Philosophy of Education in a Poor Historical Moment: A Personal Account

Under the post-metaphysical sky “old” humanistic-oriented education is possible solely at the cost of its transformation into its negative, into a power that is determined to diminish human potentials for self-exaltation. Nothing less than total metamorphosis is needed to rescue the core of humanistic genesis: the quest for edifying Life and resistance to the call for “home-returning” into the total harmony that is promised to us within nothingness.     

Against global method safety

The global method safety account of knowledge states that an agent’s true belief that p is safe and qualifies as knowledge if and only if it is formed by method M, such that her beliefs in p and her beliefs in relevantly similar propositions formed by M in all nearby worlds are true. This paper argues that global method safety is too restrictive. First, the agent may not know relevantly similar propositions via M because the belief that p is the only possible outcome of M. Second, there are cases where there is a fine-grained belief that is unsafe and a relevantly similar coarse-grained belief (with looser truth conditions) that is safe and where both beliefs are based on the same method M. Third, the reliability of conditional reasoning, a basic belief-forming method, seems to be sensitive to fine-grained contents, as suggested by the wide variation in success rates for thematic versions of the Wason selection task.

     

CHOICE: an Objective,Voluntaristic Theory of Prudential Value

Philosophia - It is customary to think that Objective List (“OL), Desire-Satisfaction (“D-S”) and Hedonistic (“HED”) theories of prudential value pretty much cover the...     

Can a Robot Be a Good Colleague?

Science and Engineering Ethics - This paper discusses the robotization of the workplace, and particularly the question of whether robots can be good colleagues. This might appear to be a strange...     

Formalized historiography,the structure of scientific and literary texts: Part I. some issues posed by computational methodology

The examination of theorizing and techniques for scientific language analysis applied to ‘history’ clearly generalizes to imply a domain of applicability potentially coextensive for behavioral scientists with the scope of cultural behavior. It is argued that the computer and related science and technology are moving toward a relationship vis-à-vis symbolic acts analogous to microscopy for the ‘sub-visual’ in scale and telescopes for astronomic phenomena. Content analysis is one of the points of departure, as also contemporary syntactic analysis, from which present ideas and algorithms have moved on. How ‘far’ — both at present and in prospect — is the subject of these articles.