Israel Huerta Castillo

A philosophical micro-history of early quantum theory is developed through an indiciary–abductive approach. Against narratives centred on axioms, formalism, or abrupt scientific ‘revolutions,’ the analysis reconstructs three early quantum episodes—Planck, Einstein, and Bohr—as clue-sensitive episodes of hypothesis appraisal under weak and heterogeneous evidence. Drawing on Ginzburg’s indiciary paradigm, Peircean abduction, and recent work on epistemic aesthetics, the reconstruction develops a rubric for analysing how local anomalies, inherited constraints, and evaluative form-values jointly shaped the comparative plausibility of candidate hypotheses. The comparative result is deliberately partial rather than total: Einstein weakly dominates Planck in the reconstructive profile, whereas Einstein and Bohr remain incomparable. Early quantum theory is thus interpreted not as a simple repudiation of classical rationality, but as a series of disciplined conjectural reorganisations in which empirical resistance, economy, limit coherence, unificatory reach, and prospective fecundity interacted in historically localised ways. The reconstruction remains intentionally limited in scope: it complements rather than replaces Kuhnian historiography and does not claim to exhaust broader social accounts of scientific change.

Late-capitalist legitimacy is increasingly produced where aesthetic adhesion and metric authority converge. Brands, platforms, institutions, and subjects are drawn into environments that make visibility, desirability, excellence, normality, and credibility feel aspirational, whilst audit infrastructures decide which signs of worth can travel and count. This article theorizes that conjunction as capitalism as an aesthetic religion. It develops Walter Benjamin’s fragment on “capitalism as religion” as a sociological operator rather than as an exegetical object, specifying a minimal grammar of cultic legitimacy: binary codes of worth, repeated verification, portable inscriptions, renewed obligation, authorized mediation, and enforceable consequences. The argument then situates this grammar within longer capitalist logics of abstraction, value-form, and reification, whilst identifying the contemporary novelty of audit power: the recursive infrastructuralization of evaluation through rankings, scores, dashboards, accreditation, diagnostic labels, and feedback systems. Audit power is theorized as a veridictive semiotic regime through which signs become public reasons for decision. Chapman’s account of normality and neurodiversity functions as a limit case, showing how statistical norms, diagnosis, and inclusion protocols can convert evaluative signs into institutional recognizability. The article contributes to cultural sociology by clarifying how social reality is authorized through the coupling of aesthetic desire and procedural verdict.

Everyday social life increasingly takes the form of a control panel: bodies, relationships, institutions, and reputations are translated into indicator arrays that offer the reassurance of clarity even as they quietly recode what clarity is taken to be. This paper theorizes that shift as metric sovereignty: the relocation of authority from situated judgment to quantified evaluative devices that set partitions of reality, impose threshold verdicts, and generate feedback loops that reorganize conduct around what is measurable rather than what is meaningful. The argument synthesizes and sharpens established insights in the sociology of quantification, valuation, and audit by specifying a portable grammar of rule composed of five mechanisms—commensuration, thresholding, feedback, reputation, and chronometry—and by showing how these mechanisms assemble into stable “stacks” that intensify under performance pressures. Through comparative qualitative mechanism tracing across three anchor arenas—education, criminal legal governance, and platform-mediated work and sociality—the paper demonstrates how metric sovereignty becomes consequential for life chances, institutional legitimacy, and subject formation. The analytical payoff is diagnostic rather than moralizing: the central problem is not measurement per se, but the conditions under which measurement becomes sovereign, displacing judgment and converting “quality” into an administrative residue of what escapes commensuration.

Under transmodern conditions—marked by convergent life sciences and computational paradigms, ubiquitous connectivity, and accelerating AI–IoT infrastructures—the classical Enlightenment architecture of knowledge (institution-centred authority, relatively stable publics, and slower epistemic rhythms) is displaced by infrastructure-mediated conditions of perception, production, and justification. The paper develops a quadrangular conceptual framework—poiesis–technē / aisthēsis–epistēmē—to show how contemporary digital systems externalize and govern aisthēsis (through distributed sensing and datafication), accelerate poiesis (through generative synthesis and automation), and reconfigure epistēmē by reshaping practical norms of evidence, credibility, and closure. Against both technoutopian and fatalistic readings, the argument treats the emancipatory content of Digital Enlightenment as conditional: it depends on whether DIY epistemologies and autodidactic learning ecologies become civic infrastructures of participation, contestability, and repair, rather than being absorbed into platform spectacle or epistemic dependency. The normative core is an infrastructural expansion of epistemic justice, where harms and asymmetries increasingly track unequal access to interpretability, auditing, and intervention rights in AI–IoT environments. The conclusion articulates a transmodern pedagogical program in which digital and AI literacy function as justice-relevant capabilities for autonomy and collective empowerment under hybrid agency.

AI-enabled medicine and digital health increasingly instantiate an implicit philosophical anthropology: the person is treated as an improvable system whose deviations from an ideal baseline can be detected, predicted, and corrected through continuous data capture and algorithmic mediation. In this framing, health is reinterpreted as optimisation and longevity becomes a technical horizon of open-ended extension. This article argues that the decisive conflict is not between being for or against enhancement, but between two rival conceptions of enhancement grounded in divergent valuations of embodiment and divergent political grammars of governance. Building on recent clarifications that separate human enhancement from transhumanism, the paper develops a prohumanist philosophical anthropology oriented to dignified longevity: bounded improvement accountable to dignity, vulnerability, justice, and meaning, rather than perfection as an end-state. The transmodern condition—platformised infrastructures, behavioural nudging, and asymmetries of expertise—intensifies the risk that optimisation becomes the default norm in health governance. Against this backdrop, the article proposes four prohumanist constraints for AI-mediated health systems: proportionality, contestability, non-totalisation, and epistemic autonomy. These constraints are translated into design and regulatory criteria for high-stakes health settings, yielding a set of evaluative questions intended to discipline enhancement claims and to protect agency and dignity under conditions of pervasive digital mediation.

Population ageing is increasingly framed as a fiscal and administrative burden, yet the UN Decade of Healthy Ageing sets a different normative horizon: healthy ageing aligned with the final decade of the Sustainable Development Goals. This article offers a conceptual and bioethical analysis of why “active ageing” can become rhetorically attractive while remaining materially unattainable for many older persons. It distinguishes two governance regimes: passive-assisted ageing, organised around downstream risk containment, scarcity triage, and administrative burden; and active ageing reconstructed as dignified longevity, assessed by functional ability and its social preconditions. The analysis introduces the “malaise state” to name structural welfare drift under demographic pressure and political–economic incentives, and develops the epistemic–existential paradox: societies can be knowledge-rich yet equity-poor because scientific and digital proliferation does not translate into health without upstream action on social and commercial determinants. Extending the argument globally, the paper contrasts longevity with inequality in high-income settings and premature mortality in low-income contexts, arguing that the Decade must be treated as a justice project rather than a behavioural exhortation. It concludes with a Decade-alignment checklist and policy-relevant ethical commitments.

Ageing research has achieved powerful syntheses by cataloguing mechanistic “causal reservoirs” (e.g., hallmark-style frameworks) and by modelling late-life vulnerability as changes in dynamical resilience and multiscale variability. Yet these approaches often leave underspecified what, functionally, deteriorates when an organism becomes less able to sustain viable engagement with its internal and external conditions. This article proposes semiodynamics as a theoretical object for ageing: the time-dependent decline of biological sense-making competence. Sense-making is analysed into a minimal four-function scaffold: discrimination (relevant difference-making under noise), transduction (faithful propagation through coherent pathways), adaptive response (flexible viability-preserving action), and organizational coherence (cross-scale integration under perturbation). A deliberately thin formalisation represents competence as a time-dependent profile, enabling principled connections to evo-devo commitments about developmental timing, canalisation and its decay, and life-history variation. The framework yields a constrained set of empirically risky consequences: structured shifts in effective noise, recovery kinetics, modular reconfiguration, and cross-scale coupling. An empirical programme is outlined that prioritises perturbation–response designs and multiscale time-series/network measures to test (and potentially falsify) the competence-decline hypothesis across taxa, domains, and interventions.

A philosophical micro-history of early quantum theory is developed through an indiciary–abductive approach. Against narratives centred on axioms, formalism, or abrupt scientific ‘revolutions,’ the analysis reconstructs three early quantum episodes—Planck, Einstein, and Bohr—as clue-sensitive episodes of hypothesis appraisal under weak and heterogeneous evidence. Drawing on Ginzburg’s indiciary paradigm, Peircean abduction, and recent work on epistemic aesthetics, the reconstruction develops a rubric for analysing how local anomalies, inherited constraints, and evaluative form-values jointly shaped the comparative plausibility of candidate hypotheses. The comparative result is deliberately partial rather than total: Einstein weakly dominates Planck in the reconstructive profile, whereas Einstein and Bohr remain incomparable. Early quantum theory is thus interpreted not as a simple repudiation of classical rationality, but as a series of disciplined conjectural reorganisations in which empirical resistance, economy, limit coherence, unificatory reach, and prospective fecundity interacted in historically localised ways. The reconstruction remains intentionally limited in scope: it complements rather than replaces Kuhnian historiography and does not claim to exhaust broader social accounts of scientific change.

The main goal that motivates the writing of this paper lies in the defence of a thesis: some living organisms of the plant kingdom would manifest in their life form a hypothetical modality of conscious agency. For this purpose, a preliminary outline of a semiotic theory of basal consciousness is offered, that works in the present research as an attempt at the onto-epistemological foundation on which the argumentative product is erected as a resource for the defence of the thesis advocated. First of all, the unfolding of this argumentation is then set out by means of an interdisciplinary exposition of those theoretical corpus that have been selected to provide sense and referential meaning to a potential “Theory of Plant Consciousness”. It manifests, therefore, the logically relational conjugation of conceptual systems belonging to a finite series of theoretical-experimental research spaces of recent emergence in the Western scientific community, such as embodied cognition (with its proposal of basal cognition), "plant neurobiology" and, finally, biosemiotics (with the extension of the semiotic paradigm to the plant kingdom, giving rise to phytosemiotics). Finally, it concludes with a series of considerations on the research carried out.

This text exposes, from a general historical perspective, the emergence and recent development, within the western scientific community, of the so-called “Quantum Theories of Consciousness” (QTC). A brief explanation is carried out attending, in chronological order of first publication, to the main QTC proposals that address the so-called “hard problem of consciousness”, starting from postulates of philosophy and quantum physics, theoretical springs that maintain an open and transversal dialogue with other disciplines such as neuroscience, chemistry, biology, psychology or cognitive sciences.

This article analyzes BDSM as a consensual sexual practice situated at the intersection of Spanish criminal law and bioethics. Drawing on a theoretical framework centred on consent, autonomy, and human dignity, it examines the relevant statutory provisions (arts. 147–150 and 155 of the Código Penal [Spanish Criminal Code]), the leading case law (STS 1049/2002 of the Tribunal Supremo [Spanish Supreme Court]), and the constitutional limits deriving from public order under the Constitución Española [Spanish Constitution]. From a pragmatist consequentialist standpoint, the article proposes a set of minimal regulatory criteria—harm thresholds, verifiable and revocable consent, and evidentiary safeguards—designed to reconcile sexual freedom with the protection of bodily integrity, reduce legal uncertainty, and avoid incentives for clandestine practices.

This article advances three theoretical proposals that unsettle the traditional notions of representation in Western art and aesthetics, engaging the work of Jean-François Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze, Aby Warburg, Georges Didi-Huberman, and Luis Puelles. Each proposal foregrounds the need to reconceive artistic representation in terms of singularity, difference, immanent forces, psychism, and the spectator’s active co-participation. Taken together, they provide a deeper understanding of contemporary aesthetics and its resistance to homogenizing narratives.

This article examines whether chronic hunger meets agent-neutral criteria for treatment as a non-communicable pandemic in global health. It integrates Twaddle’s disease–illness–sickness triad with Engel’s biopsychosocial model and operationalizes “pandemic” using six criteria (transnational spread, high burden, socioeconomic disruption, international coordination, externalities, and stable governance/funding). An explicit bioethical anchor is incorporated: right to food, distributive justice, structural non-maleficence, solidarity, and intergenerational responsibility. Verification is based on recent institutional evidence and literature on population nutrition, social determinants, syndemics, and governance. Multilevel packages (community, national, global) with countercyclical financing and integrated surveillance are derived, and objections (dilution, medicalization, terminology, thresholds) are addressed. The proposal is linked to SDG-2 and the 2030 Agenda. It is concluded that the agent-neutral pandemic framework does not dilute the term but rather refines it for decision-making when the burden and disruption so require.