This paper is about Christopher Wren’s engravings for Thomas Willis’ The Anatomy of the Brain and Nerves of 1664. It is a study in the intersection of medicine and art in 17th century Britain. Willis, an eminent English physician and anatomist, was a major figure in the development of modern neurology, and The Anatomy of the Brain and Nerves was his most famous and influential book. Wren was Willis’ assistant and medical artist. I discuss the visual strategies employed by Wren (...) to present their research and frame it as genuine knowledge. (shrink)

Robert Knox (1791–1862) is typically remembered as the Edinburgh anatomist to whom the murderers Burke and Hare sold the bodies of their victims. This association brought Knox infamy and damaged his life and career. Before the Burke and Hare scandal, Knox was one of the most famous, original and influential anatomists in Britain. He was also something of a dandy with a sophisticated appreciation of the visual arts. His most significant writings on artistic subjects were his books A Manual of (...) Artistic Anatomy and Great Artists and Great Anatomists: A Biographical and Philosophical Study. Knox's interesting and independently minded opinions on the central artistic questions of his day were taken seriously by his contemporaries. His demotion in the official history of anatomy following his involvement with Burke and Hare, however, also removed him from the history of art theory in 19th century Britain. Knox was such a magnetic and impressive figure, though, that he has to be brought back to his era and his era is not complete without him. This paper discusses how Knox's writings on anatomy and biology shaped his contributions to art theory. It is a first step towards returning Knox, the art theorist, to the cultural life of 19th century Britain. (shrink)

This paper looks at the ethics of opt-in vs. opt-out of organ donation as Scotland has transitioned its systems to promote greater organ availability. We first analyse studies that compare the donation rates in other regions due to such a system switch and find that organ increase is inconclusive and modest at best. This is due to a lack of explicit opt-out choices resulting in greater resistance and family override unless there are infrastructures and greater awareness to support such change. (...) The paper then looks at the difference between informed consent of the opt-in vs. presumed consent in the opt-out approaches. Patient autonomy and dignity are better reflected with informed consent. Eighteen months have passed since the new organ donation policy has come into effect, this paper recommends more research into organ donors’ psychological motivations to help governments and the healthcare profession obtain more organs for transplantation. (shrink)

This article examines two Buddhist explanations of how a conceptual cognition, whose object is a universal, can give rise to activity that leads to a particular. In both theories, that of Dharmottara and that of Ratnakīrti, this activity is due to a kind of error. A detailed investigation of how this error happens shows that there were big differences in the two underlying epistemological models.

ENTREVISTA COM PROFESSORAS(ES) DE FILOSOFIA DO ENSINO FUNDAMENTAL DO CEARÁCom: Jocilaine Moreira Batista do Vale, Mario Jonny de Castro Cunha, Syssa AdleyRodrigues Monteiro, Fabiana Martins TôrresPor: Antônio Alex Pereira de Sousa, Paulo Willame Araújo de Lim.

The first study, along with edition and translation, of Chrysostomus Javelli’s epitome of the _Liber de bona fortuna_ (1531), a work permitting insight into the early modern understanding of fortune, fate, and free will.

1951, L'homme et la mort est le premier travail anthropologique d'Edgar Morin. Il ouvre un champ de recherches qui ne s'épanouira qu'une quinzaine d'années plus tard en France. L'Homme n'est pas fait pour la mort, et pourtant il y est voué. Depuis le fond des âges, il créé des sépultures et manifeste ainsi son humanité, en même temps que son refus de la fatalité mortelle. À partir de deux mythes fondateurs - la mort-renaissance et la survie du double - des (...) croyances et des idéologies se sont forgées. L'ouvrage en dresse la vaste fresque pour constater que depuis près de deux siècles les sociétés occidentales vivent une véritable " crise " de la mort : l'homme a perdu le sens des rites et n'est plus protégé par l'espoir d'une survie post-mortem. Edgar Morin imagine l'avènement d'une vie prolongée presque indéfiniment grâce aux découvertes de la biologie, alors même que l'humanité reste aveugle au risque d'une méga-mort, nucléaire, écologique, ou sanitaire. Ce livre qui relie nature et culture, anthropologie et biogénétique, évoque inséparablement le tragique et l'espoir. (shrink)

This volume addresses how spatialized identities, belongingness and hospitality are interrogated in British and Irish contemporary art (painting, installation, video, photography, new public art) at a time when economic and political crises tend to encourage individual or exclusive usages of space. It sketches a cartography of encounters encompassing the home, the neighbourhood, the village or city, and the nation. Artists interrogate how intimacy is both facilitated and threatened by spatial devices, how space fashions our perception of gender, social or ethnic (...) identity and activates power relations. They explore the need for a home or a homeland and the various forms exile or placelessness can take. They may also take part in the restoration of the Commons and the constitution of alternative communities. Whether the analyses focus on the private sphere (in urban, suburban or rural contexts), or on shared communal spaces, they ponder the mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion at work in human encounters and shed light on how artistic apparatuses make the tensions between openness to the other and rejection or withdrawal perceptible. The approach, borrowing from art history as well as anthropology lays emphasis on context, situationality and field work; it proposes to repoliticize relational art and concludes on the dialogical positionality which lies at the core of art. (shrink)

Dissertação de Mestrado. VALE, Rose Silvania Figueiredo do. A ideia de Deus em Kant: da ilusão da razão pura ao postulado de agente moral. 2012. 132 folhas. Dissertação (Mestrado) – Pontifícia Universidade Católica de Minas Gerais, Programa de Pós-graduação em Ciências da Religião, Belo Horizonte. Palavras-chave : Ideias transcendentais. Ilusão. Razão. Moral. Deus. Homem. Key works : Transcendental ideas, Illusion, Reason, Moral, God, Man.

This journal article reflects on the conceptualization of a three-day meeting convened to open space for thinking differently about the city of Johannesburg, South Africa, and to begin to explore the possibility of working beyond the constraints of standard urban studies and regimes of spatial planning through which the city is conventionally viewed and researched. The incentive underpinning the 2015 Performative Urbanisms workshop was the desire to find areas of correspondence and overlap in the often widely separated realms of scholarly (...) research and grassroots urban activism. To this end, a group of international and Johannesburg-based academics, writers, artists, analysts, and activists came together to explore a range of themes around the city and its visual, spatial, textual, and especially performative, representations, in the context of its functioning as a global city in comparative perspective. As the contents of this Special Issue show, the workshop provided space to consider diverse research methodologies, creative writings, and artistic strategies aimed at moving beyond formulaic constructs of Johannesburg, and instead to offer an accounting of its novelties, complexities, and originalities. (shrink)

1. Understanding.--2. Purpose.--3. Conciliation.--4. Justice.--5. Justice, science and religion as contributions to civilization.--6. Uniformitarian process under supreme law.

O presente artigo pretende expor as considerações sobre a Lógica da filosofia de Eric Weil, originalmente publicada em 1950 e sua contribuição para a difusão do pensamento filosófico-político. Na Lógica da Filosofia, Eric Weil analisa e identifica dezoito atitudes-categorias filosóficas. Essas dezoito categorias formam, de alguma forma, as partes do discurso que o homem empregou na totalidade de sua história, partes que são maneiras de viver e de se compreender e compreender o outro. A intenção que o motiva é desenvolver, (...) quanto à sua estrutura dialética, uma Lógica como diálogo, que venha a englobar diferentes maneiras de ser, de compreender, de falar e de agir. (shrink)

The capability approach constitutes a significant contribution to social theory but its potential is diminished by its insufficient treatment of the social construction of meaning. Social meanings enable people to make value judgements about what they will do and be, and also to evaluate how satisfied they are about what they are able to achieve. From this viewpoint, a person’s state of wellbeing must be understood as being socially and psychologically co-constituted in specific social and cultural contexts. In this light, (...) the telos of ‘living well’ which is at the heart of Sen’s version of the capability approach is inadequate and must be modified to a telos of ‘living well together’ which includes consideration of the social structures and institutions which enable people to pursue individual freedoms in relation to others. The policy significance of the capability approach can be further strengthened by paying greater consideration to the political economy of policy decision-making processes and the ways in which conflicts and distributions of power are institutionalized. (shrink)

Genetic changes arising in human pluripotent stem cells (hPSC) upon culture may bestow unwanted or detrimental phenotypes to cells, thus potentially impacting on the applications of hPSCs for clinical use and basic research. In the 20 years since the first report of culture‐acquired genetic aberrations in hPSCs, a characteristic spectrum of recurrent aberrations has emerged. The preponderance of such aberrations implies that they provide a selective growth advantage to hPSCs upon expansion. However, understanding the consequences of culture‐acquired variants for specific (...) applications in cell therapy or research has been more elusive. The rapid progress of hPSC‐based therapies to clinics is galvanizing the field to address this uncertainty and provide definitive ways both for risk assessment of variants and reducing their prevalence in culture. Here, we aim to provide a timely update on almost 20 years of research on this fascinating, but a still unresolved and concerning, phenomenon. (shrink)

Queues have been at the centre of South Africa’s COVID-19 story. National lockdown was declared on 26 March 2020, around the time ‘month-end’ salaries and government grants are paid out. Within the first few days, reports came of the long lines outside banks and supermarkets, with journalists regularly citing people’s failure to ‘social distance’. This article uses the queue as an analytic tool to explore the unequal vulnerabilities entailed in the experience of COVID-19 lockdown in South Africa.

A large literature suggests that the organization of words in semantic memory, reflecting meaningful relations among words and the concepts to which they refer, supports many cognitive processes, including memory encoding and retrieval, word learning, and inferential reasoning. The co‐activation of related items has been proposed as a mechanism by which semantic knowledge influences cognition, and contemporary accounts of semantic knowledge propose that this co‐activation is graded—that it depends on how strongly related the items are in semantic memory. Prior research (...) with adults yielded evidence supporting this prediction; however, there is currently no evidence of graded co‐activation early in development. This study provides the first evidence that in children the co‐activation of related items depends on their relational strength in semantic memory. Participants (N = 84, age range: 3–9 years) were asked to identify a target (e.g., bone) amid distractors. Children's responses were slowed down by the presence of a related distractor (e.g., puppy) relative to unrelated distractors (e.g., flower)—suggesting that children co‐activated related items upon hearing the name of the target. Importantly, the degree of this co‐activation was predicted by the strength of the target–distractor relation, such that distractors more strongly related to the targets slowed down children to a larger extent. These findings have important implications for understanding how organized semantic knowledge affects other cognitive processes across development. (shrink)

RESUMO Hans Jonas na obra O Princípio Responsabilidade: ensaio de uma ética para a civilização tecnológica (2006 [1979]) apresenta o diagnóstico de uma civilização debilitada e perecível, constantemente ameaçada pelos poderes do homem tecnológico. De posse desta análise, constrói uma proposta no sentido de novas fundações para o edifício ético a partir de uma responsabilidade. Jonas constata o caráter antropocêntrico de uma ética que não abrangia as consequências dos impactos oriundas da ação humana sobre o homem e a vida na (...) biosfera. Em seu ideário filosófico sobre a civilização tecnológica, estende as atitudes dos homens para além do agir próximo, reconhecendo um direito próprio da natureza. A recolocação conceitual da natureza, dotada de finalidade própria, expressa que o poder tecnológico promove os desafios morais da contemporaneidade, visto que há a possibilidade certa (causas) e incerta (consequências) de os efeitos acumulativos desta mesma tecnologia pôr em perigo a continuidade futura da vida sobre o planeta. O imperativo da responsabilidade resulta do poder do homem contemporâneo sobre si e sobre o planeta. Caracteriza-se por ser uma responsabilidade perante a natureza e perante o próprio homem. A concepção de responsabilidade em Jonas está em conformidade com uma nova exigência axiológica. É uma responsabilidade que se firma com a preservação da vida em um futuro distante e com a continuidade da vida tal como conhecemos. O que justifica um pretenso biocentrismo no princípio responsabilidade é o fato de que a continuidade da existência gera uma obrigação com a vida, porque dizer sim a ela é ser. O grande objetivo de uma nova abordagem biocêntrica, como o imperativo de Jonas, é de manter a existência da humanidade futura, em um futuro que existam candidatos a um universo moral em um mundo concreto – o autêntico objetivo da responsabilidade.: Hans Jonas in the book The imperative of the responsibility: in search of an ethics for the technological age (2006 [1979]) presents a diagnosis of a civilization weakened and perish, constantly threatened by the powers of technological man. Armed with this analysis, a proposal to build new foundations for the building from an ethical responsibility. Jonas notes the character of an anthropocentric ethic that did not cover the consequences of impacts arising from human action on man and life in the biosphere. In his philosophical ideas on the technological civilization extends men's attitudes beyond the next act, recognizing an inherent right of nature. The replacement of the conceptual nature, with its own purpose, expressed that technological power promote the moral challenges of contemporary times, since there is a certain possibility (causes) and uncertain (consequences) of the cumulative effects of this same technology to jeopardize the continued future life on the planet. The imperative of responsibility results from the power of modern man about himself and the planet. It is characterized by being a responsibility to nature and to the man himself. The conception of responsibility in Jonas is in accordance with a new demand axiological. It is a responsibility that is established with the preservation of life in the distant future and the continuity of life as we know. What justifies a purported biocentrism the principle responsibility is the fact that the continued existence creates a bond with life, because she is saying yes to be. The ultimate goal of a new approach biocentric, as the imperative of Jonas, is to maintain the existence of mankind in the future, a future in which there are candidates for a moral universe in a concrete world - the real goal of the responsibility. Keywords : the imperative of responsibility, demand axiological, nature, biocentrism. (shrink)

Cet article considère les concepts de la confession et de la parrêsia dans l’oeuvre de Michel Foucault et les applique à l’analyse de la construction du sujet femme. Il montre comment dans une perspective confessionnelle, la femme entretiendrait un rapport à ellemême et aux autres qui tend à un auto-assujettissement selon des catégories normatives essentialistes. À ce dire-vrai confessionnel, j’oppose le dire-vrai parrèsiastique, en m’interrogeant sur la possibilité d’attribuer un rôle émancipateur à l’identité « femme ». La parrêsia devient alors (...) le modèle d’un discours critique, qui se rapproche de la critique sociale caractérisant le féminisme. Je retrouve ainsi dans l’histoire du féminisme des témoignages de ce que Foucault redécouvre chez le Grecs comme parrêsia politique, éthique et cynique. (shrink)

Dear readers, perhaps you have not realized it, but your lives so far have been spent in a period called ‘postmodern’.The word is well-known to you. It has been around for many years. It almost always occurs unexpectedly, half way through an article, in the middle of a conversation, in the course of an argument on radio or television. Something, when all is said and done, is postmodern, someone is what he or she is because he or she is postmodern; (...) a strange and inexplicable phenomenon can be explained as postmodern. This changeable, suggestive, authoritative term, which seems to allude to something precise and technical and which, at the same time, suggests the epoch-making, says all that is good and all that is bad of something. Postmodern is an accusation. Postmodern is praise. What is postmodern is degenerate, has got worse, is hardly serious, of low quality, a poor imitation, irresponsible, frivolous. Nevertheless, what is postmodern is also still more topical, even more modern, forward-looking, amusing and light, cultured without being boring, sophisticated without being elitist, complex without being obscure. (shrink)

The rapidly increasing number of cases of Zika virus and limited understanding of its congenital sequelae (e.g., microcephaly) led to stories of fear and uncertainty across social media and other mass communication networks. In this study, we used techniques generic to netnography, a form of ethnography, using Internet‐based computer‐mediated communications as a source of data to understand the experience and perceptions of families with infants diagnosed with Zika‐related microcephaly. We screened 27 YouTube™ videos published online between October 2015 and July (...) 2016, during which the Zika epidemic started, peaked, and declined. We identified three themes: (a) experiencing the news of a diagnosis of Zika‐associated microcephaly; (b) experiencing feelings and expectations of the ‘imperfect’ child; and (c) seeking to understand microcephaly to care for the child. We found that families experienced distressing feelings of shock, sadness, hopelessness, and pain, while dealing with emerging and sometimes conflicting information being transmitted by news outlets, uncertainty about the child's health, and healthcare providers’ lack of clarity to guide the family members. The ‘unknown’ factor of ZIKA was an additional stressful factor in the experience of the families. (shrink)

In this wide-ranging interview, the historian Charles van Onselen discusses his recent book, Showdown at the Red Lion: The Life and Times of Jack McLoughlin, 1959–1910 against the backdrop of his previous work. He explores social formation and the consolidation of state-power in southern Africa through the empirical optic of social banditry and the role of individual outliers. The theoretical framing is drawn from historical sociology. The role of political authority across the Indian Ocean, particularly in Australia, is also considered, (...) as is the rise of technology, the role of the Irish and the place of masculinity in the project of Empire building. The exchange also touches briefly on civil-military relations in contemporary Africa and on inter-disciplinarity in graduate studies. (shrink)

A growing body of research suggests that children with autism spectrum disorder are at risk of reading and learning difficulties. However, there is mixed evidence on their weaknesses in different reading components, and little is known about how reading skills characterize in ASD. Thereby, the current study aimed to systematically review the research investigating this function in children with ASD. To this purpose, we reviewed 24 studies that compared children with ASD and children with typical development in word and nonword (...) reading performance, children with ASD and normative data of word and nonword reading tests, and the results obtained by children with ASD in word and nonword reading tests. Most of the comparisons contrasting the reading performance of children with ASD and children with TD did not find significant differences between groups in both word and nonword reading. However, all the comparisons that reported standardized results showed that children with ASD had scores that fell within population norms. Regarding the third comparison of interest, about 54% of the studies presented data for both word and nonword reading, but only one study tested the difference between them and showed that children with ASD had higher levels of word than of nonword reading. Despite these results, the heterogeneous and small samples do not allow to draw sound conclusions regarding the strategies that children with ASD use to read words. As consequence, the nature of reading difficulties presented by children with ASD are still unknown, requiring future research conducted with larger and well-characterized samples of ASD and TD, using homogeneous specific tasks designed to assess word reading strategies. (shrink)

The source of my interest in the study of heresiology originates in many years of research on the work and life of Meister Eckhart. It is therefore in an Eckhartian perspective, which presupposes a certain leniency, and even sympathy, towards the phenomenon of heresy, that I am going to give a survey of ‘the other side of Christianity’, from the Acts of Simon Magus, ‘father of heresy’, to the dawn of the second millennium, while exposing the medieval period in greater (...) depth. (shrink)