En este artículo argumentamos que, desde la atomización violenta producida por la desmovilización de las AUC y el abandono de las pretensiones nacionales por parte de las organizaciones insurgentes, en Colombia no se desarrolla un único conflicto armado transversal a todo el país. Por el contrario, permanecen activos múltiples conflictos cuyas dinámicas a nivel subregional son independientes de lo que sucede en otras subregiones, aun cuando se encuentren geográficamente cerca. Para analizar cada uno de estos conflictos proponemos que se tengan (...) en cuenta tres elementos: la naturaleza de los actores armados, las interacciones que se gestan entre ellos y el territorio en el que actúan. A partir de esto, analizamos dos conflictos armados que tienen lugar en el Caribe: el de la Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta y el del sur de Córdoba. En estos, identificamos cuatro tipos de conflictividad: hegemonía criminal, paz mafiosa, competencia armada y competencia armada con alianzas en su interior. (shrink)

En este artículo intentamos recopilar las diferentes respuestas que se han dado al interrogante: ¿cuál es la naturaleza de la guerra en Colombia? Para ello, hemos estudiado seis formas de definir la violencia en Colombia: i) guerra anti/comunista; ii) conflicto agrario; iii) conflicto criminalizado; iv) guerra civil/guerra contra la sociedad; v) conflicto internacionalizado; vi) amenaza terrorista. Concluimos que los cambios de los actores armados, sus repertorios de violencia y del contexto internacional son respondidos por masas críticas con nuevas denominaciones. Las (...) denominaciones, así como la guerra misma, son dinámicas. Este artículo aporta una revisión de literatura sobre la naturaleza del conflicto y una perspectiva de análisis historiográfico útil para otras preguntas relacionadas con la guerra. (shrink)

Background: Family members are often required to act as substitute decision-makers when health care or research participation decisions must be made for an incapacitated relative. Yet most families are unable to accurately predict older adult preferences regarding future health care and willingness to engage in research studies. Discussion and documentation of preferences could improve proxies' abilities to decide for their loved ones. This trial assesses the efficacy of an advance planning intervention in improving the accuracy of substitute decision-making and increasing (...) the frequency of documented preferences for health care and research. It also investigates the financial impact on the healthcare system of improving substitute decision-making. Methods/DesignDyads (n = 240) comprising an older adult and his/her self-selected proxy are randomly allocated to the experimental or control group, after stratification for type of designated proxy and self-report of prior documentation of healthcare preferences. At baseline, clinical and research vignettes are used to elicit older adult preferences and assess the ability of their proxy to predict those preferences. Responses are elicited under four health states, ranging from the subject's current health state to severe dementia. For each state, we estimated the public costs of the healthcare services that would typically be provided to a patient under these scenarios. Experimental dyads are visited at home, twice, by a specially trained facilitator who communicates the dyad-specific results of the concordance assessment, helps older adults convey their wishes to their proxies, and offers assistance in completing a guide entitled My Preferences that we designed specifically for that purpose. In between these meetings, experimental dyads attend a group information session about My Preferences. Control dyads attend three monthly workshops aimed at promoting healthy behaviors. Concordance assessments are repeated at the end of the intervention and 6 months later to assess improvement in predictive accuracy and cost savings, if any. Copies of completed guides are made at the time of these assessments. DiscussionThis study will determine whether the tested intervention guides proxies in making decisions that concur with those of older adults, motivates the latter to record their wishes in writing, and yields savings for the healthcare system. Trial RegistrationISRCTN89993391. (shrink)

A paradigm shift in public health and medicine has broadened the field from a singular focus on the ill effects of negative states and psychopathology to an expanded view that examines protective psychological assets that may promote improved physical health and longevity. We summarize recent evidence of the link between psychological well-being and physical health, with particular attention to outcomes of mortality and chronic disease incidence and progression. Within this evolving discipline there remain controversies and lessons to be learned. We (...) discuss measurement-related challenges, concerns about the quality of the evidence, and other shortcomings in the field, along with a brief discussion of hypothesized biobehavioral mechanisms involved. Finally, we suggest next steps to move the field forward. (shrink)

This reply addresses observations of Drs. Larsen, Kruse, and Sweeny, and Scherer in their reviews of our published work on the link between positive psychological assets and outcomes of physical health. Inspired by Obama’s Precision Medicine Initiative we argue that the interplay between the emotion spectrum and health is likely a complex and heterogeneous amalgam of known and yet unidentified elements melding at the individual level. When exploring the emotion–health link, researchers are challenged to grapple with complex system models by (...) considering multiple hierarchies of information that span individual-level factors, genetic blueprints, and cultural and environmental context. Research is needed to more fully elucidate the mechanism through which emotion influences health, with careful consideration of differences across race/ethnicity, culture, and context. (shrink)

IntroductionRheumatologists are the primary healthcare professionals responsible for patients with rheumatic diseases and should acquire medical ethical competencies, such as the informed consent process (ICP). The objective clinical structured examination is a valuable tool for assessing clinical competencies. We report the performance of 90 rheumatologist trainees participating in a station designed to evaluate the ICP during the 2018 and 2019 national accreditations.MethodsThe station was validated and represented a medical encounter in which the rheumatologist informed a patient with systemic lupus erythematosus (...) with clinically active nephritis about renal biopsy. A trained patient–actor and an evaluator were instructed to assess ICP skills (with a focus on kidney biopsy benefits, how the biopsy is done and potential complications) in obtaining formal informed consent, delivering bad news and overall communication with patients. The evaluator used a tailored checklist and form.ResultsCandidate performance varied with ICP content and was superior for potential benefit information (achieved by 98.9% of the candidates) but significantly reduced for potential complications (37.8%) and biopsy description (42.2%). Only 17.8% of the candidates mentioned the legal perspective of ICP. Death (as a potential complication) was omitted by the majority of the candidates (93.3%); after the patient–actor challenged candidates, only 57.1% of them gave a clear and positive answer. Evaluators frequently rated candidate communications skills as superior (≥80%), but ≥1 negative aspect was identified in 69% of the candidates.ConclusionsEthical competencies are mandatory for professional rheumatologists. It seems necessary to include an ethics competency framework in the curriculum throughout the rheumatology residency. (shrink)

Judith Butler es una filósofa que se apoya en elementos deconstructivistas y se encuadra en el clima de la diferencia para escapar a la dinámica de las políticas y economías de signo neoliberal y esencialista. La concepción butleriana de la subjetividad, de fuerte impronta contextualista, es una asunción de la democracia en términos radicales y plurales y, por ello, su filosofía política y ética propone un feminismo de tintes postmodernos cuyo enclave es una figura de la subjetividad aperturista. La (...) política de los nuevos movimientos sociales, más allá de los límites institucionales, así como el énfasis en las diferencias y en su reconocimiento, sirven para asumir al antagonismo como una posición deseable democráticamente. (shrink)

this article is based on a paper that I presented during the annual meeting of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, as a keynote speaker in the Coss Dialogue sessions. I was pleasantly surprised to hear that most participants of SAAP use the term "American" in its continental, rather than in the US-centric sense. I am glad that many of the philosophers of this community of knowledge have opened their dialogues to the voices and experiences south of the (...) Río Bravo. We are living during very difficult times in which cultures and practices of violence, as well as aggressive exclusion and intolerance, are affecting our communities on both sides of the border. In this context of multiple... (shrink)

this article is based on a paper that I presented during the annual meeting of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, as a keynote speaker in the Coss Dialogue sessions. I was pleasantly surprised to hear that most participants of SAAP use the term "American" in its continental, rather than in the US-centric sense. I am glad that many of the philosophers of this community of knowledge have opened their dialogues to the voices and experiences south of the (...) Río Bravo. We are living during very difficult times in which cultures and practices of violence, as well as aggressive exclusion and intolerance, are affecting our communities on both sides of the border. In this context of multiple... (shrink)

Este artigo reconstrói as objeções dirigidas por Amy Allen ao modelo de sujeição contido nopensamento de Judith Butler. Em suas obras The Power of the Feminist Theory (1999) e The Politics ofOur Selves (2008), Allen atribui fragilidades políticas ao modelo de Butler em função do destinoinevitavelmente subordinante vinculado aos processos de sujeição. Apesar de suas críticas, entretanto,questionamos a capacidade de Allen superar por completo as consequências negativas vinculadas àtese da “subordinação necessária”, o que poderia comprometer seu próprio modelo de (...) resistênciadesenvolvido em The Politics of Our Selves. Ao final, defendemos a reinserção de componenteselementares de um conceito comunicativo de ação política que perde centralidade na obra da autoraentre os anos de 1999 e 2008, o que ajuda a conceber margens mais amplas para a transformaçãopolítica dos laços sociais marcados pela subordinação de gênero e o seu lugar nos processos deformação subjetiva. (shrink)

Bernard Williams’ integrity objection poses a significant challenge to utilitarianism, which has largely been answered by utilitarians. This paper recasts the integrity objection to show that utilitarian agents could be committed to producing the overall best states of affairs and yet not positively act to bring them about. I introduce the ‘Moral Pinch Hitter’ – someone who performs actions at the bequest of another agent – to demonstrate that utilitarianism cannot distinguish between cases in which an agent maximizes utility by (...) positively acting in response to her duty, and cases in which an agent fails morally by relying upon someone else to perform the obligatory act. The inability to distinguish among these cases establishes a new, reloaded integrity objection to utilitarianism: utilitarianism cannot explain why it would be wrong to have someone else make difficult moral decisions, and to act on those decisions, for me. (shrink)

Resumen El 16 de noviembre de 2015, se enfrentaron en el programa televisivo Argentina Debate los dos candidatos a presidente argentinos que una semana después competirían en ballotage: Mauricio Macri y Daniel Scioli. Durante el debate, sus cuentas oficiales de Twitter fueron constantemente actualizadas mediante la reproducción de fragmentos de sus participaciones en el programa. Consideramos que el análisis de los mismos, desde la perspectiva de la pragmática sociocultural. Pragmática, sociopragmática y pragmática sociocultural del discurso de cortesía: una introducción. En (...) D. Bravo, N. Hernández Flores, y A. Cordisco, Aportes pragmáticos, socio pragmáticos y socioculturales a los estudios de la cortesía. Estocolmo – Buenos Aires: Dunken), nos permitirá comprender las actividades de imagen mediante las cuales se construyó y negoció, en Twitter, la imagen de estos candidatos. Se presenta aquí el análisis de 12 mensajes publicados, durante el debate, en la cuenta oficial de ambos candidatos. Se concluye que Mauricio Macri realiza actividades en torno a su imagen de afiliación. ¿Imagen positiva vs. imagen negativa? Pragmática socio-cultural y componentes de face. Oralia 2. Análisis del discurso oral, 155–184) como miembro del partido político Cambiemos y como un ciudadano que sufre las consecuencias de la mala gestión del gobierno. Simultáneamente, desarrolla su imagen de autonomía. ¿Imagen positiva vs. imagen negativa? Pragmática socio-cultural y componentes de face. Oralia 2. Análisis del discurso oral, 155–184) como un candidato distinto que puede generar cambios en la política nacional. A su vez, realiza actos de amenazas a la imagen de afiliación de Daniel Scioli. Este, en respuesta, despliega actividades tendientes a reforzar su imagen de autonomía y a construir una imagen de afiliación amplia con la oposición a Mauricio Macri. Asimismo, realiza amenazas a la imagen de su adversario. (shrink)

The percentage of female entrepreneurs is far below the level of males, although it has increased over the past several years. Based on the theory of planned behavior, the purpose of this article is to specify a model in which the relationship among entrepreneurial potential, gender and entrepreneurial intention are explored, by analyzing how perceived behavioral control (PBC) and perceived entrepreneurial skills, as exogenous variables, affect expression of intention for business, and how these are mediated by their entrepreneurial motivations and (...) risk taking propensity. Control variables where also included in this model, such as necessity-driven motives for business, in order to observe whether these are an influential factor. An implementation of Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) was used to analyze data collected from 677 students. Variables within the model were compared by gender using t-Test, and all multivariate analysis were done by each one separately as well in order to better gauge their perceptions. Results showed that mean differences between males and females are not abundant, and come only from intentions, PBC and subjective norm, which are higher in males; and motives for business higher in females. Multivariate analysis shows gender differences at the mediation level and that necessity-driven motives are an influencing factor, more so in males, and it hampers the significance of subjective norm. Finally, the theoretical and practical implications of the results within the framework of entrepreneurship in Spain and future alternatives to improve the entrepreneurial potential are discussed. (shrink)

Examines the myriad ways contemporary residents of Beijing understand and nurture the good life, practice the embodied arts of everyday well-being, and in doing so draw on cultural resources ranging from ancient metaphysics to modern media.

Winner of the R. H. Gapper Book Prize 2011. Judith Still sets Derrida's work in a series of contexts including the socio-political history of France, especially in relation to Algeria, and his relationship to other writers, most importantly Helene Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Emmanuel Levinas - key thinkers of hospitality. Still also follows the thread of sexual difference in Derrida's writing in order to shed light on his exploration of the complex and delicate, strange yet familiar, political and ethical (...) dilemmas of how to be those impossible things, a good host and a good guest.Hospitality is critically important in Derrida's writings, and his insights in this have been influential across a range of disciplines from geography, politics and sociology to literary studies and philosophy. It functions as a way of both thinking about relations between individuals, and analysing the community or state's often inhospitable reception of outsiders, such as refugees or migrants. (shrink)

La Segunda Guerra Mundial y las atrocidades cometidas en investigaciones con los prisioneros en los campos de concentración nazis y japoneses, despertaron la conciencia por el desarrollo de los derechos humanos que se habían conquistado paulatinamente a lo largo de la historia. Por ello se conforman una serie de leyes, normas y declaraciones donde se tratan los aspectos bioéticos en los ensayos clínicos. Se debe prestar vital atención a la relación médico-paciente en el curso de las investigaciones y considerar la (...) relación beneficio/riesgo cuando se va a experimentar en seres humanos. La retinopatía diabética proliferativa es una de las afecciones oftalmológicas que más ensayos ha suscitado. El objetivo de este trabajo consiste en analizar algunos aspectos éticos en la experimentación en pacientes con esta afección. The Second World War and the atrocities committed in research with prisoners in Japanese and Nazi concentration camps, awakened consciousness for the development of human rights that had gradually been conquered throughout history. That´s why a series of laws, rules and statements that deal with bioethical aspects in clinical trials, were passed. Special attention must be given to the doctor-patient relationship during the research and consider the benefit/risk ratio when conducting experiments on human beings. Proliferative Diabetic Retinopathy is one of the ophthalmological disorders that has given rise to more trials. The research goal is to analyze some ethical aspects when experimenting on patients with this condition. (shrink)

En el presente escrito se intentará explicar de manera estructurada la compleja propuesta del filósofo francés Jacques Rancière acerca del vínculo entre el arte y la política, para luego llevar a cabo una consideración crítica de dicha postura.

This paper looks at the interpretation of legal texts, with a special emphasis on the legislative ones, from the semiotic and pragmatic points of view. The interpretation of a legislative text must start by considering it as a product of a communication act, performed through linguistic signs, and therefore it has to be studied within basic semiotic categories. Secondly, legislations are texts, and they must therefore be analyzed with the aid of textual linguistics. Thirdly, legislative texts and their legal utterances (...) are all speech acts, and consequently they must be interpreted from the perspective of the pragmatic theory of speech acts. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to address the question: Can an artificial neural network (ANN) model be used as a possible characterization of the power of the human mind? We will discuss what might be the relationship between such a model and its natural counterpart. A possible characterization of the different power capabilities of the mind is suggested in terms of the information contained (in its computational complexity) or achievable by it. Such characterization takes advantage of recent results based (...) on natural neural networks (NNN) and the computational power of arbitrary artificial neural networks (ANN). The possible acceptance of neural networks as the model of the human mind's operation makes the aforementioned quite relevant. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to outline a pragmatist image of science following Rorty’s discussions and critics of epistemology and to develop some consequences of it in the philosophical analysis and its relations to culture. I will deal with some aspects of how scientific practice is construed and understood, and also outline the shift in Philosophy of Science from epistemological to ethical-political concerns that are implied in his proposal. I will contend that this perspective suggests an interesting way of (...) analysing scientific practices, theories, and public policies of it. Furthermore, I will suggest that it successfully connects the most interesting proposals of contemporary scientific views in philosophy. Finally, I will use some examples in physics and biology to illustrate my assertions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Further Reflections on Conversations of Our TimeJudith Butler (bio)The exchange that Ernesto Laclau and I conducted through e-mail last year at this time begins a conversation that I expect will continue. And I suppose I would like to use this “supplementary” reflection to think about what makes such a conversation possible, and what possibilities might emerge from such a conversation.First of all, I think that I was drawn to (...) the work of Laclau and Mouffe when I began to read Hegemony and Socialist Strategy and realized that I had found a set of Marxist thinkers for whom discourse was not merely a representation of preexisting social and historical realities, but was also constitutive of the field of the social and of history. The second moment came when I realized that central to the notion of articulation, appropriated from Gramsci, was the notion of rearticulation. As a temporally dynamic and relatively unpredictable play of forces, hegemony had been cast by both Laclau and Mouffe as an alternative to forms of static structuralism that tend to construe contemporary social forms as timeless totalities. I read in Laclau and Mouffe the political transcription of Derrida’s “Structure, Sign, and Play”: a structure gains its status as a structure, its structurality, only through its repeated reinstatement. The dependency of that structure on its reinstatement means that the very possibility of structure depends on a reiteration that is in no sense determined fully in advance, that for structure, and social structure as a result, to become possible, there must first be a contingent repetition at its basis. Moreover, for some social formation to appear as structured is for it to have covered over in some way the contingency of its own installation.The theoretical rearticulation of structure as hegemony marked the work of Laclau and Mouffe as consequentially poststructuralist and offered perhaps the most important link between politics and poststructuralism in recent years (along with the work of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak). The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.It is, of course, impossible in this context to reconstruct the particular way in which Derrida’s work and Foucault’s work converge in the reconceptualization of hegemony that Laclau and Mouffe have offered. One of the points, however, that became most salient for me is the reintroduction of temporality and, indeed, of futurity into the thinking of social formations. Among many critical social theorists, the tendency has been to underscore how the systemic character of capital tends to incorporate any instance of opposition in the service of capital’s own self-augmentation. I would clearly agree that the incorporative and domesticating possibilities of capital are immense. But I would also [End Page 13] argue that any theory that fails to think the possibilities of transformation from within that “systemic” formation is itself complicit with the idea of the “eternal” character of capital that capital so readily produces. Hegemony also marks a limit to the totalizing terms within which social formations are to be thought. For what hegemony attends to are the moments of breakage, of rearticulation, convergence, and resistance that are not immediately coopted by social formations in their past and present forms. That no social formation can endure without becoming reinstated, and that every reinstatement puts the “structure” in question at risk, suggests that the possibility of its own undoing is at once the condition of possibility of structure itself.Before I knew the work of Laclau and Mouffe very well, I came close to this kind of insight in my work on gender. 1 There I argued that gender is not an inner core or static essence, but a reiterated enactment of... (shrink)

This book examines the transition from the perspective of adult attachment theory. It reviews previous studies of the transition to parenthood and of adult attachments, and presents the results of a comprehensive new study of parenthood. In this study, the researchers followed the experiences of approximately 100 couples who were becoming parents for the first time, together with a comparison sample of couples who were not planning to have a child at this stage. Couples were assessed on four occasions: during (...) the second trimester of pregnancy, and 6 weeks, 3 months, and 6 months post-birth. The book addresses such key issues as the division of domestic labor, the changing nature of couples' marital relationships, changes in new parents' attachment networks, postnatal depression, and factors predicting the ease of the transition. (shrink)

In this article I examine the relation between the philosophies of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Gilles Deleuze by looking at the way in which they refer to Henri Bergson’s time theory. Although Merleau-Ponty develops some fundamental Bergsonian insights on the nature of time, he presents himself as a critical reader of the latter. I will show that although Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of Bergson differs fundamentally from Deleuze’s interpretation, Merleau-Ponty’s “corrections” of Bergson’s theory fit Deleuze’s reading of Bergson very well. This indicates a (...) similarity with respect to what is at stake in the philosophies of Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze. Hence the critical reference that Deleuze makes to Merleau-Ponty’s conception of cinema and thus of movement is not justified, but is the result of a selective and prototypical reading of the early Merleau-Ponty. (shrink)

El estudio de la formación inicial del profesorado realizado al interior de las escuelas normales de México demanda situarla tanto en un espacio social, temporal e institucional específico como también volcar la mirada en los sujetos que la desarrollan, es decir, poner atención en el trabajo efectuado por los formadores. Esta investigación parte de tal reconocimiento, planteándose como objetivo analizar las configuraciones formativas que desarrollan los formadores, con base en sus constructos personales que comunican en los procesos de formación inicial (...) vivenciados al interior de las escuelas normales del estado de Oaxaca (México). El estudio se efectuó desde un enfoque cualitativo, con el uso de la Teoría Fundamentada, empleando la entrevista en profundidad y la observación participante. Se analizaron los procesos formativos de cuatro formadores pertenecientes a dos escuelas normales. Los resultados obtenidos en el trabajo de campo permitieron identificar una acentuada tendencia formativa signada por el modelo de formación docente con perspectiva académica, del cual se derivan tres configuraciones: formación académica reproductiva, formación académica social y formación académica práctica; se precisa la relevancia que cobran los planteamientos personales de los formadores a partir de sus propios constructos pedagógicos y sociales como parte de un colectivo social y profesional. (shrink)