This article reflects on pivotal concepts of psychoanalytic practice and theory, applied to a single case study to create new meanings. Drawing from the concepts of transference, countertransference, and projective identification, the author presents the notion that the researcher's subjective reactions are created and induced by the subject of study precisely because this is one, and sometimes the only way available to the subject to communicate something that is out of its full awareness. In essence, some unconscious material can be (...) expressed nonverbally by the subject by means of provoking visceral and bodily reactions in the researcher, or in some cases, psychic imagery such as dreams or fantasies. The material can be meaningfully interpreted by the researcher by receiving, containing, and sorting through these inchoate emotional reactions within self. (shrink)

This paper poses an original puzzle about the relationship between causation and moral responsibility called The Moral Difference Puzzle. Using the puzzle, the paper argues for three related ideas: (1) the existence of a new sort of moral luck; (2) an intractable conflict between the causal concepts used in moral assessment; and (3) inability of leading theories of causation to capture the sorts of causal differences that matter for moral evaluation of agents’ causal contributions to outcomes.

This paper suggests that time travelling scenarios commonly depicted in science fiction introduce problems and dangers for the time traveller. If time travel takes time, then time travellers risk collision with past objects, relocation to distant parts of the universe, and time travel-specific injuries. I propose several models of time travel that avoid the dangers and risks of time travel taking time, and that introduce new questions about the relationship between time travel and spatial location.

This paper examines both creepiness and the distinctive reaction had to creepiness, being “creeped out.” The paper defends a response-dependent account of creepiness in terms of this distinctive reaction, contrasting our preferred account to others that might be offered. The paper concludes with a discussion of the value of detecting creepiness.

The aim of this paper is to show that Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex has been mistakenly interpreted as a theory of gender, because interpreters have failed adequately to understand Beauvoir's aims. Beauvoir is not trying to explain facts, events, or states of affairs, but to reveal, unveil, or uncover (découvrir) meanings. She explicates the meanings of woman, female, and feminine. Instead of a theory, Beauvoir's book presents a phenomenological description of the sexual difference.

We argue that in implanted neurotechnology research, participants and researchers experience what Henry Richardson has called “moral entanglement.” Participants partially entrust researchers with access to their brains and thus to information that would otherwise be private, leading to created intimacies and special obligations of beneficence for researchers and research funding agencies. One of these obligations, we argue, is about continued access to beneficial technology once a trial ends. We make the case for moral entanglement in this context through exploration of (...) participants’ vulnerability, uncompensated risks and burdens, depth of relationship with the research team, and dependence on researchers in implanted neurotechnology trials. (shrink)

This paper argues that causal idealism, the view that causation is a product of mental activity, should be considered a competetitor to contemporary views that incorporate human thought and agency into the causal relation. Weighing contextualism, contrastivism, or pragmatism about causation against causal idealism results in at least a tie with respect to the virtues of these theories.

This article analyses some of the governmental issues at stake in contemporary institutional politics in its confrontation with the challenges of digitalisation. Through notions such as algorithmic governmentality (Rouvroy and Berns), platformisation (Bratton, Stiegler), extractivism, and the affect theory (Massumi), and following a symptomatologic method, we will try to establish and discuss some key points that could be useful in order to update certain concepts regarding micro- and biopolitics (Deleuze and Guattari, Foucault), the public sphere, and the management of social (...) and individual bodies. Finally, we will try to understand how the manipulation of affects via the staging of possible catastrophic futures (Parisi) is used as a powerful neurosensory weapon, with performative effects for governing and modelling behaviours. If contemporary capitalism is capable of abstracting and extracting affects, of accumulating them and of creating value through this, which policies should we apply in this situation of uncertainty and of the manipulation of affectivity? Is there any place left for public institutions, or is the market the sole political actor left? (shrink)

Artificial intelligent (AI) systems that perform image classification tasks are being used to great success in many application contexts. However, many of these systems are opaque, even to experts. This lack of understanding can be problematic for ethical, legal, or practical reasons. The research field Explainable AI (XAI) has therefore developed several approaches to explain image classifiers. The hope is to bring about understanding, e.g., regarding why certain images are classified as belonging to a particular target class. Most of these (...) approaches use visual explanations. Drawing on Elgin’s work (True enough. MIT Press, Cambridge, 2017), I argue that analyzing what those explanations exemplify can help to assess their suitability for producing understanding. More specifically, I suggest to distinguish between two forms of examples according to their suitability for producing understanding. I call these forms samples and exemplars, respectively. Samples are prone to misinterpretation and thus carry the risk of leading to misunderstanding. Exemplars, by contrast, are intentionally designed or chosen to meet contextual requirements and to mitigate the risk of misinterpretation. They are thus preferable for bringing about understanding. By reviewing several XAI approaches directed at image classifiers, I show that most of them explain with samples. If my analysis is correct, it will be beneficial if such explainability methods use explanations that qualify as exemplars. (shrink)

This paper is dedicated to articulating the ethical puzzles that arise from the possibility of time travel. I divide the puzzles into three different categories: permissibility puzzles, obligation puzzles, and conflicts between past and future selves. In each category, I suggest that ethical problems involving time travel are not as dissimilar to parallel “normal” ethical puzzles as one might think.

With the creation of the European Higher Education Area, universities are undergoing a significant transformation that is leading towards a new teaching and learning paradigm. The competencies approach has a key role in this process. But we believe that the competence approach has a number of limitations and weaknesses that can be overcome and supplanted by the capabilities approach. In this article our objective is twofold: first, make a critical analysis of the concept of competence as it is being used (...) in higher education, identifying its limitations and weaknesses; and second, present the potential of the capabilities approach for higher education and review its complementarity to the competence approach.We begin with a brief characterisation of the capabilities approach and its implications for education. Then we examine some implications of the competencies approach in higher education and the reasons that led us to choose the DeSeCo proposal for comparison with the capability approach. We then go on to compare the two approaches, addressing 1) the aims of education and 2) the concept of competence and capability. Finally, we address the implications of incorporating the capabilities approach in learning and teaching in higher education. (shrink)

This paper discusses the individuation of characters for the use asunits by geneticists at the beginning of the 20th century. Thediscussion involves the Presence and Absence Hypothesis as a case study. It issuggested that the gap between conceptual consideration and etiological factorsof individuating of characters is being handled by way of mutual adjustment.Confrontation of a suggested morphological unit character with experimentresults molded the final boundaries of it.

In Democracy without Shortcuts, Cristina Lafont identifies proceduralist or ‘deep pluralist’ conceptions of democracy alongside epistemic and lottocratic approaches as shortcuts that avoid the more challenging but, in her view, preferable path of engaging with and attempting to sway competing views, values and beliefs of fellow citizens. I argue that with the wholesale dismissal of proceduralist accounts of democracy Lafont herself takes two shortcuts: The first concerns the characterization of deep pluralism as unable to explain substantive disagreement after a decision (...) is settled, and the second undervalues proceduralism’s ability to evaluate and criticize the substance of the political decision-making process. While her critique is fitting for minimalist conceptions of proceduralism, a theory of normative proceduralism shares many objectives with Lafont’s vision of a participatory deliberative democracy. Integrating those approaches instead of dismissing proceduralism outright would render her project appealing to theorists who would not otherwise consider themselves deliberative democrats. (shrink)

In the last decades, new technologies have improved the survival of patients affected by chronic illnesses. Among them, left ventricular assist device has represented a viable solution for patients with advanced heart failure. Even though the LVAD prolongs life expectancy, patients’ vulnerability generally increases during follow up and patients’ request for the device withdrawal might occur. Such a request raises some ethical concerns in that it directly hastens the patient’s death. Hence, in order to assess the ethical acceptability of LVAD (...) withdrawal, we analyse and examine an ethical argument, widely adopted in the literature, that we call the “descriptive approach”, which consists in giving a definition of life-sustaining treatment to evaluate the ethical acceptability of treatment withdrawal. Focusing attention on LVAD, we show criticisms of this perspective. Finally, we assess every patient’s request of LVAD withdrawal through a prescriptive approach, which finds its roots in the criterion of proportionality. (shrink)

In the early 1980s, Paul V. Spade advanced the thesis that obligational reasoning was counterfactual reasoning, based upon his interpretation of the obligationes of Walter Burley, Richard Kilvington, and Roger Swyneshed. Eleonore Stump in a series of contemporary papers argued against Spade’s thesis with respect to Burley and Swyneshed, provisionally admitting it for Kilvington with the caveat that Kilvington’s theory is by no means clear or non-idiosyncratic. In this paper, we revisit the connection between counterfactual reasoning and obligationes, focusing on (...) one particular treatise, the anonymous early twelfth-century Obligationes Parisienses edited by L.M. de Rijk in the late 70s. We show that while positio in this treatise does not involve counterfactual reasoning, the species sit verum or rei veritas apparently does, and it is precisely this which distinguishes the two species in this treatise. (shrink)

The origins of field guides and other plant identification manuals have been poorly understood until now because little attention has been paid to 18th century botanical identification guides. Identification manuals came to have the format we continue to use today when botanical instructors in post-Revolutionary France combined identification keys with the "natural method" and alphabetical indexes. Botanical works featuring multiple but linked techniques to enable plant identification became very popular in France by the first decade of the 19th century. British (...) botanists, however, continued to use Linnaeus's sexual system almost exclusively for another two decades. Their reluctance to use other methods or systems of classification Can be attributed to a culture suspicious of innovation, anti-French sentiment and the association of all things Linnaean with English national pride, fostered in particular by the President of the Linnean Society of London, Sir James Edward Smith. The British aversion to using multiple plant identification technologies in one text also helps explain why it took so long for English botanists to adopt the natural method, even after several Englishmen had tried to introduce it to their country. Historians of ornithology emphasize that the popularity of ornithological guides in the 19th and 20th centuries stems from their illustrations, illustrations made possible by printing technologies that improved illustration quality and reduced costs. Though illustrations are the most obvious features of late 19th century and 20th century guides, the organizational principles that make them functional as identification devices come from techniques developed in botanical works in the 18th century. (shrink)

The ordeal of mourning, being so much harder than any thought its experience may deliver, bears out the impression developed in Julia Kristeva’s opening to The Severed Head —that thought is swift. She has recognized as well as anyone the interplay of blindness and insight. Nothing brings all this into starker evidence than the premature death of a loved other, a friend, or a true assistant in life and thought. There is a reminder in this that the new narratives of (...) subjectivity on which Kristeva places a high value, and certainly the long life of meaning in the world, come at the price of the loss and mourning of our loved others. Pleshette DeArmitt’s book, The Right to Narcissism: A Case for an Im-possible Self-Love, has given the condition of narcissism an intricate place in this difficult if promising work. (shrink)

El estudio gira en torno a una experiencia educativa llevada a cabo en un colegio con diez estudiantes de Educación Infantil (entre cinco y seis años) en Asturias (España) y el aprendizaje de la Prehistoria. Mediante una metodología participativa, experiencial y basada en la investigación se analiza su evolución en el aprendizaje de los contenidos específicos de la evolución de los homínidos y el desarrollo de su pensamiento narrativo para reconstruir su propio discurso, haciendo hincapié en los operadores temporales (secuenciación/sucesión, (...) simultaneidad, duración/ritmo, orientación temporal, periodización y, permanencia, cambios y consecuencias). Para ello, se realiza una investigación de naturaleza cualitativa mediante la observación participante durante el proceso de enseñanza-aprendizaje y la secuenciación de imágenes acompañadas de entrevistas que capta unas capacidades embrionarias. (shrink)

Mainstreaming Pacifism: Conflict, Success, and Ethics covers the history of philosophy concerning successful political means, and proposes an original interpretation of Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Marx and Gandhi. The book counters the objection that pacifism is ineffective, and proposes that pacifism is not for a sect, but rather draws its most effective strategies from, and contributes them to, the mainstream political tradition.

This paper offers an alternate solution to the puzzle of transformative experience raised by Paul (2014), through an appeal to Arthur Schopenhauer’s concept of the _acquired character_, which speaks to the intuition that authenticity entails a notion of the ‘self-as-guide’ (Rivera et al., 2019 ). On Paul’s solution to the puzzle, transformative decisions may be made authentically by adopting a meta-preference concerning personal transformation, such that the self is constituted after a decision is made. Yet when comparing Paul’s account of (...) authenticity to that of Somogy Varga’s (2012), we see that the former is too formal in that it neglects certain requirements of personal identity-formation, which Varga defines as wholehearted commitment based in strong evaluation. However, in defining these requirements as such, Varga’s account of authenticity is unequipped to adequately address the puzzle of transformative experience. Varga’s account further falls short with respect to specifying sufficient criteria for personal fitness, as Rings (2017) argues. In connection with this deficiency, Varga’s account also does not fully reckon with the threat of manipulation, given the possibility of egoistically driven self-deception in conjunction with oppressive social conditions. I argue that with the aim of character acquisition via acts of subjective contemplation, the authenticity of transformative decisions can be understood at least partly in terms of self-discovery. To expand on authenticity’s ethical dimension, as first introduced by Varga, in a way that is compatible with this established dimension of self-discovery, and with the help of Christopher Gill’s (1996) analysis of an ancient Greek conception of personhood, I suggest that we conceive of authenticity also as a process of value-interpretation, while employing a concept of the self that I will refer to as the _metapersonal_. This process is congruent with a metapersonal self in so far as it is aimed at defining and clarifying the human good in general, from within a community whose fundamental ethical demand consists of maximizing mutual and reciprocal benefit. (shrink)

Workplace ostracism is a prevalent and painful experience. The majority of studies focus on negative outcomes of ostracism, with less work examining employees’ potential adaptive responses to it. Further, scholars have suggested that such responses depend on employee attributions, yet little research has taken an attributional perspective on workplace ostracism. Drawing on sociometer theory and attribution theory we develop and test a model that investigates why and under what circumstances ostracized employees engage in adaptive responses to ostracism. Specifically, we argue (...) that ostracized employees feel greater levels of shame and, in turn, are motivated to engage in greater ingratiation behavior toward their ostracizers. However, we predict that perceptions of ostracizers’ competence and warmth shape different attributional processes, which influence the degree to which the ostracized employee experience shame and, in turn, is motivated to engage in ingratiation behavior. Results of a three-wave, time-lagged survey support our prediction that shame mediates the relationship between coworker ostracism and ingratiation behavior. Moreover, results support our three-way interaction, such that coworkers who report higher levels of ostracism and who perceive their coworkers as more (vs. less) competent and more (vs. less) warm report higher shame, and, in turn, ingratiation behavior. Theoretical and practical implications, as well as avenues for future research, are discussed. (shrink)

The concept of solidarity is of central importance to the political sense of collective action. But it is a curious fact that solidarity is virtually unmentioned across the large and growing literature in philosophical collective action theory. Instead, we see discussions of collective action overwhelmingly focus on epistemic conditions and group-level correlates of individual action explanations such as collective intentions, collective beliefs, and so on. The aim of this paper is to elucidate the relationship between solidarity and collective action theory. (...) I will try to answer two questions: (1) What is it about the structure of accounts of collective action that seems to preclude discussions of solidarity and related concepts; and (2) How can solidarity be made to play a useful role in those accounts? (shrink)

Explores the nature and significance of Petrarch’s indebtedness to Dante in the Rime sparse.

RESUMEN El concepto heterotopía, definido por Michel Foucault como espacio otro, es retomado en este artículo, desde un enfoque crítico, para analizar los procesos de construcción, gestión y puesta en marcha del Museo Itinerante de la Memoria y la Identidad de Los Montes de María, El Mochuelo. Bajo la premisa de que el desarrollo de los procesos de memorialización debe atenderse más allá del cumplimiento normativo por parte del Estado, puesto que estas prácticas de memoria territoriales en El Mochuelo subvierten (...) el estatismo y la homogeneidad con los cuales se instauran las verdades oficiales. ABSTRACT Heterotopia concept, defined by Michel Foucault as another space, is taken up in this article to analyze the processes of construction, management, and implementation of the Museo Itinerante de la Memoria y la Identidad de Los Montes de María, El Mochuelo (Itinerant Museum of Memory and Identity of Los Montes de María, El Mochuelo). Under the premise that the development of memorialization processes must be addressed beyond regulatory compliance by the State since these territorial memory practices in El Mochuelo subvert the statism and homogeneity with which official truths are established. (shrink)

Inspection of surviving mirrors and related objects shows that they were too crude to offer the early Renaissance painter an optical short-cut to a naturalistic image of his subject. The craftsmanship of mirror makers was independent of and inferior to the quality of theories of image formation of the day.

Emmanuel Levinas argues that justice is meaningful only to the extent that other persons are encountered in their individuality, as my neighbors, and not merely abstract citizens of a political community. That is, the political demand for justice arises from my ethical relationship with the other whose face I cannot look past. But despite his revolutionary ideas about the origins of justice, Levinas ultimately appeals to a very traditional view of justice in which persons are considered equal and comparable. and (...) responsibilities and rights are distributed evenly among them. In response to Levinas, I argue that insofar as justice is constructed by and for the ethicalrelationship, it must also be deconstructed by that relationship. If one takes seriously Levinas’s claim that asymmetrical ethical responsibility is the origin of justice, then one must also reject Levinas’s suggestion that justice involves viewing persons and responsibilities as comparable and symmetrical. (shrink)

This article was a response to and completion of a Liturgy on Domestic Violence, marking the start of the UN's End Domestic Violence to Women Week, 2001. This article examines some of the causes and results of domestic violence from within a feminist theological viewpoint. Although domestic violence has deep roots in human culture, this article considers the possibilities for curbing this destructive form of human behaviour. The pattern of domestic violence that is found in contemporary societies has remarkable parallels (...) with some of the stories of women found in the Hebrew Scriptures. These parallels are examined and the conclusion offered is that there are theological connections with domestic violence. Christianity could do more both to acknowledge its responsibility for the conditions that give rise to domestic violence, and to help to eradicate it. (shrink)

Hierarchical complexity's unidimensional measurement can help rectify policy confusion and debates about democratization and terrorism reduction. Stages of political development examined using the method yield task analyses demonstrating why stages cannot be skipped or rushed. Composites of stages and societies' transitions implicate policy change for anti-corruption and nation-building. New indexes for the political domain should be developed using hierarchical complexity to account for and measure a multitude of political tasks regardless of content or context. Measurement offers a reliable, empirical basis (...) to resist attempts to rush development. Hierarchical complexity accounts for why such efforts are doomed in advance to fail. (shrink)

Visual perception of space and time has been shown to rely on context dependency, an inferential process by which the average magnitude of a series of stimuli previously experienced acts as a prior during perception. This article aims to investigate the presence and evolution of this phenomenon in early aging. Two groups of participants belonging to two different age ranges (Young Adults: average age 28.8 years old; Older Adults: average age 62.8 years old) participated in the study performing a discrimination (...) and a reproduction task, both in a spatial and temporal conditions. In particular, they were asked to evaluate lengths in the spatial domain and interval durations in the temporal one. Early aging resulted to be associated to a general decline of the perceptual acuity, which is particularly evident in the temporal condition. The context dependency phenomenon was preserved also during aging, maintaining similar levels as those exhibited by the younger group in both space and time perception. However, the older group showed a greater variability in context dependency among participants, perhaps due to different strategies used to face a higher uncertainty in the perceptual process. (shrink)