This book takes us to explore the 'life of robots' and presents us with a refreshing narrative that demystifies their recurrent anthropomorphic understanding. General ideas of what robots are and what they can do often lack knowledge about the limitations, functionality, and complexity needed to turn a robot into a fully operational machine. In this book, the authors portray a grounded and accessible description of current research developing robots. They are insightful, yet still allow the reader to understand basic processes (...) and requirements of robotics. They deliver on their goal to show robots as human artifacts instead of placeholders for anxiety, i.e., a threat. However, they underdeliver regarding the ethical insights of robots as moral agents in the final chapter. Withal, this is an essential introductory reading for anyone interested in learning about the functioning of robotics and AI, and their integration to society. (shrink)

Unmanaged recreation presents a challenge to both researchers and managers of outdoor recreation in the United States because it is shrouded in uncertainty resulting from disagreement over the definition of the problem, the strategies for resolving the problem, and the outcomes of management. Incomplete knowledge about recreation visitors’ values and relationships with one another, other stakeholders, and the land further complicate the problem. Uncertainty and social complexity make the unmanaged recreation issue a wicked problem. We describe the wickedness inherent in (...) unmanaged recreation and some of the implications of wickedness for addressing the problem for the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. Conclusions about the nature of the problem are based on a problem appraisal that included a literature review and interviews of key informants. Addressing wickedness calls for institutional changes that allow for and reward the use of trust building, inclusive communication, and genuinely collaborative processes. (shrink)

Grief is often described as characterized by a particular emotional response to another person’s death. While this is true of paradigm cases, we argue that a broader notion of grief allows accommodating forms of this emotional experience that deviate from the paradigmatic case. The bulk of the paper explores such a nonparadigmatic form of grief, anticipatory-vicarious grief, which is typically triggered by pondering the inevitability of our own death. We argue that AV-grief is a particular moral emotion that serves a (...) unique function and is indissolubly linked to the practical identities of human agents. An agent’s AV-grief is about the harm that occurs to individuals whose practical identities depend on the agent. (shrink)

En este capítulo se analiza la figura de la obtención vegetal: su alcance, dimensión, requisitos y caracterización frente a otros derechos de propiedad intelectual, para así abordar su ámbito de protección y su tratamiento en el ámbito internacional. Se pretende en este sentido plantear que la tendencia regulatoria en materia de obtenciones vegetales en Colombia no sólo va en contravía de los intereses de los pueblos indígenas, sino además de su patrimonio colectivo que les ha garantizado una gran diversidad que (...) hoy por hoy es sustento de su alimentación. Con lo anterior se lleva a cabo un singular esfuerzo para tratar de forma comprensiva este asunto, buscando la primacía del consentimiento libre, previo e informado de las comunidades potencialmente afectadas. (shrink)

Anydomainofscientificresearchhasitssustainingorthodoxy. Thatis, research on a problem, whether in astronomy, physics, or biology, is con- ducted against a backdrop of broadly shared assumptions. It is these as- sumptionsthatguideinquiryandprovidethecanonofwhatisreasonable-- of what "makes sense." And it is these shared assumptions that constitute a framework for the interpretation of research results. Research on the problem of how we see is likewise sustained by broadly shared assump- tions, where the current orthodoxy embraces the very general idea that the business of the visual system is to (...) create a detailed replica of the visual world, and that it accomplishes its business via hierarchical organization and by operatingessentiallyindependently of other sensorymodalitiesas well as independently of previous learning, goals, motor planning, and motor execution. (shrink)

This paper aims to clarify the nature of understanding in medicine. The first part describes in more detail what it means to understand something and links a type of understanding (i.e., objectual understanding) to explanations. The second part proceeds to investigate what objectual understanding of a disease (i.e., biomedical understanding) requires by considering the case of scurvy from the history of medi- cine. The main hypothesis is that grasping a mechanistic explanation of a condi- tion is necessary for a biomedical (...) understanding of that condition. The third part of the paper argues that biomedical understanding is necessary, but not sufficient for understanding in a clinical context (i.e., clinical understanding). The hypothe- sis is that clinical understanding combines biomedical understanding of a disease or pathological condition with understanding illness, which involves some degree of personal understanding of the patient. It is argued that, in many cases, clinical understanding necessitates adopting a particular second-personal stance and using cognitive resources in addition to those involved in biomedical understanding. (shrink)

The National Center for Biomedical Ontology is now in its seventh year. The goals of this National Center for Biomedical Computing are to: create and maintain a repository of biomedical ontologies and terminologies; build tools and web services to enable the use of ontologies and terminologies in clinical and translational research; educate their trainees and the scientific community broadly about biomedical ontology and ontology-based technology and best practices; and collaborate with a variety of groups who develop and use ontologies and (...) terminologies in biomedicine. The centerpiece of the National Center for Biomedical Ontology is a web-based resource known as BioPortal. BioPortal makes available for research in computationally useful forms more than 270 of the world's biomedical ontologies and terminologies, and supports a wide range of web services that enable investigators to use the ontologies to annotate and retrieve data, to generate value sets and special-purpose lexicons, and to perform advanced analytics on a wide range of biomedical data. (shrink)

Este artículo aborda, desde la relectura del trabajo de Alfred Schütz “La ejecución musical conjunta” (“Makingmusictogether”), la idea de intersubjetividad como sintonía en las relaciones sociales explorando en los elementos señalados por el autor, como la dimensión temporal, el cara a cara y la sincronización con el Otro. Se abre así una posibilidad de comprensión de los procesos intersubjetivos, en la perspectiva del reconocimiento de la alteridad (Levinas) como constitutiva de intersubjetividad, y se plantea la pregunta de si es posible, (...) en contextos de exclusión, avanzar hacia la constitución de sintonía entre sociedad y Estado. (shrink)

It is common to distinguish between “holist” and “reductionist” views of brain function, where the former envisions the brain as functioning as an indivisible unit and the latter as a collection of distinct units that serve different functions. Opposing reductionism, a number of researchers have pointed out that cortical network architecture does not respect functional boundaries, and the neuroanatomist V. Braitenberg proposed to understand the cerebral cortex as a “great mixing machine” of neuronal activity from sensory inputs, motor commands, and (...) intrinsically generated processes. In this paper, we offer a contextualization of Braitenberg’s point, and we review evidence for the interactions of neuronal activity from multiple sensory inputs and intrinsic neuronal processes in the cerebral cortex. We focus on new insights from studies on audiovisual interactions and on the influence of respiration on brain functions, which do not seem to align well with “reductionist” views of areal functional boundaries. Instead, they indicate that functional boundaries are fuzzy and context dependent. In addition, we discuss the relevance of the influence of sensory, proprioceptive, and interoceptive signals on cortical activity for understanding brain-body interactions, highlight some of the consequences of these new insights for debates on embodied cognition, and offer some suggestions for future studies. (shrink)

As a result of the doctoral research developed by the main author (Vargas-Chaves, 2017), it was identified the evolution and perspectives of the pharmaceutical patent in the international trade system, as well as it future legal research needs in this topic, both immediate and long-term. Furthermore, a number of problems of public health were highlighted in which the patent-term-extension mechanisms have produced a lack of access to medicines.

How do people understand the concepts of mental health and disorder? The objective of this paper is to examine the impact of several factors on people’s judgments about whether a condition constitutes a mental disorder or a healthy state. Specifically, this study examines the impact of the source of the condition, its outcome, individual valuation (i.e., the value the individual attaches to the condition), and group valuation (i.e., the value the relevant group attaches to the condition). While we find that (...) people’s health and disorder judgments are driven by perceived dysfunction, we also find that health and disorder judgments are impacted differently by these factors. Health judgements are impacted by outcome and individual valuation, and disorder judgments are impacted by condition source. These results suggest that the folk concept of mental health is positive (i.e., mental health is more than the absence of mental disorder) and normativist (i.e., value judgments play a significant role in determining whether a condition counts as healthy), while the concept of mental disorder aligns with a naturalist perspective, at least to the extent that dysfunction plays an important role in categorizing a condition as a disorder. However, our finding that people’s dysfunction judgments are influenced by individual valuation and outcomes poses a strong challenge to naturalist accounts. To provide access to our supplementary data, an appendix has been included. (shrink)

This paper brings new work to bear on the perennial question about Hobbes's atheism to show that as a debate about scepticism it is falsely framed. Hobbes, like fellow members of the Mersenne circle, Descartes and Gassendi, was no sceptic, but rather concerned to rescue physics and metaphysics from radical scepticism by exploring corporealism. In his early letter of November 1640, Hobbes had issued a provocative challenge to Descartes to abandon metaphysical dualism and subscribe to a ?corporeal God?; a provocation (...) to which the Frenchman angrily responded, but was perhaps importantly influenced. Hobbes's minimal realism was consonant with atheism, to which Descartes felt he was being forced. Moreover, Hobbes was unrelenting in his battle against Cartesian dualism, for which he saw Robert Boyle's experimental science as a surrogate. (shrink)

Buddhist philosophy asserts that human suffering is caused by ignorance regarding the true nature of reality. According to this, perceptions and thoughts are largely fabrications of our own minds, based on conditioned tendencies which often involve problematic fears, aversions, compulsions, etc. In Buddhist psychology, these tendencies reside in a portion of mind known as Store consciousness. Here, I suggest a correspondence between this Buddhist Store consciousness and the neuroscientific idea of stored synaptic weights. These weights are strong synaptic connections built (...) in through experience. Buddhist philosophy claims that humans can find relief from suffering through a process in which the Store consciousness is transformed. Here, I argue that this Buddhist 'transformation at the base' corresponds to a loosening of the learned synaptic connections. I will argue that Buddhist meditation practices create conditions in the brain which are optimal for diminishing the strength of our conditioned perceptual and behavioural tendencies. (shrink)

We sometimes fail unwittingly to do things that we ought to do. And we are, from time to time, culpable for these unwitting omissions. We provide an outline of a theory of responsibility for unwitting omissions. We emphasize two distinctive ideas: (i) many unwitting omissions can be understood as failures of appropriate vigilance, and; (ii) the sort of self-control implicated in these failures of appropriate vigilance is valuable. We argue that the norms that govern vigilance and the value of self-control (...) explain culpability for unwitting omissions. (shrink)

The Ontology for Biomedical Investigations (OBI) is an ontology that provides terms with precisely defined meanings to describe all aspects of how investigations in the biological and medical domains are conducted. OBI re-uses ontologies that provide a representation of biomedical knowledge from the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) project and adds the ability to describe how this knowledge was derived. We here describe the state of OBI and several applications that are using it, such as adding semantic expressivity to (...) existing databases, building data entry forms, and enabling interoperability between knowledge resources. OBI covers all phases of the investigation process, such as planning, execution and reporting. It represents information and material entities that participate in these processes, as well as roles and functions. Prior to OBI, it was not possible to use a single internally consistent resource that could be applied to multiple types of experiments for these applications. OBI has made this possible by creating terms for entities involved in biological and medical investigations and by importing parts of other biomedical ontologies such as GO, Chemical Entities of Biological Interest (ChEBI) and Phenotype Attribute and Trait Ontology (PATO) without altering their meaning. OBI is being used in a wide range of projects covering genomics, multi-omics, immunology, and catalogs of services. OBI has also spawned other ontologies (Information Artifact Ontology) and methods for importing parts of ontologies (Minimum information to reference an external ontology term (MIREOT)). The OBI project is an open cross-disciplinary collaborative effort, encompassing multiple research communities from around the globe. To date, OBI has created 2366 classes and 40 relations along with textual and formal definitions. The OBI Consortium maintains a web resource providing details on the people, policies, and issues being addressed in association with OBI. (shrink)

This paper analyzes a non-temporal interpretation of the adverb sempre “always” in European Portuguese and Italian, in which the adverb expresses persistence of the truth of a proposition over time and displays specific contextual constraints (TP-sempre). Despite an overlap in the contexts in which TP-sempre may occur in both languages, we provide data showing that its distribution is not exactly the same in European Portuguese and Italian. In view of these data, we propose that TP-sempre is a modal operator of (...) confirmation in both languages, but that it is more restricted in Italian in that it has a plan presupposition only in this language. (shrink)

Malcolm’s English-Latin Leviathan is a marvelous technical accomplishment. My issues are with his contextualization, seeing Leviathan primarily as an advice book for Hobbes’s teenage pupil, the future Charles II. Malcolm’s localization involves minimalizing Leviathan's remoter sources, so the European Republic of Letters, for which Hobbes so painstakingly translated his works into Latin, is almost entirely missing, along with current European traditions of Hobbes scholarship. Is this very British Hobbes truly credible, or do we need a more European Hobbes to account (...) for the complexity of Leviathan? (shrink)

Este paper examina en detalle el marco constitucional dispuesto en 1991 para la protección del medio ambiente y la configuración del Estado colombiano frente a los nuevos retos que plantea la protección ambiental. Lo anterior, a partir de dos elementos claves para entender el papel de los mecanismos jurídicos en la defensa de la naturaleza y el ambiente: la participación ambiental y el acceso a la justicia ambiental, ello, con el fin de conocer los instrumentos que reconfiguran el Estado para (...) que la ciudadanía y las organizaciones sociales puedan ejercer una defensa jurídica del medio ambiente, que aporte a la construcción de la justicia ambiental. (shrink)

A large part of the contemporary literature on dehumanization is committed to three ideas: (a) dehumanization involves some degree of denial of humanness, (b) such denial is to be comprehended in mental terms, and (c) whatever exact mechanisms underlie the denial of humanness, they belong in the realm of post-perceptual processing. This chapter examines (c) and argues that the awareness of minds might belong to perceptual processing. This paves the way for the possibility that dehumanization might, at least in part, (...) be a perceptual phenomenon, such that dehumanizers visually perceive the dehumanized as exhibiting lesser-than-human minds. It is perhaps unsurprising that the first systematic investigations of dehumanization approached the phenomenon as linked to contexts of war, genocide, extreme hatred, and violence. One guiding hypothesis was that dehumanizers exclude the dehumanized from a moral community of human beings, implicitly conceptualized as displaying distinct individualities and being embedded in caring interpersonal relations. By comprehending the dehumanized as deindividuated entities to which moral norms and considerations of fairness do not apply (Opotow 1990), dehumanizers are able to disengage from moral restrictions and self-sanctions (Bandura 1999). (shrink)

A book review of 'Feeling Extended: Sociality as Extended Body-Becoming-Mind' by Douglas Robinson.

Debates about the genuine disease status of controversial diseases rely on intuitions about a range of factors. Adopting tools from experimental philosophy, this paper explores some of the factors that influence judgments about whether low sexual desire should be considered a disease and whether it should be medically treated. Drawing in part on some assumptions underpinning a divide in the literature between viewing low sexual desire as a genuine disease and seeing it as improperly medicalized, we investigate whether health and (...) disease judgments are affected by factors such as an individual’s gender, the cause of the low desire, whether the desire is high or low, and both personal and societal valuations of the condition. Our main findings indicate that (a) the cause of a condition influences whether it is judged a disorder, (b) how the individual values the condition influences whether the condition is seen as a proper target of medical intervention, and (c) perceived dysfunction influences judgments regarding health, disorder classification, medicalization, and medical intervention. Our findings help further illuminate the intricate interplay of factors that influence judgments about health and disease in controversial conditions. (shrink)

Schwarz pursues a primordial theme by Freudian means, extrapolating from the psychogenesis of a person to the psychogenesis of a nation. He thus associates monarchy with culture in its infancy, displaying infantile narcisism and meglomania. But as perhaps the best worst case, Pharaonic Egypt, demonstrates, meglomania and narcissism expresssed in colossi, grandiose claims of the king that would shame even the gods, are more likely a sign of weakness than strength. And classical republicanism continues to maintain a monarchical element, now (...) transferred to presidents. (shrink)

BioPortal is a Web portal that provides access to a library of biomedical ontologies and terminologies developed in OWL, RDF(S), OBO format, Protégé frames, and Rich Release Format. BioPortal functionality, driven by a service-oriented architecture, includes the ability to browse, search and visualize ontologies (Figure 1). The Web interface also facilitates community-based participation in the evaluation and evolution of ontology content.

Authenticity has become a widespread ethical ideal that represents a way of dealing with normative gaps in contemporary life. This ideal suggests that one should be true to oneself and lead a life expressive of what one takes oneself to be. However, many contemporary thinkers have pointed out that the ideal of authenticity has increasingly turned into a kind of aestheticism and egoistic self-indulgence. In his book, Varga systematically constructs a critical concept of authenticity that takes into account the reciprocal (...) shaping of capitalism and the ideal of authenticity. Drawing on different traditions in critical social theory, moral philosophy and phenomenology, Varga builds a concept of authenticity that can make intelligible various problematic and potentially exhausting practices of the self. (shrink)

It is widely agreed that obsessive-compulsive disorder involves irrationality. But where in the complex of states and processes that constitutes OCD should this irrationality be located? A pervasive assumption in both the psychiatric and philosophical literature is that the seat of irrationality is located in the obsessive thoughts characteristic of OCD. Building on a puzzle about insight into OCD (Taylor 2022), we challenge this pervasive assumption, and argue instead that the irrationality of OCD is located in the emotions that are (...) characteristic of OCD, such as anxiety or fear. In particular, we propose to understand the irrationality of OCD as a matter of harboring recalcitrant emotions. We argue that this account not only solves the puzzle about insight, but also makes better sense of how OCD sufferers experience and describe their condition and helps explain some otherwise puzzling features of compulsive behavior. (shrink)

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

Social integration was theorized to be a ‘secularizing’ process for immigrants in Western Europe. Assuming that immigrants adapt to new social environments by complying with the mainstream culture of their receiving countries, immigrant religiosity is expected to decline as they assimilate in societies where secular norms prevail. Alternatively, religion could be a coping mechanism for immigrants who struggle to assimilate in their receiving countries. ‘Buffer’ theories of religion suggest that religious identity could be interchangeable with ethnicity and nationality to mitigate (...) the identity conflicts immigrants experience. This paper addresses the following research question: What role does religion play in the identity conflict experienced by immigrants who are both an ethnic minority and a national of a Western European country? Particularly, I explore the pertinence of religious identity for first-generation Sub-Saharan African Christian immigrants (SSACI) in Germany and France, where the models of immigrant assimilation diverge. Statistical tests were conducted on data derived from two surveys to compare religious, national, and ethnic self-identities at the group and individual levels. The group comparisons suggest that Christianity was indeed more salient for SSACI than native-born Christians. SSACIs without citizenship were also more likely to experience identity conflict, to which they may cope by associating less with their ethnicity or more with their religious identity. Perceived discrimination was associated with identity conflict only in Germany where immigrant assimilation is traditionally based on a common ancestry, in contrast to the values-based model in France. These are consistent with the predictions derived from ‘buffer’ theories of immigrant religiosity but longitudinal studies are needed for a more robust understanding of these trends. (shrink)

Despite considerable growth in understanding of various aspects of sporting and exercise embodiment over the last decade, in-depth investigations of embodied affectual experiences in running remain limited. Furthermore, within the corpus of literature investigating pleasure and the hedonic dimension in running, much of this research has focused on experiences of pleasure in relation to performance and achievement, or on specific affective states, such as enjoyment, derived after completing a run. We directly address this gap in the qualitative literature on sporting (...) and exercise embodiment by contributing novel insights on the mind-body pleasures of running via focusing analytic attention towards the pleasures recalled by runners as experienced during positive, rewarding running experiences. Applying conceptual insights drawn from sociological phenomenology, we analyse data from an in-depth, event-focused interview study with distance runners who reported positive, rewarding experiences in recent recreational runs. Through reflexive thematic analysis, we present findings in relation to three themes: (1) ‘running feels like it should’; (2) sensory engagements; and (3) time out. The study contributes fresh perspectives, both conceptually and in relation to data-collection approach, to a small literature on the lived experience of pleasure in sport, exercise and physical cultures. (shrink)

In this paper, we draw on developmental findings to provide a nuanced understanding of background emotions, particularly those in depression. We demonstrate how they reflect our basic proximity (feeling of interpersonal connectedness) to others and defend both a phenomenological and a functional claim. First, we substantiate a conjecture by Fonagy & Target (International Journal of Psychoanalysis 88(4):917–937, 2007) that an important phenomenological aspect of depression is the experiential recreation of the infantile loss of proximity to significant others. Second, we argue (...) that proximity has a particular cognitive function that allows individuals to morph into a cohesive dyadic system able to carry out distributed emotion regulation. We show that elevated levels of psychological suffering connected to depressive background emotions may be explained not only in terms of a psychological loss, but also as the felt inability to enter into dyadic regulatory relations with others—an experiential constraint that decreases the individual’s ability to adapt to demanding situations. (shrink)

The DSM‐5 highlights two essential psychological features of anorexia nervosa (AN): recalcitrant fear of gaining weight and body image disturbance. Prominent accounts grant false beliefs about body weight and shape a central role in the explanation of AN behavior. In this article, we propose a stronger emphasis on recalcitrant fear. We show that such fear can explain AN behavior without the intermediary of a false belief, and thus without the associated explanatory burdens and conceptual difficulties. We illustrate how shifting the (...) emphasis from false belief to recalcitrant fear can supplement a number of different non‐doxastic models of AN. (shrink)

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

While research on Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) has traditionally focused on cognitive and behavioral deficits, there is increasing interest in exploring possible resources associated with the disorder. In this paper, we argue that the attention-patterns associated with ADHD can be understood as expressing an alternative style of inquiry, or “zetetic” style, characterized mainly by a lower barrier for becoming curious and engaging in inquiry, and a weaker disposition to regulate curiosity in response to the cognitive and practical costs associated (...) with inquiry. Exploring this zetetic style from an epistemological perspective, we show that it is often epistemically rational and can be advantageous in important respects. We close by suggesting that the very aspects of the zetetic style that might at times render it disadvantageous from the point of view of individual subjects with ADHD, will often confer epistemic benefits to the social group that the subjects are part of. (shrink)

El daño ambiental ha despertado el interés de la doctrina en Colombia, aunque aún no se aborda con rigor y profundidad. La razón, entre otras, es la omisión de los avances que ha dado el derecho comparado, donde la concepción del rol de las instituciones jurídicas va hasta una comprensión integral del daño a partir de la alteración funcional de los sistemas. Existe hoy cierto consenso respecto al deber ser del régimen de responsabilidad aplicable a esta noción integral del daño (...) ambiental, capaz de hacer frente a los componentes del medio natural y a todos los que lo conforman. El libro busca aportar al estudio del daño ambiental desde los avances antes descritos en la materia. (shrink)

As a representative of the papacy Bellarmine was an extremely moderate one. In fact Sixtus V in 1590 had the first volume of his Disputations placed on the Index because it contained so cautious a theory of papal power, denying the Pope temporal hegemony. Bellarmine did not represent all that Hobbes required of him either. On the contrary, he proved the argument of those who championed the temporal powers of the Pope faulty. As a Jesuit he tended to maintain the (...) relative autonomy of the state, denying the temporal powers ascribed by radical papalists and Augustinians. Their argument was generally framed as a syllogism: Christ, who possessed direct temporal power as both God and man, exercised it on earth; the Pope is the vicar of Christ; therefore the Pope possesses and may exercise direct temporal jurisdiction. Bellarmine simply denied that Christ had exercised the temporal power, which as God, it is true, he possessed. Moreover, he drew up and circulated a list of patristic passages collected under the title De Regno Christi quale sit, to prove to the Pope the orthodoxy of his position. (shrink)

El problema del acceso a los medicamentos no obedece siempre al rol cuestionable de la industria farmacéutica, como sí en gran medida a los Estados, responsables inmediatos por el abandono de millones de pacientes en los países bajo el umbral de pobreza y desarrollo. Para evidenciar esta información se plantean tres escenarios en los que las políticas públicas aún tienen una gran tarea pendiente: la ausencia de regulación y vigilancia, la permisividad con prácticas seudocientíficas y el abandono en regiones apartadas. (...) A lo largo del texto, y a manera de conclusión, se propone un llamado de atención a los gobiernos, para que reorienten sus acciones y hagan presencia en un panorama que usualmente se deja a un lado cuando se aborda el problema del acceso a los medicamentos. (shrink)

This article identifies a novel challenge to standard understandings of responsibility practices, animated by experimental studies of biases and heuristics. It goes on to argue that this challenge illustrates a general methodological challenge for theorizing about responsibility. That is, it is difficult for a theory to give us both guidance in real world contexts and an account of the metaphysical and normative foundations of responsibility without treating wide swaths of ordinary practice as defective. The general upshot is that theories must (...) either hew more closely to actual practice than they appear to, or they must provide some normative foundation for responsibility that does not go through actual practice. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the interpretation of the Italian approximative adverb quasi 'almost' by primarily looking at cases in which it modifies temporal connectives, a domain which, to our knowledge, has been largely unexplored thus far. Consideration of this domain supports the need for a scalar account of the semantics of quasi (close in spirit to Hitzeman's semantic analysis of almost, in: Canakis et al. (eds) Papers from the 28th regional meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, 1992). When paired with (...) suitable analyses of temporal connectives, such an account can provide a simple explanation of the patterns of implication that are observed when quasi modifies locational (e. g. quando 'when'), directional (e. g. fino 'until' and da 'since'), and event-sequencing temporal connectives (e. g. prima 'before' and dopo ' after'). A challenging empirical phenomenon that is observed is a contrast between the modification of fino and da by quasi, on the one hand, and the modification of prima and dopo by the same adverb, on the other. While quasi fino and quasi da behave symmetrically, a puzzling asymmetry is observed between quasi prima and quasi dopo. To explain the asymmetry, we propose an analysis of prima and dopo on which the former has the meaning of the temporal comparative più presto 'earlier', while the latter is seen as an atomic predicate denoting temporal succession between events (Del Prete, Nat Lang Semantics 16: 157-203, 2008). We show that the same pattern of implication observed for quasi prima is attested when quasi modifies overt comparatives, and propose a pragmatic analysis of this pattern that uniformly applies to both cases, thus providing new evidence for the claim that prima is underlyingly a comparative. A major point of this paper is a discussion of the notion of scale which is relevant for the semantics of quasi', in particular, we show that the notion of Horn (entailment-based) scale is not well-suited for handling modification of temporal connectives, and that a more general notion of scale is required in order to provide a uniform analysis of quasi as a cross-categorial modifier. (shrink)

Scaffolded Minds offers a novel account of cognitive scaffolding and its significance for understanding mental disorders. The book is part of the growing philosophical engagement with empirically informed philosophy of mind, which studies the interfaces between philosophy and cognitive science. It draws on two recent shifts within empirically informed philosophy of mind: the first, toward an intensified study of the embodied mind; and the second, toward a study of the disordered mind that acknowledges the convergence of the explanatory concerns of (...) psychiatry and interdisciplinary inquiries into the mind. The book sets out to accomplish a dual task: theoretical mapping of cognitive scaffolding; and the application/calibration of fine-grained philosophical distinctions to empirical research. It introduces the notion of actively scaffolded cognition (ASC) and offers a taxonomy that distinguishes between intrasomatic and extrasomatic scaffolding. It then shows that ASC offers a productive framework for considering certain characteristic features of mental disorders, focusing on altered bodily experience and social cognition deficits. (shrink)

Quentin Skinner’s dedication to investigating Hobbes’s concept of liberty in a number of essays and books has born some unusual fruit. Not only do we see the enormous problems that Hobbes set himself by proceeding as he did, but Skinner’s careful analysis allows us to chart Hobbes’ ingenuity as he tried to steer a path between the Charybdis of determinism and the Scylla of voluntarism – not very successfully, as we shall see. The upshot is a theory of individual freedom (...) and civil liberty to challenge the classical republican traditionThis Article does not have an abstract. (shrink)

Since the inception of their discipline, anthropologists have studied virtually every conceivable aspect of other peoples' morality - religion, social control, sin, virtue, evil, duty, purity and pollution. But what of the examination of anthropology itself, and of its agendas, epistemes, theories and praxes? Conceived as a response to Patrick Tierney's hugely inflammatory book Darkness in El Dorado , whose allegations of immoral and negligent anthropological research in South America caused a storm of protest and debate, the book combines theoretical (...) papers and case studies from eminent scholars including Steven Nugent, Marilyn Silverman and Veronica Strang. Showing how the topic of ethics goes to the heart of anthropology, it raises the controversial question of why - and for whom - the anthropological discipline functions. (shrink)

This essay advances the following set of arguments: First, that we must take seriously Hobbes's claim in Behemoth that "the science of just & unjust" is a demonstrable science, accessible to those of even the meanest capacity. Second, that Leviathan is the work in which this science, intended as a serious project in civic education, is set out. Third, that Hobbes is prepared to accept, like Plato & Aristotle, "giving to each his own," as a preliminary definition of justice, from (...) which however, he draws some very un-Aristotelian conclusions. Fourth, that though in Hobbes's theory "just & unjust" are equivalent of "lawful & unlawful," this is far from being a simple statement of legal positivism, but rather the conclusion of a practical syllogism. Fifth, that the impediments to this demonstrable science of justice being universally accepted, on Hobbes's account, are twofold, explained in terms of religion & the role of preachers & educators produced by the universities, on the one hand, & by the activity of "democratical gentlemen" & classical republicans dominating parliament, on the other. Sixth, that Hobbes's account of the transition from jus to lex, specified in terms of a transition from the state of nature to that of civil society, although Epicurean in origin, is much closer to a conventional civil law position. Adapted from the source document. (shrink)

At least some serial killers are psychopathic serial killers. Psychopathic serial killers raise interesting questions about the nature of evil and moral responsibility. On the one hand, serial killers seem to be obviously evil, if anything is. On the other hand, psychopathy is a diagnosable disorder that, among other things, involves a diminished ability to understand and use basic moral distinctions. This feature of psychopathy suggests that psychopathic serial killers have at least diminished responsibility for what they do. In this (...) chapter I consider whether psychopathic serial killers might be properly said to be both evil and morally responsible for their actions. I argue that psychopathic serial killers are plausibly evil in at least one recognizable sense of the term, but that they are nevertheless not likely to be responsible for many of the evils they perpetuate. (shrink)

It is my thesis that Renaissance classical translations and imitations were often works of political surrogacy in a literary environment characterized by harsh censorship. So, for instance, the works of Homer, Virgil, and Lucan were read as coded texts, that ranged across the political spectrum.

Medicine is increasingly subject to various forms of criticism. This paper focuses on dominant forms of criticism and offers a better account of their normative character. It is argued that together, these forms of criticism are comprehensive, raising questions about both medical science and medical practice. Furthermore, it is shown that these forms of criticism mainly rely on standards of evaluation that are assumed to be internal to medicine and converge on a broader question about the aim of medicine. Further (...) work making medicine’s internal norms explicit and determining the aim of medicine would not only help to clarify to what extent the criticism is justified, but also assist an informed deliberation about the future of medicine. To illustrate some of the general difficulties associated with such a task, the paper concludes by critically engaging Edmund Pellegrino’s account of the aim of medicine as well as the Hastings Center’s consensus report. (shrink)

Thomas Hobbes's 'Historia Ecclesiastica' presents his views on religion and aims to divert the attention of the public from charges against his being a heretic to placing heresy in pagan history, claiming that Greek philosophers were responsible for introducing heresy in the Christian Church. His book reveals his interest in religious history and the growth of hermeticism and Cabalism in England in his age.

En el presente artículo se presenta el panorama y algunos de los más importantes avances que en Colombia se han dado en materia ambiental desde la Constitución Política de 1991. La metodología llevada a cabo es descriptiva y analítica, en tanto se estudian no sólo las normas sino las sentencias más relevantes que se han constituido en un hito en la protección de los derechos ambientales. En tal sentido, lo que se pretende evidenciar es la existencia de un panorama de (...) constitucionalización de los derechos ambientales con signicativos avances tales como el rol preponderante que ha adquirido el principio de precaución o el reconocimiento de la función ecológica de la propiedad. (shrink)

We propose a semantic analysis of the particles afinal (European Portuguese) and alla fine (Italian) in terms of the notion of truth unpersistence, which combines both epistemic modality and constraints on discourse structure. We argue that the felicitous use of these modal particles requires that the truth of a proposition p* fail to persist through a temporal succession of epistemic states, where p* is incompatible with the proposition modified by afinal/alla fine, and that the interlocutors share knowledge of a previous (...) epistemic attitude toward p*. We analyze two main cases, that of plan-related propositions and that of propositions without plans. We also discuss the connections between truth unpersistence and evidentiality. (shrink)