When individuals cannot make up their mind, they sometimes use a random decision-making aid such as a coin to make a decision. This aid may also elicit affective reactions: A person flipping a coin may (dis)like the outcome, and thus decide according to this feeling. We refer to this process as catalysing decisions and to the aid as catalyst. We investigate whether using a catalyst may not only elicit affect but also result in more affect-based decision making. We used different (...) online studies that examine affect-driven decisions by investigating scope insensitivity (indirect behavioural measure) and self-reported weight given to feelings versus reasons in hypothetical donation decisions. Study 1a showed that a catalyst (a lottery wheel) lead to more scope insensitive (i.e. affect-driven) donations. Study 1b included several changes and did not replicate these results. Study 2 (preregistered) examined scope insensitivity but did not replicate previous results; Study 3 (preregistered) looked at the weight given to feelings versus reason. Although catalyst (compared to control) participants descriptively reported relying more on feelings, this difference did not reach significance. In contrast to lay beliefs, results do not indicate support for the hypothesis that using a catalyst results in more affect-based hypothetical donation decisions. (shrink)

La discussione generale sulla filosofia della scienza contemporanea è complicata dal numero e dall’eterogeneità delle scienze, mentre lo studio di temi specifici porta inevitabilmente a dissertazioni specialistiche che mancano nel dare ragione della trama di senso sottostante. Questo Piccolo trattato di epistemologia intende occupare uno spazio vuoto, proponendo alcuni temi chiave per la comprensione dei meccanismi alla base della conoscenza scientifica: i rapporti tra filosofia e scienze, siano esse naturali o umane; la complessa relazione tra fatti e valori; la distinzione (...) tra scoperta e giustificazione; la necessità di un discorso etico sulla ricerca, che chiami in causa categorie come fiducia, empatia, altruismo ed egoismo. Con un approccio chiaro e rigoroso, il volume intende rivolgersi a quell’ampia fascia di pubblico interessata alle tematiche centrali dell’epistemologia, della filosofia e delle scienze. (shrink)

In the ongoing pandemic, death statistics influence people’s feelings and government policy. But when does COVID-19 qualify as the cause of death? As philosophers of medicine interested in conceptual clarification, we address the question by analyzing the World Health Organization’s rules for the certification of death. We show that for COVID-19, WHO rules take into account both facts and values.

Alongside the renowned male pioneers of medical cytogenetics, many women participated in investigations at the laboratory bench and the bedside, both in Europe and the Americas. These women were committed to this new biological and clinical practice—cytogenetics, the origins of contemporary genetic diagnosis—and contributed to the creation of new biological concepts and settings centered on the study of chromosome imaging. This paper will review the contributions made by a group of woman scientists from a wide geographical distribution, situating their names (...) and research agendas within the history of a field dating back to early plant and insect cytogenetics. Rather than an exhaustive compendium of women geneticists, this essay presents a kind of historical reconstruction that can be achieved by placing women at center stage in their geographies and networks of circulating cytogenetic knowledge and practices thereby relating a history of genetic images though the work carried out by women, retrieving their agency and constructing an inclusive history of an influential contemporary biomedical practice as it gained increasing influence in the laboratory and the clinic. (shrink)

This work proposes an analysis of the cognitive and motivational components of hope, its basic properties, and the affective dispositions and behaviors it is likely to induce. In our view current treatments of hope do not fully account for its specificity, by making hope overlap with positive expectation or some specification of positive expectation. In contrast, we attempt to highlight the distinctive features of hope, pointing to its differences from positive expectation, as well as from a sense of successful agency, (...) optimism, trust, and faith. Fear and anxiety are also addressed, and the latter is analyzed as a state of mind implying both fear and hope. Finally, the relationship between hope and motivation is explored, and “active” hope is compared with “passive” hope. Some concluding remarks summarize the results of our analysis, and stress the role of hope in fostering the individual’s well-being. (shrink)

The article by Gustavsson et al 1 addresses the important question how to handle new medications with focus on drug candidates that reduce Aβ or tau in the brain, for individuals with Alzheimer’s disease, where the need for a disease-modifying drug is enormous. There are several ethical issues to deal with. The challenges and ethical implications associated with whom should be eligible for treatment are thoroughly discussed in the article. Should treatment only be available to those with mild symptoms and/or (...) to those with no symptoms but with risk for AD? Where do we draw the line between who will be eligible for treatment and who will not? Who will be responsible for the prioritisation? There are many ethical problems with both population screening and screening of those with high risk well discussed in the article. Indeed, the first immunotherapy drug Aducanumab was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration in …. (shrink)

This paper presents an overview of my work in philosophy from my first book on Friedrich Schiller and the political sublime to my most recent project on listening to traumatic forms of violence. Starting with a reflection on the autobiographical character of philosophy, I propose to take up the question of an aesthetic dimension of philosophical critique, where aesthetics is understood as an always already embodied perspective on the world, on truth, and on philosophical activity, as well as an always (...) already political realm, where the distribution of sense pre-determines our approach and articulation of experience. Departing from aesthetics understood and deployed as critique, the paper moves on to ask about the specific frameworks of sense or grammars that determine in advance the conditions of audibility in the realms of memory-building and history-making—particularly in those contexts where historical, political, and institutional forms of violence produce silencing and erasure. Putting in dialogue the latter with decolonial studies, I interpret “traumatic violence” as a colonizing form of violence, understanding that one of its central aspects is that it is not only an assault on life but on the conditions of production of sense that make life legible as such. In this context, my project on grammars of listening seeks to carefully unpack these complex intersections while also explaining why I believe that a radical form of listening is an essential subversive/imaginative strategy against traumatic/colonial violence. (shrink)

In the 1980s, new reproductive technologies such as in vitro fertilisation and embryo transfer became commercially available in the United States, and somatic cell nuclear transfer—the cloning process by which Dolly the Sheep would be conceived in 1996—was in its experimental phase. While anxieties concerning these new technologies escalated in the popular sensorium, Laurie Anderson explored the phenomenon of cloning in a short musical film called What You Mean We? (1986) in which Anderson consults a design team to clone herself (...) in order to manage her demanding workload. The videographic image of the clone is Anderson herself, performing in drag, and her clone’s body is partially created through the use of a pitch shifter which changes Anderson’s voice to that of the cloned—but ostensibly male—version of herself. In this article, I investigate Anderson’s technological consideration of the body, which extends beyond her own corporeality, to interrogate the biological and affective capacities of clones. I consider how Anderson addresses the convergence of reproductive technologies, the market and the creation of subjects within this market as participating in a shift in how voices are heard, governed and reproduced in the latter half of the twentieth century. (shrink)

This paper explores Kant’s ambivalent views on music. It aims to show, on the one hand, how these ambivalences are in line with the modern philosophical reflection on this art; on the other hand, to show their place within Kantian aesthetics, a place that justifies Kant’s hesitations as whether to classify music as beautiful or agreeable, art or mere enjoyment, free or dependent beauty, culture or nature.

In recent years there has been renewed interest in the participation of lay people in regulatory procedures. The debate peaked in the 1980s with the anti-nuclear movements and again more recently as a reaction to the food scandals of the mid-1990s. In the wake of the bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) crisis there has been a proliferation of European Community rules on the production, processing and retailing of food products, along with the multiplication of scientific committees in order to cope with (...) increased ... (shrink)

'Ethics' was not developed as a separate branch of philosophy in Buddhist traditions until the modern period, though Buddhist philosophers have always been concerned with the moral significance of thoughts, emotions, intentions, actions, virtues, and precepts. Their most penetrating forms of moral reflection have been developed within disciplines of practice aimed at achieving freedom and peace. This Element first offers a brief overview of Buddhist thought and modern scholarly approaches to its diverse forms of moral reflection. It then explores two (...) of the most prominent philosophers from the main strands of the Indian Buddhist tradition – Buddhaghosa and Śāntideva – in a comparative fashion. (shrink)

Por medio de un ejercicio de lectura comparada, y siguiendo un método inductivo, el presente artículo identifica distintas formas de figurar o imaginar el cuerpo en un corpus de obras de la autora panameña Cheri Lewis G., observando las posibles relaciones, tensiones o contradicciones con este mismo tipo de representación ficcional en las obras narrativas de otras autoras centroamericanas contemporáneas. En los mundos ficcionales de la selección, por un lado, el cuerpo fragmentado, animalizado o hibridizado propone modos de contradecir, pensar, (...) resistir o criticar ciertos estándares opresivos hacia las mujeres; por otro, hace elaboraciones metafóricas sobre vínculos afectivos humanos con otras formas de vida, así como alegorías de la nación fragmentada. (shrink)

This article exposes the neoplatonic element present in the metaphysics of causality elaborated in the seventeenth century by Leibniz. It explains this question in relation with medieval Neoplatonism, whose metaphysics of the Verb appears as the nucleus of the explanation of the relationship between causality and otherness.

Las fuentes de la revelación han afirmado siempre la presencia salvífica del Espíritu Santo más allá de los límites del antiguo y del nuevo Israel. Este artículo es un intento por percibirla en las ceremonias religiosas de los pueblos indígenas y mestizos del Sur Andino Peruano. Para alcanzar su objetivo, considera las circunstancias que acompañaron el anuncio del Evangelio en América y encuentra en la Carta a los Hebreos una clave para comprender e interpretar el proceso de inculturación del cristianismo (...) en los ritos dedicados a la Madre Tierra. Frente a la idolatría tributaria de la muerte, estos antiguos cultos aparecen como núcleos generadores de vida, que revelan la intervención providente de Dios en situaciones de sufrimiento injusto. (shrink)

In the realm of Polish law, arbitration is anything but a new concept. In an ever-developing economy, arbitration has become a useful tool in resolving disputes that are commercial in nature. The issue pertinent to the choice of language in an arbitral proceeding has been thoroughly investigated in the doctrine of international arbitration, yet the conclusions are not set in stone and are likely to change and evolve over time. As evidenced by the technological revolution, introduction of mechanical translations, and (...) artificial intelligence (“AI”) it may seem that the challenges will be difficult to predict. Alternatively, the status quo of the English language as the number one language in the arbitral proceedings will remain. The parties can easily dismiss the linguistic and interpretative problems surrounding arbitration agreements. Thus, this article endeavors to consider the possible implications of a case scenario, wherein a party would attempt to arbitrate an international dispute with a Polish party on the basis of a contract that would be in a language that differs from Polish. Additionally, attention is drawn to the role of witnesses in an arbitration proceeding as such witnesses may speak languages that are the same, similar, or entirely different to the language spoken by the parties involved in the arbitration, as well as differ from the primary language of the arbiters. This article examines the aforementioned hypothetical case-scenario with the emphasis on relevant Polish acts of law. The research presented in this article is also focused on the examination of regulations vested in the statute of the most prominent Arbitration Court in Poland, and its provisions pertinent to language. (shrink)

One of Julian Barbour’s main aims is to solve the problem of time that appears in quantum geometrodynamics (QG). QG involves the application of canonical quantization procedure to the Hamiltonian formulation of General Relativity. The problem of time arises because the quantization of the Hamiltonian constraint results in an equation that has no explicit time parameter. Thus, it appears that the resulting equation, as apparently timeless, cannot describe evolution of quantum states. Barbour attempts to resolve the problem by allegedly eliminating (...) time from his interpretation of QG. In order to evaluate the efficacy of his solution, it is necessary to ascertain in what sense time has been eliminated from his theory. I proceed to do so by developing a form of conceptual analysis that is applicable to the concept of time in physical theories and applying this analysis to Barbour’s account. (shrink)

Down syndrome (DS) is the most common developmental disorder characterized by mild to moderate intellectual disability. Several studies have reported poor language and prosodic skills and contradictory results regarding individuals’ with DS socio-cognitive skills, whereas most of them have focused on children with DS. The present study attempts to explore adults’ with DS language, socio-cognitive and prosodic abilities via the use of story-retellings. Twenty adults with DS and two groups of TD children, one matched to their expressive vocabulary (TD-EVT) and (...) the other matched to their non-verbal mental age (TD-RCPM), took part in the present study. Participants listened to a story while viewing a wordless picture PowerPoint presentation on a computer screen, and then, they were instructed to retell the story while viewing the pictures for a second time. Each participant listened to two stories, one with “lively” and one with “flat” prosody. Results revealed that adults’ with DS performance was comparable with the one presented by the TD-RCPM group, whereas the TD-EVT group performed significantly better in almost all variables. Individuals’ with DS re-narrations, however, contained significantly less complement clauses and internal state terms (related or not related to Theory of Mind–ToM) compared to the re-narrations of both control groups. In contrast, the group with DS performed similarly to both control groups in comprehension questions related to main characters’ internal state terms and significantly better compared to the TD-RCPM group in questions related to ToM. In terms of prosody, all three groups performed significantly better on story structure and comprehension questions when prosody was “lively” compared “flat” prosody. DS group’s re-narrations did not contain enough internal state terms, not due to their inability in recognizing them, but due to their poor morphosyntactic abilities, which did not allow them to find the proper means to express the main characters’ internal states. Prosody facilitated participants with DS in the comprehension and re-narration. This suggests that intervention programs based on prosody could support the language skills of adults with DS. (shrink)

Existen insospechados parecidos de familia. En sus clases de Ciencia y Filosofía Política en la Universidad de Yale, Seyla Benhabib suele insistir en que las personas se terminan pareciendo mucho más a sus propias instituciones que a los Estados o a las naciones en las que viven. Esta aseveración resulta inquietante. De todos es sabido que podemos identificarnos más o menos con nuestra propia nación, pero la idea de que, en verdad, todos vayamos a terminar pareciéndonos mucho más a ciertas (...) instituciones solo es comparable a una de esas experiencias culinarias que proporciona Dabiz Muñoz, calificadas por él mismo como “de romperte la cabeza”. Laureado con el Nobel en 1993, el economista e historiador Douglass C. North sostuvo que los seres humanos idean las instituciones para crear orden, reducir la incertidumbre y estructurar la interacción socio-política. (shrink)

Laurence Allard, Delphine Gardey et Nathalie Magnan proposent au public français la traduction de six textes incontournables de Donna Haraway écrits entre 1985 et 1997. Outre le célèbre Cyborg Manifesto, écrit en 1985 et traduit pour la première fois en français en 1992 dans la revue Futur Antérieur, l’anthologie parue aux éditions EXILS en 2007 présente cinq essais qui permettent de mieux comprendre la critique féministe de Haraway, celle des normes de genre et de la domination. Tout d’abord...

The concept of autarkeia present in the Aristotelian Politics is conceived as inseparable from the end of the city-State, insofar as it is not only constituted for mere living but for living well. This implies a moralization of the state order that allows us to think about the conformation of an economic dimension based on the concept of autarkeia. Taking as a methodological starting point the “dialogical tension zones” device, we will affirm that exists an Aristotelian economic thinking based on (...) three significant concepts of his political philosophy: “self-sufficiency”, “city-State”, “justice”. Finally, we will affirm that the concept of “natural slavery” aims to guarantee the constitution of an autonomous productive economic order that delegitimizes the federated states’ model of organization. (shrink)

El presente artículo analiza las primeras consideraciones de Ludwig Wittgenstein respecto de la percepción de figuras ambiguas, lo que posteriormente fue englobado por la más amplia noción de “percepción de aspectos”. El objetivo consiste en poner de manifiesto algunas las consideraciones del Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus respecto al carácter intrínsecamente representacional de la percepción en el caso del Cubo de Necker, para establecer de qué manera y en qué medida sus primeras observaciones críticas de la percepción de propiedades que admiten grados en (...) Some Remarks on Logical Form, en 1929, puede impactar análogamente sobre su propia descripción de esta clase particular de experiencias bajo consideración. (shrink)