The Purpose in Life Test is a measure of purpose in life widely used in many cultures and countries; however, cross-cultural assessments are scarce. The present study aimed to evaluate the cross-cultural measurement invariance of the PIL in the general population of seven Latin American countries. A total of 4306 people participated, selected by non-probabilistic convenience sampling, where Uruguay has the highest mean age ; while Ecuador has the lowest mean age. Furthermore, in each country, there is a higher proportion (...) of women than men. Using Multi-Group Confirmatory Factor Analysis, the factorial structure does not show evidence of invariance among the included countries. However, based on the Multi-Group Factor Analysis Alignment, there is evidence that a three-dimensional structure of the PIL is the same in the participating countries. Results based on item response theory indicate that most PIL items can significantly differentiate responses according to the level of life purpose. In addition, people with low life purpose will tend to choose the lower response alternatives on the PIL; while people with higher life purpose will choose higher response alternatives. The findings indicate that the PIL has the potential to increase knowledge about how people conceive and experience their purpose in life in different countries. (shrink)

1Department of Philosophy, University of Bristol, 9 Woodland Road, Bristol BS8 1TB, UKScience Without Laws Ronald Giere Chicago, IL University of Chicago Press 1999 x + 285 Hardback£17.50.

In Boccacio's Decameron, Cervigni sees a parodic echo of the circles of Dante's Divine Comedy, and asks whether Bocaccio envisions the voyage of the brigata as similar to Dante the Pilgrim's journey toward the center, first the abysmal center of Lucifer, then towards the highest center, God.

Depersonalization is characterised by a profound disruption of self-awareness mainly characterised by feelings of disembodiment and subjective emotional numbing.It has been proposed that depersonalization is caused by a fronto-limbic suppressive mechanism – presumably mediated via attention – which manifests subjectively as emotional numbing, and disables the process by which perception and cognition normally become emotionally coloured, giving rise to a subjective feeling of ‘unreality’.Our functional neuroimaging and psychophysiological studies support the above model and indicate that, compared with normal and clinical (...) controls, DPD patients show increased prefrontal activation as well as reduced activation in insula/limbic-related areas to aversive, arousing emotional stimuli.Although a putative inhibitory mechanism on emotional processing might account for the emotional numbing and characteristic perceptual detachment, it is likely, as suggested by some studies, that parietal mechanisms underpin feelings of disembodiment and lack of agency feelings. (shrink)

IntroductionThe idea of video recording in the operating room with panoramic cameras and microphones is a new concept that is changing the approach to medical activities in the OR. However, VR in the OR has brought up many concerns regarding patient privacy and has highlighted legal and ethical issues that were never previously exposed.AimTo review the literature concerning these aspects and provide a better ethical and legal understanding of the new challenges concerning VR in the OR.ConclusionsThere is a disparity between (...) the two main legal models concerning VR in the OR, namely the European legal system ) and the American legal framework ). This difference mainly deals with two distinct bioethical paradigms: GDPR places a strong emphasis on protecting patients’ privacy to improve the public health system, whereas HIPAA indicates the need to generate protocols to safeguard the risks connected to medical activity and patient privacy. Following from this point, we may argue that, at the ethical and bioethical level, GDPR and HIPAA depend mainly on two different ethical models: a perspective based on moral acquaintances and weak proceduralism, respectively. It is worth noting the importance of developing additional guidelines concerning different world regions to avoid the ethical problems that may emerge when simply applying a foreign paradigm to a very different culture. (shrink)

El modelo de ser humano: homo oeconomicus, impuesto por la racionalidad económica capitalista, ha tenido en las dos últimas décadas una metamorfosis compleja, a saber, la formación de un tipo de subjetividad representada en la figura del “emprendedor” o “su propio jefe” que, desde una nueva gramática teológica, encarna un proyecto mercantil solapado y subrepticio que condiciona las relaciones entre sujetos. En razón a esto, el propósito de este texto es pensar dicha problemática desde el ejercicio hermenéutico-crítico que lleva a (...) cabo el joven Marx, para someter al análisis las categorías de culpa, deuda, sacrificio y expiación destacadas por Walter Benjamin, a la luz de la categoría esencia subjetiva de la propiedad privada que permita entender cómo el capitalismo se vale hoy de la teología y su lenguaje para continuar responsabilizando al ser humano de su pobreza, de su riqueza o su fracaso económico. (shrink)

El objetivo de este artículo es presentar el problema triple (trilema) de Agripa que cuestiona la posibilidad de alcanzar una justificación epistemológica del conocimiento empírico. Una posible reconstrucción del problema es la que se apoya en el problema del regreso al infinito -uno de los modos de..

El estudio se centró en los textos de las resoluciones de acreditación de alta calidad de las Instituciones de Educación Superior en Colombia. La metodología condujo a un panorama descriptivo y posibilitó la construcción de categorías cualitativas que permitieron analizar fortalezas y debilidades. Los resultados evidencian la brecha urbano- rural; una tendencia de las instituciones oficiales a recibir más años de acreditación que las privadas y la no incidencia del carácter académico en el número de años de acreditación otorgados. Mejorar (...) las condiciones laborales de los profesores y atender las zonas rurales son prioridades que deben atender las políticas nacionales. (shrink)

The article turns to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of state capitalism and their theorization of money and debt in their critique of capitalism to develop an analysis of the governmental management of the current crisis determined by ordo- and neoliberalism. The paper argues that analyses which fail to properly recognize the power of capital to determine both state apparatuses and economic policy thereby fail to grasp the real functioning of money, debt and the Euro in the crisis and end up (...) unwittingly supporting liberalism. This is true of positions such as heterodox theory that, though critical of conventional and neoliberal political economy, nevertheless continue to uphold the state as an independent or mediating mechanism in relation to the power of capital. The neglect of the role which money plays in the strategies of capital to control both the creation of value and the functioning of the state is to be found even in Foucault’s genealogy of neoliberalism, a neglect which undermines his analysis of power. The paper highlights the implications of the standpoint of state capitalism for a more incisive analysis of the current crisis that reveals what is at stake for political struggles. (shrink)

Consideraciones introductorias Presentamos aquí un avance de análisis de un proyecto de investigación sobre enseñanza y aprendizaje de la argumentación que realizamos observando clases de filosofía y de biología de seis profesores de cada disciplina en cuatro Liceos públicos y dos privados. Además organizamos actividades argumentativas de aula a comienzos y finales de los cursos en el año 2012, con el fin de observar los eventuales avances en lo argumentativo. Presentamos en este trabajo los (...) - Sciences de l'éducation et (...) de la formation – Nouvel article. (shrink)

El propósito de este artículo es estudiar la actualidad del binomio persona-naturaleza para fundamentar la unión hipostática de acuerdo con el pensamiento de Tomás de Aquino. Ambos conceptos se necesitan mutuamente no sólo como la parte y el todo para fundar una Metafísica de la Encarnación, sino también para poder predicar las naturalezas del único supuesto de modo de no destruir la unidad personal de Cristo. De este modo, para el Aquinate, persona y naturaleza no sólo expresan nociones metafísicas, sino (...) también conceptos que se predican del único supuesto subsistente. (shrink)

The aim of the article is to show that Friedrich Schleiermacher’s Hermeneutic method is still topical andrelevant for research in the field of humanities. One of the arguments is that most of recent commentarieson his hermeneutic program are based in a “non-critical position” and reproduce the assumptions of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s “dominant reading”. This is the consequence of a lack of “critical editions” of the work ofSchleiermacher regarding Hermeneutics, an issue that has recently been compensated for with the publication of the (...) volume that collects his Vorlesungen zur Hermeneutik und Kritik, which includes numerous notes and additional material. Based on this critical edition, the article addresses some of his most important concepts, such as language, grammatical interpretation, technical or psychological interpretation, divinatory method, comparative method, hermeneutic circle of understanding, reconstruction of discourse, and interpretation as aninfinite task. It undertakes a conceptual analysis of the aforementioned collection and an interpretation that is not undermined by classical works of Hermeneutics. Finally, it offers some remarks regarding the novel possibilities of Schleiermacher’s philosophy for our time. (shrink)

The article seeks to investigate the role that censorship had in the history of modern Colombian theater during the decades from 1950 to 1980, on the basis of a journey through the trajectory of groups such as Candelaria, TEC and Escuela Municipal de Teatro, as well as its directors Santiago García, Enrique Buenaventura and Gilberto Martínez. The censorship usually came from government institutions, Church ministers, or educational institutions such as universities and colleges. In addition to the analysis of direct censorship (...) phenomena such as the prohibition of performances and the expulsion of members of theater formations, or more indirect ones such as red tape or excessive tax collection, we are interested in highlighting the strategies and practices of resistance and opposition generated by playwrights and theater groups during this time before the censorial actions and speeches. Among these strategies to fight censorship, we highlight the collectivization of structured cultural formations or guilds that brought together various theater groups at the national level, as was the case with the formation of the Colombian Theater Corporation. Collectivization was the strategy against power through which the theater guild fought to resist the repressive effects of censorship. It is necessary to shed light on the role that censorship played in the life of Colombian groups and theater in general. This approach will allow us to see the history of modern theater in Colombia as the history of resistance strategies against censorship and power. (shrink)

El concepto de holismo ha adquirido una gran importancia en losúltimos análisis semánticos y epistémicos. Sin embargo, muchosde los filósofos que han utilizado este concepto no lo han definidocon claridad. El objeto de este artículo es intentar aclarar uno delos sentidos en los que este concepto puede ser entendido. Paraello me concentraré en las relaciones entre holismo y teorías empíricas. Haré uso de algunos de los elementos de la teoría estructuralistapropuesta por Moulines, Sneed y Balzer para dar cabalcuenta de cómo (...) se podría conciliar las tesis del holismo con lavisión estructuralista de las teorías científicas. (shrink)

In the logic of theory change, the standard model is AGM, proposed by Alchourrón et al. (J Symb Log 50:510–530, 1985 ). This paper focuses on the extension of AGM that accounts for contractions of a theory by a set of sentences instead of only by a single sentence. Hansson (Theoria 55:114–132, 1989 ), Fuhrmann and Hansson (J Logic Lang Inf 3:39–74, 1994 ) generalized Partial Meet Contraction to the case of contractions by (possibly non-singleton) sets of sentences. In this (...) paper we present the possible worlds semantics for partial meet multiple contractions. (shrink)

El presente texto desea dar cuenta, a partir de aquellos aspectos fenomenológicos de la teoría del conocimiento de Thomas Hobbes, el fundamentoy justificación de la génesis del Estado civil. Sin lugar a dudas, serán la percepción o la intuición, lo sensible, la imaginación o la memoria, el lenguaje, el movimiento, el cómputo, el deseo, el miedo, entre otros, lo que lleva al sujeto a comprender su propia naturaleza y a partir de ella, a pactar con otros sujetos cediendo sus derechos (...) naturales a un tercero para dar fin al estado de naturaleza y poder conservar su vida y vivir en paz. (shrink)

Agrippa’s Problem: The purpose of this paper is to present the triple problem of Agrippa that questions the possibility of reaching an epistemological justification of empirical knowledge. A possible reconstruction of such problem is one that is based on the problem of the regresum ad infinitum –one of Agripa’s modes. In this paper, a reconstruction of this problem will be presented by means of a reduction ad absurdum argument. The attempts of solving the absurd lead to the remaining two modes (...) of Agrippa’s triple problem. (shrink)

This paper defends an inferential conception of scientific representation. It approaches the notion of representation in a deflationary spirit, and minimally characterizes the concept as it appears in science by means of two necessary conditions: its essential directionality and its capacity to allow surrogate reasoning and inference. The conception is defended by showing that it successfully meets the objections that make its competitors, such as isomorphism and similarity, untenable. In addition the inferential conception captures the objectivity of the cognitive representations (...) used by science, it sheds light on their truth and completeness, and it explains the source of the analogy between scientific and artistic modes of representation. (shrink)

I argue against theories that attempt to reduce scientific representation to similarity or isomorphism. These reductive theories aim to radically naturalize the notion of representation, since they treat scientist's purposes and intentions as non-essential to representation. I distinguish between the means and the constituents of representation, and I argue that similarity and isomorphism are common but not universal means of representation. I then present four other arguments to show that similarity and isomorphism are not the constituents of scientific representation. I (...) finish by looking at the prospects for weakened versions of these theories, and I argue that only those that abandon the aim to radically naturalize scientific representation are likely to be successful. (shrink)

Social commerce as a subset of e-commerce has been emerged in part due to the popularity of social networking sites. Social commerce brings new challenges to marketing activities. And social commerce transactions like e-commerce transactions can be dangerous and cause harmful losses to personal finances, time, and information privacy. This article examines ethical issues and consumer assessments of the risks of using an e-service and how risk affects consumer evaluations and usage of Internet-based services and self-service technologies. Results from two (...) surveys totaling 1024 consumers indicated that as usage risk concerns increased, the perceived usefulness of an e-service and intention to use it decreased. Additionally as usage risk concerns increased the effect of subjective norm on PU and intention to use an e-service strengthened, and the effect of perceived ease of use on PU and intention to use an e-service weakened. These findings advance theory and contribute to the foundation for future research aimed at improving our understanding of how consumers evaluate new e-services, new commerce systems and settings, and self-service technologies in the social commerce era. (shrink)

Resumo: O artigo a seguir tem como objetivo expor o pensamento hermenêutico de Friedrich Schleiermacher, levando em conta o contexto germinativo fértil de sua obra e sua influente posição filosófica, no âmbito do “primeiro romantismo alemão”. Schleiermacher renuncia a um importante fundamento transcendental a-histórico, em favor de uma compreensão situada, a qual se configura através do diálogo. A hipótese central deste artigo alerta que o desenvolvimento paralelo e sistemático das lições sobre ética, dialética e hermenêutica, em Schleiermacher, não é mera (...) coincidência, muito menos um sintoma isolado, senão que revela um projeto de caráter orgânico. Por um lado, será examinado - à luz de seus textos - o papel da linguagem como variável histórica e social para a compreensão e, por outro, algumas reflexões sobre as novas possibilidades de seu método hermenêutico e suas implicações, para a reflexão filosófica contemporânea.: The following article aims to expose the hermeneutic thought by Friedrich Schleiermacher, considering the fertile germinal context of his work and his influential philosophical position within the framework of “early romanticism”. Schleiermacher renounces an ahistorical transcendental foundation in favor of a situated understanding, which is configured through dialog. The central hypothesis of this article warns that the parallel and systematic development of the lessons on ethics, dialectics and hermeneutics in Schleiermacher is not a mere coincidence, much less an isolated symptom, but reveals a project of an organic nature. On the one hand, it is examined -in the light of their texts- the role of language as a historical and social variable for understanding and, on the other hand, some reflections on the new possibilities of his hermeneutical method and its consequences for contemporary philosophical reflection. (shrink)

Francisco Suárez claims that forms may be efficient causes. There is an action whose proximate efficient cause is a substantial form, namely, the natural resulting. Also a substantial form is the principal efficient cause of the eduction of other forms, although it causes this through the substance’s own accidents. The souls insofar as substantial forms participate of both features. However, they pose a new complexity because of the actions they are exclusively principles of, namely vital actions. This kind of actions (...) may seem no different from natural resulting, if vitality is mainly described as some sort of immanence. However, there is a Suarezian approach to vital actions that does not rely completely on the immanence and therefore allows to consider souls as efficient causes without turning their actions into natural. (shrink)

La migración, tanto intra-ístmica como trans-ístmica, ha marcado la vida de millones de centroamericanos a finales del siglo XX y principios del siglo XXI. Este ensayo analiza dos obras representativas del reciente subgénero narrativo de la migración centroamericana: la novela The Tattooed Soldier (El soldado tatuado, 1998), de Héctor Tobar, y el largometraje El camino (2007), dirigido por Ishtar Yasin. En él se arguye que ambos textos abordan la migración de ciudadanos centroamericanos mediante una estrategia narrativa identificada como “violencia circular (...) desterritorializada”. En este sentido, la violencia inicial (nacional, territorializada) migra junto a los protagonistas hacia los países receptores, transformándose en un fenómeno transnacional y desterritorializado. Debido al carácter transnacional y circular de esta violencia, los personajes no logran escapar de ella y más bien terminan en peores circunstancias después de migrar a la supuesta “tierra prometida”. Por medio de esta estrategia narrativa, The Tattooed Soldier y El camino critican la forma en que los centroamericanos más vulnerables han sido víctimas de una violencia estructural e institucionalizada que se extiende más allá del territorio nacional y cuyo origen y causa común es la desigualdad socioeconómica y la precariedad que marcan a estos individuos antes y después de convertirse en migrantes. (shrink)

Scientific representation is a currently booming topic, both in analytical philosophy and in history and philosophy of science. The analytical inquiry attempts to come to terms with the relation between theory and world; while historians and philosophers of science aim to develop an account of the practice of model building in the sciences. This article provides a review of recent work within both traditions, and ultimately argues for a practice-based account of the means employed by scientists to effectively achieve representation (...) in the modelling sciences. (shrink)

El artículo estudia los imaginarios construidos alrededor de la América salvaje, como contraparte del ideal civilizatorio de la cultura occidental. Propone reconstruir sus huellas a partir de la literatura, y especialmente, en la obra de Jack Kerouac. Sus novelas, inspiradas en el motivo del viaje y en la fuga hacia lo exótico, sirven para recomponer la representación de las relaciones entre la América del norte y Centroamérica, pero también con América del Sur, relaciones asociadas a la fábula de un mundo (...) de aventuras, inhóspito y desconocido. (shrink)

Resumen: En el presente artículo se pretende, junto con ampliar las referencias de interpretación y caracterización del pensamiento social y político de la Edad Media, rastrear, por medio de los aportes de Marsilio de Padua, las posibles fuentes o referencias que, en el contexto de las discusiones de los siglos XIII-XIV, pueden verse contenidas en los márgenes de las fundamentaciones de las democracias contemporáneas, incluyendo, para el caso, las discusiones en torno al liberalismo político y el imperativo del pluralismo.: Through (...) the works of Marsilius of Padua we trace sources and references that, in the context of thirteenth and fourteenth century discussions, may be seen on the margins of the foundations of contemporary democracy. The article discusses arguments related to political liberalism, the imperative of pluralism, and a broadening of the characterization of the social and political thinking of the Middle Ages. (shrink)

This paper defends the deflationary character of two recent views regarding scientific representation, namely RIG Hughes’ DDI model and the inferential conception. It is first argued that these views’ deflationism is akin to the homonymous position in discussions regarding the nature of truth. There, we are invited to consider the platitudes that the predicate “true” obeys at the level of practice, disregarding any deeper, or more substantive, account of its nature. More generally, for any concept X, a deflationary approach is (...) then defined in opposition to a substantive approach, where a substantive approach to X is an analysis of X in terms of some property P, or relation R, accounting for and explaining the standard use of X. It then becomes possible to characterize a deflationary view of scientific representation in three distinct senses, namely: a “no-theory” view, a “minimalist” view, and a “use-based” view – in line with three standard deflationary responses in the philosophical literature on truth. It is then argued that both the DDI model and the inferential conception may be suitably understood in any of these three different senses. The application of these deflationary ‘hermeneutics’ moreover yields significant improvements on the DDI model, which bring it closer to the inferential conception. It is finally argued that what these approaches have in common – the key to any deflationary account of scientific representation – is the denial that scientific representation may be ultimately reduced to any substantive explanatory property of sources, or targets, or their relations. (shrink)

Scientific representation is a booming field nowadays within the philosophy of science, with many papers published regularly on the topic every year, and several yearly conferences and workshops held on related topics. Historically, the topic originates in two different strands in 20th-century philosophy of science. One strand begins in the 1950s, with philosophical interest in the nature of scientific theories. As the received or “syntactic” view gave way to a “semantic” or “structural” conception, representation progressively gained the center stage. Yet, (...) there is another, older, strand that links representation to fin de siècle modeling debates, particularly in the emerging Bildtheorie of Boltzmann and Hertz, and to the ensuing discussion among philosophers thereafter. Both strands feed into present-day philosophical work on scientific representation. There are a number of different orthogonal questions that philosophers ask regarding representation. One set of questions concerns the nature of the representational relation between theories or models, on the one hand, and the real-world systems they purportedly represent. Such questions lie at the more metaphysical and abstract end of the spectrum—and they are often addressed with the abstract tools of the analytical metaphysician. They constitute what we may refer to as the “analytical inquiry” into representation. On the other hand there are questions regarding the use that scientists put some representations to in practice—these are questions that are best addressed by means of some of the favorite tools of the philosopher of science, including descriptive analysis, illustration by means of case studies, induction, exemplification, inference from practice, etc., and are best referred to as the “practical inquiry” into representation. The notion of representation invoked in such inquiries may be “deflationary” or “substantive”—depending on whether it construes representation as a primitive notion, or as susceptible to further reduction or analysis in terms of something else. (shrink)

In “The Toolbox of Science” (1995) together with Towfic Shomar we advocated a form of instrumentalism about scientific theories. We separately developed this view further in a number of subsequent works. Steven French, James Ladyman, Otavio Bueno and Newton Da Costa (FLBD) have since written at least eight papers and a book criticising our work. Here we defend ourselves. First we explain what we mean in denying that models derive from theory – and why their failure to do so should (...) be lamented. Second we defend our use of the London model of superconductivity as an example. Third we point out both advantages and weaknesses of FLBD’s techniques in comparison to traditional Anglophone versions of the semantic conception. Fourth we show that FLBD’s version of the semantic conception has not been applied to our case study. We conclude by raising doubts about FLBD’s overall project. (shrink)

This paper reviews four attempts throughout the history of quantum mechanics to explicitly employ dispositional notions in order to solve the quantum paradoxes, namely: Margenau's latencies, Heisenberg's potentialities, Maxwell's propensitons, and the recent selective propensities interpretation of quantum mechanics. Difficulties and challenges are raised for all of them, and it is concluded that the selective propensities approach nicely encompasses the virtues of its predecessors. Finally, some strategies are discussed for reading similar dispositional notions into two other well-known interpretations of quantum (...) mechanics, namely the GRW interpretation and Bohmian mechanics. (shrink)

In 2016, Béziau introduced the notion of genuine paraconsistent logic as logic that does not verify the principle of non-contradiction; as an important example, he presented the genuine paraconsist...