The purpose of this article is to translate teaching experiences through an interpretation of the world of signs. In between confinements, teachers exercise on stagings that are not just replicating transformations of themselves; but, unique recreations in their worldliness, and in potent sensibilities; possibly different in their own repetition. As a way of resistance in the subjectification experience, we reinvent ourselves with worlds already created, rethinking the school as an environment, institution, space, time, world, and form. With Cortázar, we place (...) ourselves in the unstable opposition, where there is an amorous combat between signs and their interpretation. And this requires a permanent process of reconstruction and recreation of the research perspective, sustained, especially, in Deleuze. Being able to translate in a different way what we are doing, caused concerns in ourselves and even in others. (shrink)

A palavra-chave é encontro, ou, talvez sua estranha intenção: a impossibilidade de expressar uma experiência que certos modos de classificação, ou uma tradição, impedem de ver o que é. Experiência que resiste ao acabado e inicia um processo de reconhecimento para dar lugar à expressão de seus vazios. Como criar esse percurso que se apodera de singularidades que a constituem? Deparamos-nos com a expressão de um ser em potência: toda vez que se tenta apreendê-lo, ele se deixa unir novamente por (...) aquilo que não tinha nada em comum, impelindo-me à criação. Expressa a necessidade de compreender os caminhos pelos quais alcancei a revelação dos pensamentos indizíveis que permitiram apreender como se engendram em nossa experiência. Descolando-se do plano da educação, seus procedimentos dirigem-se ao externo, em direção a outros planos, além do humano, passando por um plano de experiências interiores; recolhem vestígios atemporais da nossa experiência e os agrupa de tal maneira que se explicam por meios pouco confessáveis, complicando-se na expressão. Dado o desenvolvimento singular da revelação que surge com a necessidade da expressão, só mais tarde é que pude entender: o que parecia falta de sentido era justamente o sentido. É complexo descrever o que nos aconteceu. Mas foi justamente na frustração de tentar capturar o aprendizado que conseguimos de alguma forma compreendê-lo, embora não soubéssemos inicialmente traduzir essa compreensão em palavras: aí nasceram os pensamentos indizíveis. Tenho sempre comigo a sensação de que sua concepção está comprometida, donde surge um tal de desconforto, cada vez que tentamos enquadrá-los em uma explicação. Embora toda explicação exista neles e deles dependa de tal maneira que não pode ser concebida sem eles, contanto que venha depois. No instante em que surge a necessidade de dar a conhecer, esta se constitui em si mesma em um objetivo concreto. Deixo aqui palavras inspiradas em experiências mal sucedidas e encontros subseqüentes. (shrink)

Did you know that Hillary Clinton sold weapons to ISIS? Or that Mike Pence called Michelle Obama “the most vulgar First Lady we’ve ever had”? No, you didn’t know these things. You couldn’t know them, because these claims are false.1 But many American voters believed them.One of the most distinctive features of the 2016 campaign was the rise of “fake news,” factually false claims circulated on social media, usually via channels of partisan camaraderie. Media analysts and social scientists are still (...) debating what role fake news played in Trump’s victory.2 But whether or not it drove the outcome, fake news certainly affected the choices of some individual voters.Why were people willing to believe easily... (shrink)

A microaggression is a small insulting act made disproportionately harmful by its part in an oppressive pattern of similar insults. How should you respond when made the victim of a microaggression? In this paper I survey several morally salient factors, including effects upon victims, perpetrators, and third parties. I argue, contrary to popular views, that ‘growing a thicker skin’ is not good advice nor is expressing reasonable anger always the best way to contribute to confronting oppression. Instead, appropriately responding to (...) microaggression involves difficult application of practical wisdom that does not easily fall under a simple prescription. (shrink)

Slips of the tongue, unwitting favoritism and stereotyped assumptions are just some examples of microaggression. Nearly all of us commit microaggressions at some point, even if we don’t intend to. Yet over time a pattern of microaggression can cause considerable harm by reminding members of marginalized groups of their precarious position. The Ethics of Microaggression is a much needed and clearly written exploration of this pervasive yet complex problem. What is microaggression and how do we know when it is occurring? (...) Can we be held responsible for microaggressions and if so, how? How has social media affected the problem? What role can philosophy play in understanding microaggression? Regina Rini explores these highly topical and controversial questions in an engaging and fair-minded way, arguing that an event is a microaggression precisely because it causes a marginalized person to experience an ambiguous encounter with oppression. She illustrates her argument with compelling examples from media, politics and psychology and explains the significance of essential concepts, such as media representation, reparative renaming, and safe spaces. The Ethics of Microaggression explains what microaggression is and offers strategies for combating it. Assuming no prior knowledge of the topic or philosophy, it demystifies a controversial and extremely important topic in clear language. It is ideal for anyone coming to the topic for the first time and for students in philosophy, gender studies, race theory, disability theory and social and political philosophy. (shrink)

Deepfake technology uses machine learning to fabricate video and audio recordings that represent people doing and saying things they've never done. In coming years, malicious actors will likely use this technology in attempts to manipulate public discourse. This paper prepares for that danger by explicating the unappreciated way in which recordings have so far provided an epistemic backstop to our testimonial practices. Our reasonable trust in the testimony of others depends, to a surprising extent, on the regulative effects of the (...) ever-present possibility of recordings of the events they testify about. As deepfakes erode the epistemic value of recordings, we may then face an even more consequential challenge to the reliability of our testimonial practices themselves. (shrink)

For several decades, research on situated cognition and affectivity has neglected cases in which environmental features in the niche have a negative impact on agents’ cognitive and affective wellbeing. Recently, however, a new research cluster has emerged that explores how things, technologies, and organisational systems across corporate, healthcare, and educational sectors wrongfully harm certain kinds of agents. This article contributes to this research cluster by integrating work on negative niche construction, structural oppression, enculturation, and self-narration. It thereby offers a new (...) perspective on the negative, structurally oppressive impact of the socio-culturally shaped niche on enculturated self-narration. The main argument is that master plots, understood as narrative arrangements that dominate in the socio-culturally shaped niche, contribute to the structural oppression of enculturated self-narrators with systematically undermined socio-cultural identities. An analysis of the influence of pronatalist master plotting on enculturated self-narration serves to illustrate and strengthen the overall argument. (shrink)

The role played by objectivity in continuum physics is reexamined in an attempt to establish fully its deep connection with classical and relativistic time derivatives. The way of distinguishing one element in the class of objective time derivatives may depend on the particular problem of interest; this is emphasized in conjunction with material relaxation phenomena described via hidden variable evolution equations.

Looking to understand religiosity as a social factor, contributory of constructions of meaning and omnipresent in diverse historical and cultural universes, this article focuses on the ritualistic dimension of religiosity. Adopting as a research problem the religious pilgrimages, take particular note of the shrines as symbolic markers towards the supernatural. This work has a double aim: to carry out a review and critical analysis of the religious pilgrimages and to study the specificity of the pilgrimages to the Shrine of Fatima, (...) located in Portugal. After a brief mention of the dialectic dissidence-coexistence of ancient religious practices in secularized societies, the concepts of worship, rites and sacrifices are revisited. There follows a more in-depth analysis of the theme of pilgrimages to shrines, from the concept and historical review to the particularity of pilgrimages to the Shrine of Fatima, the latter viewed as a geo-symbol of religious tourism in Portugal. The results of a survey of 784 pilgrims to the Shrine of Fátima are presented, focusing on the beliefs, experiences, perceptions, purposes and expectations regarding the pilgrimage, as well as the nature of the requests addressed to the Lady of Fatima and promises fulfilled. Throughout the article the pilgrim character is emphasized, not neglecting the analysis of the active, voluntary and sacrificial behavioral implication as legitimating the benefits already granted or to be granted. (shrink)

This article aims to contribute with a reflection about religious pluralism and religious freedom into Lusophony. Reviving pieces of history since the 15th century to the current post-colonial Portuguese society, Lusophony is analyzed in two complementary perspectives: That of the colonizing people and that of the colonized nations. Evangelization, colonization and Lusophony are, and always will be, inseparable. In addition to linguistic uniformity, Lusophony gave its distinctiveness in acculturation, miscegenation, plasticity, and Christianization policy. Using the census data in the 90’s, (...) 2000’s, and 2010’s, with a documentary approach, it is established a general overview of religious affiliation in Lusophony. Moving from a faith of obligation to a faith of conviction, Lusophony is nowadays characterized by a pluralist position in religious matters. The current situation of religious freedom is analyzed from the AIS report and the GRI and SHI indexes. From multiculturalism to acculturation, the plasticity, eclecticism, and religious syncretism acted as moderators towards the imposition of a new belief. The article ends by appealing to the inclusion of religious freedom in the political agenda, in order to defend human rights and peace in the world. (shrink)

As religiões sempre foram, em parte, religiões de cura. Ao longo da história, têm sido perspetivadas como aliadas na procura de sentido para a vida e suas vicissitudes, com destaque para as situações de doença. Desde o trabalho inaugura de William James, que referia o papel preventivo da religião em certas doenças, associado à ação da ciência, diversos estudos têm explorado a relação entre religiosidade/espiritualidade e saúde e bem-estar. Mas que papel e funções a religião desempenha hoje em dia, nas (...) sociedades ocidentais contemporâneas? Neste artigo procuramos dar resposta a esta questão, bem como sistematizar um conjunto de investigação acerca da influência da espiritualidade/religiosidade em diversas áreas do ser humano, designadamente na saúde, bem-estar, suporte social e prevenção e redução de comportamentos de risco. Dos autores clássicos à contemporaneidade, este artigo debruça-se sobre: i) conceitos de religiosidade e espiritualidade; ii) o papel e funções da religião; iii) a interligação entre religião, sociedade, religiosidade, saúde e doença; iv) a influência da espiritualidade e religiosidade na saúde, bem-estar, suporte social, prevenção primária e comportamentos de risco; v) Religiosidade e espiritualidade enquanto estratégia de coping para entendimento e manejo de situações críticas. (shrink)

Os fenómenos religiosos ocupam um lugar central na vida dos crentes, na dinâmica dos grupos, na coesão das comunidades locais e na ordenação global das sociedades nacionais e transnacionais. Incidindo sobre a dimensão ideológica da religiosidade, o presente artigo pretende contribuir para um entendimento mais alargado da secularização, seus contornos sociais e consequências individuais nas sociedades ocidentais contemporâneas. Nele se revisita a tese weberiana da Secularização e seus efeitos ao nível da significação religiosa, dos estatutos/papéis religiosos e da extensão pela (...) qual se vive o religioso. Discute-se a privatização da religião e a consolidação numa religião mais transferida para a privacidade de cada um. A regressão ocorrida ao nível do efeito global e totalizante da religião assiste à procura de novas formas/rumos espirituais. A secularização vê-se transfigurada em pós-secularização, momento oportuno para a reformulação das teorias sociológicas da religião. O mundo contemporâneo é plural e secularizado, desenvolvendo-se crenças fora dos contextos institucionais, associadas a uma atitude religiosa mais pragmática. Espelho das sociedades ocidentais contemporâneas, a realidade portuguesa aproxima-se de uma posição pluralista em matérias religiosas. A relação do cristão leigo com a Igreja transformou-se, passando-se de uma fé de obrigação para uma fé de convicção. (shrink)

Mental capacities, philosophers of mind and cognition have recently argued, are not exclusively realised in brain, but depend upon the rest of the body and the local environment. In this context, the concept of ‘scaffolding’ has been employed to specify the relationship between embodied organisms and their local environment. The core idea is that at least some cognitive and affective capacities are causally dependent upon environmental resources. However, in-depth examinations of specific examples of scaffolding as test cases for current theorising (...) about scaffolding have remained scarce. The aim of the current paper is to help close this gap. To this end, I will offer a characterisation of key aspects of ‘scaffolding’ that can help specify scaffolding relations. In a second step, I will analyse fictional textual narrative as a test case for accounts of cognitive and affective scaffolding. The key claim of this paper will be that fictional textual narrative can be considered as a scaffold that transforms our capacities in social understanding and empathising in the course of ontogeny. (shrink)

This short piece draws on political philosophy to show how social media interference operations can be used by hostile states to weaken the apparent legitimacy of democratic governments. Democratic societies are particularly vulnerable to this form of attack because democratic governments depend for their legitimacy on citizens' trust in one another. But when citizen see one another as complicit in the distribution of deceptive content, they lose confidence in the epistemic preconditions for democracy. The piece concludes with policy recommendations for (...) how democratic governments should protect themselves. (shrink)

Major depression is a prevalent mental disorder that leads to persistent negative mood and tremendous suffering in affected individuals. However, the biological realization of this disorder and associated symptom clusters remain poorly understood. Recently, phenomenological accounts of major depressive disorder and contributions to the emerging predictive processing account have provided valuable insights into the phenomenological and neuro-functional components that lead to manifestations of major depressive episodes. The purpose of this paper is to weave together these different strands of research to (...) develop a predictive processing account of major depressive disorder. In doing so, I will relate personal-level descriptions of associated phenomenal experiences to a sub-personal-level predictive processing account of the functional realization of major depression. I will argue that pervasive symptoms of the disorder, which include a diminished sense of agency, fatigue, social withdrawal, and rumination, are integrated by existential feelings of loss and impossibility. These phenomenal experiences, I will argue, are associated with dysfunctional processes of prediction error minimization, which are characterized by an overall decrease of the causal contributions of active inference and by distorted precision estimates. The emerging account promises to contribute to a better understanding of the complex processes that give rise to depressive experiences. (shrink)

This article presents an analytic critique of the predominant revisionist theoretical paradigm of just war (henceforth: revisionism). This is accomplished by means of a precise description and explanation of the practicability problem that confronts it, namely that soldiers that revisionism would deem “unjust” are bound to fail to fulfil the duties that revisionism imposes on them, because these duties are overdemanding. The article locates the origin of the practicability problem in revisionism’s overidealized conception of a soldier as an individual rational (...) agent analogous to the aggressor or defender in a case of lethal self-defense, who is capable of reflecting on the morality of his status in war and of the killing he performs and thus of recognizing his revisionist duties. Revisionism, however, ignores the following fact: Killing in war is not a natural human behavior. This is why training soldiers to kill is—and arguably always has been—a necessity for the existence of war and the killing that occurs in it. Moreover, this training involves a certain level of moral desensitization to violence whose goal is to prevent soldiers from thoroughly reflecting on the morality of the killing they engage in. Hence, war and killing can only exist if soldiers are trained in such a way that they do not reflect on whether they could be addressees of revisionist duties in the first place. This means that military training is a “constitutive condition” of soldiers and war, which is why it cannot excuse their noncompliance with revisionist duties, thus making these duties categorically overdemanding. The argument here draws on the paradigmatic example of modern US military killing conditioning (MC), but embeds it into a broader military-historical perspective that describes how soldiers have always needed to be mentally and morally influenced in order to enable war and killing. The article’s explanation of revisionism’s practicability problem has a constructive consequence for future theory-building in the ethics of war: It implies that a potentially revised ethical theory of war must necessarily analyze the institutions that allocate belligerent resources, if it aims to morally assess battlefield behavior in a practicable manner. (shrink)

Cognitive innovation has shaped and transformed our cognitive capacities throughout history. Until recently, cognitive innovation has not received much attention by empirical and conceptual research in the cognitive sciences. This paper is a first attempt to help close this gap. It will be argued that cognitive innovation is best understood in connection with cumulative cultural evolution and enculturation. Cumulative cultural evolution plays a vital role for the inter-generational transmission of the products of cognitive innovation. Furthermore, there are at least two (...) important functions of enculturation for cognitive innovation. First, enculturation is responsible for the ontogenetic acquisition of cognitive practices governing the interaction with innovative products. Second, successful processes of enculturation provide opportunities for subsequent innovative processes. The trans-generational trajectory of calculation from mathematical symbol systems to the first digital computers will serve as a paradigm example of the delicate interplay of cognitive innovation, cumulative cultural evolution, and enculturation. (shrink)

The debate between proponents and opponents of a role for empirical psychology in ethical theory seems to be deadlocked. This paper aims to clarify the terms of that debate, and to defend a principled middle position. I argue against extreme views, which see empirical psychology either as irrelevant to, or as wholly displacing, reflective moral inquiry. Instead, I argue that moral theorists of all stripes are committed to a certain conception of moral thought—as aimed at abstracting away from individual inclinations (...) and toward interpersonal norms—and that this conception tells against both extremes. Since we cannot always know introspectively whether our particular moral judgments achieve this interpersonal standard, we must seek the sort of self-knowledge offered by empirical psychology. Yet reflective assessment of this new information remains a matter of substantive normative theorizing, rather than an immediate consequence of empirical findings themselves. (shrink)

Preface to the special issue 'Depiction: Contemporary Studies on Pictorial Representation'.

O presente artigo visa destacar como se instaurou o processo de construção da cidadania junto ao jovem trabalhador, no período de 1971 a 1994, através de práticas assistenciais operacionalizadas pela instituição PROMENOR, possibilitando a formação e a inserção desses jovens no espaço social florianopolitano. Tal investigação partiu do pressuposto de que a descontinuidade verificada, tanto na trajetória da Instituição PROMENOR quanto nas possibilidades de construção da cidadania, junto ao jovem trabalhador, tem-se articulado de forma conflitiva e/ou interativa com à dinâmica (...) estrutural dos campos econômico, político e social, com base em relações de disputa, no decorrer do tempo. (shrink)

According to Thomas Metzinger, many human cognitive processes in the waking state are spontaneous and are deprived of the experience of epistemic agency. He considers mind wandering as a paradigm example of our recurring loss of epistemic agency. I will enrich this view by extending the scope of the concept of epistemic agency to include cases of depressive rumination and creative cognition, which are additional types of spontaneous cognition. Like mind wandering, they are characterized by unique phenomenal and functional properties (...) that give rise to varying degrees of epistemic agency. The main claim of this paper will be that the experience of being an epistemic agent within a certain time frame is a relational phenomenon that emerges from the organism’s capacity to interact with its cognitive niche. To explore this relation, I develop a new framework that integrates phenomenological considerations on epistemic agency with a functional account of the reciprocal coupling of the embodied organism with its cognitive niche. This account rests upon dynamical accounts of strong embodied and embedded cognition and recent work on cognitive niche construction. Importantly, epistemic agency and organism-niche coupling are gradual phenomena ranging from weak to strong realizations. The emerging framework will be employed to analyze mind wandering, depressive rumination, and creative cognition as well as their commonalities and differences. Mind wandering and depressive rumination are cases of weak epistemic agency and organism-niche coupling. However, there are also important phenomenological, functional, and neuronal differences. In contrast, creative cognition is a case of strong epistemic agency and organism-niche coupling. By providing a phenomenological and functional analysis of these distinct types of spontaneous cognition, we can gain a better understanding of the importance of organism-niche interaction for the realization of epistemic agency. (shrink)

Recent work on enculturation suggests that our cognitive capacities are significantly transformed in the course of the scaffolded acquisition of cognitive practices such as reading and writing. Phylogenetically, enculturation is the result of the co-evolution of human organisms and their socio-culturally structured cognitive niche. It is rendered possible by evolved cerebral and extra-cerebral bodily learning mechanisms that make human organisms apt to acquire culturally inherited cognitive practices. In addition, cultural learning allows for the intergenerational transmission of relevant knowledge and skills. (...) Ontogenetically, enculturation is associated with neural plasticity and the development of new motor routines and action schemas. It relies on scaffolded learning that structures novice-teacher interactions. The acquisition of reading and writing are paradigm examples of enculturation. Based on an empirically informed analysis of the components of enculturation, I will apply the emerging account of enculturated cognition to narrative practices. To date, research on the impact of narratives on the constitution of the self and our understanding of folk psychology has not paid much attention to the question how narratives are influenced by cumulative cultural evolution and our capacity to acquire reading and writing during ontogeny. I will argue that textual narratives, above and beyond oral narratives, provide genuinely new ways of narration. Therefore, the enculturated interaction with textual narratives has the potential to contribute to a better understanding of ourselves and other cognitive agents. (shrink)

Contemporary and emerging chatbots can be fine-tuned to imitate the style, tenor, and knowledge of a corpus, including the corpus of a particular individual. This makes it possible to build chatbots that imitate people who are no longer alive — deathbots. Such deathbots can be used in many ways, but one prominent way is to facilitate the process of grieving. In this paper, we present a framework that helps make sense of this process. In particular, we argue that deathbots can (...) serve as affective scaffolds, modulating and shaping the emotions of the bereaved. We contextualize this affective scaffolding by comparing it to earlier technologies that have also been used to scaffold the process of grieving, arguing that deathbots offer some interesting novelties that may transform the continuing bonds of intimacy that the bereaved can have with the dead. We conclude with some ethical reflections on the promises and perils of this new technology. (shrink)

It is a philosophical truism that we must think of others as moral agents, not merely as causal or statistical objects. But why? I argue that this follows from the best resolution of an antinomy between our experience of morality as necessarily binding on the will and our knowledge that all moral beliefs originate in contingent histories. We can address this antinomy only by understanding moral deliberation via interpersonal relationships, which simultaneously vindicate and constrains morality’s bind on the will. This (...) means that moral agency is fundamentally social. I model an attitude toward our causal nature on sociologist Erving Goffman’s concept of ‘civil inattention’; our social practice of agency requires that we give minimal attention to the contingent origins of moral judgments in ourselves and others. Understood this way, seeing ourselves as moral agents requires avoiding appeal to causal aetiology to settle substantive moral disagreement. (shrink)

This paper presents a regress challenge to the selective psychological debunking of moral judgments. A selective psychological debunking argument conjoins an empirical claim about the psychological origins of certain moral judgments to a theoretical claim that these psychological origins cannot track moral truth, leading to the conclusion that the moral judgments are unreliable. I argue that psychological debunking arguments are vulnerable to a regress challenge, because the theoretical claim that ‘such-and-such psychological process is not moral-truth-tracking’ relies upon moral judgments. We (...) must then ask about the psychological origins of these judgments, and then make a further evaluative judgment about these psychological origins… and so on. This chain of empirical and evaluative claims may continue indefinitely and, I will argue, proponents of the debunking argument are in a dialectical position where they may not simply call a halt to the process. Hence, their argument cannot terminate, and its debunking conclusion cannot be upheld. (shrink)

The evidential value of moral intuitions has been challenged by psychological work showing that the intuitions of ordinary people are affected by distorting factors. One reply to this challenge, the expertise defence, claims that training in philosophical thinking confers enhanced reliability on the intuitions of professional philosophers. This defence is often expressed through analogy: since we do not allow doubts about folk judgments in domains like mathematics or physics to undermine the plausibility of judgments by experts in these domains, we (...) also should not do so in philosophy. In this paper I clarify the logic of the analogy strategy, and defend it against recent challenges by Jesper Ryberg. The discussion exposes an interesting divide: while Ryberg’s challenges may weaken analogies between morality and domains like mathematics, they do not affect analogies to other domains, such as physics. I conclude that the expertise defence can be supported by analogical means, though care is required in selecting an appropriate analog. I discuss implications of this conclusion for the expertise defence debate and for study of the moral domain itself. (shrink)

Many of our cognitive capacities are the result of enculturation. Enculturation is the temporally extended transformative acquisition of cognitive practices in the cognitive niche. Cognitive practices are embodied and normatively constrained ways to interact with epistemic resources in the cognitive niche in order to complete a cognitive task. The emerging predictive processing perspective offers new functional principles and conceptual tools to account for the cerebral and extra-cerebral bodily components that give rise to cognitive practices. According to this emerging perspective, many (...) cases of perception, action, and cognition are realized by the on-going minimization of prediction error. Predictive processing provides us with a mechanistic perspective that helps investigate the functional details of the acquisition of cognitive practices. The argument of this paper is that research on enculturation and recent work on predictive processing are complementary. The main reason is that predictive processing operates at a sub-personal level and on a physiological time scale of explanation only. A complete account of enculturated cognition needs to take additional levels and temporal scales of explanation into account. This complementarity assumption leads to a new framework—enculturated predictive processing—that operates on multiple levels and temporal scales for the explanation of the enculturated predictive acquisition of cognitive practices. Enculturated predictive processing is committed to explanatory pluralism. That is, it subscribes to the idea that we need multiple perspectives and explanatory strategies to account for the complexity of enculturation. The upshot is that predictive processing needs to be complemented by additional considerations and conceptual tools to realize its full explanatory potential. (shrink)

When we look back upon people in past societies, such as slaveholders and colonialists, we judge their actions to have been morally atrocious. Yet we should give some thought to how the future will judge us. Here I argue that future people are likely to regard our behavior as no better than that of the past. If these future people are to be believed, then we are morally hopeless; we have little chance of working out the moral truth for ourselves. (...) I argue that we ought to resist this conclusion, and that our best means for doing so it to reject moral objectivity and accept instead a form of time-linked moral relativism. (shrink)

The relevance of the research is manifested in the fact that organizational culture is an important and penetrating everywhere concept with regards to influence on organizational change programmes. Literature analysis shows that there is ambiguity in the assessment of organizational culture. A certain outcome of a cultural variable may have not the same effect on all organizational processes associated with management activity.. According to Melnick, in order to gain a deeper understanding of the processes of management and management culture changes (...) hapenning in the modern world, it is appropriate to evaluate contemporary management practices that reflect the effects of historically composed life modes and stereotypes that manifest themselves in management activities. The research aim: to discuss the factors and stages forming organizational culture development. Analysis of recent research and publications. Organizational culture is analyzed in various contexts. Organizational culture models and their components have been defined by Schein, Ostroff et al., et al., the significance of organizational culture is analyzed ; McLoughlin and Miura ; Di Pietro and Di Virgilio et al. The issues of forming/changing organizational culture remain of topical significance. Researches on this topic were carried out and the summarized results were submitted in their scientific papers by Bititci et al ; Gibbons and Kaplan, Mungiu-Pupăzan ; Hogan et al et al. In the study Hogan et al a key result is how layers of organizational culture, particularly norms, artifacts, and innovative behaviors, partially mediate the effects of values that support innovation on measures of firm performance. The objectives of the research: to define the organizational culture components and importance for the results of organizational performance; to identify the main factors of business culture that influence the results of the performance; to discuss the stages of implementation of the organizational culture development management plan. Research methodology. To achieve the goal, scientific literature analysis and synthesis methods are used. (shrink)

What can writing, the literary perspective, contribute towards the academic discourse? How can literature describe or explore the world we experience? In this article I argue that the essential porousness, the cuts and in-betweens of the world that are embodied in the poetic writing (and reading as writing) process not only embrace the absence of an objective reality or truth but also the subjectivity, the ephemeral and the ineffable as a general (postmodern) condition.

This essay examines contemporary Latin American historical writing about natural history from the nineteenth through the twentieth centuries. Natural history is a “network science,” woven out of connections and communications between diverse people and centers of scholarship, all against a backdrop of complex political and economic changes. Latin American naturalists navigated a tension between promoting national science and participating in “universal” science. These tensions between the national and the universal have also been reflected in historical writing on Latin America. Since (...) the 1980s, narratives that recognize Latin Americans' active role have become more notable within the renewal of the history of Latin American science. However, the nationalist slant of these approaches has kept Latin American historiography on the margins. The networked nature of natural history and Latin America's active role in it afford an opportunity to end the historiographic isolation of Latin America and situate it within world history. (shrink)

This article offers a new reading of Pankrates’ poem on Hadrian’s and Antinoos’ hunt of a lion in 130 AD, examining both its intertextual dialogue with Homer and its evocation of Egyptian imagery. I first show how the raging lion, which emerges directly out of a Homeric simile, has been transformed fromcomparatumtocomparandum: he no longer serves to illustrate a warrior’s force, but has himself become part of the main narrative and the subject of analogy. Contemplating theaitionin which the text culminated (...) I argue that the Antinoeian lotus, which grew out of the lion’s blood, ought to be read against the backdrop of Egyptian mythology and iconography as an emblem of rebirth. Both Pankrates’ allusions to Homer, which subtly evoke Achilles’ loss of Patroklos, and the symbolic function of the lotus strongly suggest that the poem was composed in the aftermath of Antinoos’ death and conceived as a celebration of the youth’s apotheosis. (shrink)

Recent empirical work appears to suggest that the moral intuitions of professional philosophers are just as vulnerable to distorting psychological factors as are those of ordinary people. This paper assesses these recent tests of the ‘expertise defense’ of philosophical intuition. I argue that the use of familiar cases and principles constitutes a methodological problem. Since these items are familiar to philosophers, but not ordinary people, the two subject groups do not confront identical cognitive tasks. Reflection on this point shows that (...) these findings do not threaten philosophical expertise—though we can draw lessons for more effective empirical tests. (shrink)

Introduction. According to the well-established opinion of specialists in social sciences and humanities, a person diffracts his selves in the modern world: real spaces (professions, statuses) and virtual (accounts, profiles). In the diffraction of a person through spaces of different order, each “new” self acquires relative autonomy (a trace of the self in the network, which is present regardless of the attitude to it), and at the same time there remains the connection that, as it were, keeps the self with (...) his digital images and “prints”. The main questions of the article are: in what relation and in relation to what is it possible to talk about the identity of a modern person; what fundamentally significant do the researches on human identity give us today; what do those who ask questions about personal identity in the digital age focus their attention on? In order to answer these questions, let us turn to scientific articles from domestic and foreign journals. This article presents the analytics of publications from Scopus and RSCI databases, in which the problem of personal identity is posed. The purpose of the article is to analyze scientific publications on human identity and summarize the main ideas presented in those publications. Methods. The research is based on general scientific methods, analysis and synthesis, induction, deduction, and abstraction. The author analyzes scientific publications on the basis of the interpretation method and a systematic approach method. Content analysis was used as a method, but it was used within the scope of the purpose. The publications were selected on the basis of the authors’ research of various aspects of identity and the difference in interpreting the phenomenon. Results. Analysis of Scopus publications made it possible to assert that the problem of identity is moving out of the anthropological context and acquiring new technical and technological frameworks (for example, scholars are raising the problem of the digital data identity, digital identification in the context of online transactions). At the same time, the anthropological view of identity remains. It is found for instance in the context of narratives, texts of a person about self that are posted on the Internet. In this context, the concept of “Person Life View” (M. Schechtman) is presented as a variant of a person’s holistic view of the self. The analysis of domestic publications makes it possible to conclude that representatives of social sciences and humanities in their research strive to overcome the dynamic view of a person (dissolving of identity or an absent self), are in search of models of “stability” of identity. Conclusion. Posing the question about the personal identity of a modern person, it seems that the border between the directly human (consciousness and body, for example) and the technical and technological (the Internet and the objective world) is becoming more and more destabilized every day. This predetermines the direction of the research. Contemporary scholars, who publish the results of their work in journals included in scientific databases, are faced not only with the problem of substantiating human identity as a theoretical concept that reflects the modern situation, but also with the problem of finding models in which a person is able to embody the idea of “stability” of identity in the everyday life. (shrink)

This article argues that military conditioning (MC) systematically violates the human dignity of soldiers. The argument relies on an absolute deontologist account of human dignity understood as a claim-right to live in self-respect, which is a right to decide on one’s own behalf about, and to be in control of, essential aspects of one’s own life. The article claims that MC violates soldiers’ dignity so understood because the largely automatic physical killing reflex that MC instills aims to remove their freedom (...) of choice to kill or not to kill, while the MC practices that rationalize the killing of opponents aim to subvert soldiers’ moral deliberation in relation to this behavior. MC thus aims to take away soldiers’ control over a very essential aspect of human life: the decision whether to take life in war. Thereby, MC systematically violates their human dignity. The article concludes with a proposal for an amendment to international law that would allow legal institutions to do more justice to soldiers’ dignity. (shrink)

The essay reviews the digital emergency measures many governments have adopted in an attempt to curb Covid-19. It argues that those ‘virologically legitimized’ measures may infringe the human right to privacy and mark the transition into a world of global surveillance. At this possible turning point in human history, panic and latent fear seem to fog much needed farsightedness. Leaving the current state of emotional paralysis and restarting to critically assess the digital pandemic management can serve as an emergency break (...) against drifting into a new era of digital monitoring. (shrink)

Deepfakes are algorithmically modified video and audio recordings that project one person’s appearance on to that of another, creating an apparent recording of an event that never took place. Many scholars and journalists have begun attending to the political risks of deepfake deception. Here we investigate other ways in which deepfakes have the potential to cause deeper harms than have been appreciated. First, we consider a form of objectification that occurs in deepfaked ‘frankenporn’ that digitally fuses the parts of different (...) women to create pliable characters incapable of giving consent to their depiction. Next, we develop the idea of ‘illocutionary wronging’, in which an individual is forced to engage in speech acts they would prefer to avoid in order to deny or correct the misleading evidence of a publicized deepfake. Finally, we consider the risk that deepfakes may facilitate campaigns of ‘panoptic gaslighting’, where many systematically altered recordings of a single person's life undermine their memory, eroding their sense of self and ability to engage with others. Taken together, these harms illustrate the roles that social epistemology and technological vulnerabilities play in human ethical life. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Giubilini and Minerva argue for the moral permissibility of what they call ‘after-birth abortion’, or infanticide. Here I suggest that they actually employ a confusion of two distinct arguments: one relying on the purportedly identical moral status of a fetus and a newborn, and the second giving an independent argument for the denial of moral personhood to infants (independent of whatever one might say about fetuses). After distinguishing these arguments, I suggest that neither one is capable (...) of supporting Giubilini and Minerva's conclusion. The first argument is at best neutral between permitting infanticide and prohibiting abortion, and may in fact more strongly support the latter. The second argument, I suggest, contains an ambiguity in its key premise, and can be shown to fail on either resolution of that ambiguity. Hence, I conclude that Giubilini and Minerva have not demonstrated the permissibility of infanticide, or even great moral similarity between abortion and infanticide. (shrink)