J. Martin

Synaesthesia is a condition in which one type of stimulation evokes the sensation of another, as when the hearing of a sound produces photisms, i.e. mental percepts of colours. R is a 20 year old colour blind subject who, in addition to the relatively common grapheme-colour synaesthesia, presents a rarely reported cross modal perception in which a variety of visual stimuli elicit aura-like percepts of colour. In R, photisms seem to be closely related to the affective valence of stimuli and typically bring out a consistent pattern of emotional responses. The present case study suggests that colours might be an intrinsic category of the human brain. We developed an empirical methodology that allowed us to study the subject's otherwise inaccessible phenomenological experience. First, we found that R shows a Stroop effect elicited by photisms despite the fact that he does not show a regular Stroop with real colours. Secondly, by manipulating the colour context we confirmed that colours can alter R's emotional evaluation of the stimuli. Furthermore, we demonstrated that R's auras may actually lead to a partially inverted emotional spectrum where certain stimuli bring out emotional reactions opposite to the normal ones. These findings can only be accounted for by considering R's subjective colour experience or qualia. Therefore the present paper defends the view that qualia are a useful scientific concept that can be approached and studied by experimental methods

Including articles translated from the Italian for the first time, this unique set is the first systematic collection of critical commentary on this influential figure. Reprinting some thirty years of Gramsci criticism, the collection features individual volume introductions as well as a general overview introduction. The thematically-organized volumes include: * Volume I: Life, Context and Intellectual Development * Volume II: Marxism, Philosophy and Politics * Volume III: Revolution, Praxis and the Party * Volume IV: Contemporary Applications.

This article examines the religious and Christian aspects of Federico García Lorca’s Poet in New York. Despite the significance of these themes in the work of the Granada-born poet, they have often been overlooked in some analyses. García Lorca expresses an existential and critical faith that, in response to the exploitation and dehumanization found in capitalist society in New York, takes on prophetic and even apocalyptic characteristics in a biblical sense. The mystical and Christological elements are surprisingly abundant and profound. Lorca’s insights align him with the existential faith of Unamuno and Marcel, as well as the reflections of Krause and Ortega.

This book is a defence of perspectivism in the age of post-truth. At the crossroads of science, art and philosophy, it unearths a tradition that we must rediscover: the point of view is not only what divides, it is also what is shared. The book makes a case why perspectivism alone can avoid us falling back into epistemological naivetés. It presents a series of case studies ranging from innovative interpretations of classical authors and key moments in the history of art—from ancient painting, trompe l’oeil, and Brunelleschi’s experiment in Renaissance Florence—to the issue of perspective in the work of contemporary artists such as Robert Smithson.

The rapid growth of cultural evolutionary science, its expansion into numerous fields, its use of diverse methods, and several conceptual problems have outpaced corollary developments in theory and philosophy of science. This has led to concern, exemplified in results from a recent survey conducted with members of the Cultural Evolution Society, that the field lacks ‘knowledge synthesis’, is poorly supported by ‘theory’, has an ambiguous relation to biological evolution and uses key terms (e.g. ‘culture’, ‘social learning’, ‘cumulative culture’) in ways that hamper operationalization in models, experiments and field studies. Although numerous review papers in the field represent and categorize its empirical findings, the field's theoretical challenges receive less critical attention even though challenges of a theoretical or conceptual nature underlie most of the problems identified by Cultural Evolution Society members. Guided by the heterogeneous ‘grand challenges’ emergent in this survey, this paper restates those challenges and adopts an organizational style requisite to discussion of them. The paper's goal is to contribute to increasing conceptual clarity and theoretical discernment around the most pressing challenges facing the field of cultural evolutionary science. It will be of most interest to cultural evolutionary scientists, theoreticians, philosophers of science and interdisciplinary researchers.

Unamuno, Zubiri y Bueno son tres filósofos de la religión que han marcado tendencia en la filosofía de la religión española de los últimos cien años. Unamuno sitúa el núcleo de la religión en el anhelo de inmortalidad carnal. Zubiri lo sitúa en el fundamento de la realidad sobre la que todo ser humano hace su vida. Bueno teoriza un desarrollo de la religión en tres etapas, de las cuales la primera tiene a los animales como númenes originales. Se trata de tres visiones distintas que han creado escuela y a partir de las cuales pueden orientarse numerosas investigaciones empíricas. Los tres autores comparten una lengua común y una cultura marcada por el cristianismo, aunque sus posiciones personales sean muy distintas (heterodoxa, católica y atea, respetivamente). Los tres además coinciden en el rechazo de fundar sus teorías sobre abstracciones ideales, intentándolo hacer más bien en el hombre de carne y hueso (Unamuno), la realidad (Zubiri) o los animales numinosos de la prehistoria (Bueno).

This study seeks to explore the genealogy and some of the repercussions of textualism, the main linguistic profile of postmodernism. Textualism, the doctrine that equates reality with a text or texts, while not new and rooted in Judeo-Christian philosophical and/or religious thought, represented a discontinuity and a break with that thought. The Romantic movement had a decisive influence on this; it is not in vain that postmodernism can be considered a neo-Romanticism. In connection with these theses, the article addresses the question of how textualism contributes to the destruction of the Western cultural and intellectual tradition.

Although philosophers and theologians have speculated on the ability of timeless, ontological truth to manifest itself in the flux of history, most working historians have focused on epistemological questions concerning the relationship between history as what actually happened and history as its present representation. Two extreme positions—naïve positivism and radical constructivism—have proven equally untenable. This chapter examines three alternatives: falsificationism, the new experientialism, and institutional justificationism. It defends the last of these, which posits a self-reflective community of competence, morally obliged to be truthful and engaged in an endless quest for plausible narratives and compelling explanations of past occurrences, as the most persuasive answer to skepticism about historical truth.

Although Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno's notion that “all reification is a forgetting” and Ludwig Wittgenstein's belief that “all knowledge is in the end based on acknowledgment” are outwardly unrelated, Honneth comes up with an endeavor to link these two incongruent statements. In doing so, he attempts to redefine the concept of reification and set this in the context of the theory of recognition of acknowledgment. As the concept of reification has seemingly been forgotten and undermined, the term disqualified alienation, injustice, exploitation, and other such alternatives to illustrate the negative effects of capitalism. Still the term is used without political implications in the context of contemporary theories. This introductory chapter introduces the complexities attributed to reification through incorporating Marxist principles, Hegelian principles, and other such insights of significant philosophers.

While a lot of research has investigated the cognitive mechanisms for lying, its associated affect is often overlooked. Here, we show that honesty and dishonesty cause short-lived, transient affect: honesty triggers relatively more positive affect than dishonesty. To investigate this, participants first performed several specific activities. After that, they answered questions regarding these (and other) activities in an affective priming paradigm. This required participants to first respond honestly or dishonestly to simple yes/no Prime questions, and afterwards to categorise positive or negative Probe words. Results show that participants were slower and more error prone when lying compared to responding honestly in the Prime task, replicating previous findings that it is cognitively more demanding to lie than to tell the truth. Most importantly, we found that telling the truth sensitises for subsequent positive stimuli, and it does more so than lying. Further, emotional habituation seems to take place, lessening the overall affective evaluation of self-produced actions over time. We discuss the functional role that affect may play in the generation and production of dishonesty-based behaviour in the framework of action control.

Este nuevo libro colectivo recoge los trabajos del grupo de investigación de Filosofía de la PUCE, elaborados entre 2019 y 2020. El tema elegido, Tecnología y política, define una de las problemáticas contemporáneas más relevantes dentro del trabajo académico. Como en ocasiones anteriores, cada autor plantea contextos de lectura diversos; los aportes recorren un escenario complejo, resultado de los caminos que cada uno ha elegido para consolidar su propia reflexión a partir de los proyectos de escritura de tesis de posgrado y de investigaciones desarrolladas tanto en universidades europeas como americanas. Sin embargo, el punto de encuentro está dado en la perspectiva y en las condiciones que determinan la posibilidad de proponer un pensamiento crítico y propositivo desde América Latina.

The hospitality industry plays a crucial role in economic and social development by creating jobs and promoting economic structural transformation in many countries, including Vietnam. However, despite these significant contributions, the hospitality industry also negatively impacts the environment, highlighting the urgent need for sustainable development within this sector. This study emphasizes the importance of ethical leadership and green human resource management (GHRM) in fostering employee green behavior and in-role green performance to achieve sustainable development goals (SDGs) in the hospitality industry. A research model extending Social Exchange Theory and GHRM was developed to examine employee in-role green performance. A self-administered survey was conducted with 573 employees working in four- and five-star hotels in Vietnam. The findings validate the application of Social Exchange Theory in examining the effects of GHRM policies on employee green behavior and in-role green performance. Additionally, this study provides recommendations for hotels to enhance their policies toward achieving SDGs.

Modern Quality Management appeared in the 1920s and was particularly developed from the 1950s to the 1990s with quality control, quality assurance, Total Quality and eventually Business Excellence. First designed for industrial activities, it expanded into services from the 1970s. Thanks to a number of standards and management models, it enjoyed a fast growth from the 1960s to the early 2000s. Since the mid-2000s, it has, however, lost in popularity and been increasingly abandoned by companies. The key reason for that evolution seems to be that on the one hand the various quality standards and models no longer provide a competitive advantage to companies and on the other hand do not offer management principles and tools for companies to take up the challenges that have arisen in the economic, managerial, social and natural environments. This study first proposes an overview of Quality Management’s development since its inception and second an analysis of its decline examining possible reasons for it. Finally, in a prospective manner, it proposes ways thanks to which Quality Management could be rethought and revived.

This conceptual paper aims to show that the concept of homo economicus as the foundation of management needs to be discarded and replaced by the concept of humanistic enterprise in order to ensure the well-being of stakeholders and preservation of the environment. A combined and crossed study of the philosophies of Buddha, Confucius, Aristotle and Pope Francis is used as a desirable spirit for a renewed management paradigm. The concept of homo economicus, with its stress on the maximization of profit, has created deadly negative externalities for social well-being and the preservation of the environment. Consequently, the time has come to radically alter this economic and management paradigm and adopt a new paradigm with the aim of ensuring the well-being of populations inside and outside firms and the preservation of the natural environment with a view to long-term sustainability. It is hoped that this paper can be a guide for enterprises wishing to set up and implement a durable humanistic management, wherever in the world.

This book provides a comprehensive overview of how quality management can be rethought and revitalized to meet the challenges of today's and future socio-economic management. Presenting the outcomes of the 27th Excellence in Services International Conference, held in Bergamo, Italy, on August 29–30, 2024, the book brings together both selected research contributions and numerous best-practice examples in quality management. Researchers will gain valuable insights from this book, which offers theoretical contributions to the field of humanistic management and presents a reformulated approach that integrates quality and excellence. For managers, it offers new practical knowledge to effectively evaluate strategic, tactical and operational issues. In particular, it helps to improve decision-making processes in relation to the importance of the human dimension for the future development of quality and excellence.

Although the work of Francesco Guicciardini has not the benefit of the popularity enjoyed by the work of his friend and collaborator Niccolò Machiavelli, the political thought of the author of the Storia d’Italia can be considered one of the peaks of the Italian Renaissance. The aim of this article is to analyze Guicciardini’s treatment of religion in the C1 council which opens the Ricordi, a book of advice or warnings written in Italian. In particular, the relationship between religion and politics will be analyzed in the light of the characteristics of the C essay and the tradition of realism.

This book offers a section by section commentary on Nietzsche's early masterpiece. Particular attention is given to Nietzsche's underlying theory of the nature of culture, and its mechanisms for production (across a range of media), change and revolution. This underlying theory is often either ignored or misunderstood in the literature. In addition, the book provides a sustained treatment of Nietzsche's disgnosis of the nature of modernity. The book also places Nietzsche's work in its historical context, and documents something of its immense influence.

Plausibility models are Kripke models that agents use to reason about knowledge and belief, both of themselves and of each other. Such models are used to interpret the notions of conditional belief, degrees of belief, and safe belief. The logic of conditional belief contains that modality and also the knowledge modality, and similarly for the logic of degrees of belief and the logic of safe belief. With respect to these logics, plausibility models may contain too much information. A proper notion of bisimulation is required that characterises them. We define that notion of bisimulation and prove the required characterisations: on the class of image-finite and preimage-finite models, two pointed Kripke models are modally equivalent in either of the three logics, if and only if they are bisimilar. As a result, the information content of such a model can be similarly expressed in the logic of conditional belief, or the logic of degrees of belief, or that of safe belief. This, we found a surprising result. Still, that does not mean that the logics are equally expressive: the logics of conditional and degrees of belief are incomparable, the logics of degrees of belief and safe belief are incomparable, while the logic of safe belief is more expressive than the logic of conditional belief. In view of the result on bisimulation characterisation, this is an equally surprising result. We hope our insights may contribute to the growing community of formal epistemology and on the relation between qualitative and quantitative modelling.