J. Martin

The book proposes an alternative model of technological development, that of engaging technologies. This model studies the way in which technological development can be perfect towards technological solutions compatible with sustainable development, with the ideals of solidarity or with cooperative and or only competitive participation. In short, the book is an analytical, descriptive and normative journey around the concept of "endearing technologies" coined by Miguel Ángel Quintanilla, which highlights the democratic values for the control of technology as opposed to the purely intrinsic values of technical efficiency and performance, as opposed to the automatic and uncontrolled tendency of technology.

Handwriting is a complex activity that involves continuous interaction between lower-level handwriting and motor skills and higher-order cognitive processes. It is important to allocate mental resources to these high-order processes since these processes place a great demand on cognitive capacity. This is possible when lower-level skills such as transcription are effortlessness and fluent. Given that fluency is a value in virtually all areas of academic learning, schools should provide instructional activities to promote writing fluency from the first stages of learning to write. In an effort to determine if teaching handwriting enhances writing fluency, we conducted a systematic and meta-analytic review of the writing fluency intervention literature. We selected 31 studies: 21 true and quasi-experimental studies, 4 single-group design, 3 single-subject design, and 3 non-experimental studies, conducted with K-6 students in a regular school setting. A total of 2,030 students participated in these studies. When compared to no instruction or non-handwriting instructional conditions, teaching different handwriting intervention programs resulted in statistically significant greater writing fluency. Moreover, three specific handwriting interventions yielded statistically significant results in improving writing fluency, when compared to other handwriting interventions or to typical handwriting instruction conditions: handwriting focused on training timed transcription skills, multicomponent handwriting treatments, and performance feedback. There were not enough data to calculate the impact of sensory-motor and self-regulated strategy handwriting interventions on writing fluency. The significance of these findings for implementing and differentiating handwriting fluency instruction and guiding future research will be discussed.

La integración y el uso de las TIC en los centros educativos es un proceso complejo en el que intervienen diversos factores, como son, el nivel de competencia digital docente, la infraestructura tecnológica o el acceso y uso de internet. De ahí que sea necesario abordar los estudios sobre TIC en educación desde enfoques multivariados. En este sentido, este estudio pretende conocer el uso de cinco herramientas digitales por parte de 474 estudiantes de E.S.O. en las aulas, para analizar posteriormente las ventajas e inconvenientes de dicho uso para su aprendizaje. Se presentan los resultados y se discuten sus implicaciones.

Ever since Clifford Geertz urged the “blurring of genres” in the social sciences, many scholars have considered the crossing of disciplinary boundaries a healthy alternative to rigidly maintaining them. But what precisely does the metaphor of “blurring” imply? By unpacking the varieties of visual experiences that are normally grouped under this rubric, this essay seeks to provide some precision to our understanding of the implications of fuzziness. It extrapolates from the blurring caused by differential focal distances, velocities of objects in the visual field, and competing perspectival vantage points to comparable effects in the intersection of different scholarly disciplines. Arguing against the holistic implications of Geertz's metaphor, as well as the even more totalizing concept of “consilience” introduced by E. O. Wilson, it suggests that blurring implies new types of complexity between or among those disciplines

No contemporary intellectual historian has produced more influential reflections on the historian’s craft than Hayden White and Quentin Skinner, yet their legacy has never been meaningfully compared. Doing so reveals a surprising complementarity in their approach, at least to the extent that Skinner’s stress on recovering the intentionality of authors fits well with White’s observation that irony is the dominant rhetorical mode of historical narrative in our day. Irony itself, to be sure, has to be divided broadly speaking into its dramatic or Socratic variants and the unstable and paradoxical alternative defended by poststructuralist critics. The latter produced in White an anxiety about the anarchistic implications of an allegedly inherent undecidability in historical interpretation and narration, which threatened to conflate history entirely with fiction. By recovering the necessary role of intentionality as a prerequisite for a more moderate version of Socratic and dramatic irony—in which hindsight provides some purchase on a truth denied actors at the time history is made—it is possible to rescue an ironic attitude that can register the frequency of unintended consequences without surrendering to the conclusion that no explanation or interpretation is superior to another. Against yet a third alternative, which tries to reconstruct the past rationally as a prelude to the present, acknowledging the ironic undermining of intentions avoids giving all the power to the contemporary historian and restores a dialogic balance between actors in the past and their present-day interpreters.

There is no more contentious and perennial issue in the history of modern Western thought than the vexed relationship between the genesis of an idea and its claim to validity beyond it. Can ideas or values transcend their temporal origins and overcome the sin of their original context, and in so doing earn abiding respect for their intrinsic merit? Or do they inevitably reflect them in ways that undermine their universal aspirations? Are discrete contexts so incommensurable and unique that the smooth passage of ideas from one to the other is impossible? Are we always trapped by the limits of our own cultural standpoints and partial perspectives, or can we somehow escape their constraints and enter into a fruitful dialogue with others? These persistent questions are at the heart of the discipline known as intellectual history, which deals not only with ideas, but also with the men and women who generate, disseminate, and criticize them. The essays in this collection, by one of the most recognized figures in the field, address them through engagement with leading intellectual historians—Hans Blumenberg, Quentin Skinner, Hayden White, Isaiah Berlin, Frank Ankersmit—as well other giants of modern thought—Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Georg Lukács. They touch on a wide variety of related topics, ranging from the heroism of modern life to the ability of photographs to lie. In addition, they explore the fraught connections between philosophy and theory, the truth of history and the truthfulness of historians, and the weaponization of free speech for other purposes.

The popularity of films like Titanic betokens a massive shift in the nature of aesthetic spectatorship in our time. The contemplative, distanced viewer who is able to judge from afar the spectacle before him or her, has been replaced by a more proximate, involved "kinaesthetic" subject whose body is stimulated as much as his or her eye. This is evident not only in mass culture with amusement thrill rides and the return of what has been called the "cinema of attractions"; this new spectator can also be discerned in avant-garde culture, as shown by the Sensation exhibition of Young British Artists which caused such a stir in London and New York. This spectator is especially attracted to simulacral scenes of destruction and catastrophe, in which he or she is virtually immersed. If aesthetic judgement is to be a model for its political counterpart, as has been argued by theorists like Lyotard and Arendt, it cannot do so on the basis of this aesthetics of violent immersion.

The removal of water from mines was one of the key issues that former miners had to deal with. Roman colonists brought new technology to the Iberian Peninsula that addressed this problem. However, they did not invent this technology because it had already been applied to the growth of other endeavours in the Hellenistic society throughout the Eastern Mediterranean. In the mine, the Archimedes screw, waterwheels, bucket pulleys, and Ctesibius pumps were the primary drainage systems. In this essay, the primary characteristics, and modes of operation of machines are examined. Without leaving out the most significant finds made in the southwest of the Iberian Peninsula, one of the regions with the longest history of mining exploitation. To serve as a foundation for future research in this field, this work compares the primary mining mechanisms in ancient Huelva on a qualitative and quantitative level by the implementation of a TOPSIS methodology, a multi-criteria decision analysis method.

This chapter explicates Theodor W. Adorno's dialectical engagement with inauthenticity and genuineness, two of the central tropes of his mature philosophy. The chapter discusses the extent to which Adorno's critique of genuineness in Minima Moralia and elsewhere was itself deeply indebted to Walter Benjamin's defense of mechanical reproduction against the aura and his notion of the mimetic faculty. It quickly becomes apparent that many of his “own” ideas betray precisely the kind of inauthenticity that he defended against the jargon. Or if one wants to rely on his critical use of the term, it shows the non-auratic authenticity of the intellectual who knows himself not to be in full possession of his own ideas. Paradoxically, in his very lack of originality, his reworking without entirely duplicating many of his friend's most arresting ideas, Adorno took upon himself the stigma he urged everyone to embrace.

In 1996, the sociological journal Theory and Society devoted a special issue to “Theory and Theoreticians.”1 My contribution, titled “For Theory,” was intended as an homage to the late Alvin Gouldner, the radical social theorist, self-described “outlaw Marxist,” and founding editor of the journal, among whose many books was one called For Sociology.2 The essay was also dedicated to the memory of Bill Readings, a gifted literary theorist inspired in particular by Jean-François Lyotard, and a participant in the seminar I had led at the School of Criticism and Theory a decade earlier. Best known for his unflinching critique of what he called “the university in ruins,” Bill had lost his life at the age of thirty-four...

Decía Aristóteles en la Ética a Nicómaco que "puede verse en los viajes lejanos cuán familiar y amigo es todo hombre para el hombre" en una experiencia contraria a la que Hobbes manifesta cuando asegura que el hombre es un lobo para el hombre. Aristóteles y Hobbes, como vemos en El Vizconde demediado de Calvino, se encuentran siempre presentes en la historia de la humanidad. Por ello es preciso preguntarse qué puede hacer la educación para promover ciudadanos solidarios, preocupados de la suerte de los otros, en vez de individuos egoístas, encerrados en sus intereses propios. En un Congreso de Filosofía, no se trata de analizar estrategias didácticas sino de discutir las bases teóricas de una educación orientada a alcanzar los fines señalados. En este sentido, lo que pretendemos ofrecer es un concepto de ciudadanía a la altura de nuestros tiempos, que están preocupados tanto por los Derechos Humanos como por la solidaridad y la justicia social. La ciudadanía es, antes que cualquier otra cosa, un status jurídico. Todo ciudadano tiene un peculiar conjunto de derechos y libertades. Cuáles sean tales derechos y libertades es algo que reclama urgentemente una reformulación objetiva, que no pretenda-como pide Dahrendorf-esconder turbios intereses. Limitémonos a recordar las diversas generaciones de derechos que se han producido en los últimos dos siglos, a la vez que realizamos dos observaciones. La primera es que no hay derechos y libertades que no estén unidos a deberes y responsabilidades. La segunda es que el status jurídico a que nos referimos es de la persona individual. Hablar de ciudadano significa, efectivamente, dar una supremacía al individuo frente a sus grupos de pertenencia. Ahora bien, una cosa es atribuir la preeminencia al individuo y otra muy distinta creer que sólo el individuo tiene derechos.

Si la virtus de la Antigüedad era la fuerza, la valentía y el coraje, y en la modernidad la diligencia, el trabajo, el mérito y el esfuerzo, actualmente se ha instalado la commoditas, una suerte de pseudovirtud nihilista que reivindica la ociosidad, el igualitarismo radical y el entretenimiento. La sociedad contemporánea posmoderna ha superado tanto la metafísica filosófica grecorromana como la teología cristiana, tanto el racionalismo y el empirismo ilustrado como el idealismo romántico decadentista y el positivismo materialista, y ha entrado en una suerte de fin de la historia de nihilismo lúdico autocomplaciente y autosatisfecho. Concluimos que la commoditas está para quedarse y reconfigurará la naturaleza del ser humano en función de una nueva mentalidad que empalidece a la tradición hasta prácticamente anularla.

The impact of digital devices and the Internet has generated various changes at social, political, and economic levels, the repercussion of which is a great challenge characterized by the changing and globalized nature of today's society. This demands the development of new skills and new learning models in relation to information and communication technologies. Universities must respond to these social demands in the training of their future professionals. This paper aims to analyze the empirical evidence provided by international studies in the last eleven years, related to the digital literacy of university students, including those pursuing degrees related to the field of education. Our findings highlight the fact that the digital literacy that is offered in universities to graduate/postgraduate students, in addition to treating digital literacy as a central theme, also focuses on perceived and developed self-efficacy. This is done by strengthening competencies related to digital writing and reading, the use of databases, the digital design of content and materials, and the skills to edit, publish or share them on the web, or applications aimed at treating digital literacy as emerging pedagogies and educational innovation. Secondly, we found studies related to digital competencies and use of the Internet, social networks, web 2.0, or the treatment of digital risks and their relationship with digital literacy. Thirdly, we found works that, in addition to focusing on digital literacy, also focused on different psychological constructs such as motivation, commitment, attitudes, or satisfaction.Systematic review registration:https://www.scopus.com/home.uri; https://www.recursoscientificos.fecyt.es/.

Ignorance is often a valid excuse for wrongdoing. But authors such as William FitzPatrick argued that ignorance is culpable if we could have reasonably expected the agent to take action that would have corrected or prevented it, given his capabilities and the opportunities provided by the context, but failed to do so due to vices such as laziness, indifference, disdain, etc. Guilty ignorance is still present in the debate and, in recent times, has become more pressing with the problem of technological responsibility. In this paper, an internalist perspective of culpable ignorance is adopted to analyze a form of culpability distribution in the technological context based on dispositional beliefs. Thus, two types of responsibility are found. By examining the implications of culpable ignorance, we realize that we can respond to the unambiguous idea that an engineer is morally and epistemically responsible for certain facts.

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