After nearly fifty years as settled constitutional law, the federally protected right to an abortion in America is now a thing of the past. The Supreme Court's overturning of Roe v. Wade has left Americans without a guaranteed right to access abortion--and the cost of that upheaval will be most painfully felt by individuals who already struggle with access to resources: the poor, black and brown communities, and members of the LGBTQIA+ population.Pulling together the experiences, expertise,and perspective of more than (...) 30 writers, thinkers, and activists, Aftermath: Life in Post-Roe America offers a searing look at the critical role Roe has played in improving women's and pregnant people's lives, what is at stake as it is overturned, what a future without Roe may look like, and what options exist for us to secure reproductive freedom in the future.With contributions from Jessica Valenti, Soraya Chemaly, Michele Goodwin, Alyssa Milano, Ruby Sales, Heather Cox Richardson, Robin Marty, and others, this anthology is essential reading for anyone who cares about the future of reproductive rights in America--and beyond. (shrink)

It has become recently popular to suggest that knowledge is the epistemic norm of practical reasoning and that this provides an important constraint on the correct account of knowledge, one which favours subject-sensitive invariantism over contextualism and classic invariantism. I argue that there are putative counterexamples to both directions of the knowledge norm. Even if the knowledge norm can be defended against these counterexamples, I argue that it is a delicate issue whether it is true, one which relies on fine (...) distinctions among a variety of relevant notions of propriety which our intuitions may reflect. These notions variously apply to the agent herself, her character traits, her beliefs, her reasoning and any resultant action. Given the delicacy of these issues, I argue that the knowledge norm is not a fixed point from which to defend substantive and controversial views in epistemology. Rather, these views need to be defended on other grounds. (shrink)

In this contribution, we focus on teaching and assessment in school-based activities involving the oral transmission of texts at school entry in multilingual contexts. We analyze activities involving listening and oral exchanges between five-year-olds and their teacher about the comprehension of children's literature. Our analyses show that the challenge of oral interactions in the professionalization of teachers lies in the delimitation of a common, shared space for speech between the teacher and the class collective, and that the story-character system provides (...) a framework for structuring these interactions in heterogeneous, multilingual contexts. (shrink)

Something Aristotle calls ‘right logos’ plays a crucial role in his theory of virtue. But the meaning of ‘logos’ in this context is notoriously contested. I argue against the standard translation ‘reason’, and—drawing on parallels with Plato’s work, especially the Laws—in favor of its being used to denote what transforms an inferior epistemic state into a superior one: an explanatory account. Thus Aristotelian phronēsis, like his and Plato’s technē and epistēmē, is a matter of grasping explanatory accounts: in this case, (...) accounts that identify the right action and say why it is right. Arguably, Aristotelian rationality is a matter of being able to grasp accounts in general. (shrink)

According to the naïve, pre-theoretic conception, lying seems to be characterized by the intent to deceive. However, certain kinds of bald-faced lies appear to be counterexamples to this view, and many philosophers have abandoned it as a result. I argue that this criticism of the naïve view is misplaced; bald-faced lies are not genuine instances of lying because they are not genuine instances of assertion. I present an additional consideration in favor of the naïve view, which is that abandoning it (...) comes at an extremely high price; alternative accounts which eschew the intent-to-deceive condition on lying have difficulty distinguishing lies from non-literal speech. (shrink)

An approach to explaining the nature and source of logic and its laws with a rich historical tradition takes the laws of logic to be laws of thought. This view seems intuitively compelling, after all, logic seems to be intimately related with how we think. But how exactly should we understand it? And what arguments can we give in favour? I will propose one line of argument for the claim that the laws of logic are laws of thought. I will (...) motivate the claim that there is a certain phenomenon, namely, that there are logical principles which are immune to rational doubt. I will then give an argument to the best explanation; I will argue that the best explanation of this phenomenon is to take the laws of logic to be constitutive-normative laws of thought. The proposal, and some responses to potential objections, will have a notably Kantian flavour. (shrink)

The actions performed by individuals, as consumers and citizens, have aggregate negative consequences for the environment. The question asked in this paper is to what extent it is reasonable to hold individuals and institutions responsible for environmental problems. A distinction is made between backward-looking and forward-looking responsibility. Previously, individuals were not seen as being responsible for environmental problems, but an idea that is now sometimes implicitly or explicitly embraced in the public debate on environmental problems is that individuals are appropriate (...) targets for blame when they perform actions that are harmful to the environment. This idea is criticized in this paper. It is argued that instead of blaming individuals for performing actions that are not environmentally friendly we should ascribe forward-looking responsibility to individuals, a notion that focuses more on capacity and resources than causation and blameworthiness. Furthermore, it is important to emphasize that a great share of forward-looking responsibility should also be ascribed to institutional agents, primarily governments and corporations. The urge to ascribe forward-looking responsibility to institutional agents is motivated by the efficiency aim of responsibility distributions. Simply put, if responsibility is ascribed to governments and corporations there is a better chance of creating a society in which the opportunities to act in an environmentally friendly way increase. (shrink)

Plato links pleasure with illusion, and this link explains his rejection of the view that all desires are rational desires for the good. The Protagoras and Gorgias show connections between pleasure and illusion; the Republic develops these into a psychological theory. One part of the soul is not only prone to illusions, but also incapable of the kind of reasoning that can dispel them. Pleasure appears good; therefore this part of the soul (the appetitive part) desires pleasures qua good but (...) ignores reasoning about what is really good. Hence the new moral psychology of the Republic: not all desires are rational, and thus virtue depends on bringing one's non-rational desires under the control of reason. (shrink)

Gaetano Chiurazzi Paco Editorial. 2019, 192 pp. Jundiai, ISBN : 978-85-462-1742-7.

Every paper in this collection is worth reading, for one reason or another. Still, due to certain problematic metametaphysical presuppositions most of these discussions miss the deeper mark, on the pessimist as well as the optimist side. My reasons for thinking this come from considering how best to answer three metametaphysical questions. First, why be pessimistic about metaphysics – why be Carnapian in a post-positivist age? There is, I’ll suggest, a post-positivist strategy for reviving Carnapian pessimism, but it is almost (...) entirely neglected here; and the motivations that pessimists offer instead are not compelling. Second, why think that the best way to approach metametaphysical questions is by attention to features of language, and in particular to quantifier semantics, in ordinary or ontological language(s)? Here again we are offered little motivation for this supposition, which, notwithstanding its acceptance by nearly all contributors, faces clear difficulties. Third, granting that quantification is somehow bound up with first-order questions about what exists, what is the nature of this connection, and what are the associated implications for metametaphysics? Here I find the accounts of the connection on offer implausible, especially as compared to an alternative that makes better sense of metaphysical practice and disagreement. The moral following consideration of these questions is that real progress in metametaphysics is likely to occur less by attention to semantic issues pertaining to representation, translation and quantification and more to non-semantic issues pertaining to epistemology and metaphysical determinacy. (shrink)

Numerous studies have found that many people believe that a provocatively dressed woman is at greater risk for sexual assault and bears some responsibility for her assault if she is attacked. Furthermore, in legal, academic, and public debates about sexual assault the appropriateness of the term ‘provocative’ as a descriptor of certain kinds of women’s clothing is rarely questioned. Thus, there is a widespread but largely unquestioned belief that it is appropriate to describe revealing or suggestive women’s clothing as ‘provocative’ (...) and that women who wear such clothing could provoke sexual assault and harassment from men. Yet it is rarely noted that only women’s clothing is described as sexually provocative. Men’s clothing, no matter how revealing, is never described as provocative. Why is this the case? This Article challenges the assumption that it is appropriate to describe women’s clothing as provocative. Drawing on on models of the legal defense of provocation and research on objectification and responsibility, this Article demonstrates that continued use of ‘provocative’ term normalizes and entrenches deeply problematic attitudes about women’s responsibility for men’s sexual behavior. The social interpretation of women’s clothing as provocative arises from the privileged social and legal status of men’s sexual arousal and the objectification of women’s bodies. Describing women’s clothing as provocative thus reinforces a problematic conception of women’s bodies and sexuality that is connected to women’s experiences of their bodies, their clothes, and shapes their vulnerability to sexual assault and social and legal attitudes to such attacks. (shrink)

This article has two aims. The first is to introduce some novel data that highlight rather surprising pragmatic abilities in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The second is to consider a possible implication of these data for an emerging empirical methodology in philosophy of language and mind. In pursuing the first aim, we expect our main audience to be clinicians and linguists interested in pragmatics. It is when we turn to methodological issues that we hope to pique the interest of philosophers. (...) Still, the methodological issue becomes pressing precisely because of the empirical finding—thus the first part is important for the philosophical readers as well. The game plan is as follows. Given our intended dual audience, we begin with background on autism and pragmatics. Some of this material will be familiar to some of our readership, but few will know all of it. (Those who do are invited to skip these sections.) We then present some results from our pilot study on a corpus of speech by people with ASD. The heart of our finding is that certain speakers with ASD, who have severe trouble with familiar pragmatic phenomena such as metaphor and conversational implicature, exhibit surprising abilities with respect to what is often called “pragmatic determinants of what is said.” We turn next to a possible implication of this finding: It seems to suggest that hitherto seemingly promising evidence from ASD about the semantics/pragmatics boundary is.. (shrink)

Humeans and non-Humeans reasonably agree that there may be necessary connections between entities that are identical or merely partly distinct—between, e.g., sets and their individual members, fusions and their individual parts, instances of determinates and determinables, members of certain natural kinds and certain of their intrinsic properties, and (especially among physicalists) certain physical and mental states. Humeans maintain, however, that as per “Hume’s Dictum”, there are no necessary connections between entities that are wholly distinct;1 and in particular, no necessary causal (...) connections between such entities (even when the background conditions requisite for causation are in place). The Humean’s differential treatment appears principled, in reflecting that commonly accepted necessary connections involve constitutional relations, whereas wholly distinct entities (notably, causes and effects) do not constitute each other. I’ll argue, however, that the appearance of principle is not genuine, as per the following conditional: Constitutional→Causal: If one accepts certain constitutional necessities, one should accept certain causal necessities. This result provides needed leverage in assessing the two main frameworks in the metaphysics of science, treating natural kinds, causes, laws of nature, and the like. These frameworks differ primarily on whether Hume’s Dictum is taken as a working constraint on theorizing; and it has proved difficult for either side to criticize the other without presupposing their preferred stance on the dictum, hence talking past one another. The arguments for Constitutional→Causal are based, however, in general and independent considerations about what facts in the world might plausibly warrant our beliefs in certain constitutional necessities involving broadly scientific entities. The Humean can respond to these arguments, which reveal a deep tension in their view, at attendant costs of implausibilty and adhocery. The non-Humean framework doesn’t face any such tension between constitutional and causal necessities, however, and so in this respect comes out ahead. (shrink)

Adotando como referencial teórico a obra de Jürgen Habermas, bem como as bases para o seu pensamento na Escola de Frankfurt, o presente artigo busca analisar em que medida o horizonte que se vislumbra diante da crise sanitária pode ser tomado em perspectiva para se pensar a questão do direito ao meio ambiente sustentável. Para tanto, realizou-se uma pesquisa qualitativa, sob o método hipotético-dedutivo, em uma abordagem exploratória e adotando a técnica de pesquisa bibliográfica. Ao final, conclui-se que a racionalidade (...) moderna necessita de novos paradigmas na relação homem-natureza, a qual não se pode ser mediada pela razão instrumental hegemônica. (shrink)

Our essay will be focused in the epistolary relation that Elise Reimarus (1735-1805) maintained with Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786) and F.H. Jacobi (1743-1819) because of the discussion begun by Jacobi after claiming G.E. Lessing (1729-1783) to be a “spinozist”. The analysis of Reimarus’ intervention will be divided in two parts: in the first one, we will shortly contextualize de discussion by giving the tenets of Lessing’s thought that justify Jacobi’s claim; secondly, we will offer an sketch of Elise’s biography in order (...) to proceed afterwards to judge her role within the debate. (i) By showing the way Elise took part in such intellectual affairs and (ii) by noting the relevance of her contributions, (iii) we will close the essay with a reflection on what tools and strategies are to be considered in order to include women when writing history of philosophy and thought. (shrink)

Ample research demonstrates that parents’ experience-based mental representations of attachment—cognitive models of close relationships—relate to their children’s social-emotional development. However, no research to date has examined how parents’ attachment representations relate to another crucial domain of children’s development: brain development. The present study is the first to integrate the separate literatures on attachment and developmental social cognitive neuroscience to examine the link between mothers’ attachment representations and 3- to 8-year-old children’s brain structure. We hypothesized that mothers’ attachment representations would relate (...) to individual differences in children’s brain structures involved in stress regulation—specifically, amygdala and hippocampal volumes—in part via mothers’ responses to children’s distress. We assessed 52 mothers’ attachment representations and children’s brain structure. Mothers’ secure base script knowledge was significantly related to children’s smaller left amygdala volume but was unrelated to hippocampal volume; we found no indirect links via maternal responses to children’s distress. Exploratory analyses showed associations between mothers’ attachment representations and white matter and thalamus volumes. Together, these preliminary results suggest that mothers’ attachment representations may be linked to the development of children’s neural circuitry related to stress regulation. (shrink)

The meaning of intelligence has varied across time and place, with these varied constructions holding consequences for people and society at large. There is, however, little consensus around what intelligence actually means and how the construct should be applied. Educational discourses, including textbooks used to train teachers, have commonly been the site for the dissemination of ‘authoritative’ information surrounding intelligence. In this article, we present findings from a discourse analysis informed by discursive psychology of passages related to defining and measuring (...) intelligence taken from 10 educational psychology textbooks designed for university students studying to become teachers. Our research question was: How is the dilemmatic nature of the construct of intelligence managed in introductory educational psychology textbooks at the level of discourse? We discuss the function of sequencing and topic displays and how the textbook authors navigated the ideological dilemmas surrounding the construct of intelligence. We conclude by pointing to the implications for teacher training and the importance of social constructionist projects that place into question presumably ‘real’ psychological constructs. (shrink)

The capability approach was developed as a response to the ‘equality of what?’ question, which asks what the metric of equality should be. The alternative answers are, broadly, welfare, resources or capabilities. G.A. Cohen has raised influential criticisms of this last response. He suggests that the capability approach’s focus on individuals’ freedom – their capability to control their own lives – renders its view of well-being excessively ‘athletic’, ignoring benefits achieved passively, without the active involvement of the benefitted individual. However, (...) positing ‘capabilities’ as the appropriate metric of distributive justice need not commit capability theorists to a comprehensive account of well-being, and so not to the athletic conception Cohen ascribes to them. Their aim can, instead, be to delineate legitimate government action and guide egalitarian public policy. Capabilities, in this context, are not just components of individual well-being; they must also be the appropriate goal of just distributive policies. When understood in this way, as a guide to policy, I will argue that the capability approach’s focus on ‘athletic’ individual freedom and control is justified: in the public domain, it is important not just that individuals receive ‘benefits’, but that they participate in their achievement. (shrink)

Given the long-standing controversy about whether the brain-dead should be considered alive in an irreversible coma or dead despite displaying apparent signs of life, the ethical and policy issues posed when family members insist on continued treatment are not as simple as commentators have claimed. In this article, we consider the kind of policy that should be adopted to manage a family's insistence that their brain-dead loved one continues to receive supportive care. We argue that while it would be ethically (...) inappropriate to continue to devote scarce acute care resources to such patients in a hospital setting, it may not be ethically inappropriate for patients to receive these resources in certain other settings. Thus, if a family insists on continuing to care for their brain-dead loved at their home, we should not, from a policy perspective, interfere with the family's wishes. We also argue that healthcare professionals should make some effort to facilitate the transfer of brain-dead patients to these other settings when families insist on continued treatment despite being informed about the lack of any potential for recovery of consciousness. Our arguments are strengthened by the fact that patients in a persistent vegetative state, who, when correctly diagnosed, also have no potential for recovery of consciousness, are routinely transferred from hospitals to nursing homes or long-term care facilities where they continue to be ventilated, tube fed and to receive other supportive care. We also briefly explore the question of who should be responsible for the costs of such treatment at the long-term care facility. (shrink)

Achieving valid informed consent from a human research participant involves an ongoing process designed to protect the participant and ensure their rights, safety, and well-being are not compromise...

Is the state we experienced meditating a religious, philosophical, mystical experience? Or is it just a change in brain physiology? Is it possible to achieve a state "beyond the mind" (meditative state) through a technique that uses the mind (meditative technique)? This article explores these aspects by the perspective of neurobiology.

In an era when public faith in politicians is dwindling, yet trust in scientists remains relatively high, governments are increasingly emphasizing the role of science based policy-making in response to challenges such as climate change and global pandemics. In this paper we question the quality of some scientific advice given to governments and the robustness and transparency of the entire framework which envelopes such advice, all of which raise serious ethical concerns. In particular we focus on the so-called Imperial Model (...) which heavily influenced the government of the United Kingdom in devising its response to the COVID-19 crisis. We focus on and highlight several fundamental methodological flaws of the model, raise concerns as to the robustness of the system which permitted these to remain unchallenged, and discuss the relevant ethical consequences. (shrink)

In this paper, we discuss how phenomenology might cogently express the way painful experiences are layered with complex intersubjective meaning. In particular, we propose a critical conception of pain as an intricate multi-levelled phenomenon, deeply ingrained in the constitution of one’s sense of bodily self and emerging from a web of intercorporeal, social, cultural, and political relations. In the first section, we review and critique some conceptual accounts of pain. Then, we explore how pain is involved in complex ways with (...) modalities of pleasure and displeasure, enacted personal meaning, and contexts of empathy or shame. We aim to show why a phenomenology of pain must acknowledge the richness and diversity of peculiar painful experiences. The second section then weaves these critical insights into Husserlian phenomenology of embodiment, sensation, and localisation. We introduce the distinction between Body-Object and Lived-Body to show how pain presents intersubjectively. Furthermore, we stress that, while pain seems to take a marginal position in Husserl’s whole corpus, its role is central in the transcendental constitution of the Lived-Body, interacting with the personal, interpersonal, and intersubjective levels of experiential constitution. Taking a critical-phenomenological perspective, we then concretely explore how some people may experience structural conditions which may make their experiences more or less painful. (shrink)

The proportion of the world’s population living in urban areas is increasing rapidly, with the vast majority of this growth in developing countries. As growing populations in urban areas demand greater food supplies, coupled with a rise in rural to urban migration and the need to create livelihood options, there has been an increase in urban agriculture worldwide. Urban agriculture is commonly discussed as a sustainable solution for dealing with gaps in the local food system, and proponents often highlight the (...) many social, environmental, and economic benefits. We argue that the sustainability of urban agriculture should not be assumed. There is a need for research to take a bottom-up approach, exploring the influence that city-level conditions have on livelihood decisions by farmers and how this shapes the practice of urban agriculture. This paper uses a case study for an in-depth look at urban agriculture in Delhi, India to understand from the farmers’ perspective how urban agriculture is practiced and what factors influence farmers’ livelihood decisions. Using a team-based, multi-method Rapid Assessment Process, data were collected through preliminary key informant interviews, field observations, semi-structured interviews with urban farmers, and geographic information systems mapping. This research provides an in-depth description of market-oriented urban agriculture in a developing country, explores how farmers’ livelihood decisions are embedded in the urban context, and discusses the potential of urban agriculture as a sustainable city-system. (shrink)

Bowers et al. rightly emphasise that deep learning models often fail to capture constraints on visual perception that have been discovered by previous research. However, the solution is not to discard deep learning altogether, but to design stimuli and tasks that more closely reflect the problems that biological vision evolved to solve, such as understanding scenes and preparing skilled action.

Associative memory is the ability to link together components of stimuli. Previous evidence suggests that prior familiarization with study items affects the nature of the association between stimuli. More specifically, novel stimuli are learned in a more context-dependent fashion than stimuli that have been encountered previously without the current context. In the current study, we first acquired behavioral data from 62 human participants to conceptually replicate this effect. Participants were instructed to memorize multiple object-scene pairs and were then tested on (...) their recognition memory for the objects. Importantly, 1 day prior, participants had been familiarized with half of the object stimuli. During the test phase, the objects were either matched to the same scene as during study or swapped with a different object’s scene. Our results conceptually replicated the context-dependency effect by showing that breaking up a studied object-context pairing is more detrimental to object recognition performance for non-familiarized objects than for familiarized objects. Second, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to determine whether medial temporal lobe encoding-related activity patterns are reflective of this familiarity-related context effect. Data acquired from 25 human participants indicated a larger effect of familiarization on encoding-related hippocampal activity for objects presented within a scene context compared to objects presented alone. Our results showed that both retrieval-related accuracy patterns and hippocampal activation patterns were in line with a familiarization-mediated context-dependency effect. (shrink)

DO RESTABELECIMENTO DO PRAZO DE VALIDADE DOS CRÉDITOS DE CELULARES PRÉ-PAGOS: UMA ANÁLISE DA DECISÃO DO STJ A PARTIR DA LEGISLAÇÃO CONSUMERISTA.

Resenha do novo livro de Israel Finkelstein, publicado em inglês em 2013. Israel Finkelstein apresenta nova visão acerca do reino do Norte Israel, apontando a compilação e redação final das narrativas bíblicas pelos judaítas, depois da queda do reino do Norte Israel. É uma bela obra que resume o desenvolvimento das pesquisas arqueológicas do autor.