This essay frames systemic patterns of mental abuse against women of color and Indigenous women on Turtle Island (North America) in terms of larger design-of-distribution strategies in settler colonial societies, as these societies use various forms of social power to distribute, reproduce, and automate social inequalities (including public health precarities and mortality disadvantages) that skew socio-economic gain continuously toward white settler populations and their descendants. It departs from traditional studies in gender-based violence research that frame mental abuses such as gaslighting--commonly (...) understood as mental manipulation through lying or deceit--stochastically, as chance-driven interpersonal phenomena. Building on structural analyses of knowledge in political epistemology (Dotson 2012, Berenstain 2016), political theory (Davis and Ernst 2017), and Indigenous social theory (Tuck and Yang 2012), I develop the notion of cultural gaslighting to refer to the social and historical infrastructural support mechanisms that disproportionately produce abusive mental ambients in settler colonial cultures in order to further the ends of cultural genocide and dispossession. I conclude by proposing a social epidemiological account of gaslighting that a) highlights the public health harms of abusive ambients for minority populations, b) illuminates the hidden rules of social structure in settler colonial societies, and c) amplifies the corresponding need for structural reparations. (shrink)

This essay addresses structural violence against Latinas by looking at the existential toll different forms of cultural violence take on us. In particular, it looks at linguistic violence and the role lesser-known violences play in the intergenerational continuation of colonial violence, such as hermeneutic violence. Defined as violence done to systems of meaning and interpretation, hermeneutic violence is discussed at length in relation to the experience of harm and injury. The essay further explores some resistant epistemic practices Latina feminists have (...) generated to address systemic violence. The work of Gloria Anzaldúa is elaborated as an example of resistant epistemic practices. (shrink)

The importance of emotions is supported by many authors of the ethics of care in contrast to the rationalistic paradigm of justice. However, the reference to the emotions remains generic. By focusing on three paradigmatic typologies (care out of love, care work, and care of the distant other), I propose to investigate this aspect further, and distinguish between the different emotions that motivate care (such as love, compassion, and generosity). I will try, first, to offer a reflection on which emotions (...) are likely to motivate ethical action within an ethics of care; second, to survey different potential obstacles to these emotions and propose how they might be overcome to more successfully achieve good care and ethical action. (shrink)

In the wake of continued structural asymmetries between women of color and white feminisms, this essay revisits intersectional tensions in Catharine MacKinnon’s Toward a Feminist Theory of the State while exploring productive spaces of coalition. To explore such spaces, we reframe Toward a Feminist Theory of the State in terms of its epistemological project and highlight possible synchronicities with liberational features in women-of-color feminisms. This is done, in part, through an analysis of the philosophical role “method” plays in MacKinnon’s argument, (...) and by reframing her critique of juridical neutrality and objectivity as epistemic harms. In the second section, we sketch out a provisional coalitional theory of liberation that builds on MacKinnon’s feminist epistemological insights and aligns them with decolonizing projects in women-of-color feminisms, suggesting new directions and conceptual revisions that are on the way to coalition. (shrink)

This paper examines the relationship between corporate social responsibility and financial performance for Islamic banks in the Gulf Cooperation Council region over the period 2000–2014 by generating CSR-related data through disclosure analysis of the annual reports of the sampled banks. The findings of this study indicate that there is a significant positive relationship between CSR disclosure and the financial performance of Islamic banks in the GCC countries. The results also show a positive relationship between CSR disclosure and the future financial (...) performance of GCC Islamic banks, potentially indicating that current CSR activities carried out by Islamic banks in the GCC could have a long-term impact on their financial performance. Furthermore, despite demonstrating a significant positive relationship between the composite measure of the CSR disclosure index and financial performance, the findings show no statistically significant relationship between the individual dimensions of the CSR disclosure index and the current financial performance measure except for ‘mission and vision’ and ‘products and services’. Similarly, the empirical results detect a positive significant association only between ‘mission and vision’ dimension and future financial performance of the examined banks. (shrink)

A critical approach on tolerance can be done as an endeavor to asset its rational arguments brought in its support or/and as a justification of its moral value within the process of human being completion. The commitment to such critical task is more necessary as it is unyieldingness summon in contemporary debates in political religious and, especially moral contexts, it has been equally valorized and contested. The most remarkable analyses of this rather summary rubric for many and often contradictory connotations, (...) then concept, underline the idea that a limit-matter is at stake: can be tolerated the intolerable? Because these boundaries are hard to be distinguished the critical position intellectually reasonable seems to be that of examining if is not more socially profitable and morally justifiable to be tolerant rather than intolerant.Developing possible arguments for and against the universal value of tolerance, critical discourse imposes a very meaningful statement: to uphold our humanity, even the demand for our right to intolerance must be done within the framework and with the means of tolerance. (shrink)

There is a growing trend across North America of women being criminalized for their pregnancy outcomes. Rather than being a series of aberrations resulting from institutional failures, we argue that this trend is part of a colonial strategy of administrative violence aimed at women of color and Native women across Turtle Island. We consider a range of medical and legal practices constituting gender-based administrative violence, and we argue that they are the result of non-accidental and systematic production of population-level harms (...) that cannot be disentangled from the goals of ongoing settler occupation and dispossession of Indigenous lands. While white feminist narratives of gender-based administrative violence in Latin America function to distance the places where such violence occurs from the ‘liberal democratic’ settler nation-states of the U.S. and Canada, we hold that administrative forms of reproductive violence against Latin American women are structurally connected to efforts in the U.S. and Canada to criminalize women of color and Indigenous women for their reproductive outcomes. The purpose of these systemically produced harms is to sustain cultures of gender-based violence in support of settler colonial configurations of power. (shrink)

In this paper I tackle Gadamer’s and Dewey’s conceptions of art, showing a possible dialogue between American Pragmatism and Gadamerian Hermeneutics. Despite the obvious differences, it is possible to show fundamental commonalities between the two philosophies when it comes to the role of art. They share the double goal of critiquing the aestheticism of modern age, the conception of art as a mere “art for art’s sake,” and of recomposing the continuity between aesthetic experience and everyday life. I argue that (...) this common goal entails a reassessment of the relation between the work of art and the public, a reassessment that has fundamental consequences for the role of art in our societies. The present comparison will also help shed new light on Gadamer’s conception, often accused of being a merely conversative theory. For both Gadamer and Dewey art does not consist in a product of the elites that is given to the spectators: rather, the spectators cooperate with the author in the creation and development of the work of art itself. (shrink)

This paper presents an interpretation of the paradoxical decision of Abraham done by Søren A. Kierkegaard in his work Fear and Trembling as an ethics of silence. The main idea is to understand ethics not as moral standards or specific duties, but as the responsibility of becoming a single individual in time; singularity as the intimate and personal relationship with the calling of love. In such a way, that silence is the experience of the encounter with the paradox that being (...) human means to be singular in conditions that claim an universal and general transparent manifestation dependent of the dominant rational discourse.Then, silence becomes the fundamental ethical claim to become a human person, as spirit in time, where it becomes a time of trial and examination, a temporality, where the trial is the fidelity to love’s calling, the listening of the possibilities that are presented by the anxiety of the decision. These possibilities are not immanent to the world or to history, they call for a personal choice, always containing a space of revelation; therefore of listening to the interiority of the personal choice that for Kierkegaard is the passion of faith, communicated and lived in silence. Concluding that an ethics of silence by the image of Abraham implies to re-think the role of philosophy in relationship to faith, hope and love in time, as a silent thought. (shrink)

Most of the Latin American population, including in places like Mexico and Brazil, is becoming extremely poor, slipping in the last ten years from poverty to extreme poverty. Native communities are in this condition: to live only to survive, lacking any opportunity to improve or at least meet their basics needs of food and shelter. I practiced P4C in the multicultural community of Juchitán, Oaxaca, to find if P4C overcame the limitations of extreme poverty, respecting the cultural diversity while obtaining (...) positive results. (shrink)

El trabajo constituye un homenaje a Leopoldo Zea, preparado a instancias de su colega y amigo Arturo Roig, con el propósito de resaltar la metodología y hábitos de trabajo de Leopoldo, relacionando su labor intelectual con su vida cotidiana. En este sentido se destacan su memoria prodigiosa y el hecho de que su trabajo estuviera condicionado por su personalidad. Era un intelectual intuitivo, con gran capacidad de síntesis e ingeniosa réplica para contestar en las numerosas polémicas en que participó. A (...) través de sus libros y de una intensa actividad desplegada en numerosísimos viajes, logró que el interés por América Latina se extendiera por todo el mundo. Siguiendo a Gaos y a Ortega y Gasset, consideraba que es a partir de la propia circunstancia que se puede dar la tarea de entender al mundo. Comprender y comunicar son según Zea, las dos acepciones del término logos, que sirven de fundamento a la filosofía.This work is homage to Leopoldo Zea and was written at the request of his friend and colleague, Arturo Roig, with the purpose of emphasizing Leopoldo's methodology and work habits as an intellectual as well as in his daily life. We can point out his prodigious memory and the consistency of his work with his personality. He was an intuitive intellectual, with a great ability to synthesize and a talent for the witty reply in the numerous debates he took part in. Through his books and travels he extended the interest in Latin America all over the world. Following Gaos and Ortega y Gasset, he believed that understanding one's own circumstances enabled one to understand the world. To understand and to communicate were, according to Zea, the two meanings of logos that serve as a foundation to Philosophy. (shrink)

Initially conceived as an interview with the hybrid media artist Brian Goeltzenleuchter, this text gradually took the form of a conversation on various issues regarding olfactory art and the aesthetic significance of smell. Framing the artistic uses of odours in the context of contemporary art, the paper discloses some of its foundational traits, variations, and underlying impulses. By commenting on Goeltzenleuchter’s olfactory artworks through a philosophical perspective, this contribution covers a number of subjects including the notion of atmosphere, the socio-cultural (...) values and narratives conveyed by scents, the suggestive relationship between spaces and aromas, and the phenomenology of smells as compared to the experience of sounds. Consistent with how smell perception unfolds, the dialogue flows in a form that is not rigidly structured but airy, ephemeral, and fluid, developing a sequence of insights whose aim is, rather than scrutinising a specific topic, to evoke the essence of olfactory poetics as a whole. (shrink)

We suggest a fuller understanding of the obligation to respect patient autonomy can be gained by recognizing patients as historically and socially situated agents, whose values are developed, challenged, and changed, rather than merely applied, in their decision-making about their use of preimplantation genetic diagnosis or preimplantation genetic screening (PGD/PGS). We ground this discussion in empirical research on the patients experiences with PGD/PGS, and conclude by suggesting that promoting patients’ self-respect is a useful ethical standard for providers and practices to (...) recognize. (shrink)

El presente artículo tiene como objetivo reconstruir la ética de la resistencia que Nietzsche propone en _El Anticristo _partiendo de la imagen que se ofrece en el prólogo a modo de declaración de intenciones: “preferible _vivir en medio del hielo_”. Dicha ética le exige al individuo la superación de la psicología de la convicción o de la fe y recurre, como método, a la Filología entendida como “_ephexis _en la interpretación”. La apropiación nietzscheana de ese término procedente del pirronismo obliga (...) a medir la utilidad de las enseñanzas escépticas para un individuo que aspira a autorrealizarse, _a llegar a ser el que es_. Con este fin ha de poner entre paréntesis los lugares comunes y asegurarse una posición hermenéutica propia que quiere evitar la_ des-simismación_ y que renuncia, por ello, a implicarse en la rutina democrática de las sociedades modernas. En sintonía con la sensibilidad pirrónica que anima a cultivar la distancia y la indiferencia, se acabará mostrando, en primer lugar, que Nietzsche se dirige exclusivamente a una comunidad de lectores afines y que, en segundo lugar, suspende la vocación política de su propuesta. (shrink)

My paper aims to highlight the presence of a social conception of art in Gadamer’s thought by analysing his reading of Hegel’s aesthetics. In an initial section I reconstruct the core of Gadamer’s reading of Hegel’s aesthetics as a paradigm to reassess art against the limits of aestheticism. I subsequently focus on the analysis Gadamer provides of the fundamental topic of the “past-character of art”, by stressing how this is reassessed as a “presence of the past”. On this basis, I (...) show how Gadamer’s reading of Hegel helps him focus on the role of contemporary art forms. If in modernity art lost its self-evident character, this does not prevent it from establishing a sense of community. Contemporary art is a search for a communal and social element. Gadamer’s characterization of contemporary art as a work-in-progress and intrinsically linked to the audience’s participation lays the basis for rethinking Gadamer’s aesthetics in a performative direction. (shrink)

En el presente trabajo se expone un acercamiento al concepto de inteligencia espiritual como parte de la realidad bio-psico-socio-espiritual del ser humano, con el objetivo de generar la necesidad de una educación espiritual que complete la educación emocional y favorezca al desarrollo íntegro de la persona, como parte fundamental de la finalidad del sistema educativo.

Normal development of the nervous system is achieved through an elaborate program of guided neuronal migration and axonal growth. In the last few years, a flood of research has dissected the molecular bases of these phenomena, and several cell‐surface and extracellular matrix molecules, which are implicated in neuronal and axonal targeting processes, have been recognized. Taking this knowledge a step further, a recent paper by Tom Curran's group(1) reports the molecular cloning of the gene deleted in the autosomal recessive mouse (...) mutation reeler, affecting cortical neuronal migration. This gene encodes reelin, a novel extracellular matrix protein. (shrink)

The article discusses the theoretical issues of designing a safe professional and educational environment. The environmental approach is substantiated as a methodology for this process. The environmental conditions that provide the teacher with safety and security in the implementation of professional activities are indicated. An attempt was made to determine the ratio of the structural components of the vocational and educational environment and the environmental conditions that ensure its safety. The stages and levels of designing a safe professional and educational (...) environment have been substantiated. (shrink)