Israel Huerta Castillo

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.

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.

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.

The U.N. Decade of Healthy Ageing frames later life through functional ability, environments, and well-being rather than through demographic burden alone. This article argues that healthy ageing becomes ethically unstable when it is pursued without health equity. It first distinguishes the historically influential vocabulary of active ageing from the later healthy-ageing framework centred on functional ability. It then develops a bioethical account of capability-enabling ageing governance: assistance and long-term care are ethically necessary, but they become insufficient when downstream service delivery under scarcity substitutes for upstream conditions that sustain agency, mobility, care, and social participation. The article introduces the malaise state as a conceptual diagnostic category for welfare drift under demographic, fiscal, administrative, and commercial pressure. It also formulates the knowledge-to-equity conversion problem: societies may expand biomedical knowledge, digital health, and innovation while failing to secure the conditions through which those resources become equitable functional ability. The article concludes that the Decade should be evaluated as a justice project, not as a behavioural exhortation to older persons.

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 examines the tension between sexual autonomy, human dignity, and criminal protection in the context of consensual BDSM in Spain. Drawing on the constitutional framework (Arts. 10, 15, and 18 of the Spanish Constitution), criminal doctrine (Arts. 147–148 and 155 of the Criminal Code), and key case law (notably Supreme Court Judgment 1049/2002), it outlines the current solution: consent does not remove the unlawfulness of bodily injury but may mitigate punishment. From a bioethical perspective, consent is reconstructed as a continuous process that requires information, proportionality, and reversibility, and its interaction is analysed with the principle of dignity—both ontological and socio-objective—and with abuse prevention. The case analysis applies these criteria to Supreme Court Judgment 1049/2002, gender-based violence scenarios, and the non-consensual dissemination of intimate images, showing that the relevant issue is not whether BDSM should be accepted or rejected as a sexual practice, but how to distinguish assumed risk from imposed harm, voluntary erotic representation from instrumentalisation, and genuine consent from evidentiary uncertainty. On this basis, the paper proposes a prudent regulatory framework combining: (a) tailored mitigation of punishability for minor injuries arising from freely consented sexual practices between adults; (b) clear safeguards and material limits (no grave endangerment, weapons, or coercion; specific and verifiable consent); and (c) guidance for legal and healthcare professionals. A pragmatist stance recommends continuous assessment of regulatory impact. The conclusion argues that a narrowly framed partial decriminalization could enhance legal certainty and harm prevention, provided that the autonomy–dignity tension remains the governing constitutional and bioethical criteria.

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.