Dysfunctions of the neural circuits that implement social behavior are necessary but not a sufficient condition to develop schizophrenia. We propose that schizophrenia represents a disease of general connectivity that impairs not only the “social brain” networks, but also different neural circuits related with higher cognitive and perceptual functions. We discuss possible mechanisms and evolutionary considerations.

Historians don’t seem to be concerned by the “back to Marx” trend observed in many fields during the last decade. After an initial, very limited breakthrough in the inter-war years, Marxism irrupted in the academy in the 1960’s, when it established its hegemony on historical studies, merging with a multiplicity of social sciences. This “golden age” was followed by an epoch of decline, the climax of which was reached in 1989, with the fall of the Berlin’s wall. Since this turning (...) point, historiography has being shaped by the return to neoconservative tendencies as well as by the emergence of postmodernism, which marginalized the traditional Marxist paradigms. Instead of reducing this change to a theoretical battle, the author interprets the decline of Marxist historiography as the result of a political defeat. The absence of any utopian horizon at the beginning of the twentieth first century explains the persistence of this decline. Once liberated from both teleology and Eurocentric views – its secret tendencies from the time of its transformation into a “science” – Marxist historiography could reinvent itself and redefine its goal, which does not consist in the “application” a preformed theory but, according to E.P. Thompson, in “recovering, explaining and to understanding its object : real history”. Such a reinvention means, in the wake of W. Benjamin, to conceive the past not as definitely closed but as a whole of experiences and recollections to “reactivate” in the struggles of the present. (shrink)

This paper provides a critical overview of the realist current in contemporary political philosophy. We define political realism on the basis of its attempt to give varying degrees of autonomy to politics as a sphere of human activity, in large part through its exploration of the sources of normativity appropriate for the political and so distinguish sharply between political realism and non-ideal theory. We then identify and discuss four key arguments advanced by political realists: from ideology, from the relationship of (...) ethics to politics, from the priority of legitimacy over justice and from the nature of political judgement. Next, we ask to what extent realism is a methodological approach as opposed to a substantive political position and so discuss the relationship between realism and a few such positions. We close by pointing out the links between contemporary realism and the realist strand that runs through much of the history of Western political thought. (shrink)

This is a response to Erman and Moller's response to our reply to their 'Political Legitimacy in the Real Normative World', both also in this journal.

Political realism is characterised by fidelity to the facts of politics and a refusal to derive political judgments from pre- political moral commitments. Even when they are not taken to make normative theorising impossible or futile, those characteristics are often thought to engender a conservative slant, or at least a tendency to prefer incremental reformism to radicalism. I resist those claims by distinguishing between three variants of realism—ordorealism, contextual realism, and radical realism—and contrasting them with both non-ideal theory and utopianism. (...) I then develop a version of radical realism as a form of debunking and vindicatory genealogy. Even though this new approach eschews both feasibility constraints (unlike non-ideal theory) and prescriptions about the ideal society (unlike utopianism), I show how it has more radical potential than morality-driven (and hence often ideological) political theory, and how it supports both open-ended, radical social critique and concrete forms of prefigurative political action. (shrink)

A large number of previous reports described an effect of the pituitary hormone prolactin (PRL) on steroid hormone production by the adrenal cortex. However, those studies remained anecdotal and were never converted into a conceptual and mechanistic framework, let alone being translated into clinical care. In the light of our recently published landmark study where we described PRL signalling as a pivotal regulator of the sexually dimorphic adrenal phenotype in mouse and of adrenal androgen production in humans, we present here (...) the overarching hypothesis that PRL signalling increases the activity of Steroidogenic Factor‐1 (SF‐1/NR5A1), a transcription factor that has an essential role in adrenal gland development and function, to regulate adrenal cortex growth and hormonal production in physiological and pathological conditions. PRL can then be considered as a bona fide adrenocorticotropic hormone synergizing with ACTH in the endocrine control of adrenal cortex function. (shrink)

In the domain in which the definition of property energy is available, a rigorous and general proof of additivity is provided. Then, both the definition of energy and the proof of additivity are extended to broader domains.

Reflection Principles are commonly thought to produce only strong axioms of infinity consistent with V = L. It would be desirable to have some notion of strong reflection to remedy this, and we have proposed Global Reflection Principles based on a somewhat Cantorian view of the universe. Such principles justify the kind of cardinals needed for, inter alia , Woodin’s Ω-Logic.

The fall of the Berlin Wall marked the end of the Cold War but also the rise of a melancholic vision of history as a series of losses. For the political left, the cause lost was communism, and this trauma determined how leftists wrote the next chapter in their political struggle and how they have thought about their past since. Throughout the twentieth century, argues Left-Wing Melancholia, from classical Marxism to psychoanalysis to the advent of critical theory, a culture of (...) defeat and its emotional overlay of melancholy have characterized the leftist understanding of the political in history and in theoretical critique. Drawing on a vast and diverse archive in theory, testimony, and image and on such thinkers as Karl Marx, Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, and others, the intellectual historian Enzo Traverso explores the varying nature of left melancholy as it has manifested in a feeling of guilt for not sufficiently challenging authority, in a fear of surrendering in disarray and resignation, in mourning the human costs of the past, and in a sense of failure for not realizing utopian aspirations. Yet hidden within this melancholic tradition are the resources for a renewed challenge to prevailing regimes of historicity, a passion that has the power to reignite the dialectic of revolutionary thought. (shrink)

In this rejoinder to Erman and Möller’s reply to our “Political Norms and Moral Values” we clarify the sense in which there can be specifically political values, and expound the practice-dependent notion of legitimacy adopted by our preferred version of political realism.

One of the main challenges faced by realists in political philosophy is that of offering an account of authority that is genuinely normative and yet does not consist of a moralistic application of general, abstract ethical principles to the practice of politics. Political moralists typically start by devising a conception of justice based on their pre-political moral commitments; authority would then be legitimate only if political power is exercised in accordance with justice. As an alternative to that dominant approach I (...) put forward the idea that upturning the relationship between justice and legitimacy affords a normative notion of authority that does not depend on a pre-political account of morality, and thus avoids some serious problems faced by mainstream theories of justice. I then argue that the appropriate purpose of justice is simply to specify the implementation of an independently grounded conception of legitimacy, which in turn rests on a context- and practice-sensitive understanding of the purpose of political power. (shrink)

In November 2020, the world received the good news that some vaccine candidates were highly effective at preventing COVID-19. Yet, the demand for COVID-19 vaccines within the global free market has led wealthy nations to procure most of the vaccine supply, leaving low- and middle-income countries in dire circumstances. This article considers the morality of our global procurement strategies and argues that, although what we are witnessing may be adhering to the parameters set out in global business and global politics, (...) it nonetheless has moral deficiencies.RésuméEn novembre 2020, le monde a reçu la bonne nouvelle que certains vaccins candidats étaient très efficaces pour prévenir la COVID-19. Pourtant, la demande de vaccins COVID-19 sur le marché libre mondial a conduit les pays riches à se procurer la majeure partie de l'approvisionnement en vaccins, laissant les pays à revenus faible et intermédiaire dans des circonstances désastreuses. Cet article examine la moralité de nos stratégies d'approvisionnement mondiales et soutient que, bien que ce à quoi nous assistons puisse adhérer aux paramètres définis dans le commerce international et la politique mondiale, la situation présente néanmoins des lacunes morales. (shrink)

Drawing on empirical evidence from history and anthropology, we aim to demonstrate that there is room for genealogical ideology critique within normative political theory. The test case is some libertarians’ use of folk notions of private property rights in defence of the legitimacy of capitalist states. Our genealogy of the notion of private property shows that asking whether a capitalist state can emerge without violations of self-ownership cannot help settling the question of its legitimacy, because the notion of private property (...) presupposed by that question is a product of the entity it is supposed to help legitimise: the state. We anchor our genealogical critique in recent work on ideology in epistemology and philosophy of language, and in current debates on the methodology of political theory. But, unlike more traditional approaches that aim to debunk whole concepts or even belief systems, we propose a more targeted, argument-specific form of ideology critique. (shrink)

Do salient normative claims about politics require moral premises? Political moralists think they do, political realists think they do not. We defend the viability of realism in a two-pronged way. First, we show that a number of recent attacks on realism, as well as realist responses to those attacks, unduly conflate distinctively political normativity and non-moral political normativity. Second, we argue that Alex Worsnip and Jonathan Leader-Maynard’s recent attack on realist arguments for a distinctively political normativity depends on assuming moralism (...) as the default view, which places an excessive burden on the viability of realism, and so begs the question. Our discussion, though, does not address the relative merits of realism and moralism, so its upshot is relatively ecumenical: moralism need not be the view that all apt normative political judgments are moral judgments, and realism need not be the view that no apt normative political judgments are moral judgments. (shrink)

Evolutionary fitness threats and rewards are associated with subjectively unpleasant and pleasant sensations, respectively. Initially, these correlations appear explainable via adaptation by natural selection. But here I analyse the major metaphysical perspectives on consciousness – physicalism, dualism, and panpsychism – and conclude that none help to understand the adaptive-seeming correlations via adaptation. I also argue that a recently proposed explanation, the phenomenal powers view, has major problems that mean it cannot explain the adaptive-seeming correlations via adaptation either. So the mystery (...) – call it the evolutionary paradox of consciousness – remains. Some have used this mystery to argue for non-naturalistic (e.g. theistic) explanations. But I propose a naturalistic, non-adaptive explanation of the adaptive-seeming correlations: namely, ‘sensational associative learning’ during development. In this perspective, pairing of particular sensations with unconditioned stimuli – fitness rewards or threats – cause the sensations themselves to come to be interpreted as good or bad, respectively. Sensations, like colours, that are not reliably paired with either fitness rewards or threats remain largely unvalenced. Sensational associative learning also provides explanations for adaptive-seeming structural aspects of sensations, such as the observation that sounds of different pitch are experienced as ordinal in correspondence to their wavelengths while the same is not true of colours of different hue. The sensational associative learning perspective appears compatible with physicalism, panpsychism, and dualism (though not epiphenomenalism). (shrink)

Should our factual understanding of the world influence our normative theorising about it? G.A. Cohen has argued that our ultimate normative principles should not be constrained by facts. Many others have defended or are committed to various versions or subsets of that claim. In this paper I dispute those positions by arguing that, in order to resist the conclusion that ultimate normative principles rest on facts about possibility or conceivability, one has to embrace an unsatisfactory account of how principles generate (...) normative political judgments. So political theorists have to choose between principles ostensibly unbiased by our current understanding of human motivation and political reality, or principles capable of reliably generating political judgments. I conclude with wider methodological observations in defence of the latter option, and so of a return to political philosophy’s traditional blend of normative and descriptive elements. (shrink)

This paper outlines an empirically-grounded account of normative political legitimacy. The main idea is to give a normative edge to empirical measures of sociological legitimacy through a non-moralised form of ideology critique. A power structure’s responsiveness to the values of those subjected to its authority can be measured empirically and may be explanatory or predictive insofar as it tracks belief in legitimacy, but by itself it lacks normative purchase: it merely describes a preference alignment, and so tells us nothing about (...) whether the ruled have reason to support the rulers. I argue that we can close this gap by filtering the preferences of the ruled through a form of non-moralised epistemic ideology critique, itself grounded in an empirical account of how belief in legitimacy is formed. (shrink)

In many countries, prenatal testing for certain fetal abnormalities is offered via publicly funded screening programs. The concept of reproductive autonomy is regarded as providing a justificatory basis for many such programs. The purpose of this study is to re‐examine the normative basis of public prenatal screening for fetal abnormalities by changing our perspective from that of autonomy to obligation. After clarifying the understanding of autonomy adopted in the justification for public prenatal screening programs, we identify two problems concerning this (...) justification: first, the extent to which the government is obliged to meet this demand is not evident; and, second, it is not clear whether the provision of public screening is the most appropriate way to promote autonomy. Next, to tackle these problems, we focus on Onora O’Neill’s argument of rights and obligations. Drawing on this argument, we show that, in addressing the problems above, it is important to change our normative perspective from rights or autonomy to obligation. Our argument will show that since the government does not have an incontrovertibly fundamental obligation to promote autonomy, this obligation needs to be constrained in terms of compatibility with other fundamental obligations. In addition, even if a government is obliged to promote autonomy to some degree, there could be more appropriate means to achieve it than providing public prenatal screening; therefore, it is not necessary for government obligations to extend to the provision of public prenatal screening. (shrink)

Could the notion of compromise help us overcoming – or at least negotiating – the frequent tension, in normative political theory, between the realistic desideratum of peaceful coexistence and the idealistic desideratum of justice? That is to say, an analysis of compromise may help us moving beyond the contrast between two widespread contrasting attitudes in contemporary political philosophy: ‘fiat iustitia, pereat mundus’ on the one side, ‘salus populi suprema lex’ on the other side. More specifically, compromise may provide the backbone (...) of a conception of legitimacy that mediates between idealistic (or moralistic) and realistic (or pragmatic) desiderata of political theory, i.e. between the aspiration to peace and the aspiration to justice. In other words, this paper considers whether an account of compromise could feature in a viable realistic conception of political legitimacy, in much the same way in which consensus features in more idealistic conceptions of legitimacy (a move that may be attributed to some realist theorists, especially Bernard Williams). My conclusions, however, are largely sceptical: I argue that grounding legitimacy in any kind of normatively salient agreement does require the trappings of idealistic political philosophy, for better or – in my view – worse. (shrink)

La obra lírica de María Rosa Lojo constituye un verdadero proyecto de indagación ontológica, es decir, un modo de explorar la relación del hombre con su propio ser/ estar en el mundo y con lo trascendente. En sus primeros dos libros, Visiones y Forma oculta del mundo, el hablante lírico toma la forma de un poetamédium que se asienta entre dos mundos, asume el rol de nexo con el misterio y da forma a una serie de visiones que oscilan entre (...) el kairós de la revelación momentánea y la impotencia final, estado que signa el tono de ambas antologías. (shrink)

Como as definições de causa e causalidade são estabelecidas na Ciência Política? A explicação causal tornou-se fundamental para a constituição da disciplina como ciência capaz de produzir não só entendimentos, como também previsões acerca dos fenômenos políticos. Porém, a centralidade da causalidade tem sido reduzida à questão da inferência causal, elidindo discussões ontológicas, epistemológicas e metodológicas sobre o significado de causa. Nesse artigo, exploramos os modelos de explicação causal na Filosofia como forma de promover um diálogo entre as concepções de (...) causalidade na Ciência Política para além do problema da inferência causal. Argumentamos que a Ciência Política recorre a diferentes concepções de causalidade, mas seu engajamento com reflexões mais substantivas ainda é limitado. Propomos um canal de diálogo com a literatura do realismo filosófico e suas intervenções sobre poderes causais, capacidades e tendências, as quais oferecem uma base ontológica para as discussões de causalidade na Ciência Política. (shrink)

André Gorz (1923-2007), pionnier de l'écologie politique, est en voie de reconnaissance.

The global increase in patients with chronic conditions has led to increased interest in ethical issues regarding such conditions. A basic biomedical principle—respect for autonomy—is being reexamined more critically in its clinical implications. New accounts of this basic principle are being proposed. While new accounts of respect for autonomy do underpin the design of many public programs and policies worldwide, addressing both chronic disease management and health promotion, the risk of applying such new accounts to clinical setting remain understudied. However, (...) the application of new accounts of respect for autonomy to clinical settings could support disrespectful attitudes toward or undue interference with patients with chronic conditions. Reconsidering autonomy and respect using Kantian accounts, this paper proposes respect for persons as an alternative basic bioethical principle to respect for autonomy. Unlike the principle of respect for persons in the Belmont Report, our principle involves respecting any patient’s decisions, behaviors, emotions, or life-style regardless of his or her “autonomous” capabilities. Thus, attitudes toward patients should be no different irrespective of the assessment of their decisional or executive capabilities. (shrink)

This chapter assesses John Gray’s modus vivendi-based justification for liberalism. I argue that his approach is preferable to the more orthodox deontological or teleological justificatory strategies, at least because of the way it can deal with the problem of diversity. But then I show how that is not good news for liberalism, for grounding liberal political authority in a modus vivendi undermines liberalism’s aspiration to occupy a privileged normative position vis-à-vis other kinds of regimes. So modus vivendi can save liberalism (...) from moralism, but at cost many liberals will not be prepared to pay. (shrink)

In *How Propaganda Works* Jason Stanley argues that democratic societies require substantial material equality because inequality causes ideologically flawed belief, which, in turn, make demagogic propaganda more effective. And that is problematic for the quality of democracy. In this brief paper I unpack that argument, in order to make two points: (a) the non-moral argument for equality is promising, but weakened by its reliance on a heavily moralised conception of democracy; (b) that problem may be remedied by whole-heartedly embracing a (...) more realistic conception of democracy. That conception is at least compatible with Stanley’s argument, if not implicit in parts of it. (shrink)