Microsystems are described as contexts formed by a subject, their roles, interactions, and a specific physical space and time, such as housing and the school environment. Although several studies suggest the importance of studying this type of environment and its repercussion on children's development, in a Latin American context few studies integrate the interaction of two primary settings in the development of executive functioning. The present study explores the effects of the quality of housing and school environments on the perception (...) of stress, decision making, and planning among children. A total of 114 children (43% girls and 57% boys, Mage = 10.57) from a primary school located in a community classified as poor participated in the study. It was measured: environmental quality of classrooms, housing, stress and executive functioning of children. The results reveal a model linking environmental quality levels in children's homes and schools and executive functioning. We also obtain a mediating role of stress between microsystems and performance, finding a deficit in executive performance when children experienced higher levels of stress as a result of poor environmental quality both in their homes and in their schools. (shrink)

While philosophical questions about health and disease have attracted much attention in recent decades, and while opinions are divided on most issues, influential accounts seem to embrace negativism about health, according to which health is the absence of disease. Some subscribe to unrestricted negativism, which claims that negativism applies not only to the concepts of health and disease as used by healthcare professionals but also to the lay concept that underpins everyday thinking. Whether people conceptualize health in this manner has (...) implications for medical care and public health, and so we set out to examine this claim in two studies. Participants were asked to assess and compare the health states of two people presented in two vignettes. We found that both lay people and medical students conceptualize health as something more than the absence of disease. We argue that our findings highlight a need to rethink unrestricted negativism and indicate a need to rethink the way the debate has traditionally focused on disease. (shrink)

While many profound philosophical questions arise about psychopaths, I wish to draw attention to two limitations in current debates. First, philosophers mainly deal with offender and forensic populations neglecting so-called ‘successful’ psychopaths. Second, philosophers mainly focus on the issue of empathy and responsibility, while relatively little attention is paid to volitional aspects. I address these two limitations together and argue that ‘successful’ psychopaths are volitionally constrained. In order to grasp and explore this deficiency, I argue in favour of a more (...) refined and fine-grained understanding of identifications. (shrink)

El problema del principio de razón suficiente puede hallar sus primerosindicios en Spinoza; no obstante, es hasta que Leibniz trata de definirlocuando toma cierto rango y cierta importancia filosófica. El problema essi todo tiene una razón (o causa) y si todo tiene una causa, ¿por qué? Ysi no todo tiene una causa, ¿qué razones tenemos para pensar en ello?

Este artículo presenta el principio de razón suficiente según Leibniz. Para ello, primero se muestra una sección donde trata de definirse qué es un principio y cuál es el principio de razón suficiente, para posteriormente pasar a los problemas que tiene la postulación de dicho principio desde la perspectiva de Leibniz.

In this paper I criticize libertarianism and skepticism about free will. The criticism of libertarianism takes some steps towards filling in an argument that is often mentioned but seldom developed in any detail, the argument that libertarianism is a scientifically implausible view. I say "take some steps" because I think the considerations I muster (at most) favor a less ambitious relative of that argument. The less ambitious claim I hope to motivate is that there is little reason to believe that (...) extant libertarian accounts satisfy a standard of naturalistic plausibility, even if they do satisfy a standard of naturalistic compatibility. The argument against skepticism about free will tries to show (1) perhaps the most prominent form of skeptical argument against the existence of free will does not work, and (2) there is a good general argument against skepticism about free will. (shrink)

In Quest of Justice: Islamic Law and Forensic Medicine in Modern Egypt. By Khaled Fahmy. Oakland: University of California Press, 2018. Pp. xiii + 377. $39.95.

Sexual Violation in Islamic Law: Substance, Evidence, and Procedure. By Hina Azam. Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. xi + 270. $95.

There is a familiar chain of reasoning that goes something like this: if everything is caused, no one is free, and thus, no one can be morally responsible. Reasoning like this has made scientific explanations of human behavior (e.g., biology, psychology, and neuroscience) threatening to familiar ideas of responsibility, blameworthiness, and merit. Rather than directly attacking the chain of reasoning that gives rise to these worries, I explore an alternative approach, one that begins by considering the "use" of moral responsibility. (...) What role does the concept play for us? What structure, if any, would an ideal set of practices and attitudes about moral responsibility have to it? I outline a new account of responsibility and consider what it might mean for traditional worries about causal, scientific explanations of human behavior. (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)

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)

This chapter examines traditionalists’ arguments why Dungeons Dragons (DD) is good for us first, and then discusses the cases where it could be bad for us. The irony for Christian critics of DD, such as Schnoebelen, is that the philosophical and theological arguments of Christian traditionalists, such as Thomas Aquinas and J.R.R. Tolkien, provide some of the strongest arguments in favor of DD role‐playing. However, to be fair, these same arguments can be used to argue that a particular DD game, (...) under certain circumstances, can be bad. “Postmodernists” refers loosely to a group of philosophers and thinkers who question, if not outright reject, the core tenets of the traditionalists. If the traditionalists have the correct metaphysics about the real world, then it follows that DD is good, but that care must be taken to make sure the game does not become morally objectionable. (shrink)

There is a serious flaw in The Terminator which pretty much ruins the storyline. The problem is about Kyle Reese, who must enter the time-displacement equipment in the future, sometime after the Terminator had already entered it. We call this the “Bad Timing Problem”.

Neil Levy (2007) argues that empirical data shows that psychopaths lack the moral knowledge required for moral responsibility. His account is intriguing, and it offers a promising way to think about the significance of psychopaths for work on moral responsibility. In what follows we focus on three lines of concern connected to Levy's account: his interpretation of the data, the scope of exculpation, and the significance of biological explanations for anti-social behavior.

The importance of socio-economic impacts from the introduction and use of genetically modified crops is reflected in increasing efforts to include them in regulatory frameworks. Aiming to identify and understand the present knowledge on SEI of GM crops, we here report the findings from an extensive study of the published international scientific peer-reviewed literature. After applying specified selection criteria, a total of 410 articles are analysed. The main findings include: limited empirical research on SEI of GM crops in the scientific (...) literature; the main focus of the majority of the published research is on a restricted set of monetary economic parameters; proportionally, there are very few empirical studies on social and non-monetary economic aspects; most of the research reports only short-term findings; the variable local contexts and conditions are generally ignored in research methodology and analysis; conventional agriculture is the commonly used comparator, with minimal consideration of other substantially different agricultural systems; and there is the overall tendency to frame the research upon not validated theoretical assumptions, and to over-extrapolate small-scale and short-term specific results to generalized conclusions. These findings point to a lack of empirical and comprehensive research on SEI of GM crops for possible use in decision-making. Broader questions and improved methodologies, assisted by more rigorous peer-review, will be required to overcome current research shortcomings. (shrink)

Our EcoDialogue Center is an educational space for human sustainability within the University of Veracruz. We propose that creating sustainable knowledge requires re-thinking how we conceive ourselves as human beings. This requires paying attention to what we call “the quality of being,” which means caring about and attending to the physical–emotional–mental–spiritual as the foundation of education. This way we can create a space where we can dialogue contemplatively where all dimensions of our lives interact; the physical, the emotional, the communitarian, (...) the social politic, the planetarium, and the spiritual being act with social–environmental responsibility. (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)

Moral psychology is the study of how human minds make and are made by human morality. This state of the art volume covers contemporary philosophical and psychological work on moral psychology, as well as notable historical theories and figures in the field of moral psychology, such as Aristotle, Kant, Nietzsche, and the Buddha. The volume’s 50 chapters, authored by leading figures in the field, cover foundational topics, such as character, virtue, emotion, moral responsibility, the neuroscience of morality, weakness of will, (...) and the nature of moral judgments and reasons. The volume also canvases emerging work in applied moral psychology, including adaptive preferences, animals, mental illness, poverty, marriage, race, bias, and victim blaming. (shrink)

This article addresses the relationships between dialectic and learning within the constellations of the conceptual universes of Adorno and Vygotsky. In that order, we proceed to analyze the set of links between the main dialectical categories that structure the dialectical approach that characterizes both representatives of the Marxist thought tradition (process, totality, mediation, fields of force, antagonism, praxis) and the communicating vessels that go from epistemology to aesthetics and that demonstrate the relevance of the tasks of thought in the face (...) of social transformation. Finally, the article addresses the question of an (im)possible analytical horizon that arises, from both thinkers, to emphatically think about social emancipation and its challenges today. (shrink)

I discuss the ontology and normativity of affordances by suggesting that their ontology can be dualist and that their normativity, although socioculturally shaped, has an affective biological value….

Both the current research literature and a tradition stemming from Husserl himself agree that it was Brentano’s notion of intentionality which „gave rise“ to Husserl’s phenomenology. I rely on extensive primary materials, including unpublished sources from four archives, to revisit this thesis. Already a survey of the historical circumstances of Brentano’s second decade in Vienna, when Husserl studied under him, hints at possible discrepancies in the reception of Brentano’s thought, which are further deepened by the editing policy employed by his (...) orthodox students. I analyze an unpublished lecture manuscript of Brentano to find three different notions of intentionality, including a strikingly a-phenomenological one, which I then relate to the discussion by modern scholarship and try to identify those notions of intentionality which were encountered by Husserl as a student of Brentano. Given this heterogeneous matrix of influences, it is far from surprising that a closer look at Husserl’s philosophical juvenilia shows that he misunderstood Brentano’s notion of intentionality and attempted to employ it in a different theoretical context (maybe motivated by an idiosyncratic notion of inner perception). Finally, the notion of intentionality Husserl later attributed to Brentano was probably mitigated to him by indirect sources, including lecture manuscripts copied by the extravagant and less-know student of Brentano, Hans Schmidkunz, and a debate between a contemporary logician Christoph Sigwart and Brentano’s orthodox disciples. The analysis of these transmission mechanisms could reveal a distinct transformation which proved to be instrumental in the development of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology. The allegedly decisive influence of Brentano’s notion of intentionality at Husserl thus seems to consist in a productive misunderstanding (which apparently corresponds to Brentano’s surprisingly dismissive evaluation of Husserl after Husserl’s departure from Vienna). (shrink)

Este artículo explora algunas de las relaciones entre dialéctica y filosofía dentro del programa de una dialéctica modificada de Theodor W. Adorno ¿Cómo pensar la tensión entre las categorías dialécticas y la filosofía desde el prisma de una dialéctica negativa? ¿Qué significa desde el pensamiento de Adorno a liberar a la filosofía y a la dialéctica de su carácter afirmativo? Elaborar estas preguntas es el objetivo de este trabajo.

Nomy Arpaly rejects the model of rationality used by most ethicists and action theorists. Both observation and psychology indicate that people act rationally without deliberation, and act irrationally with deliberation. By questioning the notion that our own minds are comprehensible to us--and therefore questioning much of the current work of action theorists and ethicists--Arpaly attempts to develop a more realistic conception of moral agency.

Este artículo de reflexión plantea la decisión implícita en el acto educativo y, sobre todo, evaluativo: ¿comprender o juzgar? Á partir de un hecho educativo cotidiano se plantea la alternativa filosófica e irresoluble entre el determinismo y la libertad, proponiendo un enfoque compatibilista que significa que pese a que la acción humana individual hace parte de cadenas causales, somos libres de quebrar o innovar en cualquiera de los eslabones de dichas cadenas, posibilitando así la responsabilidad moral y la ética, y (...) permitiendo un acto realmente formativo. Los aportes de Descartes y Kant, así como de Pestalozzi y Makarenko permitirán proponer la educación como anticipación en un contexto preciso. (shrink)

Este trabajo presenta como objetivo revelar la influencia de los contextos socioeconómicos en las maneras de afrontamiento al cáncer como enfermedad. Se muestra un análisis sobre el cáncer como problema social y de salud; se analiza el papel de algunos entes sociales involucrados, el acceso de los enfermos a las terapias y de los productores de fármacos a las nuevas tecnologías. Se reflexiona acerca de la sobreevaluación de los fármacos que dificulta el acceso a novedosas y efectivas terapias; la supeditación (...) del saber tecnocientífico a los intereses del capital; la creciente contaminación ambiental como detonante al incremento de casos; y la escasez de tecnologías para la prevención y el saneamiento en países subdesarrollados. Finalmente se refiere el programa cubano de lucha contra el cáncer, su situación actual y proyecciones. This paper aimes at revealing the influence of the socioeconomic contexts on the way cancer is faced as a disease. An analysis about cancer as a social and health problem is presented; the role of some social organizations involved the sick's access to therepies and drug producers' access to new technologies. It is reflected on the over-asessment of drugs which makes access to new and effective therapies difficult; the subordination of the technoscientific knowledge to the interests of the capital; the growing environmental pollution as a trigger for cases increase; and the limited technological resources for prevention and cleanup in underdeveloped countries. Finally, it is made reference to the Cuban cancer fighting program, its current status and scope. (shrink)

Body checking, characterized by the repeated visual or physical inspection of particular parts of one’s own body (e.g. thighs, waist, or upper arms) is one of the most prominent behaviors associated with eating disorders, particularly Anorexia Nervosa (AN). In this paper, we explore the explanatory potential of the Recalcitrant Fear Model of AN (RFM) in relation to body checking. We argue that RFM, when combined with certain plausible auxiliary hypotheses about the cognitive and epistemic roles of emotions, is able to (...) explain key characteristics of body checking, including how body checking behavior becomes habitual and compulsive. (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)

RESUMEN: El presente trabajo pretende estudiar la cuestión de los universales tal como Tomás de Aquino la aborda en su trabajo De ente et essentia. Busca dilucidar el modo de ser propio de los universales en tanto que accidente de la esencia absoluta presente en el entendimiento. Esto no conduce a un nominalismo ya que la esencia entendida es idéntica a la naturaleza existente en el individuo particular, desde el punto de vista de su ser absoluto. Es, en efecto, el (...) ser absoluto de la esencia y su indiferencia con respecto a su darse, ya sea en el particular, ya sea en el entendimiento, lo que posibilita la posesión intencional del ser de lo otro que es precisamente aquello en lo que el conocer consiste en cuanto tal. ABSTRACT: The following work attempts to review the issue of the universals such as Thomas Aquinas did in his work De ente et essentia. It pretends to elucidate the specific way of being of the universals as an accident of the absolute essence present in the mind. This does not lead to nominalism because the understood essence is identical to the nature existing in the particular. This way of being of the essence is what precisely allows knowledge as an intentional possession of reality. (shrink)

Between the mid-1960s and the early 1970s, the quotidian dimension took political centrality in Japan thanks to the leading role of the New Left movement and its ideology. This went hand in hand with an appreciation of the philosophical approaches of Marxist intellectuals such as Jun Tosaka and Gorō Hani, who saw the quotidian as a fundamental space for historical transformation. We know how Tosaka and Hani developed an everyday-centred philosophy of history through their writings, but we know little about (...) how formats other than the written word – such as cinema – contributed to thinking historical reality from the same ideological approach. To address this gap in our understanding, this article analyses the intersection of two highly representative films with Tosaka and Hani’s historical thought: Secrets Within Walls ( Kabe no naka no himegoto, Kōji Wakamatsu, 1965) and Ceremonies ( Gishiki, Nagisa Ōshima, 1971). These films’ cinematic allegorisation of post-war Japan’s everyday relationships was a way to reflect on the political character of that period. (shrink)

Resumen: Este artículo tiene por finalidad indagar sobre las representaciones sociales que se tejen en torno de la educación religiosa escolar (ERE). Para ello, se empleó una investigación cualitativa amparada en una perspectiva hermenéutica y un método narrativo desarrollado a través de redes semánticas naturales y análisis de contenido. El trabajo de campo se realizó con una población de estudiantes de dos instituciones educativas de carácter privado, en la ciudad de Popayán. El análisis permitió identificar los aportes de la ERE (...) a los sujetos abordados, la descripción de sinónimos con los cuales se asocia la ERE y algunas temáticas que se deberían abordar en esta área. Estos tránsitos permitieron analizar las variaciones y tendencias que posibilitan la inferencia de su articulación con la dimensión espiritual. Abstract: The purpose of this article is to investigate the social representations that are woven around school religious education (SRE). To do this, the researchers developed a qualitative research based on a hermeneutical perspective and a narrative method developed through natural semantic networks and content analysis. The fieldwork was carried out with a population of students from two private educational institutions in the city of Popayán, Colombia. The analysis made it possible to identify the contributions of the SRE to the subjects approached, the description of synonyms with which the SRE is associated, and some issues that should be addressed in this area. These transits allowed us to analyze the variations and tendencies that make possible the inference of its articulation with the spiritual dimension. (shrink)

Performance-based epistemology conceives the normativity involved in epistemic evaluation as a special case of a pattern of evaluation that can be applied to any domain where there are agents that carry out performances with an aim. This volume presents new essays by leading epistemologists who discuss key issues concerning the foundations and applications of this approach. The essays in Part I examine some foundational issues in the conceptual framework. They address questions central to the debate, including the compatibility of apt (...) success with some forms of luck; the connection between aptness and a safety condition for knowledge; the fallibility of perceptual recognitional abilities; actual-world reliabilism and reliabilism about epistemic justification; the nature of the agency required to make a cognitive success truly one's own; the basic conceptual framework of performance-based epistemology. Part II explores Sosa's epistemology of a priori intuition; internalist objections to Sosa's views on second-order knowledge; the roles that epistemic agency is meant to play in performance-based epistemology; the value that second-order reflection may have; epistemic incompetence; and the problem of epistemic circularity and criticises Sosa's alternative solution. (shrink)

Los mecanismos de participación ciudadana se refieren a los espacios de diálogo legalmente constituidos para deliberar o negociar con las instituciones públicas. Aquí se ofrecen los resultados parciales de una investigación más amplia de esos mecanismos frente al gobierno de México entre 2019 y 2022. Se señalan los mecanismos que prevalecen en México, con sus características principales.

ABSTRACT In Mexico informed consent is a legal requirement that ensures that patients who are invited to participate in clinical trials are provided with all the information needed to decide whether to participate, or not, in a research protocol. To improve our understanding of the problems physicians in developing countries encounter, when obtaining informed consent (IC), we examined their opinion on the importance of IC in clinical research, the quantity and quality of the information provided to the participant, and the (...) conditions in which the IC is obtained. Investigators considered that IC was useful to the patients, providing information that helped the patient to make a decision about his/her participation. Nevertheless, they felt that for some aspects of the research, like drug development in general, the use of placebos, and the randomization process, many of the patients were not capable of fully understanding the information provided, referring to the complexity of the information and illiteracy as the main reasons. Many investigators were not acquainted with some of the guidelines established in the Mexican General Law of Health,1 36% of them admitting to not having completed their IC letters. Most investigators gave only minutes to the patient to make a decision and 20% of ICs were obtained while the patient was hospitalized. Except for one investigator, all of them considered that specific training in medical ethics would be useful for the daily clinical work. (shrink)