Height preferences reflecting positive assortative mating for height—wherein an individual’s own height positively predicts the preferred height of their mate—have been observed in several distinct human populations and are thought to increase reproductive fitness. However, the extent to which assortative preferences for height differ strategically for short-term versus long-term relationship partners, as they do for numerous other indices of mate quality, remains unclear. We explore this possibility in a large representative sample of over 500 men and women aged 15–77 from (...) Canada, Cuba, Norway and the United States. Participants’ own heights were measured, and they indicated their height preferences for a long-term and short-term mate using graphic stimuli containing metric indices. Replicating the “male-taller norm,” participants on average preferred taller-than-average male mates, and shorter-than-average female mates. Positive assortative preferences for height were observed across sexes and samples, however the strength of these height preferences varied with relationship context for men, and not for women. Taller men preferred relatively shorter women for short-term relationships than for long-term relationships, indicating stronger assortative preferences for height in a long-term context. These results provide preliminary evidence that, in addition to mate preferences for other physical traits related to mate quality such as masculinity in the body, face, and voice, assortative preferences for height do vary as a function of expected relationship length, but this was surprisingly only observed in preferences for female height. (shrink)

Fundamento: El Plan D de la carrera de Estomatología concibe la existencia de una disciplina principal integradora denominada Estomatología Integral, sobre la base de la concepción de interdisciplinariedad y la mayor flexibilización curricular. Objetivo: Realizar una valoración de la asignatura Atención Integral a la Familia II del plan D de la carrera de Estomatología. Métodos: Se realizó un estudio descriptivo transversal en la Facultad de Estomatología de la Universidad de Ciencias Médicas de Camaguey en Mayo 2015, mediante el análisis documental (...) del plan de estudio D y programa de la disciplina integradora, se exploraron criterios de profesores sobre las potencialidades y limitaciones del diseño curricular. Fueron encuestados directivos del proceso docente y profesores de experiencia. Resultados: En los objetivos instructivos de la carrera no se incluye el referente a la Estomatología Legal, pero está recogido en los problemas de salud, en los modos de actuación del modelo del profesional y en los objetivos del 4to año donde se imparte la asignatura. La formulación del primer objetivo instructivo se considera muy general y amplia. Conclusiones: La ubicación de la asignatura es correcta en la malla curricular. Tiene suficientes horas de Educación en el trabajo y es adecuada la proporción de las actividades teóricas; como aspectos negativos contenido resalta la extensión y amplitud del tercer tema y la escasez y pobre actualización de la literatura docente. Introduction: The Curriculum D of Dentistry career conceives the existence of a main integrated discipline called Comprehensive Dentistry on the basis of the multi-disciplinary conception and the most curricular flexibility. Objective: To make an assessment of the subject Family Comprehensive Attention II Curriculum D of Dentistry career. Methods: A descriptive-transverse study was performed in the Dentistry Faculty of the University of Medical Sciences in May 2015 by means of the documentary analysis of the Curriculum D and the syllabus of the comprehensive discipline, different professors´criteria were explored about the potencialities and limitations of the curricular design. The board of directors of the teaching process as well as experienced professors were interviewed. Results: The instructive objectives of the career are not included in Legal Dentistry but they are taken into account when dealing with heath problems, the ways of behavior of the future professional and the objectives of the 4th-year subject. The formulation of the first instructive objective is considered very general and broad. Conclusions: Its location is correct bearing in mind the curricular design. It contains enough hours for the practice at dental clinics and a correct gradation of the theoretical activities, a very broad and lengthy content in topic III as well as scarce and not updated literature were the negative aspects. (shrink)

Inspired by the writings of J. M. Hinton (1967a, 1967b, 1973), but ushered into the mainstream by Paul Snowdon (1980–1, 1990–1), John McDowell (1982, 1986), and M. G. F. Martin (2002, 2004, 2006), disjunctivism is currently discussed, advocated, and opposed in the philosophy of perception, the theory of knowledge, the theory of practical reason, and the philosophy of action. But what is disjunctivism?

La Teoría de la Computación es un campo especialmente rico para la indagación filosófica. EI debate sobre el mecanicismo y la discusión en torno a los fundamentos de la matemática son tópicos que estan directamente asociados a la Teoria de la Computación desde su misma creación como disciplina independiente. La Tesis de Turing-Church constituye uno de los resultados mas característicos en este campo estando, además, lleno de consecuencias filosóficas. En este ensayo se ofrece una guía de referencia útil a aquellos (...) que desean prestar alguna atención a estos asuntos y carecen de la base técnica o histórica que se precisa. En primer lugar se ofrece un resurnen de los principales problemas relacionados con la Tesis de Turing-Church para ofrecer a continuación información sobre sus aspectos más controvertidos. Se proponen algunos problemas no resueltos y se analiza su relevancia filosófica.Computer Science is a field specially rich for philosophical inquiry. Mechanism and the discussion around foundations of mathematics are topics directly asociated to Computer Science for its very constitution as an independent discipline. Church-Turing Thesis is one of the most characteristic results in this field and is plenty of philosophical consequences. In this article I offer a referenee guide useful for those who are willing to pay some attention to these matters and ignore the technical and historical basis needed for this task. I resume the main topics related to Church-Turing Thesis and give some informationabout the most controversial aspects of this subject. Some open questions are settled for further investigation paying special attention to their philosophical importance. (shrink)

How do clinical psychiatrists arrive at their diagnostic conclusions? Little attention has been directed to this question by philosophers of psychiatry. Adrian Kind presents a systematic, in-depth philosophical investigation into this question and argues that psychiatric diagnostic reasoning can be understood as a model-based reasoning procedure analogous to scientific model-based reasoning. To support this, he draws on ideas from the philosophy of science, psychiatry, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence. This study is an invaluable resource for practicing psychiatrists, philosophers interested in (...) psychiatry, and researchers in artificial intelligence or cognitive science interested in medical cognition. (shrink)

Does the existence of body representations undermine the explanatory role of the body? Or do certain types of representation depend so closely upon the body that their involvement in a cognitive task implicates the body itself? In the introduction of this special issue we explore lines of tension and complement that might hold between the notions of embodiment and body representations, which remain too often neglected or obscure. To do so, we distinguish two conceptions of embodiment that either put weight (...) on the explanatory role of the body itself or body representations. We further analyse how and to what extent body representations can be said to be embodied. Finally, we give an overview of the full volume articulated around foundational issues (How should we define the notion of embodiment? To what extent and in what sense is embodiment compatible with representationalism? To what extent and in what sense are sensorimotor approaches similar to behaviourism?) and their applications in several cognitive domains (perception, concepts, selfhood, social cognition). (shrink)

Immanuel Kant is one of Alain Badiou’s principle philosophical enemies. Kant’s critical philosophy is anathema to Badiou not only because of the latter’s openly aired hatred of the motif of finitude so omnipresent in post-Kantian European intellectual traditions—Badiou blames Kant for inventing this motif—but also because of its idealism. For Badiou-the-materialist, as for any serious philosophical materialist writing in Kant’s wake, transcendental idealism must be dismantled and overcome. In his most recent works, Badiou attempts to invent a non-Kantian notion of (...) the transcendental, a notion compatible with the basic tenets of materialism. However, from 1988’s Being and Event up through the present, Badiou’s oeuvre contains indications that he hasn’t managed fully to purge the traces of Kantian transcendental idealism that arguably continue to haunt his system—with these traces clustering around a concept Badiou christens “counting-for-one”. The result is that, in the end, Kant’s shadow still falls over Badiouian philosophy—this is despite Badiou’s admirable, sophisticated, and instructive attempts to step out from under it—thus calling into question this philosophy’s self-proclaimed status as materialist through and through. (shrink)

There has been much discussion of the moral, legal and prudential implications of geoengineering, and of governance structures for both the research and deployment of such technologies. However, insufficient attention has been paid to how such measures might affect geoengineering in terms of the incentive structures which underwrite scientific progress. There is a tension between the features that make science productive, and the need to govern geoengineering research, which has thus far gone underappreciated. I emphasize how geoengineering research requires governance (...) which reaches beyond science’s traditional boundaries, and moreover requires knowledge which itself reaches beyond what we traditionally expect scientists to know about. How we govern emerging technologies should be sensitive to the incentive structures which drive science. (shrink)

The growing body of research on interdisciplinarity has encouraged a more in depth analysis of the relations that hold among academic disciplines. In particular, the incursion of one scientific discipline into another discipline's traditional domain, also known as scientific imperialism, has been a matter of increasing debate. Following this trend, Scientific Imperialism aims to bring together philosophers of science and historians of science interested in the topic of scientific imperialism and, in particular, interested in the conceptual clarification, empirical identification, and (...) normative assessment of the idea of scientific imperialism. Thus, this innovative volume has two main goals. Indeed, the authors first seek to understand interdisciplinary relations emerging from the incursion of one scientific discipline into one or more other disciplines, such as in cases in which the conventions and procedures of one discipline or field are imposed on other fields; or more weakly when a scientific discipline seeks to explain phenomena that are traditionally considered proper of another discipline's domain. Secondly, the authors explore ways of distinguishing imperialistic from non-imperialistic interactions between disciplines and research fields. The first sustained study of scientific imperialism, this volume will appeal to postgraduate students and postdoctoral researchers interested in fields such as Science and Technology Studies, Sociology of Science & Technology, Philosophy of Science, and History of Science. (shrink)

This paper provides and justifies a broader definition of a ‘law-breaking event’ than that adopted by D. Lewis who identifies this concept with the notion of an event that falsifies the laws of nature in his sense of ‘falsification’. It is pointed out that the broader definition is the key to answering C. Ginet’s objection against local miracle compatibilism. It also allows a neutral reconstruction of one of the disagreements underlying the compatibilism debate about the ability to do otherwise, i.e., (...) the disagreement over nomological possibility of alternative action in a deterministic world. Under this reconstruction, neither the incompatibilist nor the compatibilist can take advantage of the concept of a law-breaking event to show that their opponent’s view is false. (shrink)

This essay argues that contemporary warfare seems to be religious but is in fact secular in nature and as such calls forth religious alternatives. The violence unleashed by Islamic terrorism and the ‘global war on terror’ is secular in this sense that it is unmediated and removes any universal ethical limits from conflicts: unrestrained violence is either a divine injunction which is blindly and fideistically believed; or it is waged in the name of the supremely sovereign state which deploys war (...) to uphold the constitutional order guaranteeing an exclusive state monopoly on the use of arbitrary physical force. The first part compares and contrasts two false universalisms; that of global market democracy and a revivified pan-Islamic Ummah. The second part explores the classical and modern origins of Islamic terrorism. The third part examines the perverted theology at the heart of the neo-conservative ‘global war on terror’. The fourth part analyses the permanent ‘state of exception’ which underpins the modern state and licenses unrestricted violence by the sovereign who stands outside and above the constitutional order of legality and legitimacy. The fifth and final part outlines religious alternatives to secular warfare; with specific reference to Islam and Christianity. (shrink)

An argument that we should be optimistic about the capacity of “methodologically omnivorous” geologists, paleontologists, and archaeologists to uncover truths about the deep past. -/- The “historical sciences”—geology, paleontology, and archaeology—have made extraordinary progress in advancing our understanding of the deep past. How has this been possible, given that the evidence they have to work with offers mere traces of the past? In Rock, Bone, and Ruin, Adrian Currie explains that these scientists are “methodological omnivores,” with a variety of strategies (...) and techniques at their disposal, and that this gives us every reason to be optimistic about their capacity to uncover truths about prehistory. Creative and opportunistic paleontologists, for example, discovered and described a new species of prehistoric duck-billed platypus from a single fossilized tooth. Examining the complex reasoning processes of historical science, Currie also considers philosophical and scientific reflection on the relationship between past and present, the nature of evidence, contingency, and scientific progress. -/- Currie draws on varied examples from across the historical sciences, from Mayan ritual sacrifice to giant Mesozoic fleas to Mars's mysterious watery past, to develop an account of the nature of, and resources available to, historical science. He presents two major case studies: the emerging explanation of sauropod size, and the “snowball earth” hypothesis that accounts for signs of glaciation in Neoproterozoic tropics. He develops the Ripple Model of Evidence to analyze “unlucky circumstances” in scientific investigation; examines and refutes arguments for pessimism about the capacity of the historical sciences, defending the role of analogy and arguing that simulations have an experiment-like function. Currie argues for a creative, open-ended approach, “empirically grounded” speculation. (shrink)

A Religion of Progress has taken shape over the last 21 centuries, from the Enlightenment to present times. It is quite simple to follow a thread from Hermeticism to today, however, several facts have altered its content, therefore, reformulating some of its promises and vision of the world. This paper attempts to evaluate how that Religion of Progress has become a sort of Techno-Hermeticism 2.0. Digital technologies have redefined old hermetic myths into a high-tech religion with dire environmental consequencies. Some (...) of those myths are the resurrection of the bodies, the construction of the City of God, the Adamic universal language and so forth. Now religion must confront the upcoming collapse, however, it is unable to provide satisfactory answers. This goes for all the different churches, from accelerationists (Nick Land) to extinctionists and believers of digital solutionism. That leaves possible imaginative responses to that sociecological crisis without any relevant proposals. (shrink)

Natural disaster events such as drought affect the broader economy and inflict adverse consequences for firms because of spill-over effects in an integrated economy. Contrary to the expectation that firms would engage in higher levels of corporate tax avoidance strategies when they experience a negative cash flow shock, we document consistent evidence that firms engage in less corporate tax avoidance when their headquarter states experience drought. Reduced tax avoidance is more pronounced among firms with higher CSR performance and among firms (...) operating in states that experience a GDP decline. Collectively, the findings of our study demonstrate prosocial and ethical behavior of U.S. firms when they experience natural disaster events. (shrink)

This paper argues that there took place in the eighteenth century a specific, distinctive and essential phase in the emergence of modern science, a phase which can be characterised as “the Great Instauration” in that it witnessed the large-scale realisation of Francis Bacon’s earlier vision—albeit not, for the most part, through the specific means which Bacon had proposed. That claim is exemplified in three fields—the “physico-mathematical sciences,” chemistry and electricity—each of which yielded dramatic and permanent advances in knowledge; and an (...) attempt is then made to render those advances intelligible in terms of specific social and technical themes. The paper proposes that the eighteenth-century Great Instauration arose from the development of an international natural-philosophical community, made possible by new institutions and especially by new publication media. And it suggests that what made this social development epistemologically fruitful was an inherently progressive process which had been anticipated by Bacon, namely what Sophie Weeks has called his “cybernetic” account of knowledge-making—the refinement of both questions and techniques in the light of Nature’s response to investigation. (shrink)

This essay argues that modern sovereignty is not simply a legal or political concept that is coterminous with the modern nation-state. Rather, at the theoretical level modern sovereign power is inscribed into a wider theological dialectic between “the one” and “the many”. Modernity fuses juridical-constitutional models of supreme state authority with a new, “biopolitical” account of power whereby natural life and the living body of the individual are the object of politics and are subject to state control (section 1). The (...) origins of this dialectic go back to changes within Christian theology in the late Middle Ages and the early modern period. In particular, these changes can be traced to Ockham's denial of the universal Good in things, Suárez's priority of the political community over the ecclesial body and Hobbes's “biopolitical” definition of power as state dominion over life (section 2). At the practical level, modern sovereignty has involved both the national state and the transnational market. The “revolutions in sovereignty” that gave rise to the modern state and the modern market were to some considerable extent shaped by theological concepts and changes in religious institutions and practices: first, the supremacy of the modern national state over the transnational papacy and national churches; second, the increasing priority of individuality over collectivity; third, a growing focus on contractual proprietary relations at the expense of covenantal ties and communal bonds (section 3). By subjecting both people and property to uniform standards of formal natural rights and abstract monetary value, financial capitalism and liberal secular democracy are part of the “biopolitical” logic that subordinates the sanctity of life and land to the secular sacrality of the state and the market. In Pope Benedict's theology, we can find the contours of a post-secular political economy that challenges the monopoly of modern sovereignty (sections 4–5). (shrink)

Sara Alonso Gomez présente le début de sa traduction du livre de Sianne Ngai sur les catégories esthétiques. Trois nouvelles catégories semblent nécessaires à côté du sublime et du beau, pour rendre compte de la manière dont les expériences privées façonnent les discours esthétiques : le mignon qui renvoie à Adorno et à la consommation, le zinzin qui renvoie à Nietzsche et à la production, l’intéressant qui renvoie à Frédéric Schlegel et à la circulation.

The paper defends a compatibilist solution to the problem of the relationship between divine and human freedom. It is argued that the asymmetry of ability constituted by our ability to foreknowledge influence the future and our inability to control the past results from the asymmetry of openness between fixed past and open future interpreted in terms of the asymmetry of counterfactual dependence. Therefore, if the asymmetry of openness is not true of some types of facts, then we may be able (...) to control them even if they are facts about the past. It turns out that widely shared accounts of the nature and source of God’s foreknowledge entail that the asymmetry of openness does not apply to God’s past beliefs about future contingencies. Thus, it is unjustified to claim that we are unable to now do anything such that, if we were to do it, God’s past beliefs would have been different. (shrink)

ExcerptIntroduction Is the neo-liberal era since the mid-1970s synonymous with a corporate capture of the state and the passage to “post-democracy”? And if so, might the failure of neo-liberalism since the onset of the international economic crisis in 2007 and the state-sponsored bailout of global finance presage a return to the primacy of democratic politics over “free-market” economics commonly associated with the post–World War II period? At the time of this writing, it is premature to analyze the aftermath of the (...) Great Recession (2007–09), which could yet mutate into a twenty-first-century Great Depression. However, the current…. (shrink)

SummaryThe purpose of this article is to critically undermine two commonly held and closely related contentions regarding the British idealist tradition. The first is that the British idealist tradition went into rapid and terminal decline shortly after the outbreak of the First World War. The second is that J. A. Smith was largely responsible for it. These aims are achieved through a diachronic analysis of Smith's conception of human imperfection as well as an assessment of Smith's intellectual legacy. As this (...) article will show, contrary to the received view, Smith was a philosophical innovator who instigated an intellectual evolution within the British idealist. In particular, this article shows that Smith substituted aspects of his early Greenian philosophy with elements of Italian idealism. As a result, Smith was instrumental in moving British idealism away from its traditional underpinnings and towards more a Croce–Gentilian foundation. It is this neglected philosophical innovation which has given scholars the false impression of the tradition's collapse. By establishing Smith's intellectual innovation this article intends to show that Smith made a much more significant intellectual contribution to the philosophical tradition to which he belongs than has so far been recognised. (shrink)

In the preface to the second edition of his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant laments thatit still remains a scandal to philosophy and to human reason in general that the existence of things outside us … must be accepted on faith, and if anyone thinks good to doubt their existence, we are unable to counter his doubts by any satisfactory proof. The two editions of the Critique each contain a celebrated refutation of epistemological scepticisms like those of Descartes and Hume. (...) The first edition refutation has been widely decried as relying on an objectionable sort of idealism. The refutation of the second edition, though rather more difficult to interpret than the first, has usually been read as a mere reworking of the first. (shrink)

I am grateful for Prof. Goodman's comments. Let me try to respond briefly.He asks me to explain how we can recognize "the pragmata as they are, while refraining from judgments about them." In my reading of Sextus Empiricus, what he calls "appearances" are what we perceive immediately and involuntarily, that is, the thoughts and sensations that are present to us as we actually experience them. Visually, these are shapes and colors and tones; audibly, they are sounds of varying intensity and (...) quality; and so on for the other senses. Similarly, our thoughts—imaginings and memories—are all immediately and involuntarily present as we have them. (If you think of your mother, you cannot but help have a "mental image" of... (shrink)

El artículo trata sobre la antropología de la masculinidad y de la feminidad, a partir de la experiencia del cuerpo y de la experiencia de la soledad originaria, tal como Juan Pablo II las analizó en sus Catequesis sobre el amor humano. Así, a partir de la experiencia del propio cuerpo sexuado, podemos llegar a la comprensión de la estructura comunional de la diferencia sexual. Varón y mujer son y existen en una «comunión de personas», y constituyen la estructura central (...) que articula y sostiene el orden personal. (shrink)

A crítica de Platão à escrita se situa em meio ao conflito entre o mundo oral e a cultura escrita. Platão escreveu diálogos que são claramente o retrato de discussões que ocorreram na vida real, tenham ou não acontecido verdadeiramente. Os Ensaios de Montaigne, por outro lado, são monólogos que estabelecem uma interlocução com o leitor. Ambos tentaram de alguma forma superar a artificialidade da escrita trazendo ao texto a mesma versatilidade e vivacidade do discurso oral. Montaigne escreveu em uma (...) época na qual muitas obras em forma de diálogo circulavam, sendo então um gênero literário conhecido e influente na sua época. Os Ensaios emergem no contexto histórico do Renascimento com uma originalidade sem precedentes. Seria admissível julgar o estilo ensaístico de Montaigne como um novo gênero literário produzido com a pretensão de superar a forma de diálogo?Palavras-chave: Platão. Montaigne. Diálogo. Ensaio. Estilo. (shrink)