This article inquires whether or not religious beliefs are rational, that is to say, whether or not they can be rationally sustained. The point of the article is not to prove the existence of God, but rather simply to show whether or not religious language has real meaning. To do this, we shall examine the concept of belief in general. Then we shall look at religious beliefs in particular from two opposing points of view: on the one hand, from the (...) position of authors who claim that religious beliefs can in fact be sustained by rational evidence, and on the other hand, from the perspective of other authors who affirm that these beliefs cannot be rationally justified, because spiritual discourse refers to the ineffable, which deprives it of the means to verify or deny its propositions. (shrink)

El presente artículo consta de tres partes. La primera consiste en analizar el concepto de justicia dentro del pensamiento de David Hume en las obras Tratado de la naturaleza humana e Investigación sobre los principios de la moral. La segunda aplica el el proceso anterior pero a las obras de Jean Rousseau Contrato Social y Discurso sobre el origen de la desigualdad entre los hombres. La tercera establece que las concepciones sobre la justicia, tanto las del escocés como las del (...) ginebrino, poseen contextos y sentidos distintos pero que, en realidad, son posturas que tienen algunas similitudes en lo que respecta al fundamento de la propiedad. (shrink)

In this research, a sliding mode regulator with sine mapping is suggested for the stabilization of electricity generators being affected by magnet interaction nonlinearities and generator nonlinearities. To reach this goal, our suggested regulator has the following contributions: it starts from the sliding mode regulator with the modifications that the saturation mapping is used to reach a smoother performance instead of the signum mapping, and the sine mapping is applied to reach an upper bound in the proportional gain error, it (...) is used to reach some chosen constant behaviors for the angle position, angle speed, and current in the electricity generators, and its stabilization is ensured based on the Lyapunov approach. We show the simulation of the suggested regulator in two electricity generators. (shrink)

Los desafíos de la filosofía para el siglo XXI -- ¿La filosofía tiene alguna función en la sociedad? -- ¿Incide la filosofía mexicana en la sociedad actual? -- Diez tesis sobre el papel de la filosofía en la educación y la sociedad -- La filosofía y las humanidades y su no lugar en la reforma de la educación media superior puesta en marcha por la Secretaría de Educación Pública -- La tarea de las humanidades hoy -- En torno al libro (...) Ser y quehacer de la universidad. Ciencia, poder, eticidad, de Francisco Piñon -- El edificio de la razón, de Jaime Labastida -- Tres retos de la sociedad por venir, de Luis Villoro -- Ética y política, de Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez. (shrink)

The Luck Problem has existed in one form or another since David Hume, at least. It is perhaps as old as Stoic objections to the Epicurean swerve. Although the general issue admits of different formulations with subtly different emphases, the characterization of it that will serve as my target focuses on “cross-worlds” luck, a kind of luck that arises when the decision-making of agents is indeterministic.

In _Time’s Causal Power_, Antonio Vargas explains how Proclus (412-485 C.E.) developed the unique theory that time is a cause and a god, the world’s first unmoved mover by addressing Aristotle’s criticisms of Plato’s claim that time is a change.

This essay is part of a special issue celebrating 50 years of Political Theory. The ambition of the editors was to mark this half century not with a retrospective but with a confabulation of futures. Contributors were asked: What will political theory look and sound like in the next century and beyond? What claims might political theorists or their descendants be making in ten, twenty-five, fifty, a hundred years’ time? How might they vindicate those claims in their future contexts? How (...) will the consistent concerns of political theorists evolve into the questions critical for people decades or centuries from now? What new problems will engage the political theorists (or their rough equivalents) of the future? What forms might those take? What follows is one of the many confabulations published in response to these queries. (shrink)

"Knowing how we know" is the subject of this book. Its authors present a new view of cognition that has important social and ethical implications, for, they assert, the only world we humans can have is the one we create together through the actions of our coexistence. Written for a general audience as well as for students, scholars, and scientists and abundantly illustrated with examples from biology, linguistics, and new social and cultural phenomena, this revised edition includes a new afterword (...) by Dr. Varela, in which he discusses the effect the book has had in the years since its first publication. (shrink)

The paper engages Christopher Boorse’s Bio-Statistical Theory. In its current form, BST runs into a significant challenge. For BST to account for its central tenet—that lower-level part-dysfunction is sufficient for higher-level pathology—it must provide criteria for how to decide which lower-level parts are the ones to be analyzed for health or pathology. As BST is a naturalistic theory, such choices must be based solely on naturalistic considerations. An argument is provided to show that, if BST is to be preserved, such (...) parthood choices are based on non-naturalistic considerations. We demonstrate that even when parthood choices are based on the best way to preserve BST, there are counterintuitive results which bring the central tenet of BST into question. (shrink)

A satisfactory construal of the subject matter of free will debates must allow for disagreements along two axes. First, it must allow for the possibility of higher order disagreements, or disagreements about what concepts, phenomena, or practices an account of free will is supposed to capture or explain. Second, it must allow for the fact of variation in the extent to which theories are bound by antecedent pre-philosophical thought, talk, and practices. A promising way of accommodating these two thoughts is (...) to treat free will in broadly functionalist terms. On the account proposed here, free will is a power that makes sense of everyday responsibility practices. This construal is not widely shared, but it allows for the possibility that we might have false beliefs about the nature of free will, while still making sense of central philosophical debates about free will. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 9, September 2020, Page W1-W4.

Zygon®, Volume 57, Issue 1, Page 46-59, March 2022.

En este artículo postulamos que el trabajo de Kuhn es una revolución filosófica para la filosofía de la ciencia. La búsqueda de revoluciones filosóficas es una extensión de las ideas de Kuhn acerca de las revoluciones científicas. Las revoluciones filosóficas se distinguen de las revoluciones científicas en algunos aspectos que discutimos en este trabajo. Defendemos que la revolución kuhniana consiste en la naturalización de la filosofía de la ciencia que se desprende de sus trabajos y discutimos la analogía biológica que (...) Kuhn empleó como un ejemplo ilustrativo. (shrink)

CONTENIDO: Kant y la pedagogía - De la objetividad a la objetivación - De la tensión entre el investigador y el método - Interdisciplinariedad e investigación cualitativa en educación - Formación y subjetividad: epistemología, lenguaje y pedagogía - La pedagogía ante la tecnología como estructura del mundo de la vida - Alcances y limitaciones de la inteligencia artificial en pedagogía - A propósito de la informática en el mundo de la pedagogía y de la educación - La representación del conocimiento (...) y la inteligencia artificial - La lógica de las ciencias como didáctica: ¿un bastión de modernidad? - La educación del futuro como futuro de la educación - De la epistemología de la pedagogía a la filosofía de la educación. (shrink)

Nomy Arpaly rejects the model of rationality used by most ethicists and action theorists. Both observation and psychology indicate that people act rationally without deliberation, and act irrationally with deliberation. By questioning the notion that our own minds are comprehensible to us--and therefore questioning much of the current work of action theorists and ethicists--Arpaly attempts to develop a more realistic conception of moral agency.

En su más reciente libro, Cuestiones de Filosofía del Lenguaje: Pragmática, David Pérez Chico (2022) nos presenta una muy interesante selección de artículos sobre diferentes temáticas actualmente trabajadas en filosofía del lenguaje. Personalmente, considero que este libro es una lectura imprescindible para cualquier lector de habla hispana que quiera introducirse en las temáticas más contemporáneamente discutidas en esa disciplina. En este marco, en el presente artículo me propongo realizar un análisis crítico de cuatro de los artículos de la compilación que (...) trabajan la temática de las emisiones evaluativas, i.e., emisiones cuya extensión depende de parámetros contextuales semánticamente no estándares. (shrink)

Authenticity has become a widespread ethical ideal that represents a way of dealing with normative gaps in contemporary life. This ideal suggests that one should be true to oneself and lead a life expressive of what one takes oneself to be. However, many contemporary thinkers have pointed out that the ideal of authenticity has increasingly turned into a kind of aestheticism and egoistic self-indulgence. In his book, Varga systematically constructs a critical concept of authenticity that takes into account the reciprocal (...) shaping of capitalism and the ideal of authenticity. Drawing on different traditions in critical social theory, moral philosophy and phenomenology, Varga builds a concept of authenticity that can make intelligible various problematic and potentially exhausting practices of the self. (shrink)

Esta reseña aborda el libro de la estudiosa norteamericana Sophi Esch a propósito de la literatura y la música centroamericana y mexicana producida en medio de acontecimientos que involucran el uso de la violencia. A partir de registros variados, la autora observa los procesos de agencia, vinculados a nociones como masculinidad o independencia. El libro puede ser considerado una historia cultural de producciones sociales que parten de contingentes variados y que se emplazan desde lugares de enunciación diversos. Reseña de Letra (...) y metralla. Cultura y política durante los periodos de conflictos armados en México y Centroamérica (1910-1920), Ciudad de México, Bonilla Artiga Editores, 2022, cuenta con 350 páginas y el ISBN: 978-607-8838-09-7. (shrink)

En la formación inicial docente, el estudio de la epistemología constituye una pieza fundamental para que los futuros profesores puedan filosofar sobre la realidad de los diversos contextos educativos y se pregunten cómo mejorarla desde los principios que rigen la investigación científica. De este modo, gracias al sustento epistemológico, los estudiantes de pedagogía pueden formarse como docentes investigadores capaces de analizar los cambios sociales propuestos por las múltiples realidades y conocer cómo se construye el conocimiento científico de una especialidad dada. (...) La finalidad de este trabajo, es presentar una reflexión filosófica-epistemológica sobre la imperiosa necesidad de desarrollar el conocimiento epistemológico en la formación inicial del profesorado de matemática e historia, considerando los fundamentos disciplinares, pedagógicos y cognitivos de dichas áreas. (shrink)

Philosophers such as Elizabeth Anscombe and Donald Davidson have explained that we cannot derive predictions from judgments such as "he boasted from vanity." Such judgments are also the source of countless painful mistakes. However, are they necessarily unreliable? Often enough, even if only gradually and partially, we get people right. Assuming that we do is already assuming that there must be a connection, if not causal then at least casual, between what a person is, what she does, and how she (...) acts; and that we may describe it correctly. If no ironclad generalizations can be made that connect the way a person is, her reasons, and her actions, how might we describe correctness in judgments such as this?Anscombe... (shrink)

Building upon the insights of scholars attuned to story, narrative, and myth, this article explores the relationship between myth, science, and religion. After clarifying the interplay of the three terms—story, narrative, and myth—and the preference for the term myth, this article will argue that myth can serve as a medium through which religion, neuroscience, and mental well‐being interact. Such an exploration will cover the role of myths in religion, the neurological basis of myth, and the practices of narrative psychology and (...) bibliotherapy. The article will conclude with suggestions for understanding and utilizing the relationship between myth and the scholarly study of the relationship between science and religion. This article ultimately suggests that myth can operate as a methodological aid to the science‐and‐religion field. (shrink)

In a world of ever growing specialization, the idea of a unity of science is commonly discarded, but cooperative work involving cross-disciplinary points of view is encouraged. The aim of this paper is to show with some textual support that Charles S. Peirce not only identified this paradoxical situation a century ago, but he also mapped out some paths for reaching a successful solution. A particular attention is paid to Peirce's classification of the sciences and to his conception of science (...) as a collective and cooperative activity of all those whose lives are animated by the desire to discover the truth. -/- . (shrink)

A large part of the contemporary literature on dehumanization is committed to three ideas: (a) dehumanization involves some degree of denial of humanness, (b) such denial is to be comprehended in mental terms, and (c) whatever exact mechanisms underlie the denial of humanness, they belong in the realm of post-perceptual processing. This chapter examines (c) and argues that the awareness of minds might belong to perceptual processing. This paves the way for the possibility that dehumanization might, at least in part, (...) be a perceptual phenomenon, such that dehumanizers visually perceive the dehumanized as exhibiting lesser-than-human minds. It is perhaps unsurprising that the first systematic investigations of dehumanization approached the phenomenon as linked to contexts of war, genocide, extreme hatred, and violence. One guiding hypothesis was that dehumanizers exclude the dehumanized from a moral community of human beings, implicitly conceptualized as displaying distinct individualities and being embedded in caring interpersonal relations. By comprehending the dehumanized as deindividuated entities to which moral norms and considerations of fairness do not apply (Opotow 1990), dehumanizers are able to disengage from moral restrictions and self-sanctions (Bandura 1999). (shrink)

Grief is often described as characterized by a particular emotional response to another person’s death. While this is true of paradigm cases, we argue that a broader notion of grief allows accommodating forms of this emotional experience that deviate from the paradigmatic case. The bulk of the paper explores such a nonparadigmatic form of grief, anticipatory-vicarious grief, which is typically triggered by pondering the inevitability of our own death. We argue that AV-grief is a particular moral emotion that serves a (...) unique function and is indissolubly linked to the practical identities of human agents. An agent’s AV-grief is about the harm that occurs to individuals whose practical identities depend on the agent. (shrink)

How do people understand the concepts of mental health and disorder? The objective of this paper is to examine the impact of several factors on people’s judgments about whether a condition constitutes a mental disorder or a healthy state. Specifically, this study examines the impact of the source of the condition, its outcome, individual valuation (i.e., the value the individual attaches to the condition), and group valuation (i.e., the value the relevant group attaches to the condition). While we find that (...) people’s health and disorder judgments are driven by perceived dysfunction, we also find that health and disorder judgments are impacted differently by these factors. Health judgements are impacted by outcome and individual valuation, and disorder judgments are impacted by condition source. These results suggest that the folk concept of mental health is positive (i.e., mental health is more than the absence of mental disorder) and normativist (i.e., value judgments play a significant role in determining whether a condition counts as healthy), while the concept of mental disorder aligns with a naturalist perspective, at least to the extent that dysfunction plays an important role in categorizing a condition as a disorder. However, our finding that people’s dysfunction judgments are influenced by individual valuation and outcomes poses a strong challenge to naturalist accounts. To provide access to our supplementary data, an appendix has been included. (shrink)

This chapter argues that despite the recent, welcome interest in autobiographical writing about depression, its use for research purposes presents an epistemological challenge because the extent to which these descriptions illuminate the true nature of depressive experience cannot be discerned. Contextualized within the genre of autobiography as well as the subgenre of illness memoir, the depression memoir exhibits ambiguities, it is shown, imposed by the constraints of its genre, and by the nature of autobiographical memory. Sources of ambiguity distinctive to (...) depression memoirs are next introduced, some tied to cultural meanings, others to the status of depressive states as constituted by moods. Finally, some empirical corroboration for these claims is cited, in findings indicating that depression affects autobiographical memory and writing style. The indeterminacy identified here is not a reason to dismiss depression memoirs, it is concluded, so much as to employ caution in drawing inferences from them. (shrink)

Here they are revised notions of the Western tradition that conform the discourse of poetic reason, and the way that Maria Zambrano assumed them. Her thought examines the possibilities of the words, either poetic or philosophical, to allow persons to get conscience. She attempts to unify both types of words using a notion of love as essential intent for dealing with the otherness, allowing, also, the human being conscious reflection on the affectivity. To achieve this, she revises culture to find (...) ideas and examples to support the poetic reason as loving and hopeful reflection and as a possibility of the humanity to know about its own feelings. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:To Nurse BetterJaime HenselWhen things were quiet again I asked him what training he’d had to become the director of hospital security. “I worked for 20 years in corrections,” he answered proudly, and I was saddened but not surprised.In September 2010 I started an accelerated graduate entry nurse practitioner program to become a family nurse practitioner. Accelerated programs leave little time for preamble, since the idea is to take (...) a total novice and turn her first into a nurse and then into a nurse practitioner in just three years. While the classroom information was vital, it was our clinical experiences that really initiated us into the profession. In just the second week of school, we were divided into small groups and assigned to clinical preceptors—hands–on teachers who introduced us to our first patients, curbed our mistakes, quelled our fears, and pushed and pulled and cajoled us into being nascent healthcare providers. In showing us how to give bed baths, suction secretions, insert Foley catheters, and hang IV bags, our preceptors really began showing us how to use our hands as healers.In that first semester my patients also proved to be invaluable instructors. Talking to them, administering their medication, washing their bodies made me keenly aware of the delicate balance of vulnerability and power and trust and respect and intimacy that underlies all healthcare relationships. I hope, wherever those patients are now, they know how deeply I appreciate their patience and good humor and their collusion in my education.In December, the first semester and the first clinical rotations ended. Four months into nursing school I had a basic understanding of what it means to be a nurse. Frankly, most days I still felt like an impostor in blue pajamas sporting a stethoscope I didn’t really know how to use and new Dansko clogs that squeaked with every step. But in an accelerated program, fast and furious is the name of the game. We went away for winter break—a much needed breather—and came back to something completely different: psychiatric nursing.In preparation for these new clinicals, we were taught in class that we should not wear dangly jewelry or stethoscopes. That we should never let the patient get between us and the door. That psychiatric (psych) patients could escalate quickly; psych patients could have surprising triggers; psych patients could be very unpredictable. And psych patients could be violent. We were taught about physical and chemical restraints, and about show of force. We were cautioned, as students, to stay out of the way if things got tense on the floor. In stark contrast to medical patients, psych patients were made to sound less like people who had diseases and more like adversaries. I drove to my first day on the floor with trepidation.My new preceptor had spent her entire career in psych. She loved her job, loved the care of psychiatric patients. She set up a rotation because she wanted our entire clinical group to get full exposure to the breadth of psychiatric services offered by this medium–sized community hospital. We would each get to spend shifts on the locked psych floor, observing outpatient group therapy sessions, and in the psych emergency department (ED).I rotated to the psych ED for the first time on a Friday night. The first couple hours of the shift were very slow. I started talking to the mustachioed guard on duty, who looked as bored as I felt. He told me about his kids, I told him about nursing school. He seemed nice.When our conversation flagged, I explored the psych ED. It didn’t take long—just a short hallway with a bathroom, the social workers’ office, and two patient rooms without doors. The majority of the designated psych beds were actually around the corner in the main room of the medical ED—stretchers lined against the wall, without curtains or any [End Page 98] other attempt at privacy. I noticed that from where the guard stood at the corner of the psych hall he had a pretty good view of all the beds. Then again, so did most of the other patients... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Philosophies of America Reader: From the Popol Vuh to the Present ed. by Kim Díaz and Mathew A. FoustBernardo R. Vargas (bio)The Philosophies of America Reader: From the Popol Vuh to the Present. Edited by Kim Díaz and Mathew A. Foust. New York: Bloomsbury, 2021. Pp. 480. Paperback $46.75, isbn 978-1-4742-9626-7.Philosophy in the United States continues to be among the least diverse disciplines in the humanities, (...) dominated statistically by white males, with the next largest group being white female philosophers.1 This lack of diversity affects how we define philosophy and who counts as a philosopher. As the editors of The Philosophies of America Reader, Kim Díaz and Mathew A. Foust, put it, "Just as history has fashioned and popularized distorted accounts of the 'discovery' of America, it has done the same in its presentation of American Philosophy" (p. xv). This exemplary collection of essays from across the Americas allows the readers and instructors to reimagine what we construe as philosophy and who we imagine an American philosopher to be.The editors offer diverse essays covering an impressive timeframe, ranging from the Popol Vuh, whose oral tradition from Guatemala predates Spanish colonization and was recorded in the mid-1500s, to contemporary philosophers such as Gregory Pappas. The collection excels in offering texts that typical philosophy anthologies are unlikely to include, which the editors call "unusual suspects" that have been historically marginalized, while also maintaining more familiar or "classical" figures (pp. xv–xvi). These "unusual suspects" include women, Latinx, American Indigenous, Black, and Caribbean thinkers.The Philosophies of America Reader offers various resources to enhance the student and instructor's experience. The book is structured into four themes: (1) Selfhood and Identity, (2) Knowing and Learning, (3) Aesthetics and Spirituality, and (5) Violence and Peace. The editors design these themes to fit the traditionally understood areas of philosophy of metaphysics, epistemology, and axiology. Even if the instructor's course description does not specifically target American Philosophy, these thematic categories are valuable for th ose who wish to incorporate a more diverse reading list. For example, these essays could easily apply to courses such as Critical Philosophy of Race, Introduction to Philosophy, or Introduction to Ethics. Each thematic section also features a "For Further Reading" segment, which includes selected secondary sources to broaden research or substitute texts. In addition, the editors provide a detailed [End Page 1] syllabus example, including a Course Description and Outline of the Course for a bi-weekly class, which is neatly divided into a 16-week reading schedule. They also include instructive sections such as a Note to the Teacher to aid in thinking through how to interact with the unfamiliar texts and a Note to the Student to guide their disposition and readings.Moreover, the text presents introductory essays for each thematic section. These essays provide an overview of the content and delve into the author's positionality, such as their geography, context, motivations for writing, race, ethnicity, and native tongue. The introductions are philosophically robust yet accessible to new philosophy students and are not filled with unnecessary philosophical jargon.Due to its large scope of thinkers, this text offers a vibrant opportunity to dialogue with philosophers who share or differ in their perspectives across the major thematic categories. The editors emphasize that although this is not a history of thought, the texts present lineages of progression, elaboration, and disagreement intended to guide instructors in connecting the texts with their students (p. xx). Furthermore, this allows the reader and the instructor to avoid isolating their discourse to a particular time, geography, gender, or race and ethnicity. In addition to the biographical and contextual information given in the introductions, a small yet helpful detail is a timeline of the selections that further contextualizes the readings.I wish to underscore two key clusters of essays amidst the vast array of 50 readings related to Asian-American and Mexican-American discourse for the instructor's consideration, particularly those teaching in the United States. These two large population groups deserve consideration as enrollment rates for Asian Americans and Hispanics (of whom Mexicans are the largest population... (shrink)

Neil Levy (2007) argues that empirical data shows that psychopaths lack the moral knowledge required for moral responsibility. His account is intriguing, and it offers a promising way to think about the significance of psychopaths for work on moral responsibility. In what follows we focus on three lines of concern connected to Levy's account: his interpretation of the data, the scope of exculpation, and the significance of biological explanations for anti-social behavior.

This paper aims to clarify the nature of understanding in medicine. The first part describes in more detail what it means to understand something and links a type of understanding (i.e., objectual understanding) to explanations. The second part proceeds to investigate what objectual understanding of a disease (i.e., biomedical understanding) requires by considering the case of scurvy from the history of medicine. The main hypothesis is that grasping a mechanistic explanation of a condition is necessary for a biomedical understanding of (...) that condition. The third part of the paper argues that biomedical understanding is necessary, but not sufficient for understanding in a clinical context (i.e., clinical understanding). The hypothesis is that clinical understanding combines biomedical understanding of a _disease_ or pathological condition with understanding _illness,_ which involves some degree of personal understanding of the patient. It is argued that, in many cases, clinical understanding necessitates adopting a particular second-personal stance and using cognitive resources _in addition_ to those involved in biomedical understanding. (shrink)

The Philosophy of Psychiatry is a unique area of research because the nature of the subject matter leads to quite distinct methodological issues. Naturalism, Interpretation, and Mental Disorder is an original new work focusing on the challenges we face when trying to interpret and understand mental illness. The book integrates a hermeneutical perspective, and shows how such an approach can reveal important facts about historical sources in psychiatry and the nature of dialogue in the therapeutic encounter. In addition, the book (...) demonstrates how such an approach can be valuable for understanding the concept of mental disorder itself. Naturalism, Interpretation, and Mental Disorder brings fresh thinking to the philosophy of psychiatry, and will be of interest to students and scholars in the fields of Mental Health and Philosophy. (shrink)

Between the mid-1960s and the early 1970s, the quotidian dimension took political centrality in Japan thanks to the leading role of the New Left movement and its ideology. This went hand in hand with an appreciation of the philosophical approaches of Marxist intellectuals such as Jun Tosaka and Gorō Hani, who saw the quotidian as a fundamental space for historical transformation. We know how Tosaka and Hani developed an everyday-centred philosophy of history through their writings, but we know little about (...) how formats other than the written word – such as cinema – contributed to thinking historical reality from the same ideological approach. To address this gap in our understanding, this article analyses the intersection of two highly representative films with Tosaka and Hani’s historical thought: Secrets Within Walls ( Kabe no naka no himegoto, Kōji Wakamatsu, 1965) and Ceremonies ( Gishiki, Nagisa Ōshima, 1971). These films’ cinematic allegorisation of post-war Japan’s everyday relationships was a way to reflect on the political character of that period. (shrink)