The goal of this article is to show that formal analysis and reconstructions may be useful to discuss and shed light on substantive meta-theoretical issues. We proceed here by exemplification, analysing and reconstructing as a case study a paradigmatic biochemical theory, the Monod-Wyman-Changeux theory of allosterism, and applying the reconstruction to the discussion of some issues raised by prominent representatives of the new mechanist philosophy. We conclude that our study shows that at least in this case mechanicism and more traditional (...) accounts are not rivals but complementary approaches. (shrink)

Gender, age, and culturally specific beliefs are often considered relevant to observed variation in social interactions. At present, however, the scientific literature is mixed with respect to the significance of these factors in guiding moral judgments. In this study, we explore the role of each of these factors in moral judgment by presenting the results of a web-based study of Eastern (i.e., Russia) and Western (i.e., USA, UK, Canada) subjects, male and female, and young and old. Participants ( n = (...) 659) responded to hypothetical moral scenarios describing situations where sacrificing one life resulted in saving five others. Though men and women from both types of cultures judged (1) harms caused by action as less permissible than harms caused by omission, (2) means-based harms as less permissible than side-effects, and (3) harms caused by contact as less permissible than by non-contact, men in both cultures delivered more utilitarian judgments (save the five, sacrifice one) than women. Moreover, men from Western cultures were more utilitarian than Russian men, with no differences observed for women. In both cultures, older participants delivered less utilitarian judgments than younger participants. These results suggest that certain core principles may mediate moral judgments across different societies, implying some degree of universality, while also allowing a limited range of variation due to sociocultural factors. (shrink)

Little is known empirically about the role of supervisor listening and the emotional conditions that listening facilitates. Having the opportunity to speak is only one part of the communication process between employees and supervisors. Employees also react to whether they perceive the supervisor as actively listening. In two studies, this paper examines three important outcomes of employee perceptions of supervisor listening. Furthermore, positive and negative affect are investigated as distinct mediating mechanisms. Results from Study 1 revealed that employee perceptions of (...) supervisor listening reflected supervisors’ self-ratings of how they listen to their employees and these perceptions were associated with the three work outcomes. Study 2 replicated the findings in a larger sample and found evidence for two explanatory mechanisms. Positive affect mediated the effects of perceived supervisor listening on organizational citizenship behavior and turnover intention, whereas negative affect mediated listening effects on emotional exhaustion and turnover intention. Implications for organizational research and managerial practice concerning workforce sustainability are discussed. (shrink)

Andy Clark and David Chalmers (1998) argue that certain mental states and processes can be partially constituted by objects located beyond one’s brain and body: this is their extended mind thesis (EM). But they maintain that consciousness relies on processing that is too high in speed and bandwidth to be realized outside the body (see Chalmers, 2008, and Clark, 2009). I evaluate Clark’s and Chalmers’ reason for denying that consciousness extends while still supporting unconscious state extension. I argue that their (...) reason is not well grounded and does not hold up against foreseeable advances in technology. I conclude that their current position needs re-evaluation. If their original parity argument works as a defence of EM, they have yet to identify a good reason why it does not also work as a defence of extended consciousness. I end by advancing a parity argument for extended consciousness and consider some possible replies. (shrink)

Master teacher Mukunda Stiles offers 18 lessons in Tantra Yoga, a practice of transformational self-healing in which we can deepen awareness of our bodies, ...

The extended mind thesis maintains that the functional contributions of tools and artefacts can become so essential for our cognition that they can be constitutive parts of our minds. In other words, our tools can be on a par with our brains: our minds and cognitive processes can literally ‘extend’ into the tools. Several extended mind theorists have argued that this ‘extended’ view of the mind offers unique insights into how we understand, assess, and treat certain cognitive conditions. In this (...) chapter we suggest that using AI extenders, i.e., tightly coupled cognitive extenders that are imbued with machine learning and other ‘artificially intelligent’ tools, presents both new ethical challenges and opportunities for mental health. We focus on several mental health conditions that can develop differently by the use of AI extenders for people with cognitive disorders and then discuss some of the related opportunities and challenges. (shrink)

Alan Turing, one of the fathers of computing, warned that Artificial Intelligence (AI) could one day pose an existential risk to humanity. Today, recent advancements in the field AI have been accompanied by a renewed set of existential warnings. But what exactly constitutes an existential risk? And how exactly does AI pose such a threat? In this chapter we aim to answer these questions. In particular, we will critically explore three commonly cited reasons for thinking that AI poses an existential (...) threat to humanity: the control problem, the possibility of global disruption from an AI race dynamic, and the weaponization of AI. (shrink)

Abstract:This paper offers a historico-political exegesis of V-I Mudimbe’s Invention of Africa and Idea of Africa, reading how these texts respond to a post-independence African context of political and epistemic despair. This despair reflects at once the desire for a non-Western claim to knowledge and life, for political and economic autonomy from the West, and the seeming impossibilities (confirmed by the political ordinary) of enacting these. Retracing Mudimbe’s analysis of African political thought in the wake of Négritude and his critique (...) of representation, this essay works through Mudimbe’s intellectual historical methods to draw out a subtextual response to questions of historicity, political commitment, and the role of intellectual thought in Black resistant response. I argue that these questions are instantiated in the concept of “absolute discourse.” This concept reveals a theory of speech, inhabitation, and contingency critically aligned with postcolonial Marxist demands for authenticity, sovereignty and authority. Moreover, through this, and against any presumption of futility, I argue that Mudimbe constitutes a theory of politics—of resistance, claim, and seizure, and their limits—and contingency amidst seeming and real epistemic and material closures. (shrink)

This paper is about even in downward entailing contexts. Karttunen and Peters (1979) have shown that there are two different sets of implicatures of even in such contexts. They argue that the two sets of implicatures are derived by allowing even to take scope either higher or lower than a negative polarity licenser. Rooth (1985) argues that even is lexically ambiguous, that is, there is a negative polarity even. I argue against Rooth's ambiguity theory and show that within Rooth's theory (...) of focus, a scope theory of even has better empirical coverage. I also answer objections to the scope theory raised by Rooth (1985) and Karttunen and Karttunen (1977). (shrink)

El objetivo del presente trabajo es presentar los primeros pasos de una reconstrucción estructuralista de la teoría alostérica MWC. Esta teoría fue presentada en dos artículos publicados en Journal of Molecular Biology, en el primero de ellos “Allosteric proteins and cellular control systems”, de 1963, una versión simplificada, y en el segundo, “On the nature of allosteric transitions: a plausible model”, publicado en la misma revista en 1965, una versión más acabada. En estos trabajos, el ganador del premio Nobel en (...) Fisiología, Jacques Monod, introduce por primera vez un nuevo concepto que revolucionará la bioquímica y biología de la época: el alosterismo. (shrink)

Political Insults proposes a theory of international insult that focuses on interrelations between social identity and power. The book analyses conflicts between the U.S. and North Korea, sovereignty contestations around islands in the Japanese sea, Pussy Riot in Russia, veterans in Ukraine, and Nagorno-Karabakh.

JUSTIÇA RESTAURATIVA: UMA ANÁLISE SOCIOLÓGICA DOS FINS QUE OS MEIOS PUNITIVOS NÃO ALCANÇAM.

This study explored the effect of attitude towards entrepreneurship, need for achievement, risk-taking propensity, proactive personality, self-efficacy, opportunity recognition competency, entrepreneurship education, uncertainty avoidance, and entrepreneurial knowledge on entrepreneurial intention among university students in Malaysia. This quantitative study had adopted the cross-sectional design approach and involved 391 university students in Malaysia via the online survey. The study outcomes revealed that the NFA, PRP, and SLE significantly affect students’ attitudes towards entrepreneurship. Moreover, entrepreneurship education and UNA significantly affect ORC. Finally, ATE (...) has a positive and significant effect on ENIN among university students in Malaysia. As entrepreneurship offers an alternative career path for people seeking economic prosperity and addressing social issues, including unemployment, the government should formulate effective policies and regulations that support entrepreneurship activities. Universities and other institutions should play a pivotal role in providing the proper exposure via entrepreneurship education while honing the essential traits for a career in entrepreneurship. (shrink)

Your smartphone is much more than just a phone. It can tell a more intimate story about you than your best friend. No other piece of hardware in history, not even your brain, contains the quality or quantity of information held on your phone: it ‘knows’ whom you speak to, when you speak to them, what you said, where you have been, your purchases, photos, biometric data, even your notes to yourself – and all this dating back years. In this (...) piece I ask whether, given the role they play in our lives, our devices deserve the same legal protections as our brains and bodies? (shrink)

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the media have repeatedly praised healthcare workers for their ‘heroic’ work. Although this gratitude is undoubtedly appreciated by many, we must be cautious about overuse of the term ‘hero’ in such discussions. The challenges currently faced by healthcare workers are substantially greater than those encountered in their normal work, and it is understandable that the language of heroism has been evoked to praise them for their actions. Yet such language can have potentially negative consequences. Here, I (...) examine what heroism is and why it is being applied to the healthcare workers currently, before outlining some of the problems associated with the heroism narrative currently being employed by the media. Healthcare workers have a clear and limited duty to treat during the COVID-19 pandemic, which can be grounded in a broad social contract and is strongly associated with certain reciprocal duties that society has towards healthcare workers. I argue that the heroism narrative can be damaging, as it stifles meaningful discussion about what the limits of this duty to treat are. It fails to acknowledge the importance of reciprocity, and through its implication that all healthcare workers have to be heroic, it can have negative psychological effects on workers themselves. I conclude that rather than invoking the language of heroism to praise healthcare workers, we should examine, as a society, what duties healthcare workers have to work in this pandemic, and how we can support them in fulfilling these. (shrink)

Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) and social phobia (SP) are major anxiety disorders identified by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th edition (DSM-IV). They are comorbid, overlap in symptoms, yet present with distinct features (worry in GAD and fear of embarrassment in SP). Both have also been explained in terms of conditioning-based models. However, there is little reasoning currently to believe that GAD in adulthood reflects heightened conditionability or heightened threat processing—though patients with SP may show heightened processing (...) of social threat stimuli. Moreover, the computational architectures that maintain these disorders in adulthood are different. For GAD this may reflect the development of an inefficient “worrying” strategy of emotional regulation. For SP this appears to reflect the atypical processing of self-referential information. (shrink)

W. Dilthey’s program of “criticism of historical reason” was formed in a polemic with the legacy of I. Kant on the basis of transcendental reflection of the data of descriptive psychology. It was focused on understanding the radical difference between the sciences of the spirit and the sciences of nature. Starting from a critical rethinking of Kant's legacy within the boundaries of his own version of the academic philosophy of life, Dilthey began to talk about the fact that the reason, (...) directing the cognitive activity of the subject, is characterized, first of all, not by the theoretical “purity”, but by its involvement in the “open” flow of history, which it gives meaning and sense through language. It interacts with historical experience, which arises through the synthesis of actual events perception in the time flow and memory images with real categories and concepts constructed by the intellect of the human subject. The ability to judge what is happening in history, its assessment in a humanistic perspective, is also considered by Dilthey as inseparable from the work of historical reason. The reason involved in the flow of time and life cannot be a carrier of theoretical “purity” and acts as inherently hermeneutic in its nature. Dilthey presented an interesting analysis of the main levels of hermeneutical procedure - emotional perception, expression and understanding, aimed at comprehension of the diversity of spiritual and cultural worlds in synchrony and diachrony of their existence. Denying the possibility of comprehending the meaning and sense of history by constructing substantialist schemes, he asserted the importance of narrative representation of the past in the light of the present. Dilthey's project of “criticism of historical reason” was based on the idea of the “openness” of the meaning of the past, due to its rootedness in the very way of human existence in time. This idea was inherited and further developed in the horizon of the fundamental ontology of M. Heidegger and other contemporary thinkers of hermeneutical orientation. (shrink)

Este artículo examina las medidas adoptadas por el Gobierno de Colombia para atender las necesidades de la población diagnosticada con coinfección de los virus de inmunodeficiencia humana (VIH) y de hepatitis C (VHC), inclusive las personas privadas de la libertad, y de esa manera garantizar su derecho fundamental a la salud. Para verificar tales acciones, se realiza una revisión de las guías elaboradas por el Ministerio de Salud y Protección Social y la Cuenta de Alto Costo, en las que se (...) aborda el panorama de estas enfermedades, así como los mecanismos legales para acceder al tratamiento. Los hallazgos indican que, si bien el Sistema de Salud en Colombia no es excelente, lo cierto es que se evidenció la gestión de los últimos gobiernos para implementar una política de prevención de tales enfermedades, así como, para destinar mayores recursos públicos que permitan una adecuada satisfacción de las necesidades sanitarias de este grupo vulnerable. (shrink)

La crisis sanitaria ocasionada por la expansión del Covid-19 pone en evidencia las consecuencias que tiene sobre la vida común la mercantilización de lo público y el mercado como eje regulador de la vida y de las relaciones humanas. El contexto actual demostró la cadena de inequidades que enfrentan las mujeres en la región, pudiendo identificarse al menos tres dimensiones en las que se expresa esta desigualdad: los cuidados, el trabajo y la violencia. Es menester de este artículo realizar un (...) estudio del impacto de la pandemia en estas tres dimensiones, buscando aportar a la reflexión para la acción que permita repensar un mundo pospandemia, donde la perspectiva de género no se constituya como una agenda coyuntural de los gobiernos, sino como un elemento fundamental en la transformación de nuestras sociedades. Este artículo es fundamentalmente descriptivo, utilizando para su análisis la información de datos secundarios, principalmente cuantitativos, de diferentes fuentes de información; por tanto se trata de datos recolectados, procesados, analizados y publicados con propósito diferente a los objetivos de este artículo. Las principales fuentes de información han sido ONU, OIT, CEPAL, ONU MUJERES, UNESCO y ACNUR. (shrink)

How do why-interrogatives work? How do they express the questions they express, in the contexts in which they express them? In this essay, I argue that, at a fundamental level, why-interrogatives work just like other wh-interrogatives, particularly other adjunct wh-interrogatives, and they express the questions they express, in the contexts in which they express them, by the same means that other wh-interrogatives do. These conclusions go against a trend in recent work on why-interrogatives, which holds that they are syntactically and (...) semantically unlike other wh-interrogatives. Since the claim that why-interrogatives are unlike other wh-interrogatives has been taken to support various philosophical theses about the nature of why-questions and explanation, showing that why-interrogatives are just like other wh-interrogatives undermines this line of support for these theses. (shrink)

This book explores the ways in which memory sites contribute to the dynamics of identity-based conflicts, fuelling fears, sharpening divisions, and justifying violence. Through an analysis of the dynamics of identity-based conflicts, the book shows how memory sites become intertwined with the transformations of social boundaries and perceptions of relative deprivation, outgroup threat, collective axiology, and power relations. It posits that these two sets of factors - the functioning of collective memory as an ideological construct and the transformation of conflictual (...) social relations - define the role and influence of memory sites in the dynamics of identity-based conflicts. Through multiple case studies representing different dynamics -- dealing with fascist and communist pasts in Italy, post-colonial relations between South Korea and Japan, ethnic conflict in Kosovo, and tribal acknowledgement for Native American Nations - the book discusses how memory sites contribute to competition over ownership, fights for legitimacy, claims of entitlements, and negative portrayals of the Other. In doing so, it outlines four major functions of memory sites - enhancing, ascribing, interacting, and legitimizing - and shows how they contribute to and shape the structure and dynamics of conflict. Concentrating on the linkages between memory sites, violence prevention, and reconciliation, the book proposes solutions for promoting peace, including the focus on plurality of heritage, recognition of fluidity of meanings, and resistance to singular interpretations and manipulations by identity entrepreneurs. This volume will be of much interest to students of peace and conflict studies, memory studies and International Relations in general. (shrink)

El propósito de este estudio es determinar las características y cantidad de publicaciones biomédicas retractadas sobre la covid-19, a través de la revisión de las bases de datos PubMed y Retraction Watch, para determinar autores, título, revista, fecha de publicación, fecha de retractación y motivo de la retractación. La literatura sobre la covid-19 ya alcanza más de 280.000 artículos, de los cuales 63 ya han sido retractados. Se observan rápidos procesos editoriales tanto para la publicación como para la retractación. Se (...) destacan 25 artículos donde no se proporciona el motivo de la retractación. Dentro de los que sí lo señalan se encuentran publicaciones duplicadas, plagios, falta de aprobación del comité de ética, problemas de datos y metodológicos. (shrink)

The extended mind thesis prompted philosophers to think about the different shapes our minds can take as they reach beyond our brains and stretch into new technologies. Some of us rely heavily on the environment to scaffold our cognition, reorganizing our homes into rich cognitive niches, for example, or using our smartphones as swiss-army knives for cognition. But the thesis also prompts us to think about other varieties of minds and the unique forms they take. What are we to make (...) of the exotic distributed nervous systems we see in octopuses, for example, or the complex collectives of bees? In this paper, I will argue for a robust version of the extended mind thesis that includes the possibility of extended consciousness. This thesis will open up new ways of understanding the different forms that conscious minds can take, whether human or nonhuman. The thesis will also challenge the popular belief that consciousness exists exclusively in the brain. Furthermore, despite the attention that the extended mind thesis has received, there has been relatively less written about the possibility of extended consciousness. A number of prominent defenders of the extended mind thesis have even called the idea of extended consciousness implausible. I will argue, however, that extended consciousness is a viable theory and it follows from the same ‘parity argument’ that Clark and Chalmers first advanced to support the extended mind thesis. What is more, it may even provide us with a valuable paradigm for how we understand some otherwise puzzling behaviors in certain neurologically abnormal patients as well as in some nonhuman animals. (shrink)

En este trabajo ofrezco una elucidación de la normatividad de lo mental en términos de la perspectiva de segunda persona, con la esperanza de abrir un horizonte conceptual que nos permita ir más allá de Donald Davidson. A tal efecto, el artículo tiene la siguiente estructura. En la primera parte presento su original respuesta al problema mente/cuerpo y reconstruyo su argumentación a favor de la tesis de la irreducibilidad de los conceptos mentales. En la segunda parte me ocupo del rasgo (...) que, en su sistema, porta la peculiaridad de lo mental, a saber: la normatividad. En la tercera sección exploro y evalúo el tratamiento davidsoniano de las perspectivas de primera, segunda y tercera persona con vistas a precisar, finalmente, mi propuesta. (shrink)

Este comunicado fue presentado como parte del seminario "Hacia un modelo de cuidados y apoyos comunitarios: una perspectiva feminista". En él se aborda la precariedad y las dificultades que enfrentan las personas cuidadoras en España, tanto profesionales como no profesionales. Destaca que la mayoría son mujeres, muchas migrantes, quienes experimentan condiciones laborales desfavorables y carecen de apoyo adecuado, afectando su salud mental y situación económica. La exposición refuerza la necesidad urgente de mejorar estas condiciones laborales para revalorizar el sector, atraer (...) a más personas y promover la igualdad de género, enfatizando el considerable impacto económico del trabajo de cuidados no remunerado. (shrink)