The purpose of this communication, written on May 18th, 2018 at the National Shrine of Aparecida, during the XII Mariologycal Congress, is to present a "theological restoration" of the image of Our Lady of the Conception Aparecida, through an ecclesiological perspective, from a symbolic, biblical and pastoral re-reading, of the elements present in the found of its image and the meaning of the image itself, in order to, by its iconography, extract a significant message about the mystery of the Church (...) that has the Virgin Mary as Mother, Member and Model. (shrink)

In spite of a powerful tradition, more than two thousand years old, that in a valid argument the premises must be relevant to the conclusion, twentieth-century logicians neglected the concept of relevance until the publication of Volume I of this monumental work. Since that time relevance logic has achieved an important place in the field of philosophy: Volume II of Entailment brings to a conclusion a powerful and authoritative presentation of the subject by most of the top people working in (...) the area. Originally the aim of Volume II was simply to cover certain topics not treated in the first volume--quantification, for example--or to extend the coverage of certain topics, such as semantics. However, because of the technical progress that has occurred since the publication of the first volume, Volume II now includes other material. The book contains the work of Alasdair Urquhart, who has shown that the principal sentential systems of relevance logic are undecidable, and of Kit Fine, who has demonstrated that, although the first-order systems are incomplete with respect to the conjectured constant domain semantics, they are still complete with respect to a semantics based on "arbitrary objects." Also presented is important work by the other contributing authors, who are Daniel Cohen, Steven Giambrone, Dorothy L. Grover, Anil Gupta, Glen Helman, Errol P. Martin, Michael A. McRobbie, and Stuart Shapiro. Robert G. Wolf's bibliography of 3000 items is a valuable addition to the volume. (shrink)

Feminist epistemology has often been understood as the study of feminine "ways of knowing." But feminist epistemology is better understood as the branch of naturalized, social epistemology that studies the various influences of norms and conceptions of gender and gendered interests and experiences on the production of knowledge. This understanding avoids dubious claims about feminine cognitive differences and enables feminist research in various disciplines to pose deep internal critiques of mainstream research.

Brentano plays a paradoxical role in the history of philosophy. He is the key transitional figure between two antithetical traditions: although a profound influence to phenomenology, Brentano himself was inspired by the positivism of Comte and Mill. While his students found in his teachings both a reason and the means to combat the spirit of positivism, Brentano himself believed "the true method of philosophy was nothing other than the method of the natural sciences." The incoherence of his historical role is (...) reflected in his own development. After his retirement, Brentano developed a psychological theory of apriori knowledge intended to explain how analytic judgments can be ampliative, and he ascribed this kind of knowledge to all sciences. A consensus exists that this squares poorly with the empiricism of his Psychology or his positivist manifesto. But the model Brentano employed to explain the workings of apriori knowledge was nothing other than his own methodology in descriptive psychology, elaborated in the influential lectures of the late 1880's: a mereology of consciousness as a synchronous manifold. And this was only a formalization of the method he had practiced in Book Two of his Psychology, where the basic kinds of mental phenomena and the laws of their coexistence are described. The late theory of apriori knowledge is therefore nothing more than a fine-grained psychological analysis of what was meant by "description" all along. Even in the Psychology this description generates what Brentano would later call apriori knowledge. For among the "parts" of consciousness distinguished by a synchronous mereology are not only "separable parts", but also "inseparable parts" which are distinguishable, but not really capable of existing separately. To each such distinction corresponds a law of necessary interconnection. To describe their mode of interconnection is to know apriori that they cannot exist apart. Thus, it is the theory of "distinctions" which allows an empirical description to have apriori validity. In this respect Brentano is rehabilitating a Scholastic tradition in order to make a positive, but non-trivial science of synchronous manifolds possible. But in so doing, he invents phenomenology: the positive, but apriori valid description of the possible and necessary structures of conscious experience. Continuity in Brentano's own development can therefore be affirmed, and even the subsequent development of phenomenology is seen to have its origin in a radical form of empiricism. (shrink)

We agree with Heyes that an explanation of human uniqueness must appeal to cultural evolution, and not just genes. Her account, though, focuses narrowly on internal cognitive mechanisms. This causes her to mischaracterize human behavior and to overlook the role of material culture. A more powerful account would view cognitive gadgets as spanning organisms and their (shared) environments.

The appropriate methodology for psychological research depends on whether one is studying mental algorithms or their implementation. Mental algorithms are abstract specifications of the steps taken by procedures that run in the mind. Implementational issues concern the speed and reliability of these procedures. The algorithmic level can be explored only by studying across-task variation. This contrasts with psychology's dominant methodology of looking for within-task generalities, which is appropriate only for studying implementational issues.The implementation-algorithm distinction is related to a number of (...) other “levels” considered in cognitive science. Its realization in Anderson's ACT theory of cognition is discussed. Research at the algorithmic level is more promising because it is hard to make further fundamental scientific progress at the implementational level with the methodologies available. Protocol data, which are appropriate only for algorithm-level theories, provide a richer source than data at the implementational level. Research at the algorithmic level will also yield more insight into fundamental properties of human knowledge because it is the level at which significant learning transitions are defined.The best way to study the algorithmic level is to look for differential learning outcomes in pedagogical experiments that manipulate instructional experience. This provides control and prediction in realistically complex learning situations. The intelligent tutoring paradigm provides a particularly fruitful way to implement such experiments.The implications of this analysis for the issue of modularity of mind, the status of language, research on human/computer interaction, and connectionist models are also examined. (shrink)

An experimental survey was undertakento explore the links between thecharacteristics of a moral issue, the degree ofmoral intensity/moral imperative associatedwith the issue, and people'sstated willingness to pay for policy toaddress the issue. Two farm animal welfareissues were chosen for comparison and thecontingent valuation method was used to elicitpeople's wtp. The findings of the surveysuggest that increases in moral characteristicsdo appear to result in an increase in moralintensity and the degree of moral imperativeassociated with an issue. Moreover, there was apositive link (...) between moral intensity/moralimperative associated with an issue andpeople's stated wtp for policy to address theissue. The paper discusses the relevance of thefindings of the survey in the context of thedebate concerning the relationship betweenmoral and economic values and the use of thecontingent valuation method to estimatepeople's wtp of policy options with moraldimensions. (shrink)

Like being able to drive a car, being autonomous is a socially attributed, claimed, and contested status. Normative debates about criteria for autonomy (and what autonomy entitles one to) are best understood, not as debates about what autonomy, at core, really is, but rather as debates about the relative merits of various possible packages of thresholds, entitlements, regulations, values, and institutions. Within different “regimes” of autonomy, different criteria for (degrees of) autonomy become authoritative. Neoliberal, solidaristic, and perfectionist regimes entail conflicting (...) understandings of what gets you autonomy and what autonomy gets you—for example, in relation to policies regarding physician-assisted suicide or financial support for senior citizens. In light of this, justifying a particular understanding of autonomy is inseparable from the task of arguing for the context-specific merits of a regime of autonomy as a whole and in relation to other ethical and political commitments. (shrink)

A relatively new and exciting area of collaboration has begun between philosophy of mind and ethics. This paper attempts to explore aspects of this collaboration and how they bear upon traditional ethics. It is the author's contention that much of Western moral philosophy has been guided by largely unrecognized assumptions regarding reason, knowledge and conceptualization, and that when examined against empirical research in cognitive science, these assumptions turn out to be false -- or at the very least, unrealistic for creatures (...) with our cognitive structures. The fundamental tension between the Western idea of morality (as basically rule-following) and the way in which people actually confront and experience moral dilemmas is a result of our failure to take the insights of cognitive psychology seriously. This failure has had a dramatic impact on not only how we teach ethics, but how we attempt to live out lives. (shrink)

Peter Winch's The Idea of a Social Science has been the subject of repeated misunderstanding. This discussion takes one recent example and shows how Winch's argument is gravely distorted. What is at issue is not, as is usually supposed, whether we can accept or endorse another society's explanations of its activities, but whether we have to look for an explanatory connection between concepts and action. Winch's argument is that before we can try to explain actions, we have to identify them (...) correctly. This can only be done by seeing how they, and the concepts they are associated with, fit within a way of life. Grasping its rule?following character is understanding action. Once the difficulties in making such identifications are appreciated, we will be less inclined to accept facile explanations why people in other societies do the things they do. (shrink)

(2001). Disability: Societal Responses to Difference and Interdisciplinary Interventions by Bioethicists. The American Journal of Bioethics: Vol. 1, No. 3, pp. 62-63.

What, for Kant, is the semantic status of the proposition: Water is H2O? Is it analytic or synthetic? The question is not one of merely esoteric import since an answer to it would constitute a statement about the meaningfulness of all our scientific propositions. And, insofar as the Critique is a defense of the possibility of the natural sciences, it seems that we should be able to find in it the answer to our question. Further, we should be able to (...) find an answer to the question of whether or not Kant is a scientific essentialist. I attempt to show that he is not an essentialist despite the fact that his semantics of natural kind terms greatly resembles that of some contemporary authors who are essentialists and take their semantic theories to provide evidence for their views. One way to go about this would be simply to locate Kant's criteria for the analytic/synthetic distinction and then to place the proposition in the category dictated by those criteria. Rather than employ this method, I will examine instead some of Kant's own examples. The hope is that by means of the examples the criteria themselves will achieve a greater degree of clarity and that through this clarification Kant's position will emerge as a genuine alternative to contemporary positions. (shrink)

This article considers the experiences of a group of women science students of color who reported encountering moral injustices, including misrecognition, lack of peer support, and disregard for their altruistic motives. We contend that university science departments face a moral imperative to cultivate equal relationships and the altruistic power of science.

Despite their crucial role in the translation of pre-clinical research into new clinical applications, phase 1 trials involving patients continue to prompt ethical debate. At the heart of the controversy is the question of whether risks of administering experimental drugs are therapeutically justified. We suggest that prior attempts to address this question have been muddled, in part because it cannot be answered adequately without first attending to the way labor is divided in managing risk in clinical trials. In what follows, (...) we approach the question of therapeutic justification for phase 1 trials from the viewpoint of five different stakeholders: the drug regulatory authority, the IRB, the clinical investigator, the referring physician, and the patient. Our analysis shows that the question of therapeutic justification actually raises multiple questions corresponding to the roles and responsibilities of the different stakeholders involved. By attending to these contextual differences, we provide more coherent guidance for the ethical negotiation of risk in phase 1 trials involving patients. We close by discussing the implications of our argument for various perennial controversies in phase 1 trial practice. (shrink)

Recent trends in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science can be fruitfully characterized as part of the ongoing attempt to come to grips with the very idea of homo sapiens--an intelligent, evolved, biological agent--and its signature contribution is the emergence of a philosophical anthropology which, contra Descartes and his thinking thing, instead puts doing at the center of human being. Applying this agency-oriented line of thinking to the problem of representation, this paper introduces the Guidance Theory, according to which (...) the content and intentionality of representations can be accounted for in terms of the way they provide guidance for action. We offer a brief account of the motivation for the theory, and a formal characterization. (shrink)

When we witness a great actor, musician, or sportsperson performing, we share something of their experience. Only recently has it become clear just how this sharing of experience is realised within the human brain. 'Mirrors in the brain' provides an accessible overview of mirror neurons, written by the man who first discovered them.

In this article, I advance a theory of gendered money and demonstrate how couples give special symbolic meaning to men’s money in domestic exchanges. Unlike previous perspectives on gender and money such as resource theories and gender performance, this framework acknowledges money as a prop and tool that couples use to construct gender boundaries and signal normalcy in the marital relationship. Integrating concepts from economic sociology with Hochschild’s insights on the symbolism of domestic labor, I find that Ukrainians use money (...) as a token and symbol of value, not as a commodity with which to obtain desired outcomes. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 56 married and cohabiting individuals, I discover that couples subvert market meanings of money to enact a Soviet-style gender ideology. By spending men’s money on “necessary” items and avoiding accessing women’s money in the household, couples construct men’s money as both visible and valuable while rendering women’s money non-fungible. These practices highlight the primacy of culture and ideology over relative income, and can help explain the reproduction of male privilege in the household, despite gains in women’s employment and earnings. (shrink)

Does media coverage of politics undermine democratic deliberation? By covering the “horse race” instead of the issues, the media encourage people to believe that politicians place self‐interest above the public interest. The media also affect which issues people consider important, and negative advertisements discourage political participation. People learn from the media only because they know so little about politics. Were democracy deliberative, these media effects would undermine it. But democracy is not a deliberation but a contest that relies on the (...) ability of the media to shape public opinion. The evidence for media effects is strong, but the media cannot be undermining a form of democracy that does not and cannot exist, and they do sustain the form that does. (shrink)