J. Martin

The greatest natural disaster to have occurred in Spain in the last hundred years, the Dana of October 2024, which caused an enormous flood in part of the province of Valencia, forces us to reflect on our response to disasters. Beyond the classic view of an unfortunate, unpredictable coincidence that has nothing to do with human intervention, it is worth considering the relationship between science and political management, the response of solidarity and the debate on the definition of moral, political and legal responsibility.

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

Resumen: Las políticas europeas de inmigración y refugio han sido criticadas por quienes las consideran emblemas de una concepción que pone en grave riesgo elementos básicos del Estado de Derecho y aun de la democracia. El epítome es la aparición de mercados de esclavos en Libia, a las puertas de la UE, un Estado fallido que la UE y sus Estados miembros se empeñan en elevar a la condición de partner privilegiado de sus políticas de externalización. Tomando como base los análisis de Lochak, Agambem y Bauman y la concepción de la propuesta por el filósofo camerunés Mbembé, desarrollando tesis de Foucault (biopolítica), se proponen algunas alternativas que vienen presididas por la exigencia de reconocimiento y garantía de derechos básicos de inmigrantes y refugiados. Abstract: European immigration and refuge policies have been criticized by those who see them as emblems of a conception that puts in serious risk basic elements of the Rule of Law and even of democracy. The epitome is the emergence of slave markets in Libya (at the gates of the EU), a failed state that, nevertheless, the EU and its Member States are determined to raise to the status of privileged partner of their outsourcing policies. Based on the analysis of Lochak, Agambem and Bauman and the conception of the proposed by the Cameroonian philosopher Mbembé who develops Foucault's thesis about biopolitics, this text will propose some alternatives that are leaded by the requirement of recognition and guarantee of rights of immigrants and refugees.

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.

Cuidar a los otros en sus enfermedades es un caso particular de un cuidado más amplio por la realidad, por nosotros mismos, por los demás e incluso por lo sagrado. Pero el teléfono móvil está reconfigurando nuestra relación con todo esto. La posibilidad de tener a mano acceso a las redes significa al menos un cambio de perspectiva en la propia realidad, en el hombre individual y comunitario y en nuestra relación con lo sagrado. El cuidado con el ser de las cosas cambia, porque las nuevas tecnologías contemporáneas suponen una desrealización del mundo, acrecentando de manera acelerada la hiperrealidad del mundo virtual, mientras que a la vez se nos introduce en procesos de semiosis infinita donde nunca es posible dar con el dato real (cuidado por la realidad). El cuidado de uno mismo cambia porque las nuevas tecnologías de hoy también suponen la supresión del tiempo de espera entre la necesidad y el deseo, necesario para toda maduración, del mismo modo que cuestionan el dominio que ejercemos sobre la técnica invirtiendo los términos en esta relación de dominio (cuidado por uno mismo). El cuidado de los otros cambia porque las nuevas tecnologías se corre el riesgo de despersonalizar la comunicación en general y aislar al sujeto, convirtiendo al otro en mero medio (cuidado por los otros). Por último el cuidado de lo sagrado también cambia debido a que las nuevas tecnologías contemporáneas tienden a adquirir los atributos que clásicamente se atribuían a la divinidad (omnipotencia, omnisciencia, ubicuidad, eternidad, etc.), configurando sin pretenderlo una especie de nueva salvación-salud a la que se sacrifica la propia vida (cuidado por lo sagrado). La presente reflexión pretende servir de reflexión filosófica sobre la que aplicar después las técnicas del cuidado concretas.

This paper re-evaluates the formative year of quantum mechanics—from Heisenberg’s first paper on matrix mechanics to Schrödinger’s equivalence proof—by focusing on the role of radiation in the emerging theory. We argue that the radiation problem played a key role in early quantum mechanics, a role that has not been taken into account in the standard histories. Radiation was perceived by the main protagonists of matrix and wave mechanics as a central lacuna in these emerging theories and continued to contribute to the theoretical development and conceptual clarification of quantum mechanics. Studying the interplay between quantum mechanics and radiation, the paper provides an account of (a) how quantum mechanics was able to connect to its empirical basis in spectroscopy and (b) how Schrödinger’s equivalence proof emerged from his explorative calculations on the emission of radiation.

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.

© 2016 International Society for Microbial Ecology.Multiple models describe the formation and evolution of distinct microbial phylogenetic groups. These evolutionary models make different predictions regarding how adaptive alleles spread through populations and how genetic diversity is maintained. Processes predicted by competing evolutionary models, for example, genome-wide selective sweeps vs gene-specific sweeps, could be captured in natural populations using time-series metagenomics if the approach were applied over a sufficiently long time frame. Direct observations of either process would help resolve how distinct microbial groups evolve. Here, from a 9-year metagenomic study of a freshwater lake, we explore changes in single-nucleotide polymorphism frequencies and patterns of gene gain and loss in 30 bacterial populations. SNP analyses revealed substantial genetic heterogeneity within these populations, although the degree of heterogeneity varied by >1000-fold among populations. SNP allele frequencies also changed dramatically over time within some populations. Interestingly, nearly all SNP variants were slowly purged over several years from one population of green sulfur bacteria, while at the same time multiple genes either swept through or were lost from this population. These patterns were consistent with a genome-wide selective sweep in progress, a process predicted by the 'ecotype model' of speciation but not previously observed in nature. In contrast, other populations contained large, SNP-free genomic regions that appear to have swept independently through the populations prior to the study without purging diversity elsewhere in the genome. Evidence for both genome-wide and gene-specific sweeps suggests that different models of bacterial speciation may apply to different populations coexisting in the same environment.

The elevation of aesthetic experience in the Enlightenment, most extensively developed in Kant's analysis of disinterested contemplation, to compensate for the loss of putatively objective standards of beauty had several problematic implications. One was the privileging of the subject who had the experience over the object that stimulated it. Another was the potential extension of that experience to objects that were never intended to be works of art, not merely to ones given in nature, but also to political, social and cultural phenomena whose ethical or cognitive dimensions were concomitantly suppressed or marginalized. The aestheticization of the commonplace could thus countenance an inappropriate imperialism of the aesthetic sub-system of modernity over alternative sub-systems. Although the pragmatist aesthetics of John Dewey, recently revived in the work of Richard Shusterman, has acknowledged a need to revitalize the role of the art object, it may too quickly postulate a notion of aesthetic experience in which the equiprimordiality of subject and object is assumed. It is perhaps better to hold on to a tense constellation between art objects and the experience they generate in subjects in order to avoid a premature sublation of what remains still unreconciled in the larger culture.

Odnos Ortege do Husserlove fenomenologije je v zadnjih desetih letih postal ena najpomembnejših točk kritike španskega filozofa. Kar se je njegovim učencem zdelo že izčrpano vprašanje, se je izkazalo odločilnega pomena. V ta odnos je marveč vgrajen sklepnik razumevanja te filozofije. Odvisnost Ortegove filozofije od Husserlove fenomenologije sem poskušal dokazati na drugem mestu, pri čemer sem prišel do sklepa, da tvorijo Logične raziskave, Ideje I in raziskave fenomenologov v Husserlovem göttinškem krogu nujen okvir za ključne pojme Ortegove teoretične filozofije. V kritiki odnosa Ortege do Husserla pa je pomembno, da datiramo posamezne Ortegove trditve, ker potem lahko ugotovimo, da trditev, da je presegel in zapustil Husserlovo fenomenologijo, takoj ko jo je spoznal, namreč izvira šele iz poznih let, natančno, iz leta 1929.In the last decades, the relationship between Ortega and Husserl’s phenomenology has become one of the crucial points of the critical approach to Ortega. What students of Ortega found as exhausted issues later proved decisive. The relationship between the two namely reveals the grain of salt of his philosophy. I discussed the dependence of Ortega’s philosophy on Husserl’s phenomenology elsewhere; there I argued, as a result, that Logical Investigations, Ideas I and research works done by other phenomenologists from Husserl’s Göttingen circle, prove of utmost importance for the key concepts of Ortega’s theoretical philosophy. However, if we want to criticize Ortega’s relationship with Husserl, we have to pay special attention to the dating of Ortega’s individual claims: namely, this could well lead us to the conclusion that the claim that Ortega went beyond the confines of Husserl’s phenomenology the moment he tackled it, stems from his later period, more exactly from 1929

Frente al paradigma de la ciencia clásica que marginaba lo humano y la vida separándolos del ámbito de la naturaleza, el paradigma de la complejidad muestra la necesidad de pensar al hombre como ser natural. Mi objetivo es presentar las grandes transformaciones que lo humano experimenta con el paso a la complejidad y mostrar, a la vez, la necesidad de un "orden" práctico que, sin desligarlo artificialmente de la naturaleza, permita al hombre contemporáneo superar la profunda desorientación que sufre

El presente artículo expone y analiza una ontología bastante novedosa, inspirada por recientes descubrimientos en el campo de las ciencias positivas y por la creciente complejidad que exhibe la sociedad actual en sus diferentes niveles. No obstante, el autor incurre en ocasiones en arriesgadas extrapolaciones que, aunque comprensibles, no están suficientemente avaladas por la experiencia. En suma, con ello se pretende reconstruir el saber y mostrar una nueva imagen de la realidad desde los nuevos conceptos y categorías que aporta el paradigma de la complejidad