Healthcare user fees present an important barrier for accessing services for the poorest (indigents) in Burkina Faso and selective removal of fees has been incorporated in national healthcare planning. However, establishing fair, effective and sustainable mechanisms for the removal of user fees presents important challenges. A participatory action-research project was conducted in Ouargaye, Burkina Faso, to test mechanisms for identifying those who are indigents, and funding and implementing user fee removal. In this paper, we explore stakeholder perceptions of ethical considerations (...) relating to participation and partnership arising in the action-research. (shrink)

This volume consists of 21 essays on Marsilio Ficino (1433-99), the Florentine scholar-philosopher-magus-priest who was the architect of Renaissance Platonism.

Central sensitization refers to the increased responsiveness of nociceptive neurons in the central nervous system after repeated or sustained peripheral nociceptor activation. It is hypothesized to play a key role in the development of chronic pain. A hallmark of central sensitization is an increased sensitivity to noxious mechanical stimuli extending beyond the injured location, known as secondary hyperalgesia. For its ability to modulate the transmission and the processing of nociceptive inputs, attention could constitute a promising target to prevent central sensitization (...) and the development of chronic pain. It was recently shown that the experimental induction of central sensitization at both forearms of healthy volunteers using bilateral high-frequency electrocutaneous stimulation (HFS), can be modulated by encouraging participants to selectively focus their attention to one arm, to the detriment of the other arm, resulting in a greater secondary hyperalgesia on the attended arm as compared to the unattended one. Given the potential value of the question being addressed, we conducted a preregistered replication study in a well-powered independent sample to assess the robustness of the effect, i.e., the modulatory role of spatial attention on the induction of central sensitization. This hypothesis was tested using a double-blind, within-subject design. Sixty-seven healthy volunteers performed a task that required focusing attention toward one forearm to discriminate innocuous vibrotactile stimuli while HFS was applied on both forearms simultaneously. Our results showed a significant increase in mechanical sensitivity directly and 20 min after HFS. However, in contrast to the previous study, we did not find a significant difference in the development of secondary hyperalgesia between the attended vs. unattended arms. Our results question whether spatial selective attention affects the development of secondary hyperalgesia. Alternatively, the non-replication could be because the bottom-up capture of attention caused by the HFS-mediated sensation was too strong in comparison to the top-down modulation exerted by the attentional task. In other words, the task was not engaging enough and the HFS pulses, including those on the unattended arm, were too salient to allow a selective focus on one arm and modulate nociceptive processing. (shrink)

This article discusses the set of Harsanyi payoff vectors of a cooperative TU-game, also known as the Selectope. We reconsider some results on Harsanyi payoff vectors within a more general framework. First, an intuitive approach is used, showing that the set of Harsanyi payoff vectors is the core of an associated convex game. Next, the set of individual rational Harsanyi payoff vectors, the Harsanyi imputations in short, is considered. Existence conditions are provided, and if non-empty, we provide a description as (...) the core of a well-defined convex game, and show that it is an externally stable set. (shrink)

Social problems such as racism, sexism, and inequality are often cited as structural rather than individual in nature. What does it mean to invoke a social structural explanation, and how do such explanations relate to individualistic ones? This article explores recent philosophical debates concerning the nature and usages of social structural explanation. I distinguish between two central kinds of social structural explanation: those that are autonomous from psychology, and those that are not. This distinction will help clarify the explanatory power (...) that each type of SSE has, points of convergence with methodological traditions such as critical theory and rational choice theory, and the difficulties that each type of SSE faces. (shrink)

Yule, Valerie Review(s) of: Heroes and heretics: A political history of western thought, by Barrows Dunham, Publisher, Alfred A. Knopf in 1964.

Bilder und Narrative gehören zu unserer politischen Kultur. Viele denken aber an Inszenierung, den schönen Schein oder reinen Symbolismus, wenn man nach der Ästhetik in der Politik fragt. Entgegen dieser Intuition arbeitet Valérie Dietrich die Produktivität und den konstitutiven Beitrag der Ästhetik für eine demokratische Politik heraus. Mit Hilfe des radikaldemokratischen Politikbegriffs von Jacques Rancière bindet sie sie an die sinnliche Wahrnehmung zurück und setzt sie in ein Verhältnis zu den anderen Vermögen der menschlichen Vernunft. Damit zeigt sie, dass die (...) Ästhetik ein zentraler Ort gesellschaftlicher Reflexivität ist, von dem aus eine neue Politik beginnen kann. (shrink)

Entre l’achat de l’éditeur Zynga par Google environ 200 millions de dollars et l’acquisition pour 400 millions de dollars de Playfish par Electronic Arts, le phénomène des jeux sociaux utilisant les réseaux sociaux comme Facebook, quitte le secteur des studios indépendants pour rejoindre les acteurs majeurs de l’industrie numérique. Attirés par l’explosion des usages de ces plateformes participatives et leurs millions d’utilisateurs, ces éditeurs numériques s’intéressent aux marchés des joueurs occasionnels en ligne. Nous proposons dans cet article d’explorer deux phénomènes (...) contemporains émergeant de ces pratiques : la convivialité et la gratuité. Derrière la figure d’un joueur occasionnel apparaît un « joueur-hyperconsommateur » révélateur de nos temps hypermodernes.With Google’s buyout of publisher Zynga for around 200 million dollars and the 400 million dollar purchase of Playfish by Electronic Arts, social gaming on networks like Facebook has moved out of the independent studio sector and joined the digital industry’s big league. Booming use of these participatory platforms, along with their millions of users, are attracting the interest of digital publishers in the casual online gaming market. This article explores two contemporary phenomena that have emerged from online gaming practices: conviviality and free access. Underlying the casual gamer profile is a form of hyper-consumerism that epitomises our hypermodern times. (shrink)

Sugar, pork, beer, corn, cider, scrapple, and hoppin' John all became staples in the diet of colonial America. The ways Americans cultivated and prepared food and the values they attributed to it played an important role in shaping the identity of the newborn nation. In A Revolution in Eating, James E. McWilliams presents a colorful and spirited tour of culinary attitudes, tastes, and techniques throughout colonial America. Confronted by strange new animals, plants, and landscapes, settlers in the colonies and West (...) Indies found new ways to produce food. Integrating their British and European tastes with the demands and bounty of the rugged American environment, early Americans developed a range of regional cuisines. From the kitchen tables of typical Puritan families to Iroquois longhouses in the backcountry and slave kitchens on southern plantations, McWilliams portrays the grand variety and inventiveness that characterized colonial cuisine. As colonial America grew, so did its palate, as interactions among European settlers, Native Americans, and African slaves created new dishes and attitudes about food. McWilliams considers how Indian corn, once thought by the colonists as "fit for swine," became a fixture in the colonial diet. He also examines the ways in which African slaves influenced West Indian and American southern cuisine. While a mania for all things British was a unifying feature of eighteenth-century cuisine, the colonies discovered a national beverage in domestically brewed beer, which came to symbolize solidarity and loyalty to the patriotic cause in the Revolutionary era. The beer and alcohol industry also instigated unprecedented trade among the colonies and further integrated colonial habits and tastes. Victory in the American Revolution initiated a "culinary declaration of independence," prompting the antimonarchical habits of simplicity, frugality, and frontier ruggedness to define American cuisine. McWilliams demonstrates that this was a shift not so much in new ingredients or cooking methods, as in the way Americans imbued food and cuisine with values that continue to shape American attitudes to this day. (shrink)

the problem of estimation of High Hume (NBIC) technogenic evolutionary risks is analysed as part of concept of 3-components evolutionary strategy of Homo sapiens.

The impact of "human enhancement" can manifest itself only overtime. And this is why, the author argues, "human enhancement" is an issue for the youth-oriented policies. As such, the problem of "human enhancement" is a social problem. The author stresses the influence of individual experiments that young people run on themselves and that have to do with human enhancement. He argues that these experiments have the potential of opening new directions for a social construction of reality. He relates this potential (...) to the innovative impulse that young people have. (shrink)

During the already long history of the Israel-Palestine conflict, women from both sides of the Green Line have been highly visible participants in the often perilous enterprise of establishing dialogue, of maintaining links with the other side, and of thinking seriously about the conditions that will need to be brought together for the construction of a just and lasting peace. By their words, their often symbolic actions, and their activist strategies, they have durably contributed to the building of a ‘clandestine’ (...) peace often far removed from the calendars and issues of the major international negotiations. In these collective actions, choosing the path of non-violence has often been at the heart of their repertoire of militant activities and their discourses. This article proposes to examine certain examples of such activities and involvement since the first Intifada of 1987 up until the very recent past, showing that the choice of non-violent strategies has been a significantly marked tendency of the activism of women, and that this is always associated with the formulation of renewed forms of discourse around peace and reconciliation. (shrink)

Bioethical Proposals to Face Social and Ethical Problems Generated by Neglected Infectious Diseases Propostas bioéticas ante os problemas sociais e éticos que geram as doenças infecciosas desatendidas This review article appointed to the topic of Neglected Tropical Diseases, a group of 18 disabling pathologies, which are sometimes fatal, and often deforming, that prevail in the populations of Asia, Africa and the tropical areas of South America. We presented, categorized, and analyzed, through a bibliographical review, the elements that relate to these (...) diseases from the Universal Declaration of Bioethics and Human Rights, 2005, in terms of equality, justice and equity, the non-discrimination and stigmatization, social responsibility and health approach. Throughout the review, we concluded that the problem around NTDs is multifactorial and we propose solutions to mitigate and to attend the NTDs, from a perspective of focused bioethics around the dignity of the human person and the affected population. We proposed including bioethics in the debate about the care of the NTDs to analyze the problems and examine solutions through transdisciplinary research projects that involve collaborative and formative work among the affected communities, government entities, health professionals and veterinary sciences. Para citar este artículo / To reference this article / Para citar este artigo Sáenz V, Mazzanti di Ruggiero MA. Propuestas bioéticas frente a los problemas sociales y éticos que generan las enfermedades infecciosas desatendidas. Pers Bioet. 2019; 23: 84-110. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5294/pebi.2019.23.1.6 Recepción: 27/09/2018 Aceptación: 06/02/2019. (shrink)

The article explores the place of affect in community relations with respect to trauma following the closure of a steelworks for a working-class community in the South Wales valleys in 2002. A review of sociological approaches to community demonstrates the poor handling of relational and affective aspects which, it is argued, are central to the way in which community relations were formed and provided a safe and containing skin against the uncertainty of industrial production. Using psychoanalytic approaches to affect which (...) stress the importance of skin, particularly the work of Bick, Tustin, Winnicott and Anzieu, the article explores how a sense of a containing skin provides a feeling of ontological security for a community beset by uncertainty and insecurity. It is argued that, following the closure of the steelworks in 2002, this skin is ruptured and that it is difficult for the members of the community to find a way forward. Using examples taken from psychosocial interviews with community members, the case is made for a range of affective relations and practices through which the skin is created. The absence of these practices and relations creates a profound sense of lack of safety and fear of death within the inhabitants, which needs to be addressed, but is rarely discussed in approaches to community or regeneration. (shrink)

Cet article propose une analogie entre la problématique du « vouloir dire » et celle du « vouloir faire » en utilisant la question de l'intentionalité telle qu’elle est traitée par la philosophie de l'action post-wittgensteinienne d'Elizabeth Anscombe. L’enjeu est de déterminer à quelles conditions nous pouvons appliquer une philosophie de l’action au langage. S’il ne s’agit pas de réduire toute analyse du langage à une philosophie de l’action, il s’agit néanmoins de montrer qu’il existe entre langage et action une (...) relation à double sens. D’une part, comme le montrent les travaux d’Anscombe et de John L. Austin, l’analyse du langage (et en particulier des concepts d’intention, de volontaire, etc.) sert au philosophe à rendre compte de la notion d’action. D’autre part, comme l’a montré Austin, parler, utiliser le langage, c’est agir, faire des actions. En examinant cette relation, cet article examine la façon dont le concept d’intentionalité intervient dans la logique de l’action et dans celle du langage en tant qu’action. Dans ce cadre, le problème de l'intentionalité surgit de la possibilité logique d'un décalage (qui n’est pas la règle) entre ce qu'une personne dit ou fait et ce que cette personne veut dire ou veut faire. L’objectif de cet article est de montrer qu'il est possible de penser l'intentionalité sans penser ce décalage sur le modèle d'une inadéquation entre un dire ou un faire et une sorte de doublon mental qui y correspondrait plus ou moins. Il s’agit de penser l’intentionalité en dehors du dualisme de l’esprit et du monde, tout en conservant intacte, non seulement la possibilité du décalage, mais également la pertinence de la distinction conceptuelle entre le vouloir dire/faire et le dire/faire dans les cas sans décalage. Le parallèle proposé vise avant tout à suggérer que, s'il est possible de concevoir les rapports entre le dire et le vouloir dire en termes d'intentionalité au même titre que les rapports entre le faire et le vouloir faire, c'est que certains traits logiques ou grammaticaux caractéristiques de l'intention ou de la visée s'appliquent dans les deux cas. (shrink)

To what extent should we focus on implicit bias in order to eradicate persistent social injustice? Structural prioritizers argue that we should focus less on individual minds than on unjust social structures, while equal prioritizers think that both are equally important. This article introduces the framework of transactive memory into the debate to defend the equal priority view. The transactive memory framework helps us see how structure can emerge from individual interactions as an irreducibly social product. If this is right, (...) then debiasing interventions are structural interventions. One upshot is that the utility of the individual versus structural distinction is not apparent for the purposes of intervention. (shrink)

Over the last 30 years, the publicly visible “otherness” embodied by the Muslim population in the member states of the European Union has sparked movements of transnational public discussions mainly driven by the fear of the collapse of “national cohesion.” This paper engages theoretically with the idea that these debates have become an ordinary trap for European publics, France being the main illustration in the text. It is more specifically concerned with the discussions surrounding the recent ban on the wearing (...) of the full veil in French public space, asking: what does the omnipresence of public discussions about religious otherness reveal of the national culture of citizenship? What are the epistemological and political implications of the evaluation of daily individual experiences as criminal in secular contexts? The text develops some speculative readings of the public experience arising from the visibility of Islamic religious signs and the capital attached to their visibility. (shrink)

This book combines metaphysics, aspects of modern logic, and legal theory in order to conceptualise a wrong in law's claim of right. The book takes as its starting point a restriction on the freedom of concept formation that is dictated by classical logic's inability to handle antinomies in reason's attempts to constitute its own foundations. Relating this to law's claim of right, the notion of 'wrong' does not fasten on law's violence or injustice, and neither does it seek to elaborate (...) a moral or ethical critique of law. On the contrary: it is sceptical of, and seeks an alternative to, the various ethical turns of recent legal and political theory. The 'wrong' of the wrong of law is logical and epistemic in character. It is a failure or refusal to recognise the cognitive relevance of contradictions of self-reference. In this respect, The Wrong of Law draws on a metaphysical-logical development from Kant via Hegel and Marx to the foundations of modern logic, in order to establish the sense in which a restriction on self-reference amounts to a limitation on truth-seeking or comprehension. This limitation is then demonstrated through analysis of the reasoning in a series of legal cases in Australia, concerning Indigenous peoples. This book will be of significant interest to scholars in critical legal theory, the philosophy of law and jurisprudence; as well as others with an interest in foundational studies across the disciplinary borders of metaphysics, mathematical logic, sociology and legal theory. (shrink)

The article discusses the possible “physical” meaning of the distance between genetic sequences, based on comparing the set of all words of fixed length occurring in two genomic sequences. The considered distances suitable describe phylogenetic relationships and allow ranking by the genomes similarities in situations where it is practically impossible to provide by alignment methods. A simulation shows that the distances between the N-gram distributions change almost linearly, with genome lengths growing for relatively small artificial evolutionary modifications. In the general (...) case of comparing two genetic texts, a function for “calibrating” the distance between N-gram distributions is found. This fact makes it possible to interpret the considered distances by means of the number of elementary operators performed in an alignment process between the compared sequences. (shrink)

The infusion of the internet technologies into schools introduces a new instantiation of text into the everyday experiences of students, teachers, and administrators. Given the dialectic interaction between organizations, cognitions, and technologies, hypertext, primarily delivered through interaction with the World Wide Web, will likely have far reaching implications. The decentered, complex, and open nature of hypertext promotes multiculuralism and multivocality, questioning the efficacy of accountability-based learning, the authority of the textbook, a particular interpretation of texts, the curriculum, and the policy (...) that heretofore validated the typical educational experience. This article argues that the result of this challenge will be movement in the direction of more localized and fluid solutions to problems confronting students and educators, and more reliance on expertise from nontraditional sources. Ultimately, the introduction of hypertext into the daily “vocabulary” of education will effect change in the domains of educational policy, organizational structures, and institutional authority. (shrink)

Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.

It is commonly accepted that what we ought to do collectively does not imply anything about what each of us ought to do individually. According to this line of reasoning, if cooperating will make no difference to an outcome, then you are not morally required to do it. And if cooperating will be personally costly to you as well, this is an even stronger reason to not do it. However, this reasoning results in a self-defeating, yet entirely predictable outcome. If (...) everyone is rational, no one will cooperate, resulting in an aggregate outcome that is devastating for everyone. This dismal analysis explains why climate change and other collective action problems are so difficult to ameliorate. The goal of this paper is to provide a different, exploratory framework for thinking about individual reasons for action in collective action problems. I argue that the concept of commitment gives us a new perspective on collective action problems. Once we take the structure of commitment into account, this activates requirements of diachronic rationality that give individuals instrumental reasons to cooperate in collective action problems. (shrink)

Although, in the literature, Principle C of Binding Theory is taken not to apply to copular sentences on the basis of English data alone, this study aims to show that this Principle applies to French copular sentences. French displays a dichotomy between predicational copular sentences and other subtypes of copular sentences : while the former use the verb est alone, the latter need an additional form, namely the neuter demonstrative pronoun ce. Evidence is given that, in French, the two terms (...) flanking the copula est cannot be referential because the post-copula term would be bound by the pre-copula one, in accordance with Principle C of Binding Theory. Thus, adding the pronoun ce modifies the structure of the sentence and gives rise to a Topic c’est Focus structure, which escapes Principle C. (shrink)