. En primer lugar, se presentará la visión de (...) identidad personal de acuerdo con el pensamiento de Zahavi. En segundo lugar, se propondrá que tal núcleo personal se da como un hecho fenomenológico, es decir, revelado por la experiencia misma del yo. Finalmente, se sostendrá que dicho núcleo personal, que es el fundamento de las otras dimensiones del yo y de la identidad personal, se puede complementar con las otras dos dimensiones del yo desarrolladas por Zahavi. (shrink)

En este trabajo se explora la segunda parte de la fórmula foucaulteana para describir a la biopolítica, esto es, el “dejar morir” biopolítico. A través del análisis de los diferentes abordajes de Michel Foucault, realizados en el período comprendido entre 1976 y 1979, se buscará entender cómo esta forma de ejercicio del poder, a pesar de estar centrada en la maximización de la vida, posee un accionar tanático, una vinculación con la muerte en términos poblacionales. Por esto mismo, el objetivo (...) de este escrito será mostrar que la biopolítica para maximizar la vida precisa intervenir y gestionar e incidir sobre la muerte. (shrink)

El discernimiento de espíritus ha sido a lo largo de la historia del cristianismo un mecanismo fundamental para el control del acceso al carisma. Su desarrollo ha estado profundamente ligado a los cambios en la estructura social de las iglesias. Por ello buscamos aportar nuevas miradas sobre este dispositivo, analizándolo en el contexto de las periferias cristianas. Específicamente centraremos nuestro análisis en las iglesias evangélicas aborígenes mocoví del suroeste de la provincia del Chaco en Argentina. Nos aproximaremos a estas cuestiones (...) a partir del análisis a la estructura social de estas iglesias, sus concepciones sobre los vínculos con las potencias no-humanas, la gestión de salud y enfermedad y la experiencia del culto. (shrink)

En este trabajo se explora la primera parte de la formula foucaulteana para describir a la biopolítica, esto es, el “hacer vivir” biopolítico. Mediante estos análisis se busca entender el modo en que el poder se vincula con la vida de la población, cuáles son sus estrategias, sus mecanismos y sus efectos. Para ello se detiene, en primer lugar, en comprender el concepto de vida que atañe al biopoder, sirviéndose de los análisis de Foucault respecto a la biología. Luego, en (...) segundo lugar, se busca dar cuenta de las prácticas utilizadas por dicha tecnología para modificar los fenómenos vitales en pos de sus intereses de gobierno. (shrink)

Este artículo se propone analizar la actualidad de los abordajes foucaulteanos sobre el saber médico para explicar los sucesos acontecidos a raíz de la pandemia del covid-19. Para ello nos centraremos en su definición de la medicina como práctica biopolítica, analizando en qué medida esta continúa siendo una técnica política de intervención con efectos de poder sobre la vida y sobre la muerte de la población. Al mismo tiempo, intentaremos pensar el marco de racionalidad política en el que se inscribe (...) la actual crisis sanitaria, esto es: el neoliberalismo y sus consecuentes formas de “hacer vivir y dejar morir”. (shrink)

To understand Lacan’s thinking process on vision, the entirety of his teaching must be taken into consideration. Until the 60s, the visual field is the imaginary, the constitutive principle of reality in its phenomenal giving to the experience of a subject. This register is the opposite of the field of the word with the L schema and, subsequently, as subordinated to the symbolic system according to the model of the optical schema of the inverted flower vase of Bouasse. It is (...) only with the 1964 seminar that Lacan makes a daring turnaround through which the visual becomes a sign of the emergence of a real that is irreducible to both reality and the mediation of the subject of knowledge. The split that separates reality and the real is reproduced in Lacan within the visual field, which is, on the one hand, the cardinal principle of the consistency of the experience of reality, and on the other, it is an element of irreducibility to reality. This produces a cascade of consequences: first of all, the modification of the presentation of the mirror stage. Unlike the voice, which through prosody, tone, and volume, finds some strips with which anchor itself imaginatively to reality, the gaze, invisible and elusive, escapes the imaginary grasp. Captured in myths, it reveals its power and ability to annihilate—as in the myth of Medusa’s gaze—or to make people fall in love but only with a narcissistic love that leads inexorably to death as in the myth of Narcissus. The gaze is elusive because the subject is dependent on it in the field of desire. Like the voice, it is about the desire on which the subject is supported; it is one of the objects on which the phantom depends. In our opinion, thanks to this characteristic, the gaze object can make remote psychoanalytic treatment possible through easily accessible videoconferencing tools and, at the same time, create new conditions within it that should be carefully evaluated to understand its implications in the session itself. (shrink)

Virtue ethics has often been regarded as complementary or laissez-faire ethics in solving business problems. This paper seeks conceptual and methodological improvements by developing a virtue character scale that will enable assessment of the link between organizational level virtue and organizational performance, financial or non-financial. Based upon three theoretical assumptions, multiple studies were conducted; the content analysis of 158 Fortune Global 500 firms ethical values and a survey of 2548 customers and employees. Six dimensions of organizational virtue (Integrity, Empathy, Warmth, (...) Courage, Conscientiousness and Zeal) are identified through confirmatory factor analysis, and validated against satisfaction measure. Strategic implications of virtue characters are discussed. (shrink)

While the concept of adaptive preferences is an important tool for criticizing injustice, it is often claimed that using the concept involves showing disrespect for persons judged to have adaptive preferences. In this paper, I propose an account of adaptive preferences that does the relevant political work while still showing persons two centrally important kinds of respect. My account is based in what I call an indirect substantive account of autonomy, which places substantive requirements on the options available to a (...) person, rather than on the option that she ultimately prefers. This allows us to pinpoint cases in which a person's circumstances have rendered her insufficiently autonomous, without saying that any conception of the good must be non-autonomous tout court. (shrink)

I propose that we can explain the contribution of mental time travel to agency through understanding it as a specific instance of our more general capacity for narrative understanding. Narrative understanding involves the experience of a pre-reflective and embodied sense of self, which co-emerges with our emotional involvement with a sequence of events. Narrative understanding of a sequence of events also requires a ‘recombinable system’, that is, the ability to combine parts to make myriad sequences. Mental time travel shares these (...) two characteristics: it involves an embodied sense of self and the ability to create novel scenarios. What is unique about mental time travel is that it is a story explicitly about our selves, and it involves metarepresentation. Agency is enabled by narrative understanding when we are able to put our current situation into a larger narrative context, whereby some possible actions, but not others, make sense. However, new features of agency are enabled when we understand stories that are explicitly about our selves: we gain the ability to plan and act on plans. (shrink)

The medial temporal lobe supports both navigation and declarative memory. On this basis, a theory of phylogenetic continuity has been proposed according to which episodic and semantic memories have evolved from egocentric and allocentric navigation in the physical world, respectively. Here, we explored the behavioral significance of this neurophysiological model by investigating the relationship between the performance of healthy individuals on a path integration and an episodic memory task. We investigated the path integration performance through a proprioceptive Triangle Completion Task (...) and assessed episodic memory through a picture recognition task. We evaluated the specificity of the association between performance in these two tasks by including in the study design a verbal semantic memory task. We also controlled for the effect of attention and working memory and tested the robustness of the results by including alternative versions of the path integration and semantic memory tasks. We found a significant positive correlation between the performance on the path integration the episodic, but not semantic, memory tasks. This pattern of correlation was not explained by general cognitive abilities and persisted also when considering a visual path integration task and a non-verbal semantic memory task. Importantly, a cross-validation analysis showed that participants' egocentric navigation abilities reliably predicted episodic memory performance. Altogether, our findings support the hypothesis of a phylogenetic continuity between egocentric navigation and episodic memory and pave the way for future research on the potential causal role of egocentric navigation on multiple forms of episodic memory. (shrink)

La discusión acerca de los modelos en ciencias sociales, en particular en economía, es central a la disciplina, especialmente si se intenta mediante estas construcciones teóricas no sólo comprender sino también transformar el mundo social. ¿Qué son los modelos? ¿Para qué sirven? ¿Cómo tienen que ser? Estas preguntas se encuadran en la cuestión acerca de cómo tiene que ser la economía como ciencia en el marco de la epistemología de la economía. Popper, Lawson y Mӓki se plantean estas preguntas y (...) ofrecen posiciones diferentes respecto de la naturaleza, el uso, y el alcance de los modelos. Las propuestas de estos autores aportan en nuestro tiempo al debate acerca de cómo debe ser la economía como ciencia y sus métodos para poder explicar y predecir en el mundo social. (shrink)

Si bien no es habitual pensar a Hayek en términos de realismo, sino comprenderlo como neokantiano, presentaremos la interpretación realista fenomenológica de Hayek que ofrece Zanotti a lo largo de su obra. Señalaremos los aspectos centrales de la epistemología de Hayek y la lectura realista fenomenológica como una posición superadora tanto del positivismo como de una hermenéutica relativista.

In this paper, I argue for the counter-intuitive conclusion that the same adaptive preference can be both prudentially good and prudentially bad for its holder: that is, it can be prudentially objectionable from one temporal perspective, but prudentially unobjectionable from another. Given the possibility of transformative experiences, there is an important sense in which even worrisome adaptive preferences can be prudentially good for us. That is, if transformative experiences lead us to develop adaptive preferences, then their objects can become prudentially (...) better for our actual selves than the objects of their non-adaptive alternatives would now be. I also argue, however, that the same worrisome adaptive preferences might still be prospectively prudentially objectionable: that is, our pre-transformation selves might be prudentially better off undergoing a non-adaptive alternative transformative experience instead. I argue that both claims hold across the range of the most broadly-defended accounts of well-being in the literature. (shrink)

As the “Sacred Place”—meant as the new space for religions offered by the Internet—demands for continuous investigations on the encounter between traditional narratives and social practices, the rapid growth of Question and Answering websites asks for improving social research about the Authenticity of the religious feeling as well as their responsibility in the construction of a shared knowledge. In this background, the aim of this study is to investigate the role of Q&A websites as additional interpretative resources in accordance with (...) different religious forms of life. About 800 extracts—composed by questions and answers—from the religious pages of Stack Exchange were analyzed, in accordance with social discursive psychology, through bottom-up and top-down pathways. In relation to the different emerging questioners’ profiles, the rhetoric of “closeness” and “openness” reveal a dialectic trend of these websites in offering both supplementary and extending religious experiences. (shrink)

The significance of critical phenomenology for psychiatric praxis has yet to be expounded. In this paper, I argue that the adoption of a critical phenomenological stance can remedy localised instances of hermeneutical injustice, which may arise in the encounter between clinicians and patients with psychosis. In this context, what is communicated is often deemed to lack meaning or to be difficult to understand. While a degree of un-shareability is inherent to subjective life, I argue that issues of unintelligibility can be (...) addressed by shifting from individualistic conceptions of understanding to an interactionist view. This takes into account the contextual, historical and relational background within which meaning is co-constituted. I conclude by providing a corrective for hermeneutical injustice, which entails a specific attentiveness towards the person’s subjectivity, a careful sensitivity to contingent meaning-generating structures, and a degree of hermeneutical flexibility as an attitude of openness towards alternative horizons of possibility. (shrink)

How do engineers respond to ethical dilemmas that occur in practice? How do they view their individual and collective responsibilities? How do they make decisions before all the facts are in? Using the space shuttle programme as the framework, this book examines the role of ethical decision making in the practice of engineering. In particular, the book considers the design and development of the main engines of the space shuttle as a paradigm for how individual engineers perceive, articulate, and resolve (...) ethical dilemmas in a large, complex organisation. A series of in-depth case studies show engineers at work on various stages of the project as they balance budgets, deadlines and risks. By documenting the historical development of a single system, the book provides a unique opportunity to explore the complex interactions between political, organisational and technical pressures and engineering and management decisions. (shrink)

This study compares the different emphases on virtuous characters presented in their values, across global firms considering country and industry of origin. It presents a content analysis of the 122 codes of conduct statements from Fortune Global 500 firms, drawn from four sectors and using correspondence analysis. American firms tend to emphasize courage, while European firms emphasize integrity and empathy, surprisingly with Asian firms being closer to European ones. Retailers and pharmaceutical firms emphasize empathy, while banks and petroleum emphasize courage. (...) This study extends the newly emerging strategic paradigm of organizational virtue, by introducing an empirical study of ethical values. Implications for multinational companies are then discussed. (shrink)

The brain is often taken to be a paradigmatic example of a signaling system with semantic and representational properties, in which neurons are senders and receivers of information carried in action potentials. A closer look at this picture shows that it is not as appealing as it might initially seem in explaining the function of the brain. Working from several sender-receiver models within the teleosemantic framework, I will first argue that two requirements must be met for a system to support (...) genuine semantic information: 1. The receiver must be competent —that is, it must be able to extract rewards from its environment on the basis of the signals that it receives. 2. The receiver must have some flexibility of response relative to the signal received. In the second part of the paper, this initial framework will be applied to neural processes, pointing to the surprising conclusion that signaling at the single-neuron level is only weakly semantic at best. Contrary to received views, neurons will have little or no access to semantic information (though their patterns of activity may carry plenty of quantitative, correlational information) about the world outside the organism. Genuine representation of the world requires an organism - level receiver of semantic information, to which any particular set of neurons makes only a small contribution. (shrink)

Are there representations in the brain? It depends on what you mean by representations, and it depends on what you want them to do for you—both in terms of the causal role they play in the system, and in terms of their explanatory value. But ideally, we would like an account of representation that allows us to assign a representational role and content to the appropriate mechanistic precursors of behavior that in fact play that role and conversely, search for the (...) mechanistic realizers of representational roles that are posited by our models of behavior and cognition. Such an account would be methodologically valuable in neuroscience. Lately, people have started asking similar questions about deep neural networks. What representations do they learn and use, and what is the relation between those representations and the sometimes impressive capacities these networks exhibit? More philosophically puzzling, perhaps, is the question of why the internal activities or dispositions labeled as such in neuroscience and AI research should count as representations at all. I think we can give a unified answer to both sets of questions, in the form of a kind of representational pragmatism. What makes something a representation just is that we can identify and re-identify it as such, and moreover, that we can manipulate it effectively to do whatever it is that we think representations ought to do for us in that particular context. For the first condition, the idea is that so long as we have some probe that allows us to pick out the relevant causally effective candidate, we should consider that to be a candidate representation-relative-to-that-probe. The second condition can be understood as a kind of anti-gerrymandering constraint: one ought to be able to intervene on the candidate, and see effects of that intervention consistent with the functional role the representation is supposed to play. Naturally the details need to be spelled out for different contexts—and I will articulate them for a few illustrative cases—which effectively allows for a kind of pluralism about representation depending on the setting and the kinds of questions being asked. With the extra components filled in, representational pragmatism can make sense of existing practices in neuroscience and AI, as well as their relationship to naturalistic theories of representation in philosophy. (shrink)

In this article, I first propose four guidelines that follow from understanding the project of assigning victims duties to resist oppression as an ameliorative project. That is, if we understand the project to be motivated by the urgent aim of ending or mitigating the harm that oppression imposes on the oppressed, I argue that we should focus on developing and assigning duties that satisfy what I call the ability, weighting, fairness, and overdemandingness guidelines. Second, I develop the duty to be (...) a non-normative individual, which satisfies all four guidelines. (shrink)

Philosophical proponents of predictive processing cast the novelty of predictive models of perception in terms of differences in the functional role and information content of neural signals. However, they fail to provide constraints on how the crucial semantic mapping from signals to their informational contents is determined. Beyond a novel interpretative gloss on neural signals, they have little new to say about the causal structure of the system, or even what statistical information is carried by the signals. That means that (...) the predictive framework for perception can be relabeled in traditional, non-predictive terms, with no empirical consequences relevant to existing or future data. To the extent that neuroscientific research based on predictive processing is both innovative and productive, it will be due to the framework’s suggestive heuristic effects, or perhaps auxiliary empirical claims about implementation, rather than a difference in the information-processing structure that it describes. (shrink)

La crisis sanitaria ocasionada por la expansión del Covid-19 pone en evidencia las consecuencias que tiene sobre la vida común la mercantilización de lo público y el mercado como eje regulador de la vida y de las relaciones humanas. El contexto actual demostró la cadena de inequidades que enfrentan las mujeres en la región, pudiendo identificarse al menos tres dimensiones en las que se expresa esta desigualdad: los cuidados, el trabajo y la violencia. Es menester de este artículo realizar un (...) estudio del impacto de la pandemia en estas tres dimensiones, buscando aportar a la reflexión para la acción que permita repensar un mundo pospandemia, donde la perspectiva de género no se constituya como una agenda coyuntural de los gobiernos, sino como un elemento fundamental en la transformación de nuestras sociedades. Este artículo es fundamentalmente descriptivo, utilizando para su análisis la información de datos secundarios, principalmente cuantitativos, de diferentes fuentes de información; por tanto se trata de datos recolectados, procesados, analizados y publicados con propósito diferente a los objetivos de este artículo. Las principales fuentes de información han sido ONU, OIT, CEPAL, ONU MUJERES, UNESCO y ACNUR. (shrink)

Esta es la versión escrita de una entrevista realizada a Eugenio Bulygin, profesor emérito de Filosofía del Derecho (UBA), con respecto a quien toda presentación podría resultar o bien imcompleta o bien superflua. -/- Nuestra intención al realizar esta entrevista fue indagar acerca de las respuestas que dieron a esos interrogantes las personas que, en ese momento, ocuparon posiciones de toma de decisión en la Facultad de Derecho de la UBA. La elección del entrevistado, Eugenio Bulygin, no podría haber sido (...) mejor. No solo por su lucidez y por haber ocupado un puesto de suma importancia en la transición democrática, el de Decano Normalizador, sino porque, además, ha estado siempre, antes y después de la transición, estrechamente vinculado a la Facultad, de modo que provee un testimonio invaluable de sus transformaciones a lo largo de la segunda mitad del S. XX. (shrink)

La naturaleza interdisciplinar del “enfoque de las capacidades” (ca, por sus siglas en inglés) ha hecho que su estudio se encuentre diseminado en un amplio espectro de revistas. Así el case ha asentado en las áreas de la filosofía política o la economía del desarrollo, y ha ampliado su alcance al ser utilizado como marco teórico para la creación de indicadores sobre la privación, la calidad de vida o la salud, o bien para abordar las cuestiones de la educación superior (...) o el impacto de la tecnología en la vida de las personas. Se ofrece una visión general sobre los principales conceptos empleados en ese enfoque, buscando distinguir las propuestas de A. Sen y M. Nussbaum, con el fin de analizar la idea de sostenibilidad y su incorporación en la agenda del enfoque. (shrink)

Although the problem of adaptiveness plays an important motivating role in her work on human capabilities, Martha Nussbaum never gives a clear account of the controversial concept of adaptive preferences on which she relies. In this paper, I aim both to reconstruct the most plausible account of the concept that may be attributed to Nussbaum and to provide a critical appraisal of that account. Although her broader work on the capabilities approach moves progressively towards political liberalism as time passes, I (...) aim to show that her account of adaptive preferences continues to maintain her earlier commitment to perfectionism about the good. I then distinguish between two obligatory kinds of respect for persons, which I call, respectively, primary and secondary recognition respect. This distinction allows us to see that her perfectionist account of adaptive preferences allows her to show persons primary but not secondary recognition respect. Ultimately, I claim that an acceptable account of adaptive prefer.. (shrink)

Tony Lawson, founder of The Social Ontology Group and The Realist Workshop of Cambridge, has proposed critical realism to reorient economics. The transformation of the social world that Lawson tries, emerges from the adherence to critical realism, this is, from taking the transcendental realism of Roy Bhaskar to the social realm. With the purpose of deepening the criticisms to this movement, we will specify what is critical realism, and which are the philosophical assumptions of the mainstream according to this author. (...) We will set out the criticisms on: a) the notion of mainstream economics, b) the possibilities of economics based on social ontology, c) the realism of economic models, and d) the notions of isolation and abstraction. (shrink)

In this paper we will analyze Lawson’s criticism of Hayek for not having transcended positivism. We will distinguish two levels in the criticism: methodological and ontological. So far as methodological criticism is concerned, we consider that Lawson’s positivist interpretation of Hayek regarding the method in economics is not the only possible, and we will try to develop another one. With respect to ontological criticism, we will state that though it is possible to understand Hayek as an ontological positivist, since he (...) assumes an ontological individualism, this fact would not necessarily lead to positivism -question to which Lawson seems to bring Hayek closer after 1955- but a moderate ontological individualism could be assigned to Hayek founded on a realistic interpretation of Husserl’s phenomenology. (shrink)

Industrial pollution is of both national and international concern in the context where one country's emissions contribute to the problem of global warming. Existing studies have focused on government and regulations rather than on employees. The context of this study is in respect of 472 workers in seven Chinese energy companies in Shanxi province in China, one of the biggest coal mining regions and a region most responsible for environmental pollution. The key findings are two-fold: first, employees' values were positively (...) correlated with attitudes toward the environment, which also correlates with perceived corporate citizenship; second, the ownership type of the firm had a significant influence on corporate citizenship, employee values and their attitudes toward environment. Contrary to existing beliefs, Stateowned enterprises in China have much poorer ratings on all the three constructs compared to privately owned companies. The results highlight the role of the government and policy makers in shaping employees' attitudes toward the environment, and in turn the corporate citizenship of the Chinese energy industry. (shrink)

Conocer los mecanismos que operan en el mundo social es tarea fundamental de la economía como ciencia. La transformación del mundo social está vinculada a la reorientación de esta disciplina. Tal es la propuesta de Tony Lawson y la Escuela de Cambridge. Para que la economía sea reorientada ha de ajustarse a los presupuestos ontológicos del Realismo Crítico. En este trabajo se intentará profundizar en la naturaleza de los mecanismos y su relación con la economía como ciencia, y se presentarán (...) dos dificultades en torno a esta noción: a) la posibilidad de una teoría económica de sistemas abiertos, y b) el conocimiento de los mecanismos. (shrink)