Background Neuroscientific approaches have historically triggered changes in the conception of creativity and artistic experience, which can be revealed by noting the intersection of these fields of study in terms of variables such as global trends, methodologies, objects of study, or application of new technologies; however, these neuroscientific approaches are still often considered as disciplines detached from the arts and humanities. In this light, the question arises as to what evidence the history of neurotechnologies provides at the intersection of creativity (...) and aesthetic experience. Methods We conducted a century-long bibliometric analysis of key parameters in multidisciplinary studies published in the Scopus database. Screening techniques based on the PRISMA method and advanced data analysis techniques were applied to 3612 documents metadata from the years 1922 to 2022. We made graphical representations of the results applying algorithmic and clusterization processes to keywords and authors relationships. Results From the analyses, we found a) a shift from a personality-focus quantitative analysis to a field-focus qualitative approach, considering topics such as art, perception, aesthetics and beauty; b) The locus of interest in fMRI-supported neuroanatomy has been shifting toward EEG technologies and models based on machine learning and deep learning in recent years; c) four main clusters were identified in the study approaches: humanistic, creative, neuroaesthetic and medical; d) the neuroaesthetics cluster is the most central and relevant, mediating between creativity and neuroscience; e) neuroaesthetics and neuroethics are two of the neologism that better characterizes the challenges that this convergence of studies will have in the next years. Conclusions Through a longitudinal analysis, we evidenced the great influence that neuroscience is having on the thematic direction of the arts and humanities. The perspective presented shows how this field is being consolidated and helps to define it as a new opportunity of great potential for future researchers. (shrink)

In the social sciences and in everyday speech we often talk about groups as if they behaved in the same way as individuals, thinking and acting as a singular being. We say for example that "Google intends to develop an automated car", "the U.S. Government believes that Syria has used chemical weapons on its people", or that "the NRA wants to protect the rights of gun owners". We also often ascribe legal and moral responsibility to groups. But could groups literally (...) intend things? Is there such a thing as a collective mind? If so, should groups be held morally responsible? Such questions are of vital importance to our understanding of the social world. In this lively, engaging introduction Deborah Tollefsen offers a careful survey of contemporary philosophers? answers to these questions, and argues for the unorthodox view that certain groups should, indeed, be treated as agents and deserve to be held morally accountable. Tollefsen explores the nature of belief, action and intention, and shows the reader how a belief in group agency can be reconciled with our understanding of individual agency and accountability. _Groups as Agents_ will be a vital resource for scholars as well as for students of philosophy and the social sciences encountering the topic for the first time. (shrink)

This article presents the results of the research “Philosophical Attitude and Childhood: Teachers’ Formation and Transformation”, developed at the Universidad Pedagógica y Tecnológica de Colombia UPTC Kindergarten, by using the Community of Inquiry as a strategy to foster a philosophical attitude. It is divided in three descriptive moments, the first one, previous considerations, contains: philosophy as a tool to think, philosophical attitude as a life style, philosophy for kids as a theoretical and methodological perspective; the second one includes methodological perspectives; (...) and the third one, the experience as a transformation, covers: the Community of Inquiry and ludic, the Community of Inquiry with kids, teacher’s formation and transformation, childhood’s discovery, critical, creative and ethic thinking in childhood, and from the Community of Inquiry to a life style. (shrink)

Bégout, Bruce. Le ParK.Trad. Rubén Martín Giráldez. Barcelona: Siberia, 2014. 137 pp.

Argues that the central cognitive component of ethical virtue for Aristotle is awareness of the value of particulars.

El objetivo del presente artículo es múltiple. Primero, pondera una serie de razones por las cuales la mística aún es relevante para el análisis de la condición humana del hombre actual. Segundo, propone a la promesa y a la ausencia como dispositivos de la mística. Tercero, expone, desde la lectura que hacen Alois Haas y Amador Vega de algunos sermones alemanes del Maestro Eckhart y de El peregrino querúbico de Angelus Silesius, los planteamientos fundamentales de la mística de estos autores, (...) a saber: el vaciamiento del alma, el coengendramiento, el abismo de Dios y la unión mística. Al mismo tiempo esboza cómo el pensamiento de Eckhart y Silesius, además de ser estudiado, produce ecos en algunas de las formulaciones filosóficas más importantes del siglo XX. The aim of this article is multiple. First, it weighs a series of reasons for which mysticism is still relevant for the analysis of man’s current human condition. Second, it proposes promise and absence as the devices of mysticism. Third, it exhibits, according to the reading of Alois Haas and Amador Vega of some of Meister Eckhart’s German sermons and Angelus Silesius’ The Cherubic Wanderer, the fundamental expositions of these authors’ mysticism, namely: voidance of the soul, co-conceivement, God’s abyss and mystical union. At the same time it outlines how the thought of Eckhart and Silesius, besides being studied, produces echoes in some of the most important philosophical formulations of the 20th century. (shrink)

The seventeenth century was a period of extraordinary invention, discovery and revolutions in scientific, social and political orders. It was a time of expansive automation, biological discovery, rapid advances in medical knowledge, of animal trials and a questioning of the boundaries between species, human and non-human, between social classes, and of the assumed naturalness of political inequality. This book gives a tour through those objects, ordinary and extraordinary, which captivated the philosophical imagination of the single most important French philosopher of (...) this period, Rene Descartes. Deborah J. Brown and Calvin G. Normore document Descartes' attempt to make sense of the complex, composite objects of human and divine invention, consistent with the fundamental tenets of his metaphysical system. Their central argument is that, far from reducing all the categories of ordinary experience to the two basic categories of substance, mind and body, Descartes' philosophy recognises irreducible composites that resist reduction, and require their own distinctive modes of explanation. (shrink)

Justifying his proposal for “health savings accounts,” which would allow individuals to set aside tax-free dollars against future healthcare needs, President Bush has said that “Health savings accounts all aim at empowering people to make decisions for themselves.” Who could disagree with such a sentiment? Although bioethicists may be among those who express skepticism that personal health savings accounts will be part of the needed “fix” of our healthcare financing system, self determination has long been part of their mantra. Indeed, (...) the field of bioethics played an important role in advancing this idea in the medical world when physician paternalism was regnant. Has its popularity caused it to become so vapid as to be ripe for misuse? (shrink)

Decades before the environmental movement emerged in the 1960s, Adorno condemned our destructive and self-destructive relationship to the natural world, warning of the catastrophe that may result if we continue to treat nature as an object that exists exclusively for our own benefit. "Adorno on Nature" presents the first detailed examination of the pivotal role of the idea of natural history in Adorno's work. A comparison of Adorno's concerns with those of key ecological theorists - social ecologist Murray Bookchin, ecofeminist (...) Carolyn Merchant, and deep ecologist Arne Naess - reveals how Adorno speaks directly to many of today's most pressing environmental issues. Ending with a discussion of the philosophical conundrum of unity in diversity, "Adorno on Nature" also explores how social solidarity can be promoted as a necessary means of confronting environmental problems. (shrink)

The first form of the inside-outside dichotomy appears as a self-encapsulated system with an active border. These systems are based on two complementary but asymmetric processes: constructive and interactive. The former physically constitute the system as a recursive network of component production, defining an inside. The maintenance of the constructive processes implies that the internal organization also constrains certain flows of matter and energy across the border of the system, generating interactive processes. These interactive processes ensure the maintenance of the (...) constructive processes thus specifying a meaningful outside. Upon this basic form of identity formation, the evolutionary and historical domain is open for the emergence of a whole hierarchy and ecology of insides and outsides. These which mutually subsume and collaborate in the maintenance of the essential inside-outside dichotomy that defines the conditions of possibility of the subjects and the worlds they generate. (shrink)

This article focuses on blood donation as a form of bloodletting in a context where donation is commonly seen to alleviate the symptoms of `thick blood'. It deals with the gendered aspects of blood donation, and the parallels drawn between donating blood and menstruating. Women are seen not to need to donate blood as much as men, who, in the absence of menstruation, are more prone to thick blood and require a means to expunge the ensuing excess. While blood donation (...) professionals strive to reconstruct donation as a selfless and ungendered act, counterposing the `facts' of arterial blood circulation to local blood-lore and beliefs, lay understandings challenge this construction in the use they make of blood donation centres or by reiterating the personalistic and gendered dimensions of donation. The article explores cases of patients who use hormonal contraceptives which suppress menstruation and express concerns over the resulting accumulation of blood in the body. It considers how blood donation is adopted by some women as a means of dispelling both the perceived inconveniences of menstrual bleeding and its swelling effects. Such literalized engagements with medical technologies reveal a conception of the body as a permeable, malleable and recipient-like enclosure. These views are often characterized as `ignorance' by medical practitioners, where ignorance is seen to derive not only from the absence of knowledge, but from the presence of the wrong kind of knowledge. (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)

Economists and other social scientists in this century have often supported economic arguments by referring to positions taken by philosophers of science. This important new book looks at the reliability of this practice and, in the process, provides economists, social scientists, and historians with the necessary background to discuss methodological matters with authority. Redman first presents an accurate, critical, yet neutral survey of the modern philosophy of science from the Vienna Circle to the present, focusing particularly on logical positivism, sociological (...) explanations of science (Polanyi, Fleck, Kuhn), the Popper family, and the history of science. She then deals with economic methodology in the twentieth century, looking at a wide range of methodological positions, especially those supported by positions from the philosophy of science. She considers the myth of the feasibility of falsification in economics and, within the context of its significance for economics, discusses the interpretation of Kuhn's philosophy of science as consensus and the danger such a view represents to science. Appendices review the history of the is-ought dispute and list economists whose first works deal with methodological topics. Comprehensive, readable, and accessible to those with little background knowledge, Redman's book will appeal to a wide range of social scientists and philosophers of science. (shrink)

Les hormones sexuelles sont des objets hybrides et complexes à la frontière du sexe et du genre. Dès lors qu’elles sont synthétisées sous forme pharmaceutique, elles peuvent attribuer des caractéristiques sexuelles au corps de manière partiellement exogène à celui-ci. Il s’en suit que l’utilisation clinique qui en est faite est socialement réglementée. À travers une analyse de divers contextes d’utilisation des hormones observés à Bahia, au Brésil, cet article montre que le dualisme sexuel est le produit de pratiques de régulation (...) biomédicales qui visent à encadrer la circulation des hormones. Le sens du terme local « hormônio » n’est pas pleinement recoupé par celui d’hormone, qu’il excède. L’emploi commun qui est fait au Brésil du singulier procure au terme « hormônio » une qualité fluide et homogène. Dans ce contexte, les hormones sont comprises comme une sorte de substance qui peut circuler entre les corps. Cette conceptualisation des hormones comme une substance a des implications pour le statut ontologique des corps et révèle la relative plasticité de la relation sexe/genre. (shrink)

Research on linguistic interaction suggests that two or more individuals can sometimes form adaptive and cohesive systems. We describe an “alignment system” as a loosely interconnected set of cognitive processes that facilitate social interactions. As a dynamic, multi-component system, it is responsive to higher-level cognitive states such as shared beliefs and intentions (those involving collective intentionality) but can also give rise to such shared cognitive states via bottom-up processes. As an example of putative group cognition we turn to transactive memory (...) and suggest how further research on alignment in these cases might reveal how such systems can be genuinely described as cognitive. Finally, we address a prominent critique of collective cognitive systems, arguing that there is much empirical and explanatory benefit to be gained from considering the possibility of group cognitive systems, especially in the context of small-group human interaction. (shrink)

Latin American countries have an extensive biological diversity and a tropical or subtropical climate. This condition has advantages for development and for the implementation of biotechnological solutions for environmental problems. Environmental biotechnology could be used to enhance biodegradation, waste recovery, and also for the development of biotechnology-based products to diagnose and reduce environmental impacts such as biosensors, biopesticides, biofertilizers and biofuels. To generate new environmental biotechnological products, Latin American countries must not only overcome the known limitations associated with investment in (...) science and technology and in human resource training, but also develop their own vision of using environmental biotechnology, adapted to the economic, and environmental context. Biotechnology used wisely as a tool for promoting sustainable development in Latin American countries may also contribute to the solution of problems that represent potential risks to society and the environment in general. This document discusses the context of the research and innovation in Latin American countries around environmental biotechnology and also reviews perspectives for the improvement of these developments. (shrink)

Ainslie advances Freud's and Skinner's theories of homunculi by basing their emergent complexity on the interaction of simple algorithms. The rules of competition and cooperation of these interests are underspecified, but they provide a new way of thinking about the basic elements of conditioning, particularly conditioned stimuli (CSs).

Despite the widespread use of key concepts of the Neyman–Pearson (N–P) statistical paradigm—type I and II errors, significance levels, power, confidence levels—they have been the subject of philosophical controversy and debate for over 60 years. Both current and long-standing problems of N–P tests stem from unclarity and confusion, even among N–P adherents, as to how a test's (pre-data) error probabilities are to be used for (post-data) inductive inference as opposed to inductive behavior. We argue that the relevance of error probabilities (...) is to ensure that only statistical hypotheses that have passed severe or probative tests are inferred from the data. The severity criterion supplies a meta-statistical principle for evaluating proposed statistical inferences, avoiding classic fallacies from tests that are overly sensitive, as well as those not sensitive enough to particular errors and discrepancies. Introduction and overview 1.1 Behavioristic and inferential rationales for Neyman–Pearson (N–P) tests 1.2 Severity rationale: induction as severe testing 1.3 Severity as a meta-statistical concept: three required restrictions on the N–P paradigm Error statistical tests from the severity perspective 2.1 N–P test T(): type I, II error probabilities and power 2.2 Specifying test T() using p-values Neyman's post-data use of power 3.1 Neyman: does failure to reject H warrant confirming H? Severe testing as a basic concept for an adequate post-data inference 4.1 The severity interpretation of acceptance (SIA) for test T() 4.2 The fallacy of acceptance (i.e., an insignificant difference): Ms Rosy 4.3 Severity and power Fallacy of rejection: statistical vs. substantive significance 5.1 Taking a rejection of H0 as evidence for a substantive claim or theory 5.2 A statistically significant difference from H0 may fail to indicate a substantively important magnitude 5.3 Principle for the severity interpretation of a rejection (SIR) 5.4 Comparing significant results with different sample sizes in T(): large n problem 5.5 General testing rules for T(), using the severe testing concept The severe testing concept and confidence intervals 6.1 Dualities between one and two-sided intervals and tests 6.2 Avoiding shortcomings of confidence intervals Beyond the N–P paradigm: pure significance, and misspecification tests Concluding comments: have we shown severity to be a basic concept in a N–P philosophy of induction? (shrink)

Autism is one of the most compelling, controversial, and heartbreaking cognitive disorders. It presents unique philosophical challenges as well, raising intriguing questions in philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and philosophy of language that need to be explored if the autistic population is to be responsibly served. Starting from the "theory of mind" thesis that a fundamental deficit in autism is the inability to recognize that other persons have minds, Deborah R. Barnbaum considers its implications for the nature of consciousness, our (...) understanding of the consciousness of others, meaning theories in philosophy of language, and the modality of mind. This discussion lays the groundwork for consideration of the value of an autistic life, as well as the moral theories available to persons with autism. The book also explores questions about genetic decision making, research into the nature of autism, and the controversial quest for a cure. This is a timely and wide-ranging book on a disorder that commends itself to serious ethical examination. (shrink)

On September 4, 2001, press reports indicated that the Defense Intelligence Agency of the U.S. Department of Defense planned to reproduce a strain of anthrax virus suspected of being held in Russian laboratories. According to the same reports, the Central Intelligence Agency, under the auspices of Project Clear Vision, is engaged in building replicas of bomblets believed to have been developed by the former Soviet Union. These small bombs were designed to disperse biological agents, including anthrax. Government attorneys were said (...) to be confident that, because these projects were designed to develop defensive measures, they were not in violation of the 1972 Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention. (shrink)

If economics has been the “dismal science” of the past century, health policy promises to be that of the next. Health policy issues evoke far less passion than the emotion-laden immediacies of bedside decision making. Nevertheless, it is patent that “macro” issues in all their obscurity and complexity are unavoidable if the health care delivery system of the future is to be fiscally sound and publicly acceptable. In addition, as Americans are now learning, options for care at the bedside are (...) ineluctably constrained by seemingly distant societal choices. (shrink)

This paper examines how unethical behavior in the workplace occurs when management places inordinately strong emphasis on goalattainment without a corresponding emphasis on following legitimate procedures. Robert Merton's theory of sodal structure and anomie provides a foundation to discuss this argument. Key factors affecting ethical climates in work organizations are also addressed. Based on this analysis, the paper proposes strategies for developing and changing aspects of organizational culture to reduce anomie, thereby creating work climates which discourage unethical practices and provide (...) employees with mechanisms to resolve ethical conflicts in a constructive way. (shrink)

Descartes is often accused of having fragmented the human being into two independent substances, mind and body, with no clear strategy for explaining the apparent unity of human experience. Deborah Brown argues that, contrary to this view, Descartes did in fact have a conception of a single, integrated human being, and that in his view this conception is crucial to the success of human beings as rational and moral agents and as practitioners of science. The passions are pivotal in this, (...) and in a rich and wide-ranging discussion she examines Descartes' place in the tradition of thought about the passions, the metaphysics of actions and passions, sensory representation, and Descartes' account of self-mastery and virtue. Her study is an important and original reading not only of Descartes' account of mind-body unity but also of his theory of mind. (shrink)

This paper examines how unethical behavior in the workplace occurs when management places inordinately strong emphasis on goalattainment without a corresponding emphasis on following legitimate procedures. Robert Merton's theory of sodal structure and anomie provides a foundation to discuss this argument. Key factors affecting ethical climates in work organizations are also addressed. Based on this analysis, the paper proposes strategies for developing and changing aspects of organizational culture to reduce anomie, thereby creating work climates which discourage unethical practices and provide (...) employees with mechanisms to resolve ethical conflicts in a constructive way. (shrink)

Essays cover historical, sociological, psychological and anthropological approaches, ethics and politics, and the policy implications of the real and perceived differences between the sexes.