Este artículo se propone, en primer lugar, analizar algunos de los cambios producidos en el concepto de naturaleza humana a lo largo de la historia y, en segundo lugar, realizar una reflexión bioética acerca de las intervenciones planteadas por el transhumanismo y el enhancement o mejoramiento humano. Después de repasar la génesis y principales cambios transcendentales del concepto de physis aplicado al hombre, concluiremos que hoy en día el concepto de naturaleza humana, tal y como lo entiende el transhumanismo, podría (...) alinearse por analogía con la modernidad líquida. Entenderíamos, así, la naturaleza humana como una “naturaleza líquida”, permanentemente en cambio. Esto plantea numerosos problemas, no solo de índole ética o biomédica, sino sobre todo de carácter antropológico y metafísico, en el modo de entender al hombre, y condiciona toda valoración bioética acerca de las intervenciones que supuestamente mejoran la humanidad. (shrink)

Hemos recogido hasta aquí algunas de las notas características de la naturaleza humana: su inteligencia, su dimensión social, histórica, biográfica y cultural. Se podrían señalar otros rasgos comunes a todo ser humano como la libertad, la dignidad, la finitud y la vulnerabilidad. No teníamos la pretensión de ser exhaustivos sino de apuntar una tercera vía en la compresión de la naturaleza humana. Es posible una tercera vía, que recoge algunos elementos desde el pensamiento clásico a nuestros días, pasando por autores (...) contemporáneos como Zubiri, personalistas y demás, y hacer una propuesta de naturaleza humana como aquello que hace al humano ser quien es y no otro animal cualquiera. La especificidad de lo humano es innegable, y su irreductibilidad a materia queda en el horizonte como un punto de fuga, donde quizá haya que invocar la dimensión del enigma o el misterio, con palabras del Profesor Miguel García-Baró, y recuperar la verticalidad del ser humano, el horizonte último de compresión acerca de quién es, de su sentido y significado. «La ciencia es cumulativa, la sabiduría no», afirmó Jérôme Lejeune. La ciencia progresa exponencialmente, a una velocidad acelerada, el transhumanismo es prueba de ello; por contrario, la sabiduría no. El desarrollo de la razón técnico-instrumental está siendo muy rápido y acelerado; la razón sapiencial, en cambio, procede lentamente, sin capacidad de analizar con calma y detalle todo lo que implican estos cambios. Se nos exige una mayor reflexión acerca de quiénes somos y hacia dónde vamos como especie. El transhumanismo y el posthumanismo se plantean la cuestión de la utilidad, pero no aquellas del significado y el sentido último, o primero, de la existencia humana. (shrink)

This essay frames systemic patterns of mental abuse against women of color and Indigenous women on Turtle Island (North America) in terms of larger design-of-distribution strategies in settler colonial societies, as these societies use various forms of social power to distribute, reproduce, and automate social inequalities (including public health precarities and mortality disadvantages) that skew socio-economic gain continuously toward white settler populations and their descendants. It departs from traditional studies in gender-based violence research that frame mental abuses such as gaslighting--commonly (...) understood as mental manipulation through lying or deceit--stochastically, as chance-driven interpersonal phenomena. Building on structural analyses of knowledge in political epistemology (Dotson 2012, Berenstain 2016), political theory (Davis and Ernst 2017), and Indigenous social theory (Tuck and Yang 2012), I develop the notion of cultural gaslighting to refer to the social and historical infrastructural support mechanisms that disproportionately produce abusive mental ambients in settler colonial cultures in order to further the ends of cultural genocide and dispossession. I conclude by proposing a social epidemiological account of gaslighting that a) highlights the public health harms of abusive ambients for minority populations, b) illuminates the hidden rules of social structure in settler colonial societies, and c) amplifies the corresponding need for structural reparations. (shrink)

This paper aims to define the position of Protagoras on poetry, taking some crucial passages of Platonic Protagoras as texts that express the positions of the historical Protagoras. These passages, strictly incompatible with some essential theses of Plato’s thought, are the Great Speech (320c8-328d2), the intervention on the variety and variability of the good (334a3-c6) and the comment on the poem by Simonides (338e6-339d9). From these passages we can infer the position of the sophist towards poetry which could be summarized (...) in the following theses: 1. Poetry is an essential part of education. Epic poetry provides models for the education. Lyric poetry in turn helps to internalize in the souls of children the rhythm and the harmony that its verses contain. 2. However, an educated person should know how to evaluate what is right or wrong in the words of the poets. Criticism of Simonides’ poem is an example. From this perspective, the myth of Prometheus contained in the Protagoras Great Speech, which amends the versions of Hesiod and Aeschylus, can be considered as an model of poetic orthoepeia. (shrink)

Parménides es uno de los pensadores más influyentes de la filosofía occidental. El presente libro ofrece una hipótesis hermenéutica que se puede resumir en dos afirmaciones esenciales: primera, Parménides, como todos los pensadores de su tiempo, era ante todo un físico o fisiólogo (como los denominó Aristóteles), cuyas inquietudes y aportaciones se expresan en la segunda parte de su poema Sobre la naturaleza. Esa parte, escasamente representada en los fragmentos conservados, exponía una teoría original que se caracterizaba por defender una (...) física dualista frente al monismo de los milesios. Segunda, Parménides, a diferencia de la mayoría de los físicos, tomó conciencia por primera vez de la necesidad de explicar, no solo el orden de la naturaleza (physis) y las leyes que la rigen (tarea de los físicos), sino también el orden y las leyes del mundo del discurso (logos), de la teoría que trata de explicar el mundo. A esta segunda tarea, que sin duda puede ser calificada como el descubrimiento de la lógica, dedicó la primera parte de su Poema a modo de un discurso del método y no de una anacrónica especulación metafísica. (shrink)

The current study investigates the influence of variety among online providers and customers' access to knowledge on consumer networks, consumer engagement, and sustainable purchasing. Emphasis is on the underlying relationships among these constructs in the digital economy, which has evolved into a complex structure of multifarious nodes and linkages unfolding in the online environment. The underlying theoretical approaches are knowledge-attitude-behavior (KAB) and customer sovereignty. Against this backdrop, a questionnaire-based survey was given to 200 Millennials (i.e., generation Y) and gen Z (...) Italians—approached as empowered stakeholders requiring accurate information and sustainable solutions from online providers—in January 2023. The data was processed via the structural equation modeling technique PLS-SEM, based on SmartPLS 4. The findings indicated that sustainable purchasing is influenced to some extent by access to knowledge, consumer engagement, and consumer networks. The study endeavors to fill a research gap, as the relationships between variety among online providers and sustainable purchasing, as well as consumer engagement from the empowerment perspective are underexplored. The study provides new evidence of the relationships between consumer networks, consumers' access to knowledge, sustainable purchasing, and consumer engagement in the framework of online retail by inquiring respondents. (shrink)

La Organización de Naciones Unidas y la Organización de los Estados Americanos han desarrollado sistemas de indicadores de derechos humanos para monitorear el cumplimiento de los compromisos asumidos por los Estados a partir de la ratificación de los pactos y protocolos internacionales. Además de los clásicos indicadores cuantitativos, estos sistemas proponen incorporar “indicadores cualitativos” y “señales de progreso cualitativas”, aunque se observan diferencias en sus formas de construcción y conceptualización. El propósito de este trabajo fue desarrollar un análisis crítico de (...) las propuestas de inclusión de metodologías cualitativas en los sistemas de monitoreo de derechos humanos. Para ello, se llevó a cabo una revisión de los aspectos definitorios de la investigación y evaluación cualitativas, así como de los presupuestos ontológicos, epistemológicos y axiológicos que las vinculan al paradigma interpretativo comprensivo. A partir de ese recorrido, se argumentó que la elaboración de indicadores fijos, estandarizados y construidos a priori se presenta como un contrasentido desde una propuesta de investigación/evaluación cualitativa anclada en el paradigma interpretativo comprensivo. Por el contrario, se destacó la importancia de recuperar la perspectiva de las personas situadas, mediante abordajes inductivos que pongan en tensión los derechos reconocidos en los documentos internacionales con las realidades, percepciones y sentidos que emergen en los contextos socio-históricos concretos en que ellos se materializan. Se concluyó que este tipo de evaluación contribuiría a recuperar en los derechos humanos su potencial político emancipador, al resignificar el protagonismo de las personas como titulares de derechos y situarlas en el centro de los procesos de monitoreo. (shrink)

The enactive approach to cognition distinctively emphasizes autonomy, adaptivity, agency, meaning, experience, and interaction. Taken together, these principles can provide the new sciences of language with a comprehensive philosophical framework: languaging as adaptive social sense-making. This is a refinement and advancement on Maturana’s idea of languaging as a manner of living. Overcoming limitations in Maturana’s initial formulation of languaging is one of three motivations for this paper. Another is to give a response to skeptics who challenge enactivism to connect “lower-level” (...) sense-making with “higher-order” sophisticated moves like those commonly ascribed to language. Our primary goal is to contribute a positive story developed from the enactive account of social cognition, participatory sense-making. This concept is put into play in two different philosophical models, which respectively chronicle the logical and ontogenetic development of languaging as a particular form of social agency. Languaging emerges from the interplay of coordination and exploration inherent in the primordial tensions of participatory sense-making between individual and interactive norms; it is a practice that transcends the self-other boundary and enables agents to regulate self and other as well as interaction couplings. Linguistic sense-makers are those who negotiate interactive and internalized ways of meta-regulating the moment-to-moment activities of living and cognizing. Sense-makers in enlanguaged environments incorporate sensitivities, roles, and powers into their unique yet intelligible linguistic bodies. We dissolve the problematic dichotomies of high/low, online/offline, and linguistic/nonlinguistic cognition, and we provide new boundary criteria for specifying languaging as a prevalent kind of human social sense-making. (shrink)

This article studies the patternsfor slave resistance in Santiago de Cuba, based on the analysis of the ptlrchase contracts recordedfrom 1780 to 1803. The main objective of this work is to categorize tlze diferent ways of slave resistance, also attending to gender strategies.

This article provides a conceptual account of causal understanding by connecting current psychological research on time and causality with philosophical debates on the causal asymmetry. I argue that causal relations are viewed as asymmetric because they are understood in temporal terms. I investigate evidence from causal learning and reasoning in both children and adults: causal perception, the temporal priority principle, and the use of temporal cues for causal inference. While this account does not suffice for correct inferences of causal structure, (...) I show it to serve as a preliminary understanding of causal concepts as asymmetric, that later incorporates other types of evidence. This approach supplies causal models with an asymmetric concept of causation that underlies hypotheses about causal structure, as I will illustrate from the framework of the knowledge-based causal induction model. I further argue for an integrating perspective, showing how the understanding of causes as preceding their effects underlies both psychological models and philosophical debates over time and the causal asymmetry, particularly regarding problem cases such as simultaneous causation or backwards causation, and the conceptual connection between causation and action. (shrink)

This paper takes a critical stance on Tallis’s separation of causation and agency. While his critique of the causal theory of action and the assumptions about causation underlying different versions of determinism, including the one based on neuroscience is right, his rejection of causation (of all sorts) has implausible consequences. Denying the link between action and causation amounts to overlooking the role action plays in causal inference and in the origin of causal concepts. I suggest that a weaker version of (...) Tallis’ claim, compatible with causation understood as agency, would work better. (shrink)

In recent years, supported by new scientific evidence, the conceptualization of cognitive reserve has been progressively enriched and now encompasses not only cognitive stimulating activities or educational level, but also lifestyle activities, such as leisure physical activity and socialization. In this context, there is increasing interest in understanding the role of psychological factors in brain health and cognitive functioning. In a previous study, we have found that these factors mediated the relationship between CR and self-reported cognitive functioning. In this study, (...) we have confirmed an association between two important constructs included in the psychological wellbeing and salutogenic models, “purpose in life” and “sense of coherence,” CR, as assessed using a questionnaire, and cognitive functioning, as evaluated using a comprehensive neuropsychological battery. Results from 888 middle-aged healthy participants from the Barcelona Brain Health Initiative indicate that both sense of coherence and CR were positively associated with verbal memory, reasoning and attention, working memory, and global cognition. Moreover, the relation between CR and cognitive functioning in the different domains is partially mediated by SoC. When we controlled for brain integrity, introducing into the model neurofilament light chain measures, the mediator role of SoC was confirmed for reasoning and attention and global cognition. However, purpose in life was not associated with cognitive functioning. These results reveal the central role of the SoC construct, which mediates the association between classic CR estimates and cognitive functions, potentially representing a modifiable target for interventions that aim to promote brain health. (shrink)

Objective: Loneliness is the subjective distress of feeling alone and has a strong impact on wellbeing and health. In addition to well-known predictors like isolation and poor health, a better understanding of the psychological determinants of loneliness would offer effective targets for future complementary interventions.Methods: In this cross-sectional observational study, we compared the explanatory power of several important risk factors of loneliness with the affective, motivational, and cognitive aspects of the Meaning in Life construct. Different nested linear models were compared (...) including socio-demographic, lifestyles, social-connectedness, and self-rated health variables, to assess the overlapping and non-overlapping explanatory power of each of them.Results: Health status and MiL were found to be the most important predictors of loneliness, followed by social connectedness and, with a much lower weight, lifestyles, and socio-demographic factors. Within the MiL factor, the most cognitive component, sense of coherence, had a greater explanatory power than the more affective and motivational ones.Conclusion: Reduced MiL, the capacity of an individual to attach “value and significance” to life, is a crucial predictor to the feeling of loneliness. These results suggest that programs aiming to combat loneliness should go well beyond situational interventions and include more cognitive, value-centered interventions that enable individuals to define and pursue a meaningful vital plan. (shrink)

The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has had the opportunity to address the sensitive matter of the wearing of the Islamic headscarf in the workplace in two preliminary rulings. The result of these decisions implies that the wearing of this veil at work is, in general, neither proscribed nor always justified as a legitimate expression of religious beliefs. However, the law studied and applied deals exclusively with discrimination in the workplace on religious grounds. Nonetheless, the Islamic headscarf (...) is only worn by (some) Muslim women (never by men). This article reviews the EU legislation and policy on equality, intersectionality and multiple discrimination to verify that gender mainstreaming does not reach the work of the Court. Only the inclusion of a feminist perspective to the application of justice, with a clear methodology, can guarantee that gender does not disappear in cases of complex discrimination. (shrink)

Coordination is a widely employed term across recent quantitative and qualitative approaches to intersubjectivity, particularly approaches that give embodiment and enaction central explanatory roles. With a focus on linguistic and bodily coordination in conversational contexts, I review the operational meaning of coordination in recent empirical research and related theorizing of embodied intersubjectivity. This discussion articulates what must be involved in treating linguistic meaning as dynamic processes of coordination. The coordination approach presents languaging as a set of dynamic self-organizing processes and (...) actions on multiple timescales and across multiple modalities that come about and work in certain domains (those jointly constructed in social, interactive, high-order sense-making). These processes go beyond meaning at the level that is available to first-person experience. I take one crucial consequence of this to be the ubiquitously moral nature of languaging with others. Languaging coordinates experience, among other levels of behavior and event. Ethical effort is called for by the automatic autonomy-influencing forces of languaging as coordination. (shrink)

This is the first English translation of Ibn Sīnā's (Avicenna) Commentary on Chapters 6-10 of Aristotle's Metaphysics Λ. It is significant as it is one of only a small number of surviving commentaries by Ibn Sīnā and offers crucial insights into not only his attitudes towards his predecessors, but also his own philosophical positions — especially with regard to the human intellect's connections to God and the cosmos — and his attempt to develop a distinctive mode of commentary.

La gestión de la información es una actividad sustancial en la formación inicial del profesorado, y para la convivencia en la sociedad digital. De ahí la necesidad de, diagnosticar las competencias informacionales del profesorado en formación, a fin de determinar sus carencias y expectativas de logro. En ese propósito se aplicó el cuestionario IL-HUMASS (Information Literacy Humanities Social Sciences Survey) a 344 estudiantes de nueve especialidades pedagógicas de una facultad de educación. Los resultados permiten evidenciar las diferencias de adquisición, en (...) términos de la importancia y autoeficacia atribuida a las competencias informacionales; y la necesidad de rediseñar la formación docente. (shrink)

Carl Menger’s theory of subjective economic value is not only one of the greatest contributions of Austrian economics, subjective value is also the received view in mainstream economics today. However, modern-day economic theory does not explicitly address the theory advanced by Menger but merely assumes that value is subjective on the basis that the experience of valuing something is no more than an expression of preference. Accordingly, contemporary economists do not appear to recognize the distinction between this understanding of value (...) and any other possible understanding of value, such as objective theories of moral value advanced in older strands of inquiry. Lacking the theoretical basis laid by Menger, subjectivity indeed appears deceptively simple: choices are made on the basis of preferences, and preferences are subjective. It would thus follow that further examination of the phenomenon of choice appears unnecessary. The aim of this paper is to present the Austrian philosophical foundations of the theory of subjective economic value and examine how this received theory has been quite significantly transformed in its transition to a neoclassical economics framework that has disposed of its theoretical basis. (shrink)

This essay argues that according to feminist existential phenomenology, feminist pragmatism, and feminist genealogy, our embodied condition is an important starting place for ethical living due to the inevitable role that habits play in our conduct. In bodies, the phenomenon of habit uniquely holds together the ambiguities of freedom and determinism, transcendence and immanence, and stability and plasticity. Seeing habit formation as a matter of self-growth and social justice gives fresh opportunity for thinking of “assuming ambiguity” as a lifelong endeavor (...) made up of many small projects and practices of situated resistance to stagnation. Transcendence, understood as ameliorative transformation, is found in cultivating habits of learning from our bodily living. I articulate this argument via a reading of Simone de Beauvoir's The Coming of Age, John Dewey's Human Nature and Conduct, and Ladelle McWhorter's Bodies and Pleasures. I discuss two domains wherein the ethical significance of habit formation appears: cognitive psychological research on neural plasticity, and certain projects of self-cultivation that risk turning into overdetermining “cult of the self ” practices that close off possibilities for personal and collective transformation. (shrink)

The famous dispute between Protagoras and Euathlus concerning Protagoras’s tuition fee reportedly owed to him by Euathlus is solved on the basis of practical argumentation concerning actions. The dispute is widely viewed as a kind of a logical paradox, and I show that such treating arises due to the double confusion in the dispute narrative. The linguistic expressions used to refer to Protagoras’s, Euathlus’s and the jurors’ actions are confused with these actions themselves. The other confusion is the collision between (...) the pairs of incompatible actions ambiguously expressed by two different pairs of sentences, one of which is a propositionally consistent pair whereas the other is an inconsistent one. The actional paradox solution aims to clear up these confusions by means of two core borderlines, propositional and expressive, drawn between the actions and the propositions. The propositional distinction says that actions are empirical facts and they lack truth values unlike propositions, which are mental entities and are often employed for referring to the actions. This distinction helps to avoid the confusion between the empirical incompatibility of actions and the truth-functional inconsistency of propositions. The expressive distinction claims that although the same linguistic sentences can be used to refer both to actions and propositions, two empirically incompatible actions can be expressed both by a pair of inconsistent propositions as well as by a pair of consistent ones. Therefore, the action of Protagoras’s being paid may be linguistically symbolized in four different ways: Protagoras gets paid due to the verdict, Protagoras gets paid due to the contract that amount to Protagoras does not get paid by the contract and Protagoras does not get paid by the verdict respectively, and likewise for Euathlus’s actions. The two distinctions are used for classifying the two groups of paradox solutions, legal and logical, proposed so far depending on which of the two confusions they purport to escape from. The actional reconstruction of the paradox suggests that there is only one single agent in the dispute, Protagoras, while the other named Euathlus is a ‘phantom,’ which most probably was invented by Protagoras himself for the sake of creating this challenging sophism. (shrink)

Este libro estudia cuestiones pertenecientes al campo de la lógica aplicada, concretamente de teoría de la argumentación informal. Abarca el análisis de los principales tipos de errores por incom­petencia argumentativa a partir de un enfoque nor­mativo actualizado y con una propuesta de taxono­mía de falacias lógicas informales basada en los cri­terios básicos de buena argumentación. Se identifi­can, describen y ejemplifican, con textos de varios niveles de dificultad, las falacias más habituales (en­tre ellas, las falacias «ad hominem, ad populum, petitio principii», (...) por inducción precipitada, falsa analogía, falso dilema) presentes en diferentes interacciones lin­güísticas interpersonales (documentos políticos, pe­riodísticos, pseudocientíficos, filosóficos) formu­ladas en lenguajes naturales. A lo largo del libro, los principales epígrafes se ilustran con textos extraídos del «Quijote» y de obras de Lewis Carroll. En los capí­tulos iniciales se abordan asuntos previos recomen­dables para la buena comprensión de los capítulos de desarrollo de falacias específicas, a saber, la re­la­ción entre lógica y retórica, los distintos tipos de ar­gumentos, la relación entre razonar y argumentar, el lugar de las emociones en la argumentación falaz y las distintas teorías y definiciones de falacia, así como los errores conceptuales más comunes asociados con el término o el vínculo entre falacias y paradojas. Se re­servan dos capítulos finales, uno sobre falacias bioéticas contemporáneas, y otro con una propuesta de «Código de Buenas Prácticas Argumentativas», fun­damentado en los criterios a partir de los que se ela­bora la taxonomía de falacias del libro. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 45, Issue 11, November 2021.

Prompted by our commentators, we take this response as an opportunity to clarify the premises, attitudes, and methods of our enactive approach to human languaging. We high-light the need to recognize that any investigation, particularly one into language, is always a concretely situated and self-grounding activity; our attitude as researchers is one of knowing as engagement with our subject matter. Our task, formulating the missing categories that can bridge embodied cognitive science with language research, requires avoiding premature abstractions and clarifying (...) the multiple circularities at play. Our chosen method is dialectical, which has prompted several interesting observations that we respond to, particularly with respect to what this method means for enactive epistemology and ontology. We also clarify the important question of how best to conceive of the variety of social skills we progressively identify with our method and are at play in human languaging. Are these skills socially constituted or just socially learned? The difference, again, leads to a clarification that acts, skills, actors, and interactions are to be conceived as co-emerging categories. We illustrate some of these points with a discussion of an example of aspects of the model at play in a study of gift giving in China.Keywords: Enactive epistemology, Enactive ontology, Dialectics, languaging, Shared know-how. (shrink)

In cammino con l'ermeneutica -- Il tempo e la poetica della narratività -- Ermeneutica della temporalità e narrazione -- Ermeneutica della storicità e etica della narratività.

This paper investigates the concept of behavioral autonomy in Artificial Life by drawing a parallel to the use of teleological notions in the study of biological life. Contrary to one of the leading assumptions in Artificial Life research, I argue that there is a significant difference in how autonomous behavior is understood in artificial and biological life forms: the former is underlain by human goals in a way that the latter is not. While behavioral traits can be explained in relation (...) to evolutionary history in biological organisms, in synthetic life forms behavior depends on a design driven by a research agenda, further shaped by broader human goals. This point will be illustrated with a case study on a synthetic life form. Consequently, the putative epistemic benefit of reaching a better understanding of behavioral autonomy in biological organisms by synthesizing artificial life forms is subject to doubt: the autonomy observed in such artificial organisms may be a mere projection of human agency. Further questions arise in relation to the need to spell out the relevant human aims when addressing potential social or ethical implications of synthesizing artificial life forms. (shrink)

The ubiquitous human practice of spontaneously gesturing while speaking demonstrates the embodiment, embeddedness, and sociality of cognition. The present essay takes gestural practice to be a paradigmatic example of a more general claim: human cognition is social insofar as our embedded, intelligent, and interacting bodies select and construct meaning in a way that is intersubjectively constrained and defeasible. Spontaneous co-speech gesture is markedly interesting because it at once confirms embodied aspects of linguistic meaning-making that formalist and linguistic turn-type philosophical approaches (...) fail to appreciate, and it also forefronts intersubjectivity as an inherent and inherently normative dimension of communicative action. Co-speech hand gestures, as linguistically meaningful speech acts, demonstrate both sedimentation and spontaneity (in the sense of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s dialectic of linguistic expression ( 2002 )), or features of convention and nonconvention in a Gricean sense ( 1989 ). Yet neither pragmatic nor classic phenomenological approaches to communication can accommodate the practice of co-speech hand gesturing without some rehabilitation and reorientation. Pragmatic criteria of intersubjectivity, normativity, and rationality need to confront the non-propositional and nonverbal meaning-making of embodied encounters. Phenomenological treatments of expression and intersubjectivity must consider the normative nature of high-order social practices like language use. Reciprocally critical exchanges between these traditions and gesture studies yield an improved philosophy that treats language as a multi-modal medium for collaborative meaning achievement. The proper paradigm for these discussions is found in enactive approaches to social cognition. Co-speech hand gestures are first and foremost emergent elements of social interaction, not the external whirring of an isolated internal consciousness. In contrast to current literature that frequently presents gestures as uncontrollable bodily upsurge or infallible imagistic phenomenon that drives and dances with verbal or “linguistic” convention (McNeill 1992 , 2005 ), I suggest that we study gestures as dynamic, embodied, and shared tools for collaborative sense-making. (shrink)

This paper investigates Negative Concord, arguing that it results from a systematic lexical ambiguity: the items that participate in Negative Concord ("n-words" in Laka's 1990 terminology) are ambiguous between negative polarity items and their genuinely negative counterparts. I try to show that on empirical grounds the proposed account compares favorably with other analyses that shy away from ambiguity. I furthermore suggest that the ambiguity is not implausible conceptually because it can be viewed as reflecting an intermediate stage of the Jespersen (...) Cycle. Negative Concord can be observed in many languages. The data discussed here are taken from Romance, primarily Spanish. (shrink)

Bare conditionals, I argue, exhibit Conditional Duality in that when they appear in downward entailing environments they differ from bare conditionals elsewhere in having existential rather than universal force. Two recalcitrant phenomena are shown to find a new explanation under this thesis: bare conditionals under only, and bare conditionals in the scope of negative nominal quantifiers, or what has come to be known as Higginbotham’s puzzle. I also consider how bare conditionals behave when embedded under negation, arguing that such conditionals (...) often involve denial negation. One important conclusion that emerges from the discussion is that an account of bare conditionals that validates Conditional Excluded Middle is not warranted. By limiting the scope of the strict analysis Conditional Duality is also a way of maintaining such an account. (shrink)

This article examines how specific realist and projectivist versions of manipulability theories of causation deal with the problem of objectivity. Does an agent-dependent concept of manipulability imply that conflicting causal claims made by agents with different capacities can come out as true? In defence of the projectivist stance taken by the agency view, I argue that if the agent’s perspective is shown to be uniform across different agents, then the truth-values of causal claims do not vary arbitrarily and, thus, reach (...) a satisfactory level of objectivity. My argument connects Price’s considerations on the situation of deliberation, whose structure, common to all agents, is the same with respect to both decision making and causal claims on a concept inspired by Douglas’s classification of objectivity of thought processes: the perspective of the detached agent. I further argue that, despite his agent-independent concept of intervention, Woodward’s claim of a stronger objectivity standard cannot be achieved, as the relativity of causal concepts to a variable set brings about the issue of the agent’s choice of variables. Consequently, a more permissive objectivity standard applies to both views. (shrink)

In response to the grim realities of the present world Jewish thought has not tended to retreat into eschatological fantasy, but rather to project utopian visions precisely on to the present moment, envisioning redemptions that are concrete, immanent, and necessarily political in nature. In difficult times and through shifting historical contexts, the messianic hope in the Jewish tradition has functioned as a political vision: the dream of a peaceful kingdom, of a country to return to, or of a leader who (...) will administer justice among the nations. Against this background, it is unsurprising that Jewish messianism in modern times has been transposed, and lives on in secular political movements and ideologies. The purpose of this book is to contribute to the deeper understanding of the relationship between Jewish thought, utopia, and revolution, by taking a fresh look at its historical and religious roots. We approach the issue from several perspectives, with differences of opinion presented both in regard to what Jewish tradition is, and how to regard utopia and revolution. These notions are multifaceted, comprising aspects such as political messianism, religious renewal, Zionism, and different forms of Marxist and Anarchistic movements. (shrink)