Environmental problems were not among the core issues for the United Nations at its creation in 1945. In the 1970s, however, they created a crescendo of public concern as the threats posed by toxic chemicals, large-scale destruction of natural ecosystems, and the loss of species became visible and were obviously linked to human activity. Pollution, it was clear, did not stop at national borders and solutions required common effort. As part of the special issue on “The United Nations at Seventy-Five: (...) Looking Back to Look Forward,” this essay explores how, as the only institution equipped to identify global problems and generate collective action toward their resolution, the UN became the platform for creating multilateral environmental agreements, convening global conferences, and mobilizing national and international effort through a progressively larger number of institutions at the national and international level to guide decisions and influence behavior. We have moved the environmental needle in terms of information, institutions, and awareness. Yet, many environmental problems persist, some are getting worse, and new challenges and, indeed, crises are emerging. (shrink)

The article is devoted to the study of the phenomenon of ideology in the context of its normative and regulatory function. The author's contribution to the further knowledge of the ideology was the following main conclusions. The emergence of ideology as a regulatory mechanism was primarily due to the transition from a traditional society to a modern one. Ideology is an attribute of modern society, since it acts as an intermediary between a person and social reality, determining and regulating the (...) activities of all people and relations between them in any sphere of society. In the XIX – first half of the XX centuries political ideology in its theoretical form dominated. As a regulatory mechanism, it functioned alongside religion, morality, and law, complementing them. In the second half of the XX – XXI centuries, as a result of the third STR, ideology in an ordinary and practical form became widespread. It began to replace the traditional regulatory mechanisms, surpassing them in the degree of influence on public consciousness and becoming the main mechanism of social regulation. (shrink)

The purpose of the study is to develop a monitoring methodology and its tools, taking into account the cyclical nature of the management process in the organizations of the system of continuing professional education. The article reveals the methodological features of the formation and management of the system of continuing professional education. Among the management functions, the monitoring function stands out. The possibilities of monitoring from the standpoint of the planning and management cycle implemented in the organizations of continuing professional (...) education are investigated. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the formalization of the monitoring mechanism and substantiation of the methodological prerequisites for its application in the strategic management of the system of continuing professional education. As a result of the research, a set of proposals has been formulated that ensure the development of monitoring methodology in its strategically oriented interpretation. (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.

In this conceptual article, we argue that defining corporate social responsibility and corporate social irresponsibility as opposite constructs produces a lack of clarity between responsible and irresponsible acts. Furthermore, we contend that the treatment of the CSR and CSI concepts as opposites de-emphasizes the value of CSI as a stand-alone construct. Thus, we reorient the CSI discussion to include multiple aspects that current conceptualizations have not adequately accommodated. We provide an in-depth exploration of how researchers define CSI and both identify (...) and analyze three important gray zones between CSR and CSI: the role of harm and benefit, the role of the actor and intentionality, and the role of rectification. We offer these gray zones as factors contributing to the present lack of conceptual clarity of the term CSI, as a concept in its own right, leading to difficulties that researchers and managers experience in categorizing CSI acts as distinct from CSR. (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)

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 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.

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)

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)

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)

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)