The transcience of existence, the fragility of life and human transcience do nothing but remind each of us of the imminence of death, now experienced as an unparalleled tragedy, accompanied, often, by the anguish of witnessing a slow and gradual ageing of the body. In the post-modern era characterized by pervasive technology, a new religion is emerging that aims to halt the ageing process and defeat death once and for all. But what is the price to be paid: according to (...) some, we will witness the dissolution of the human being’s soul; according to others, the world will be populated by humanoids with severe psychic problems. (shrink)

This article is a review and reflection of the new elements of rights and laws, applied to the principle of justice and sovereignty, but above all in the demonstration that law as a science once again allows us to conceive that as a science it evolves and must be modified according to the new conducts that the State and society require, such is the case of the constitutional recognition that this type of rights have. In the last decades, human beings (...) have evidenced that the way in which they interact with nature is causing serious consequences to the ecosystems that compose it. In the past, these consequences were not yet evident and, therefore, the environmental awareness that exists today did not exist. Therefore, it is necessary to analyze and reflect on certain conditions of this right in Ecuador. (shrink)

Se han cumplido cincuenta años desde la publicación de Teoría de la Justicia. Sin duda, la obra de J. Rawls marcó un hito fundamental en la historia del pensamiento político del siglo XX. Nuestro trabajo se pregunta hasta qué punto la justicia como imparcialidad sigue siendo una referencia fundamental en el pensamiento político actual. Para ello abordamos la propuesta de M.C. Nussbaum. Nos planteamos si el enfoque de las capacidades de Nussbaum es realmente una continuación o supone una verdadera ruptura (...) con la propuesta de Rawls. Y a partir de las objeciones de Nussbaum a Rawls, nos interrogamos por el presente y el futuro de una obra que, a nuestro juicio, después de medio siglo, parece tener todos los ingredientes necesarios para ser verdaderamente un clásico del pensamiento político. (shrink)

La primera parte del presente estudio (J.M. Panea) aborda el pensamiento de Giambattista Vico en torno a conceptos como utopía, historia y deber; y muestra cómo Vico nos abre a una concepción trágica de la acción. La segunda parte (F.H. Llano) pretende realizar, desde un marco iusfilosófico, un análisis introspectivo que ponga de manifiesto los principales hitos y fundamentos del pensamiento jurídico viquiano, destacando en particular aquellos aspectos que, por su incidencia en la actual Teoría del Derecho, presentan un mayor (...) interés científico. (shrink)

In this book, I present the results of an investigation which began with an extended stay at Oxford's Balliol College during the first half of 1995. My visit to Oxford was made possible by a grant from the Spanish Ministerio de Educaci6n y Ciencia. My sincere thanks go to Joseph Raz who served as my supervisor in Oxford. For several points of the present study, conversations with Timothy Endicott in Oxford were also of great help. The book is part of (...) a larger project of investigation, directed by Albert Calsami glia, which is a joint effort of a group of legal philosophers from the Universitat Pom peu Fabra and the Universitat de Girona, and which also receives financial support from the Spanish Ministerio de Educaci6n y Ciencia. An earlier version of the manuscript was presented in June 1996 to the selection committee for a tenured professorship in Legal Philosophy at the Universitat de Girona. The members of the committee were Francisco Laporta, Albert Calsamiglia, Gregorio Peces-Barba, Camilo J. Cela Conde, and Francesca Puigpelat. I am grateful to all of them for their comments, which have been extremely useful in preparing the final ver sion of this book. (shrink)

In this article, we review the conceptions of Collective Effervescence (CE) –a state of intense shared emotional activation and sense of unison that emerges during instances of collective behavior, like demonstrations, rituals, ceremonies, celebrations, and others– and empirical approaches oriented at measuring it. The first section starts examining Émile Durkheim's classical conception on CE, and then, the integrative one proposed by the sociologist Randall Collins, leading to a multi-faceted experience of synchronization. Then, we analyze the construct as a process emerging (...) in collective encounters when individuals contact with social ideal and values, referring to the classical work of Serge Moscovici as well as those more recent empirical approaches. Third, we consider CE as a set of intense positive emotions linked to processes of group identification, as proposed by authors of the Social Identity Theory tradition. Finally, we describe CE from the perspective of self-transcendence (e.g., emotions, experiences), and propose a unified description of this construct. The second section shows the results of a meta-analytical integration (k= 50,N= 182,738) aimed at analyzing CE's proximal effects or construct validity (i.e., Individual Emotions and Communal Sharing) as well as its association with more distal variables, such as Collective Emotions, Social Integration, Social Values and Beliefs and Empowerment. Results indicate that CE strongly associates with Individual Emotions –in particular, Self-Transcendent Emotions– and Communal Sharing constructs (e.g., Group Identity, Fusion of Identity), providing construct validity. Among the distal effects of CE, it is associated with Collective Positive Emotions, long-term Social Integration (e.g., Ingroup Commitment), Social Values and Beliefs and Empowerment-related variables (e.g., Wellbeing, Collective Efficacy, Collective Self-Esteem). Among the moderation analyses carried out (e.g., study design, CE scale, type of collective gathering), the effects of CE in demonstrations are noticeable, where this variable is a factor that favors other variables that make collective action possible, such as Group Identity (rpooled= 0.52), Collective Efficacy (rpooled= 0.37), Negative and Self-Transcendent Emotions (rpooled= 0.14 and 0.58), and Morality-related beliefs (rpooled= 0.43). (shrink)

Jackendoff's Foundations of Language: Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution attempts to reconnect generative linguistics to the rest of cognitive science. However, by minimally acknowledging decades of work in cognitive linguistics, treating dynamical systems approaches somewhat dismissively, and clinging to certain fundamental dogma while revising others, he clearly risks satisfying no one by almost pleasing everyone.

The relationship between a human being and an AI system has to be considered as a collaborative process between two agents during the performance of an activity. When there is a collaboration between two people, a fundamental characteristic of that collaboration is that there is co-supervision, with each agent supervising the actions of the other. Such supervision ensures that the activity achieves its objectives, but it also means that responsibility for the consequences of the activity is shared. If there is (...) no co-supervision, neither collaborator can be held co-responsible for the actions of the other. When the collaboration is between a person and an AI system, co-supervision is also necessary to ensure that the objectives of the activity are achieved, but this also means that there is co-responsibility for the consequences of the activities. Therefore, if each agent's responsibility for the consequences of the activity depends on the effectiveness and efficiency of the supervision that that agent performs over the other agent's actions, it will be necessary to take into account the way in which that supervision is carried out and the factors on which it depends. In the case of the human supervision of the actions of an AI system, there is a wealth of psychological research that can help us to establish cognitive and non-cognitive boundaries and their relationship to the responsibility of humans collaborating with AI systems. There is also psychological research on how an external observer supervises and evaluates human actions. This research can be used to programme AI systems in such a way that the boundaries of responsibility for AI systems can be established. In this article, we will describe some examples of how such research on the task of supervising the actions of another agent can be used to establish lines of shared responsibility between a human being and an AI system. The article will conclude by proposing that we should develop a methodology for assessing responsibility based on the results of the collaboration between a human being and an AI agent during the performance of one common activity. (shrink)

Particularly in his work Representative Government, J. S. Mill tries to shape the government of social order according to the rules that served as a pattern for the constitution of the literary salons and clubs of the 17 th and 18th centuries. On these rules the Enlightened legal-rational model of society was built, whose demands as well as its differences from reality are enormous. However, this model, which remained in existence, although often broken, during the 19 th and 20 th (...) centuries, does not seem able to survive, even as a regulative ideal. The characteristics that now define the society of the masses in which we live make the fundamentals of Mill’s theory totally inadequate for an understanding of that society. (shrink)

This paper does resemble a philosophical-juridical perspective that reflects on the possibility to reconstruct the constitutional democracy through a Hegelian focus. Its aim is to tackle the current crisis of our liberal democracy, as well as to determine its causes. These causes are not only found in a deficient praxis of its purposes, but fundamentally in an insufficient understanding of the principles of that type of democracy. At the end, this democracy, if we mind to deter its ruin, has to (...) last on the idea of universal will and its determination through the individual rights and liberties. In this context, political liberties obtain a key role, especially the right of political participation and the freedom of expression, whose final purpose lays in the construction of a rational political will. (shrink)

Ante las dificultades que presenta el camino que hace ya algún tiempo se decidió emprender en este país, un camino lúgubre en el que proliferan como hongos diversas reivindicaciones del derecho de autodeterminación, esto es, de la soberanía, por parte de distintos pueblos o naciones, se hace evidente la necesidad de reflexionar sobre el mismo concepto del poder soberano. En este texto se aborda tal problema desde tres perspectivas, fáctica, normativa y racional. Al mismo tiempo que se ponen de manifiesto (...) las insuficiencias de las dos primeras, se defiende una comprensión racional del poder soberano, que quizá podría contribuir a la disolución de los malos augurios que se ciernen sobre nuestro futuro. (shrink)

El estudio de la retórica política empleada por Clinton durante sus dos mandatos en la Casa Blanca, ofrece un panorama plural y sugerente de las expectativas que genera entre sus ciudadanos el sistema político de Estados Unidos, así como de las funciones simbólicas e institucionales que debe asumir ..

In this paper, we examine possible formalisations of the riskiness condition for hypothesis testing. First, we informally introduce derivability and riskiness as testing conditions together with the corresponding arguments for refutation and confirmation. Then, we distinguish two different senses of confirmation and focus our discussion on one of them with the aid of a historical example. In the remaining sections, we offer a brief overview of the main references to the risky condition in the literature and scrutinise different options for (...) formally capturing riskiness; we show why none of them works. We conclude with some remarks about the relation between derivability and riskiness and claim that riskiness essentially involves a contextual, pragmatic component that eludes a complete formal reconstruction. (shrink)

It is evident that the international order has been changed at the beginning of the twenty-first century after the terrorist attacks of September 2001. Peace is the essential end of every constitutional democracy, internally -in the relationships that its members maintain among themselves-, as well as externally -those relations that a society sustains with others. The problem arises especially in the relation of constitutional democracies with other political regimes. Whereas Kant defended that the best means to achieve peace was the (...) expansion of the republican regime, Rawls’ defense of liberal democracy did not envisage its expansion. The relations of a constitutional democracy with other societies, whether democratic or not, necessarily require a limitation of sovereignty in their exercise abroad. However, the relations among different sovereigns remain underdeveloped, practically at the mercy of the good or bad will of each of them, without a praetor with the capacity to establish the universal will that should prevail in the relations among states. (shrink)

Racial Battle Fatigue is described as the physical and psychological toll taken due to constant and unceasing discrimination, microagressions, and stereotype threat. This edited volume looks at RBF from the perspectives of graduate students, middle level academics, and chief diversity officers at major institutions of learning.

This book is about the ethical issues that clinicians encounter as they care for patients and is written to assist those who serve on hospital ethics committees as they deliberate about appropriate action in difficult ethical cases.

This text focuses on the grounding of the legal and political structure of the modern state and starts from the Hobbesian conception of power as absolute and unlimited power. For their part, Spinoza and Bentham argue, against Hobbes, for the need to set certain limits to power, although they each based it on radically different grounds. Spinoza's political ontology makes it easy to carry out to the end what was permitted by a factual conception of power, which opens up the (...) possibility of thinking about power in a different way, namely, normatively. The difference between the utilitarian approach and that of Spinoza is his special conception of natural law, which leads him to maintain that it can only be defended where men have rights in common, that is, where there is civil order, making the preservation of our being the justification and limit of the institutionalization of the civil order. Bentham, however, remains true to his empiricist conception and a prisoner of its shortcomings, so that he cannot conceive of the limit of power except as self-limitation. The reason is that he does not have a sufficiently consistent concept of natural rights. Bentham's conception of them as “nonsense upon stilts” makes it impossible. (shrink)

8 March, now known as International Women’s Day, is a day for feminist claims where demonstrations are organized in over 150 countries, with the participation of millions of women all around the world. These demonstrations can be viewed as collective rituals and thus focus attention on the processes that facilitate different psychosocial effects. This work aims to explore the mechanisms involved in participation in the demonstrations of 8 March 2020, collective and ritualized feminist actions, and their correlates associated with personal (...) well-being and collective well-being, collective efficacy and collective growth, and behavioral intention to support the fight for women’s rights. To this end, a cross-cultural study was conducted with the participation of 2,854 people from countries in Latin America and Europe, with a retrospective correlational cross-sectional design and a convenience sample. Participants were divided between demonstration participants and non-demonstrators or followers who monitored participants through the media and social networks. Compared with non-demonstrators and with males, female and non-binary gender respondents had greater scores in mechanisms and criterion variables. Further random-effects model meta-analyses revealed that the perceived emotional synchrony was consistently associated with more proximal mechanisms, as well as with criterion variables. Finally, sequential moderation analyses showed that proposed mechanisms successfully mediated the effects of participation on every criterion variable. These results indicate that participation in 8M marches and demonstrations can be analyzed through the literature on collective rituals. As such, collective participation implies positive outcomes both individually and collectively, which are further reinforced through key psychological mechanisms, in line with a Durkheimian approach to collective rituals. (shrink)