Jose Garcia

Automated legal reasoning and its application in smart contracts and automated decisions are increasingly attracting interest. In this context, ethical and legal concerns make it necessary for automated reasoners to justify in human-understandable terms the advice given. Logic Programming, specially Answer Set Programming, has a rich semantics and has been used to very concisely express complex knowledge. However, modelling discretionality to act and other vague concepts such as ambiguity cannot be expressed in top-down execution models based on Prolog, and in bottom-up execution models based on ASP the justifications are incomplete and/or not scalable. We propose to use s(CASP), a top-down execution model for predicate ASP, to model vague concepts following a set of patterns. We have implemented a framework, called s(LAW), to model, reason, and justify the applicable legislation and validate it by translating (and benchmarking) a representative use case, the criteria for the admission of students in the “Comunidad de Madrid”.

Language employs various coordinators to connect propositions, a subset of which are “logical” in nature and thus analogous to the truth operators of formal logic. We here focus on two linguistic connectives and their negations: conjunction _and_ and (inclusive) disjunction _or_. Linguistic connectives exhibit a truth-conditional component as part of their meaning (their semantics), but their use in context can give rise to various implicatures and presuppositions (the domain of pragmatics) as well as to inferences that go beyond semantic/pragmatic properties (the result of reasoning processes). We provide a comprehensive review of the role of the logical connectives in language and argue that three sets of factors—semantic, pragmatic, and those related to reasoning—are separate and separable, though some details may differ cross-linguistically. As a way to showcase the argument, we present two experiments in language comprehension in Spanish wherein pragmatic content was minimised and reasoning processes neutered, thus potentially highlighting what might be the default meanings of the connectives under study. In Experiment 1 we show that the conjunctive reading of inclusive disjunction is available in positive contexts other than in syntactically intricate cases such as downward entailing and free choice contexts, contrary to what has been claimed in the literature. In Experiment 2 we show that negated conjunctions and disjunctions in Spanish can easily receive the same interpretation when contrasted against the same context and, moreover, that these interpretations match those available in English, despite claims from the literature that linguistic connectives and local negation interact differently in English and Romance languages.

This book is devoted to discussion of the views of Pierre Musso and starts with a central chapter written by Musso, entitled Network Ideology: from Saint-Simonianism to the Internet. Pierre Musso is a French philosopher and is one of the most original thinkers in the history of the network society. His thought develops a critique of information and communication technologies through their imaginary and social representations and of the information society, based on the network metaphor. The main question on which Musso has focused his attention is how the network metaphor is one of the most powerful ways of understanding the complex societies in which we live. Showing characteristic attention to detail, and drawing on the history of ideas, political philosophy and sociology, Musso traces the genealogy of the network imaginary, and points out that it did not emerge with the Internet. He shows how its modern roots can be found in Henri de Saint-Simon and his disciples, engineers and entrepreneurs such as Michel de Chevalier, and Barthélemy Prosper Enfantin, who developed channel networks, railroads, and the telegraphic network in France in the nineteenth century. In addition to the central piece written by Musso, the book includes a general introduction and six commentaries from experts on information technologies and networks. It displays a wide range of perspectives from a diverse set of authors in terms of nationalities and universities, as well as disciplinary backgrounds.

En este ensayo se plantea la progresiva pérdida, en las últimas décadas, de la ubicación en el sistema productivo en cuanto elemento identitario de la ciudadanía, lo que, desde perspectivas más o menos afines a planteamientos libertarios, ha conllevado dos líneas fundamentales de disidencia y protesta social. En primer lugar, a partir del desarrollo de planteamientos ideológicos que rechazan el trabajo asalariado, por su naturaleza alienante y en connivencia con el establishment. Y en segundo lugar, desde las posiciones de quienes ven en el consumo el mecanismo para la transformación social, a través de estrategias, ora cercanas al decrecimiento, ora defensoras de una utilización política de los ingresos. A lo largo del texto se ilustran con ejemplos y propuestas concretas ambas líneas de actuación, que evidencian la evolución del homo laborans al homo consumens

A través de una mirada histórica este artículo muestra cómo filosofía y literatura han mantenido una línea de relación compleja pero inevitable, mostrando esa zona en que los seres humanos, como individuos y seres sociales, han de dar respuestas a situaciones singulares desde la experiencia adquirida y la atención a la multiplicidad. Se hace hincapié en las principales etapas, se mencionan algunos autores relevantes y se ofrece al lector una reflexión que presenta ambas formas como necesarias para la construcción del orden y buscar salidas a la encrucijada de la vida pues esta, conocimiento y sentido moral, solo es viable desde esa doble atención.

El artículo se propone mostrar que las concepciones semántica y pragmática del significado, asumidas por Heidegger y Merleau-Ponty, respectivamente, dan lugar a interpretaciones disímiles de la diferencia la política-lo político, de gran difusión en el pensamiento contemporáneo. La tesis es que Heidegger y la llamada izquierda heideggeriana, Lacoue-Labarthe, Nancy, asumiendo la prevalencia epocal del inicio ontológico occidental, se comprometen con una concepción semántica, en último término esencialista. La historia de Occidente queda orientada por una metafísica identificada con la tecnología, con lo que, por una parte, la libertad subjetiva moderna y los derechos a los que da lugar quedan traslapados por aquella, y por otra, la política y lo político quedan escindidos y la primera es impotente para alterar lo segundo. Según la pragmática, sustentada entre otros por Merleau-Ponty, el significado no está dado por una previa apertura de mundo sino que va siendo establecido por un sentido inmanente a las prácticas, las cuales tienen el poder de abrir mundo. La filosofía, en este enfoque, tiene por tarea sustituir el sentido latente de las prácticas por un sentido manifiesto. En esa línea, Claude Lefort sostiene una concepción no esencialista de lo político, enfatiza la novedad de la democracia moderna y la relevancia de los derechos humanos.

En este trabajo se presenta la concepción aristotélica de la filosofía primera como ciencia de los principios y de las causas primeras según el libro primero de la Metafísica. Para ello, se distinguen tres momentos sucesivos que constituyen el análisis de la naturaleza y la meta que debe alcanzar esta ciencia: 1) la concepción de la sabiduría como ciencia que se ocupa de ciertos principios y causas; 2) la sabiduría como ciencia de los primeros principios y de las causas; 3) la determinación de las cuatro causas primeras como tarea de la filosofía primera. De este modo, se pretende mostrar que la Metafísica de Aristóteles es un intento para explicar las últimas cuestiones, el último porqué, indicando cuatro géneros diferentes de respuesta.

In recent years, the study of women entrepreneurship has experienced great growth, gaining a broad consensus among academics and contributing above all to understanding all those factors that explain the difficulty of women in undertaking an entrepreneurial career. This document tries to contribute to the field of study, thanks to a systematic analysis through the publications present in the topic. For this purpose, 2,848 peer-reviewed articles were analyzed, published between 1950 and 2019, using the Scopus database (SCImago Research Group). Through the use of a series of bibliometric indicators it was possible to define the current state of research on the international scene. The analysis revealed that it is a multidisciplinary field of study and that has started to expand further since 2006, culminating in 2019, which makes it become a current and valid object of study. The analysis of the clusters allowed to isolate 6 different lines of research in which emerged, on the one hand, the importance of entrepreneurial education, social entrepreneurship and the socio-cultural context of reference (e.g. culture, family and institutional support) as tools to overcome the gender gap, on the other, the importance that women entrepreneurship assumes in the economic growth of the country (especially in developing economies), promoting social inclusion and combating poverty and discrimination. The study presents an important contribution to reflect on current policies and to outline future lines of investigation.

The theory of separation assumes, with provocation, that an organization cannot reconcile profits and social function. Organizations can reconcile these two, apparently contrasting, missions, by considering emotions, especially moral emotions, to create a genuine motivation for focusing on goals beyond simple economic earnings and protecting organizations or groups of people from dysfunctional attitudes and behaviors, as well as considering the important role of the stakeholder accountability. Using the PRISMA method, we created a review of records using keywords relating to a socio-emotional value within organizations, with a particular focus on the last 20 years. We used the SCOPUS database and, after removing irrelevant records, we used the VOSviewer tool to create a cluster map of different areas in this topic. Some records cite the socio-emotional value that is related to organizational and employee suffering, while other articles consider it a positive factor that improves performance and prevents problems in organizations.