This article aims to enhance social technology as a resource that induces education and well-being in maternal and child health, more specifically in contexts of social vulnerability. This is an action research, with social technology characteristics, developed between July/2022 and December/2023, with 17 women (pregnant and postpartum women) from a vulnerable community in the central region of Rio Grande do Sul. Based on education in health and in an interprofessional approach, the social technology developed and called “Endowing lives” is the (...) result of demands previously identified, discussed and implemented with the research participants and local health professionals. The social technology developed expanded interprofessional possibilities, promoted preventive health measures and contributed to the empowerment of pregnant and postpartum women in decision-making. (shrink)

In this innovative study Patricia Kitcher argues that we can only understand the deduction of the categories in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason in terms of his attempt to fathom the psychological prerequisites of thought. Thus a consideration of his conception of psychology is essential to an understanding of his philosophy. Kitcher specifically considers Kant's claims about the unity of the thinking self; the spatial forms of human perceptions; the relations among mental states necessary for them to have content; the (...) relations between perceptions and judgment; and the limits of philosophical insight into psychological processes. (shrink)

Aristotle claims that Empedocles took perception and knowledge to be the same; Theophrastus follows Aristotle. The paper begins by examining why Aristotle and Theophrastus identify thought/knowing with perception in Empedocles. I maintain that the extant fragments do not support the assertion that Empedocles identifies or conflates sensation with thought or cognition. Indeed, the evidence of the texts shows that Empedocles is careful to distinguish them, and argues that to have genuine understanding one must not be misled into supposing that sense (...) perception is sufficient for knowledge. Nevertheless, sense perception is necessary for human knowing. (shrink)

The explanation of a child's discriminate responses to his environment turns on ascribing to the child a perceptual discrimination which counts certain things as more similar to one another than to some other thing. As Quine forcefully puts it:If an individual is to learn at all, differences in degree of similarity must be implicit in his learning pattern. Otherwise any response, if reinforced, would be conditioned equally and indiscriminately to any and every future episode, all these being equally similar.Now for (...) those determined to cleave to behaviourist canons, the problem is to use ‘perceptual similarity’ in explaining the subject's discriminating responses in a way which does not imply the existence of mental states and entities. What this really means is that the behaviourist must reconstruct the notion of ‘perceptual similarity', purifying it of its mentalistic dimension. So long as physicalism is a reasonable position, and while we are awaiting and abetting the neurophysiological millennium, the behaviourist's project is of significant moment. Now in Word and Object Quine does not seriously attempt to provide behavioural criteria for a subject's perceiving similarities, and he provisionally permits himself the mentalistic idiom he avows finally to eschew. (shrink)

_Employment and Employee Rights_ addresses the issue of rights in the workplace. Although much of the literature in this field focuses on employee rights, this volume considers the issue from the perspective of both employees and employers. Considers the rights of both employees and employers. Discusses the moral and legal landscape and traditional assumptions about right in employment. Investigates arguments for guaranteeing rights, particularly for employees, which are derived from relational, developmental, and economic bases. Explores new dimensions of employment including (...) a model that incorporates growing workplace diversity, builds upon our understanding of the legal landscape, and expands upon our justifications for recognizing and protecting rights. (shrink)

A crise da representação política e as atuais ameaças às democracias liberais consistem em temas de grande reflexão e debate na filosofia política contemporânea, o que explica, em parte o renovado interesse pelo conceito de representação política. O presente artigo defende que a compreensão das ideologias políticas, a partir da abordagem morfológica de Michael Freeden, possibilita novas formas de pensar sobre a representação e sua relação com a democracia. Ao atribuírem significados determinados e estáveis a conceitos políticos essencialmente contestados, as (...) ideologias disputam o controle da linguagem política, desempenhando também uma função integrativa, ao vincular simbolicamente o indivíduo à sociedade a qual pertence, permitindo, assim, o compartilhamento de conteúdos da consciência individual. A partir da obra de Nadia Urbinati, defende-se a centralidade da recuperação da dimensão ideológica da política para uma noção de representação efetivamente democrática, o que passa pela compreensão do papel deliberativo das ideologias e o caráter híbrido destes sistemas de pensamento, que agregam elementos racionais e não-racionais. (shrink)

This paper updates, modifies, and extends an account of psychopaths’ responsibility and blameworthiness that depends on behavioral control rather than moral knowledge. Philosophers mainly focus on whether psychopaths can be said to grasp moral rules as such, whereas it seems to be important to their blameworthiness that typical psychopaths are hampered by impulsivity and other barriers to exercising self-control. I begin by discussing an atypical case, for contrast, of a young man who was diagnosed as a psychopath at one point (...) but who lacks the element of impulsivity. He exhibits the usual deficits of empathy and related moral emotions, but by now he has developed effective alternative means of conforming to moral rules, essentially on the basis of self-interest. I think it does seem reasonable to hold him morally responsible if he should violate a rule, despite his refusal to acknowledge any specifically moral reasons. I then turn to more typical cases, arguing that blameworthiness is mitigated by the difficulty of learning alternative means of self-control. In a departure from my earlier work, I do not take responsibility to have degrees. But since both blameworthiness and freedom to do otherwise have degrees that depend on the same factors, I go on to explain how it can be reasonable to blame a typical psychopath for an act he may not have been free to avoid. More generally, my suggestion is that notions commonly conflated in philosophers’ treatments of responsibility should be prized apart. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: Hobbes belonged to philosophical and scientific circles grappling with the big question at the dawn of modern physics: materialism and its consequences for morality. ‘Matter in motion’ may be a core principle of this materialism but it is certainly inadequate to capture the whole project. In wave after wave of this debate the Epicurean view of a fully determined universe governed by natural laws, that nevertheless allows to humans a sphere of libertas, but does not require a creator god (...) or teleology to explain it, comes up against monotheism and its insistence on the incoherence of an ordered world in the absence of a God and his purposes. The following questions were central to this debate: Can we understand the universe as law-governed in the absence of a god? If so, what room is there in a fully determined mechanical universe for human freedom? If humans do enjoy freedom, does the same hold for other animals? Is this freedom compatible with standard views of morality? (shrink)

This paper argues that Aristotelian practical wisdom (phronêsis) is a state of conviction (pistis) in the goodness of our goals based on proper grounds. This state of conviction can only be achieved if rational arguments and principles agree with how things appear to us. Since, for Aristotle, passions influence appearances, they can support or undermine our conviction in the goodness of ends that are worth pursuing. For this reason, we cannot be practically wise without virtuous dispositions to experience appropriate passions. (...) Along the way, I argue that this reading allows us to explain the shortcomings of self-controlled and akratic agents. -/- . (shrink)

Neurophenomenological (NP) methods integrate objective and subjective data in ways that retain the statistical power of established disciplines (like cognitive science) while embracing the value of first-person reports of experience. The present paper positions neurophenomenology as an approach that pulls from traditions of cognitive science but includes techniques that are challenging for cognitive science in some ways. A baseline study is reviewed for “lessons learned,” that is, the potential methodological improvements that will support advancements in understanding consciousness and cognition using (...) neurophenomenology. These improvements, we suggest, include (1) addressing issues of interdisciplinarity by purposefully and systematically creating and maintaining shared mental models among research team members; (2) making sure that NP experiments include high standards of experimental design and execution to achieve variable control, reliability, generalizability, and replication of results; and (3) conceiving of phenomenological interview techniques as placing the impetus on the interviewer in interaction with the experimental subject. (shrink)

This book explores Gilles Deleuze's contribution to film theory. According to Deleuze, we have come to live in a universe that could be described as metacinematic. His conception of images implies a new kind of camera consciousness, one that determines our perceptions and sense of selves: aspects of our subjectivities are formed in, for instance, action-images, affection-images and time-images. We live in a matrix of visual culture that is always moving and changing. Each image is always connected to an assemblage (...) of affects and forces. This book presents a model, as well as many concrete examples, of how to work with Deleuze in film theory. It asks questions about the universe as metacinema, subjectivity, violence, feminism, monstrosity, and music. Among the contemporary films it discusses within a Deleuzian framework are Strange Days, Fight Club, and Dancer in the Dark. (shrink)

Habit and Embodiment in Merleau-PontyIntroductionMerleau-Ponty (French phenomenological philosopher, born in 1908 and deceased in 1961) refers to habit in various passages of his Phenomenology of Perception as a relevant issue in his philosophical and phenomenological position. Through his exploration of this issue he explains both the pre-reflexive character that our original linkage with the world has, as well as the kind of “understanding” that our body develops with regard to the world. These two characteristics of human existence bear a close (...) relation with the vision of an embodied mind sustained by Gallagher and Zahavi in their work The Phenomenological Mind: An Introduction to Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science. Merleau-Ponty uses concepts like those of the lived or own body and of lived space in order to emphasize, from a first-person perspective, the co-penetration that exists between subject and world.Gallagher and Zahavi have regained the experience of phenomenology, especially that of Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, to contribute to the development of the cognitive sciences. Via the phenomenological approach to the reality of habit, a new understanding of the body becomes possible for us, such that it becomes characterized “as subject, as experiencer, as agent”, and at the same time we can understand “the way the body structures our experience” (Gallagher and Zahavi, 2008). Additionally, the idea of a pre-reflexive understanding is conceived of by these authors... (shrink)

The notion of shared value presents business with a challenge: to generate social benefit and profit simultaneously. This challenge involves resolving tensions/paradoxes inherent when integrating the apparent contradictory elements of social and economic values. Unfortunately, resolving such tensions is difficult due to the habitual, automatic nature of sensemaking. This paper offers a mechanism whereby individuals can, over time, begin to overcome habitual sensemaking and potentially resolve tensions inherent in shared value. The mechanism is labeled inner knowledge creation. IKC is described (...) and its role in creating shared value for businesses is illustrated through a conceptual model. The model shows how IKC develops metacognitive capabilities, builds capacities to resolve tensions/paradoxes, and cultivates openness to others’ perspectives. (shrink)

Attention has turned from Hobbes the systematic thinker to his inconsistencies, as the essays in the Hobbes symposium published in the recent volume of Political Theory suggest. Deborah Baumgold, in "The Difficulties of Hobbes Interpretation," shifted the focus to "the history of the book," and Hobbes's method of serial composition and peripatetic insertion, as a major source of his inconsistency. Accepting Baumgold's method, the author argues that the manner of composition does not necessarily determine content and that fundamental paradoxes in (...) Hobbes's work have a different provenance, for which there are also contextual answers. Hobbes was a courtier's client, but one committed early to a materialist ontology and epistemology, and these commitments shackled him in treating the immediate political questions with which he was required to deal, leading to systemic paradoxes in his treatment of natural law, liberty, authorization, and consent. (shrink)

Birth order has been examined over a wide variety of dimensions in the context of modern populations. A consistent message has been that it is better to be born first. The analysis of birth order in this paper is different in several ways from other investigations into birth order effects. First, we examine the effect of birth order in an egalitarian, small-scale, kin-based society, which has not been done before. Second, we use a different outcome measure, fertility, rather than outcome (...) measures of social, psychological, or economic success. We find, third, that being born late in an egalitarian, technologically simple society rather than being born early has a positive outcome on fertility, and fourth, that number of older siblings and sibling set size are even stronger predictors of fertility, especially for males. (shrink)

The study of morality is increasingly an interdisciplinary endeavor spanning the cognitive, social, and biological sciences. This article provides an overview and synthesis of recent work fields relevant to the scientific understanding of morality, with a focus on how moral judgment and behavior are rooted in the functioning, development, and evolution of the brain. It presents themes that have emerged from studies examining the cognitive processes involved in morality. It shows studies that directly investigate the neural substrates of morality using (...) modern brain imaging techniques. A number of brain regions and systems are identified that appear to be essential for normal moral behavior. The article focuses on two clinical conditions: lesions to the prefrontal cortex and psychopathy. Furthermore, it discusses neuroendocrinology and evolutionary neurobiology—that is relevant to understanding the development of morality and concerns evolutionary history and functions of two neuropeptides, oxytocin and vasopressin, in the mammalian brain and their effects on behavior. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that the logos, the primary object of knowledge in Heraclitus’ epistemology, is a unity both as an object of knowledge and as an instance of being rather than becoming. Section I begins with discussions of knowledge and Heraclitus’ conception of logos; section II is concerned with knowledge and unity. The two later sections of the paper explore the consequences of the account I attribute to Heraclitus: section III considers being, unity, and change; and section IV (...) discusses Heraclitus’ views of knowledge and sense perception. (shrink)

The last twenty years have seen a remarkable increase in scholarly work on the Presocratics: new texts have appeared, new interpretations have been advanced, and a new appreciation for the scientific and philosophical claims of the early Greek thinkers is evident.1 There has been a general broadening of the questions that have been examined: scholars have been exploring the supposed boundaries of Presocratic thought, and new work on reception history and on the transmission of texts has enriched our understanding of (...) the earliest Greek philosophers. Here, I survey some of the trends and results of the new Presocratic scholarship.2Because no complete Presocratic text survives, those who work with the early Greek .. (shrink)

El objetivo de este artículo es comprender las prácticas y percepciones de las navegadoras de pacientes con sospecha o diagnóstico de cáncer de mama en cuatro hospitales públicos argentinos respecto del uso de las tecnologías de información y comunicación en su tarea cotidiana. En el sistema de navegación de CM, la navegadora acompaña a las pacientes para evitar o superar barreras de acceso a la línea de cuidado del CM, buscando lograr diagnóstico, atención y tratamiento en tiempos óptimos. El abordaje (...) metodológico de la investigación aquí presentada es cualitativo con un diseño descriptivo y exploratorio. Se realizaron entrevistas y observaciones participantes. Entre otros hallazgos, observamos que los déficits estructurales de las TIC en los servicios de salud estudiados obstaculizan el desarrollo de la navegación y refuerzan rechazos y desconfianza a su utilización en las navegadoras estudiadas. A pesar de ello, las TIC se instalan progresivamente en la navegación de pacientes con CM. (shrink)

The papal monarchy is the subject of Thomas Hobbes's Historical Narration concerning Heresy, much of Behemoth, and his long Latin poem, the Historia Ecclesiastica. Hobbes's was not the only account in his day of the papal monarchy as a history of iniquity, or even as “the ghost of the Roman Empire.” The papal creation of a parallel system of offices in the late Roman and Holy Roman Empires is of immense institutional importance. Hobbes's analysis of the second papal strategy, the (...) co‐optation of Roman Law as canon law, is complicated. Hobbes's account of both the institutional and philosophical consequences of the papal monarchy is surprisingly congruent with some of the most authoritative modern accounts. The fourteenth‐century hierocratic publicists belonged as much to the reception of Averroist Aristotelianism as their contemporary antagonists. None of the parties to the struggle between pope and emperor appears to have been immune to the Aristotelianism of the Arabic commentators. (shrink)

Hobbes in Leviathan, chapter xv, 4, makes the startling claim: “The fool hath said in his heart, ‘there is no such thing as justice,’” paraphrasing Psalm 52:1: “The fool hath said in his heart there is no God.” These are charges of which Hobbes himself could stand accused. His parable of the fool is about the exchange of obedience for protection, the backslider, regime change, and the tyrant; but given that Hobbes was himself likely an oath-breaker, it is also self-reflexive (...) and self-justificatory. For, Hobbes’s fool is not a windbag, or one of the dumb mob, led astray by priests. He is, in the terminology of Psalm 52, an insipiens, a madman or raving lunatic, whose rebellion against God the King is his own destruction and that of his people. A long iconographic tradition portraying the fool as insipiens, Antichrist, heretical impostor and tyrant king, was at Hobbes’s disposal. (shrink)

This article develops the notion of plant writing or phytographia, the roots of which go back to the early modern concept of signatura rerum, as well as, more recently, to Walter Benjamin’s idea of a “language of things” and to Jacques Derrida’s arche-writing. Phytographia designates the encounter between the plants’ inscription in the world and the traces of that imprint left in literary works, mediated by the artistic perspective of the author. The final section of the essay turns to the (...) so-called “jungle novel,” set in the Amazonian rainforest, as an instantiation of phytographia. (shrink)

This article is concerned with the first philosophers and scientists in the Western tradition. It studies the Presocratic philosophers. One can approach early Greek philosophy through either particular figures of the period or thematic studies that cover broader time periods. If the term “Presocratic philosopher” is a conventional designation established by scholars, it marks out a set of figures who do seem to merit special attention. So as long as there is a tribe of philosophers in the West, they will (...) look back to the first antecedents of their profession. And it seems that the Presocratics are the obvious candidates for founders of the movement. (shrink)

Teacher and author Vivian Paley is highly regarded by parents, educators, and other professionals for her original insights into such seemingly everyday issues as play, story, gender, and how young children think. In _The Classrooms All Young Children Need_, Patricia M. Cooper takes a synoptic view of Paley’s many books and articles, charting the evolution of Paley’s thinking while revealing the seminal characteristics of her teaching philosophy. This careful analysis leads Cooper to identify a pedagogical model organized around two complementary (...) principles: a curriculum that promotes play and imagination, and the idea of classrooms as fair places where young children of every color, ability, and disposition are welcome. With timely attention paid to debates about the reduction in time for play in the early childhood classroom, the role of race in education, and No Child Left Behind, _The Classrooms All Young Children Need_ will be embraced by anyone tasked with teaching our youngest pupils. (shrink)

Nelson argues the best we can hope for in a nonsexist society is to revalue those feminine qualities that have previously been devalued. I argue that those qualities are the result of a sexist construction of gender categories, and that a nonsexist society would have no reason to preserve them.