This paper argues for a revised concept of authenticity entailing two demands that must be balanced. The first demand moves authenticity from the position of a strictly self-regarding virtue towards the position of a fully social virtue, acknowledging the crucial feature of steadiness, i.e. self-consistency, as being precisely what we ‘naturally’ lack. Nevertheless, the value of personal authenticity in a modern, open society comes from the fact that it brings about not only steadiness, but also the public development of a (...) variety of existential options that can be understood as Millian ‘original experiments in living’. Thus the second demand of authenticity is a demand for ‘experimental’ authenticity which covers the whole spectrum of technologies of the self, from Nietzschean ‘brief habits’, to the use of enhancement technologies. (shrink)

Kitcher has proposed an ideal-theory account—well-ordered science (WOS)— of the collective good that science’s research agenda should promote. Against criticism regarding WOS’s action-guidance, Kitcher has advised critics not to confuse substantive ideals and the ways to arrive at them, and he has defended WOS as a necessary and useful ideal for science policy. I provide a distinction between two types of ideal-theories that helps clarifying WOS’s elusive nature. I use this distinction to argue that the action-guidance problem that WOS faces (...) remains even under the aims/means distinction, because the WOS’s failure is more basic than critics have suggested. (shrink)

De ce a fost fondată Uniunea Europeană? Un prim răspuns ar fi dorinţa de pace după un război devastator şi umilitor. Un al doilea răspuns ar fi realizarea importanţei unităţii. O unitate care se va caracteriza printr-o diversitate a culturilor şi a limbilor. Statele europene nu au dorit să renunţe la suveranitatea lor, au vrut să devină un corp comun pentru a nu a mai putea fi călcate în picioare de iureşul istoriei. Ca orice unitate, UE avea nevoie de un (...) cadru de reglementare oferit de instituţii şi politici europene. De asemenea, pentru a armoniza ceva trebuie să poţi pune împreună anumite elemente separate. Armonizarea Uniunii a fost realizată prin fondarea instituţiilor şi a reglementărilor acestora (structura instituţională a UE este prezentată în Anexa nr. 1). Instituţionalizarea Uniunii Europene este cheia de boltă a construcţiei istorice europene. Început în anul 1957, acest proces a lăsat urme adânci în conştiinţa politică europeană. Dacă la început a fost privită cu reticenţă, acum Uniunea nu poate exista fără instituţii. (shrink)

Pérez Carballo adopts an epistemic utility theory picture of epistemic norms where epistemic utility functions measure the value of degrees of belief, and rationality consists in maximizing expected epistemic utility. Within this framework he seeks to show that we can make sense of the intuitive idea that some true beliefs—say true beliefs about botany—are more valuable than other true beliefs—say true beliefs about the precise number of plants in North Dakota. To do so, however, Pérez Carballo argues that (...) we must think of the value of epistemic states as consisting in more than simply accuracy. This sheds light on which questions it is most epistemically valuable to pursue. (shrink)

In order to grasp the true ethical meaning of Foucault's aesthetics of existence, I begin by explaining in what sense he was an anti-normativist, arguing that the most important thing about the "final" Foucault is his strong emphasis on the idea of human freedom. I go on with a brief discussion about Foucault's sources of inspiration and a criticism of Rorty's kindred plea for "aesthetic life". I strongly reject the interpretation of Foucault's aesthetics of existence in terms of narcissistic individualism, (...) arguing, on the contrary, that it has a definite communitarian dimension. I also claim that it is rooted in the Socratic and Stoic understanding of "care of the self," at the same time allowing new challenging developments fitted for our "post-duty" historical age, by way of analogy with the process of artistic making. I conclude with some short answers to a few questions regarding the status of this aesthetics of living. (shrink)

Explanations of the genuine openness of the future often appeal to objective indeterminacy. According to the received view, such indeterminacy is indeterminacy of certain future-tensed state of affairs that presently obtain. We shall call this view the weak indeterminate present, to distinguish it from the view we will defend in this paper, which we dub the strong indeterminate present. According to our view, unsettledness of the future is grounded on the present indeterminacy of some present-tensed state of affairs. In order (...) for an indeterminate present-tensed state of affairs to explain the unsettledness of a future-tensed state of affairs, there has to be a connection between the two. We argue that this connection can only be provided if we look at the internal structure of the relevant state of affairs. Finally, we will suggest that the best background theory to explain the connection are the so-called spontaneous collapse models of quantum mechanics. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to examine the problematic frontier that separates the phenomenology of the body and the phenomenology of animality. The main difficulty is to differentiate phenomenologically not only between embodiment and animality, but also between specifically human embodied experience and what is accessible to us through empathy in relation to the corporeality of the animal. I will tackle these questions by considering relevant textual material from the writings of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. On the one (...) hand, I will show that although embodiment and animality are convergent on the level of the naturalistic attitude in Husserl’s Ideas II, they are divergent as soon as we place ourselves in the personalistic attitude, where the body enters into a different conjunction—namely, with the idea of person and of the spiritual world. On the other hand, Heidegger claims that, in spite of the abysmal bodily kinship with the animal, there is an essential difference between the human body and the animal organism, thus opposing the tendencies to humanize the animal and to animalize the human. (shrink)

Extreme inequality of opportunity leads to a number of social tensions, inefficiencies and injustices. One issue of increasing concern is the effect inequality is having on people’s fair chances of attaining meaningful work, thus limiting opportunities to make a significant positive contribution to society and reducing the chances of living a flourishing life and developing their potential. On a global scale we can observe an increasingly uneven provision of meaningful work, raising a series of ethical concerns that need detailed examination. (...) The aim of this article is to explore the potential of a normative framework based upon the idea of contributive justice to defend a fairer provision of meaningful work. (shrink)

După sfârşitul celei de a doua mari conflagraţii mondiale, Europa se afla în ruină şi dezastru economico-social. Ajutorul dat de Statele Unite ale Americii în reconstrucţia statelor europene a fost vital pentru supravieţuirea Occidentului european. În anul 1948, cinci state (Franţa, Marea Britanie, Belgia, Ţările de Jos şi Luxemburg) semnează Tratatul de Cooperare Culturală, Socială, Economică şi Apărare Colectivă, pe scurt Tratatul de la Bruxelles . După numirea generalului Dwight Eisenhower în funcţia de comandant suprem aliat în Europa, acest tratat (...) va deveni parte a documentelor NATO. Nevoia de apărare împotriva ameninţării sovietice se face şi mai vizibilă în propunerea ministrului de externe francez Réne Pléven. Planul Pléven, propus în anul 1952, viza constituirea unei Comunităţii Europene a Apărării, dar şi a unei Comunităţi Politice Europene. Planul nu a fost votat de către Adunare Franceză în anul 1954. Eşecul acestei comunităţi se datorează lipsei de viziune a liderilor europeni. O altă piedică în adoptarea acestui plan a fost teama statelor naţionale de posibila federalizare a Europei. (shrink)

In various responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, we can observe insufficient sensitivity towards the needs and circumstances of poorer citizens. Particularly in a context of high inequality, policy makers need to engage with the wider public in debates and consultations to gain better insights in the realities of the worst-off within their jurisdiction. When consultations involve members of traditionally underrepresented groups, these are not only more inclusive, which is in itself an ethical aim, but pool ideas and observations from a (...) much more diverse array of inhabitants. Inclusivity increases the odds to identify a larger range of weak spots for health security and to design health interventions that are less burdensome on those worst-off. (shrink)

Ca actor pe scena internațională, UE trebuie să facă fată noilor pericole, amenințări și provocări, cu atât mai mult cu cât urmărește să joace un rol în securitatea globală ceea ce implică asumarea de responsabilități sporite, așa cum sunt prezentate în anexă. Mediul global este caracterizat prin insecuritate, astfel Uniunea Europeană are nevoie de un mecanism complex de management al crizelor. Dezvoltarea unei astfel de capabilități atrage de la sine o altă problemă majoră, dezvoltarea unei capabilități a Uniunii. Există pericolul (...) ca această nouă capabilitate să dubleze NATO sau există pericolul ca Uniunea să își dezvolte o capacitate dar fără puterea de a o proiecta. Un conflict ce se întrevede în viitor este între președintele Consiliului European și Înaltul Reprezentant al UE pentru afaceri externe şi politică de securitate, în opinia unor eurosceptici. Dezvoltarea acestor capabilități este necesară Uniunii ce se dorește un important actor pe scena internațională. (shrink)

Two competing accounts of value incomparability have been put forward in the recent literature. According to the standard account, developed most famously by Joseph Raz, ‘incomparability’ means determinate failure of the three classic value relations ( better than , worse than , and equally good ): two value-bearers are incomparable with respect to a value V if and only if (i) it is false that x is better than y with respect to V , (ii) it is false that x (...) is worse than y with respect to V and (iii) it is false that x and y are equally good with respect to V . Most philosophers have followed Raz in adopting this account of incomparability. Recently, however, John Broome has advocated an alternative view, on which value incomparability is explained in terms of vagueness or indeterminacy . In this paper I aim to further Broome’s view in two ways. Firstly, I want to supply independent reasons for thinking that the phenomenon of value incomparability is indeed a matter of the indeterminacy inherent in our comparative predicates. Secondly, I attempt to defend Broome’s account by warding off several objections that worry him, due mainly to Erik Carlson and Ruth Chang. (shrink)

In this paper I explore the implications of moral vagueness (viz., the vagueness of moral predicates) for non-naturalist metaethical theories like those recently championed by Shafer-Landau, Parfit, and others. I characterise non-naturalism in terms of its commitment to 7 theses: Cognitivism, Correspondence, Atomism, Objectivism, Supervenience, Non-reductivism, and Rationalism. I start by offering a number of reasons for thinking that moral predicates are vague in the same way in which ‘red’, ‘tall’, and ‘heap’ are said to be. I then argue that (...) the moral non-naturalist seeking to countenance moral vagueness faces a dilemma: are moral properties vague, or perfectly sharp? On either horn of the dilemma, serious problems arise for some of the central tenets of non-naturalism: vague properties seem to threaten Objectivism, Supervenience, and Non-reductivism; on the other hand, sharp properties raise problems for Supervenience and Rationalism. The difficulties on each horn of the dilemma are real, and while they may not be insuperable, they do, at the very least, drastically limit the things non-naturalists can consistently say about moral properties, facts, and reasons. (shrink)

The 20th century was a bloody one, full of armed clashes which destroyed Europe, withered an entire generation’s hope of European-level peace. After the Versailles Treaty, the famous economist John Maynard Keynes uttered this prophecy: ”With such a peace treaty, you’ll be at war again within 20 years”. John Maxwell Coetzee, an important South-African novelist, called the 20th century “Satan’s century”. A tough statement yet extremely true unfortunately. Besides war, the past one hundred years also witnessed terrible totalitarian regimes occur, (...) such as the Nazi and fascism. The hardness of those regimes at least equaled the suffering caused by the world wars. One wouldn’t be wrong to call such regimes state terrorism: a leader suppressing his own citizens just to satisfy his own fantasy. The hugeness of their deeds goes beyond human imagination according to the number of victims. A classical word of wisdom describes terrorism as follows: ”It kills a few, but terrifies more”. (shrink)

Background: Several countries have recently changed their model of consent for organ donation from opt-in to opt-out. We undertook a systematic review to determine public knowledge and attitudes towards these models in Europe. Methods: Six databases were explored between 1 January 2008 and 15 December 2017. We selected empirical studies addressing either knowledge or attitudes towards the systems of consent for deceased organ donation by lay people in Europe, including students. Study selection, data extraction, and quality assessment were conducted by (...) two or more reviewers independently. Findings: Awareness of the consent model was lower in opt-out countries than in opt-in countries. A majority of the public agrees with opt-in, regardless of the law in their own country. There are ambivalent attitudes regarding the opt-out system. The public tend to prefer opt-in and mandatory choice over opt-out when several options are offered. Interpretation: The assumption that people in opt-out countries are aware of the legal requirements to be excluded from the pool of potential donors is not supported by the results of this review. This is a concern, since ignorance hinders people's autonomy regarding organ donation decision-making. Higher awareness of consent model in opt-in countries may reflect greater efforts to inform the public through campaigns to motivate donation. Legal moves towards opt-out are at odds with people's expressed preferences. Main limitations of this review are the lack of data from some countries, study population heterogeneity, and methodological shortcomings. (shrink)

Some comparisons are hard. How should we think about such comparisons? According to John Broome, we should think about them in terms of vagueness. But the vagueness account has remained unpopular thus far. Here I try to bolster it by clarifying the notion of comparative vagueness that lies at its heart.

Having an adequate and extensively recognized resource governance system is essential for the conservation and sustainable use of crop genetic resources in a highly populated planet. Despite the widely accepted importance of agrobiodiversity for future plant breeding and thus food security, there is still pervasive disagreement at the individual level on who should own genetic resources. The aim of the article is to provide conceptual clarification on the following concepts and their relation to agrobiodiversity stewardship: open access, commons, private property, (...) state property and common heritage of humankind. After presenting each property regime, we will examine whether and how these incentivize the conservation, improvement and sharing of crop genetic resources, and conclude by defending a mixed property regime. (shrink)

Laura Specker Sullivan (2022) makes a fairly compelling case for the value of the perspectives of Buddhist practitioners in neuroethics. In this study, Tibetan Buddhist monks have been asked, among other things, whether consciousness, in brain-injured patients in a minimally conscious state, entails a duty to preserve life. In our view, some of the participants’ responses could be used to inform the bioethical debate on death determination.

In this article, I focus on the problem of body as it is developed in Heidegger’s Zollikon Seminars, in contrast with its enigmatic concealment in Being and Time. In the first part, I emphasize the implicit connection of Heidegger’s approach of body with Husserl’s problematic of Leib and Körper, and with his phenomenological analyses of tactility. In the second part, I focus on Heidegger’s distinction between the limits of the lived body and the limits of the corresponding corporeal thing, opening (...) to an ontological understanding of the ecstatic bodying forth of the body. In the third part, I analyse this ecstatic bodiliness in relation to the problem of spatiality, exploring the tension between the here and the over there in the experience of the embodiment. Heidegger not only refuses to understand the space starting from the here of the body, but he also refuses to understand the body starting from the here of the space. Thus, there are two interconnected inversions that Heidegger operates in relation to Husserl: In the topic of spatiality, he rejects the pre-eminence of the here; in relation to the body, he contests the primacy of tactility. Finally, the conclusion stresses that, even if the bodying forth penetrates almost all behaviour of Dasein in the world, there is however a limit of embodiment, an unreachable frontier beyond any possibility of the bodying forth, namely the understanding of being. This also implies that the problem of body needs be understood in the context of the ontological difference. (shrink)

The concept of food sovereignty is becoming an element of everyday parlance in development politics and food justice advocacy. Yet to successfully achieve food sovereignty, the demands within this movement have to be compatible with the way people are pursuing consumer sovereignty, and vice versa. The aim of this article is to examine the different sets of demands that the two ideals of sovereignty bring about, analyze in how far these different demands can stand in constructive relations with each other (...) and explain why consumers have to adjust their food choices to seasonal production variability to promote food sovereignty and so secure future autonomy. (shrink)

Food security brings a number of benefits to humanity from which nobody can be excluded and which can be simultaneously enjoyed by all. An economic understanding of the concept sees food security qualify as a global public good. However, there are four other ways of understanding a public good which are worthy of attention. A normative public good is a good from which nobody ought to be excluded. Alternatively, one might acknowledge the benevolent character of a public good. Others have (...) argued that public goods demand being public in the sense of being visible to all. Finally, it has also been argued that public goods are those goods which need joint action to be produced and maintained. This chapter discusses these five understandings of the public good in relation to food security and highlights the advantage of assessing policies from each of these perspectives. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 48, Issue 1, pp 57 - 76 The aim of this article is to address the question of the anthropological difference by focusing on the intersubjective relation between the human and the animal in the context of a phenomenological analysis of violence. Following some Levinasian and Derridian insights, my goal is to analyze the structural differences between interspecific and intraspecific violence by asking how the generic phenomenon of violence is modalized across various levels: from human to human, (...) from human to animal, from animal to human, from animal to animal. I will address questions of incarnated vulnerability and altered states of affectivity, and I will relate the various forms of violence emerging in the context of the anthropological difference to the question of territoriality, arguing that violence is structurally modified in relation to particular articulations of our worldly spatiality. (shrink)

As populations grow and arable land becomes increasingly scarce, large-scale long- term land leases are signed at a growing rate. Countries and investors with large amounts of financial resources and a strong agricultural industry seek long-term land leases for agricultural exploitation or investment purposes. Leaders of financially poorer countries often advertise such deals as a fast way to attract foreign capital. Much has been said about the short-term social costs these types of leases involve, however, less has been said about (...) the normative dimension of their long-term environmental impact. We therefore will focus on the likely impact such deals have for soil conservation, by (1) briefly introducing the basics of long-term leasing arrangements by comparing land leases to the renting of buildings, (2) explaining from a soil sciences perspective the difficulties in assessing the current value of an estate and in calculating the damages of soil erosion and degradation, and (3) show how difficult it is to incentivize the conservation of soil quality when one cannot sufficiently and cost-effectively valorize existing environmental capital and eventual future damages. Attempting to oblige tenants through contracts to invest in sustainable stewardship has limited potential when liability payments do not reflect true costs and are hard to enforce. (shrink)

The mixture of political, social, cultural and economic environments in Latin America, together with the enormous diversity in climates, natural habitats and biological resources the continent offers, make the ethical assessment of agricultural policies extremely difficult. Yet the experience gained while addressing the contemporary challenges the region faces, such as rapid urbanization, loss of culinary and crop diversity, extreme inequality, disappearing farming styles, water and land grabs, malnutrition and the restoration of the rule of law and social peace, can be (...) of great value to other regions in similar latitudes, development processes and social problems. This chapter will provide a brief overview of these challenges from the perspective of a continent that is exposed to the consequences of extreme inequality in multiple dimensions and conclude by arguing for the need to have a continuous South-South dialogue on the challenges of establishing socially and environmentally sustainable food systems. (shrink)

A wide range of proposals to alleviate the negative effects of intellectual property regimes is currently under discussion. This article offers a critical evaluation of six of these proposals: the Health Impact Fund, the Access to Knowledge movement, prize systems, open innovation models, compulsory licenses and South-South collaborations. An assessment on how these proposals target the human rights affected by intellectual property will be provided. The conflicting human rights that will be individually discussed are the rights: to benefit from one’s (...) own scientific work, to benefit from the advancement of science, to participate in scientific enterprises and to self-determination. (shrink)

While practitioners think highly of randomized studies, some philosophers argue that there is no epistemic reason to randomize. Here I show that their arguments do not entail their conclusion. Moreover, I provide novel reasons for randomizing in the context of interventional studies. The overall discussion provides a unified framework for assessing baseline balance, one that holds for interventional and observational studies alike. The upshot: practitioners’ strong preference for randomized studies can be defended in some cases, while still offering a nuanced (...) approach to evidence-appraisal, one where not all non-randomized studies are treated equally. (shrink)

What is a valid measuring instrument? Recent philosophy has attended to logic of justification of measures, such as construct validation, but not to the question of what it means for an instrument to be a valid measure of a construct. A prominent approach grounds validity in the existence of a causal link between the attribute and its detectable manifestations. Some of its proponents claim that, therefore, validity does not depend on pragmatics and research context. In this paper, I cast doubt (...) on the possibility of a context-independent causal account of validity. I assess several versions, arguing that all of them fail to judge the validity of measuring instruments correctly. Because different research purposes require different properties from measuring instruments, no account of validity succeeds without referring to the specific research purpose that creates the need for measurement in the first place. (shrink)

Taking people’s longevity as a measure of good life, humankind can proudly say that the average person is living a much longer life than ever before. The AIDS epidemic has however for the first time in decades stalled and in some cases even reverted this trend in a number of countries. Climate change is increasingly becoming a major challenge for food security and we can anticipate that hunger caused by crop damages will become much more common. -/- Since many of (...) the challenges humanity faced in the past were overcome by inventive solutions coming from the life sciences, we are compelled to reconsider how we incentivize science and technology development so that those in need can benefit more broadly from scientific research. There is a huge portion of the world population that is in urgent need for medicines to combat diseases that are currently neglected by the scientific community and could immensely benefit from agricultural research that specifically targets their environmental conditions. At the same time efforts have to be made to make the fruits of current and future research more widely accessible. These changes would have to be backed by a range of moral arguments to attract people with diverging notions of global justice. This article explores the main ethical theories used to demand a greater share in the benefits from scientific progress for the poor. Since life sciences bring about a number of special concerns, a short list of conflictive issues is also offered. (shrink)

Our goal in this paper is to articulate a precise concept of at least a certain kind of disease-mongering, showing how pharmaceutical marketing can commercially exploit certain diseases when their best definition is given through the success of a treatment in a clinical trial. We distinguish two types of disease-mongering according to the way they exploit the definition of the trial population for marketing purposes. We argue that behind these two forms of disease-mongering there are two well-known problems in the (...) statistical methodology of clinical trials (the reference class problem and the distinction between statistical and clinical significance). Overcoming them is far from simple. (shrink)

Time-tested commons characterize by having instituted sanctioning mechanisms that are sensitive to the circumstances and motivations of non-compliers. As a proposed Global Antimicrobial Commons cannot cost-effectively develop sanctioning mechanisms that are consistently sensitive to the circumstances of the global poor, I suggest concentrating on establishing a wider set of incentives that encourages both compliance and participation.

As a policy instrument that is deeply rooted in technology assessment, the precautionary principle examines the effects of a given object on humans and the environment. In practice the principle is rarely used to analyze the effects of our safety measures on the object itself or the way it is produced. Yet it is exactly in the effect on the blood procurement system that blood safety regulations based on the precautionary principle have to be particularly careful, as the vast majority (...) of blood products in the Global North are obtained through donations. (shrink)

One of the most attractive, but nevertheless highly controversial proposals to alleviate the negative effects of today’s international patent regime is the Health Impact Fund (HIF). Although the HIF has been drafted to facilitate access to medicines and boost pharmaceutical research, we have analysed the burdens for the global poor a similar proposal designed to promote the use and development of climate-friendly technologies would have. Drawing parallels from the access to medicines debate, we suspect that an analogous “Climate Impact Fund” (...) will increase the already very high scientific and technological supremacy of the developed world over the Global South. We advocate countering this dominance on the ground that countries with scarce research and development capacities will be in a difficult position to reject technologies and will not have a say on how such technologies should look like. Further, addressing global hazards should be an inclusive endeavour and not only a privilege reserved for the developed world. Incentivizing grassroots innovation would be a major step to promote scientific and technological inclusion. (shrink)

The field of Latin American philosophy has established itself as a relevant subfield of philosophical inquiry. However, there might be good reasons to consider that our focus on the subfield could have distracted us from considering another subfield that, although it might share some geographical proximity, does not share the same historical basic elements. In this paper, I argue for a possible and meaningful conceptual difference between Latin American Philosophy and Indigenous philosophy produced in Latin America. First, I raise what (...) I call Mariátegui’s Solidarity Challenge to show that there might be some neglectful treatment of the philosophical views of different Indigenous groups. I then depart from Mariátegui and engage in a critical exercise to show that even he would be guilty of failing in his own solidarity demands. I follow that by drawing out some implications of the argument. I first sketch how this differentiation would play out against the political project of “Mestizaje,” a project that seems to inform some of the Latin American philosophical tradition. I then speculate about the kinds of duties that the field of Latin American philosophy might have towards the field of Indigenous Philosophy produced in Latin America. (shrink)

Dacă cercetarea fenomenologică are o anumită intuiţie mai mult sau mai puţin vagă a direcţiei în care se îndreaptă, ea nu ştie dintru început unde anume va ajunge, unde anume o vor ghida întrebările. Ca în Călăuza lui Tarkovski, cercetătorul aruncă înaintea sa întrebarea şi apoi o urmează, înaintând oarecum în necunoscut, în orizontul neştiut pe care întrebarea îl deschide. Tocmai de aceea cercetarea fenomenologică este o explorare, o înaintare în necunoscut, fără o hartă sigură, fără o busolă infailibilă, alta (...) decât cea a propriei pre-înţelegeri, care poate fi confirmată sau infirmată pe parcurs. Spre deosebire de alte tipuri de cercetare, care pornesc de la un dat pozitiv deja disponibil, deja asigurat, în fenomenologie cercetătorul trebuie să îşi obţină datul originar, să şi-l asigure constant, să-l extragă din contexte fenomenale în care el este de cele mai multe ori ocultat, mascat şi obturat. Tot aşa şi noi, întrebându-ne dacă şi cum ar putea fi conceput un sens originar şi integrator al trupului, unul care să premeargă şi totodată să cuprindă diversele forme de expresie corporală a existenţei umane, noi nu presupunem că îl avem deja, gata dat, disponibil, apt de a fi arătat cu degetul: iată-l! Dimpotrivă, este mult mai plauzibil ca acest sens originar să ne fie dat întâi de toate prin ocultările sale, prin formele sale derivate, privative sau sărăcite. Explorarea fenomenologică ia atunci chipul unei operaţii de desfoliere, de recuperare a unui strat de sens originar, ascuns în spatele unor aluviuni care îl acoperă şi, uneori, îl fac de nerecunoscut. (shrink)

We will explore ecumenical collaboration for the sake of mission in the 21st century in this region. In this sense, we will consider ecumenical relations, theological education, migration and diaspora, and present challenges, and will try to identify the vision of the future. We will do this by focusing on four countries from the region as critical studies: the Czech Republic, Poland, Romania, and Serbia.

This dissertation focuses on teleology and functions in biology. More precisely, it focuses on the scientific legitimacy of teleofunctional attributions and explanations in biology. It belongs to a multi-faceted debate that can be traced back to at least the 1970s. One aspect of the debate concerns the naturalization of functions. Most authors try to reduce, translate or explain functions and teleology in terms of efficient causes so that they find their place in the framework of the natural sciences. Our approach (...) here is radically different, as we question the premise that teleological explanations are disguised causal explanations. On the contrary, we defend that they are acceptable in natural sciences and in biology in particular. We challenge the idea that teleological explanations are immature causal explanations, as well as the idea that teleology and functions are some sort of intentional explanations. We therefore reject the accusations of anthropomorphism, vitalism and finalism. On the contrary, we defend that teleology, causality and intentionality correspond to different, autonomous and complementary modes of representation of the outside world. -/- ———[FRANÇAIS]——— -/- Ce travail de thèse porte sur la téléologie et les fonctions en biologie. Plus précisément, il porte sur la légitimité scientifique des attributions et des explications téléofonctionnelles en biologie. Il s’inscrit dans le cadre d’un débat à plusieurs facettes que l’on peut faire remonter au moins jusqu’aux années 1970 et qui est encore très actif aujourd’hui. L’un des aspects du débat porte sur la naturalisation des fonctions, c’est-à-dire sur la manière de les réduire, de les traduire ou de les expliciter en termes de causes efficientes de sorte qu’elles trouvent leur place dans le cadre des sciences de la nature. Notre approche ici est radicalement différente, car nous remettons en question la prémisse selon laquelle les explications téléologiques seraient des explications causales déguisées. Nous défendons au contraire qu’elles sont acceptables en tant que telles aussi bien de façon générale que dans le domaine scientifique et en particulier en biologie. De façon générale, nous remettons en question l’idée selon laquelle la pensée téléologique serait une pensée causale immature, ainsi que sa dépendance présumée vis-à-vis de la psychologie, c’est-à-dire de l’intentionnalité. Nous rejetons donc les accusations d’anthropomorphisme, de vitalisme et de finalisme formulées contre elle. Nous défendons au contraire que la téléologie, la causalité et l’intentionnalité correspondent à des modes différents, autonomes et complémentaires de représentation du monde extérieur. (shrink)

According to an influential view, when it comes to representing reality, some words are better suited for the job than others. This is elitism. There is reason to believe that the set of the best, or elite, words should not be redundant or arbitrary. However, we are often forced to choose between these two theoretical vices, especially in cases involving theories that seem to be mere notational variants. This is the riddle of redundancy: both redundancy and arbitrariness are vicious, but (...) there are cases in which one must be picked. Logical realists admit that there are some logical constants among the elite words. This leads to awkward questions, such as which among conjunction and disjunction is elite. In this paper, I show how the riddle of redundancy arises for logical realists, and offer a solution. This approach requires us to change how we represent negation. Instead of using some particular symbol, we represent negation by flipping formulae over the horizontal axis. (shrink)

Intellectual property regimes necessarily create artificial scarcity leading to wastage, both by blocking follow-up research and hindering access to those who are only able to pay less then the actual retail price. After revising the traditional arguments to hinder access to people’s intellectual labour we will examine why we should be more open to allow free-riding of inventive efforts, especially in cases where innovators have not secured the widest access to the fruits of their research and failed to cooperate with (...) follow-up innovators. We will do so by questioning the voluntariness involved in consumption of objects of innovation, restating the positive social externalities that arise when wider access to the fruits of innovation is assured, and examining the eventual harms innovators face. (shrink)

There is a widely held view on measurement inferences, that goes back to Stevens’s ([1946]) theory of measurement scales and ‘permissible statistics’. This view defends the following prohibition: you should not make inferences from averages taken with ordinal scales (versus quantitative scales: interval or ratio). This prohibition is general—it applies to all ordinal scales—and it is sometimes endorsed without qualification. Adhering to it dramatically limits the research that the social and biomedical sciences can conduct. I provide a Bayesian analysis of (...) this inferential problem, determining when measurements from ordinal scales can be used to confirm hypotheses about relative group averages. The prohibition, I conclude, cannot be upheld, even in a qualified sense. The beliefs needed to make average comparisons are less demanding than those appropriate for quantitative scales. I illustrate with the alleged paradigm ordinal scale, Mohs’ scale of mineral hardness, arguing that the literature has mischaracterized it. (shrink)

Climate change, pollution, and deforestation have a negative impact on global mental health. There is an environmental justice dimension to this challenge as wealthy people and high-income countries are major contributors to climate change and pollution, while poor people and low-income countries are heavily affected by the consequences. Using state-of-the art data mining, we analyzed and visualized the global research landscape on mental health, climate change, pollution and deforestation over a 15-year period. Metadata of papers were exported from PubMed®, and (...) both relevance and relatedness of terms in different time frames were computed using VOSviewer. Co-occurrence graphs were used to visualize results. The development of exemplary terms over time was plotted separately. The number of research papers on mental health and environmental challenges is growing in a linear fashion. Major topics are climate change, chemical pollution, including psychiatric medication in wastewater, and neurobiological effects. Research on specific psychiatric syndromes and diseases, particularly on their ethical and social aspects is less prominent. There is a growing body of research literature on links between mental health, climate change, pollution, and deforestation. This research provides a graphic overview to mental healthcare professionals and political stakeholders. Social and ethical aspects of the climate change-mental health link have been neglected, and more research is needed. (shrink)

Die Diversität von Nahrungspflanzen, ein Ergebnis Jahrtausende langer Zuchtbemühungen, ist in den letzten Jahrzehnten dramatisch zurückgegangen. Schätzungen zufolge machen von den über 7000 Nahrungspflanzenarten ganze 103 Sorten 90% der Nahrungsmittelproduktion aus. Dieser Verlust könnte in Zukunft gewaltige negative Auswirkungen auf die Nahrungsmittelsicherheit haben, da die Biodiversität eine zentrale Rolle bei der Absorbierung biotischer und abiotischer Stressfaktoren spielt, die auf die Pflanzen wirken. Darüber hinaus stellt der Verlust eine bedeutende Verarmung nicht nur des Pools genetischer Ressourcen dar, die zukünftigen Generationen zur (...) Verfügung stehen, sondern auch der kulturellen Diversität, indem die Nahrungsmittelvielfalt der Landesküchen eingeschränkt und sowohl Kulturlandschaften als auch Stadtgärten vereinheitlicht werden. Wegen der grundlegenden Funktion, die die Agrobiodiversität in der menschlichen Gesellschaft erfüllt, werden wir im Folgenden verschiedene Schwierigkeiten bei der Pflege der Agrobiodiversität als ein gemeinsames Erbe der Menschheit in einer stark ungleichen Welt erörtern. Zuvor jedoch möchten wir untersuchen, was Agrobiodiversität eigentlich ist und welche Funktion sie für das menschliche Wohlbefinden erfüllt. Ziel dieses Artikels ist zu zeigen, inwieweit sich verschiedene Anreizsysteme unterschiedlich auf den Erhalt von Agrobiodiversität auswirken. (shrink)

Taking into consideration the extremely harsh public health conditions faced by the majority of the world population, the Health Impact Fund (HIF) proposal seeks to make the intellectual property regimes more in line with human rights obligations. While prioritizing access to medicines and research on neglected diseases, the HIF makes many compromises in order to be conceived as politically feasible and to retain a compensation character that makes its implementation justified solely on basis of negative duties. Despite that current global (...) health realities make such steps reasonable, the paper looks up the negative effects on one overlooked human right: the right to participate in scientific advancement. (shrink)

On why agricultural innovation from the Global South can and should be used to adapt food production to climate change. Discussed on hand of three cases studies.

The classification of preserved hypothalamic activity in brain death and brainstem death as functional or non-functional has become a subject of debate. While proponents of the neurological criterion claim that these activities lack functional significance (Shemie et al. 2014), Nair-Collins and Joffe (2023) argue for their functional physiological role. However, the interpretation of the term "function" within the medico-legal framework, where death is characterized by the irreversible cessation of all brain functions, remains unclear. -/- My intention here is not to (...) engage in a debate over the validity of different viewpoints regarding the functional significance of preserved activities in the hypothalamus or the heart. Rather, I aim to highlight the critical importance of exploring and defining the concept of function in medicine, which currently lacks clarity. My point is that, whatever our position in the brain death debate, reaching a consensus on this conceptual matter would minimize misunderstandings and establish a robust foundation for further insightful analysis. (shrink)

Achieving energy sovereignty is increasingly gaining prominence as a goal in energy politics. The aim of this paper is to provide a conceptual analysis of this principle from an ethics and social justice perspective. We rely on the literature on food sovereignty to identify through a comparative analysis the elements energy sovereignty will most likely demand and thereafter distinguish the unique constituencies of the energy sector. The idea of energy sovereignty embraces a series of values, among which we identified: (i) (...) accessibility, to allow access to everyone, (ii) empowerment and recognition, to develop and sustain capabilities to collaboratively produce solution-oriented energy system knowledge and effectively participate in governance, (iii) stewardship and sustainability, to be able to design and manage decentralised renewable systems in view of protecting the environment, (iv) self-sufficiency, to reduce the negative shocks of exploitative business practises, (v) resilience, to maintain production capacities while withstanding socioeconomic, political, environmental and climatic shocks, (vi) peace, to establish production systems that do not involve hostile relations, (vii) transparency and self-determination, to establish democratic decision-making mechanisms that give a voice to previously underrepresented groups and limit corporate takeover (viii) gender-justice, by acknowledging the contributions of women and eliminate barriers to their empowerment. With a conceptual framework of energy sovereignty, we present a rationale that draws on the key values to be considered when formulating policy solutions for the energy sector. (shrink)

Explaining the behaviour of ecosystems is one of the key challenges for the biological sciences. Since 2000, new-mechanicism has been the main model to account for the nature of scientific explanation in biology. The universality of the new-mechanist view in biology has been however put into question due to the existence of explanations that account for some biological phenomena in terms of their mathematical properties (mathematical explanations). Supporters of mathematical explanation have argued that the explanation of the behaviour of ecosystems (...) is usually provided in terms of their mathematical properties, and not in mechanistic terms. They have intensively studied the explanation of the properties of ecosystems that behave following the rules of a non-random network. However, no attention has been devoted to the study of the nature of the explanation in those that form a random network. In this paper, we cover that gap by analysing the explanation of the stability behaviour of the microbiome recently elaborated by Coyte and colleagues, to determine whether it fits with the model of explanation suggested by the new-mechanist or by the defenders of mathematical explanation. Our analysis of this case study supports three theses: (1) that the explanation is not given solely in terms of mechanisms, as the new-mechanists understand the concept; (2) that the mathematical properties that describe the system play an essential explanatory role, but they do not exhaust the explanation; (3) that a non-previously identified appeal to the type of interactions that the entities in the network can exhibit, as well as their abundance, is also necessary for Coyte and colleagues’ account to be fully explanatory. From the combination of these three theses we argue for the necessity of an integrative pluralist view of the nature of behaviour explanation when this is given by appealing to the existence of a random network. (shrink)

Farmers’ organizations all over the world are very well aware that in order to build and retain a critical mass with sufficient bargaining power to democratically influence local governments and international organizations they will have to unite by identifying common goals and setting aside their differences. After decades of local movements and struggles, farmers’ organizations around the globe found in the concept of “food sovereignty” the normative framework they were long searching for. The broadness of the concept has had a (...) remarkable success in embracing the interests of food producers and consumers from all geographic locations and development levels. (shrink)

We are already past the point where climate change mitigation alone does not suffice and major efforts need to be undertaken to adapt agriculture to climate change. As this situation was both foreseeable and avoidable, it is urgent to see that particularly people who have historically contributed the least to climate change do not end up assuming most of the costs. Climate change will have the worst effects on agriculture in the tropical region in the form of droughts, extreme heat (...) waves and massive storms. The historical unequal contributions to climate change and its unjustly distributed consequences morally oblige us to distribute global adaptation costs fairly. Yet to have a full understanding of the social implications of adapting to climate change we need to look beyond making adaptation technologies accessible and available. Using a social justice framework, I defend fair prices of adaptation technologies as a demand of justice in exchange, an allocation of research attention proportional to urgent global needs as distributive justice, inclusive technology development and governance as contributive justice and addressing the interests of future generations as intergenerational justice. (shrink)