Objectives: The objective of this study is to estimate the proportion of different types of end‐of‐life decisions (ELDs) of physicians in the city of Hasselt (Flanders, Belgium). The question is addressed to what degree these ELD meet legal constraints and the ethical requirements for prudent practice. Methodology: All physicians of the city of Hasselt who signed at least one death certificate in 1996 (N=166) received an anonymous self‐administered mail questionnaire per death case (max. 5/doctor) Results: the response rate was 55% (...) (N=269). In 37.3% of all cases at least one ELD was made (16.5% non‐treatment decisions; 16% potential life‐shortening by intensifying the treatment of pain and symptoms; 4.8% administration, supply or prescription of lethal drugs). In 59.5% of the cases were an ELD was made that decision was legally questionable. Patient characteristics were clearly related to the type of ELD. There was no influence of physician characteristics, except for commitment to life‐stance. In 71.3% of the cases the ELD was in no way discussed with the patient. 8.1% of the ELD‐cases were in response to a direct request from the patient Conclusions: The incidences of ELDs in Hasselt are consistent with earlier findings. The study shows that religious commitment influences the behaviour of physicians at the end of their patients' life. The patient's and her family's entitlements to participation in the decision making process were rather poorly respected. (shrink)

Is it ethical or not to enhance the characteristics and capacities of human beings, making use of technological incorporations in their biology? This article presents arguments from both position pros and cons, about technological incorporations in human bodies. The denaturalization of technologically enhanced humans is discussed; A discussion is raised about the impact of these technologies on the population inequality; We present a contrast between whether the research is for treatment or enhancement purposes. Some of the repercussions on a society (...) of humans are analyzed, both hyper connected and technologically enhanced. Some of the future challenges that societies with technologically enhanced humans must face are presented. In conclusion, the development of technologies, within a regulatory and normative framework, to enhancing the characteristics and capacities of human beings is ethical. Because technologically enhanced humans are part of the NBIC convergence, and the NBIC convergence will generate new knowledge that will surely be used to develop clean and safe energy sources, preventive medical treatments that will eliminate diseases such as cancer and HIV, and design strategies to the conservation and decontamination of the planet. (shrink)

El autor nos introduce en la experiencia del silencio, que postula fue en el comienzo de los tiempos el estado natural de los seres, y afirma que en el contexto de la vida occidental actual el hombre y la mujer han perdido contacto con su ser interior. Que el ruido de la sociedad moderna y artificial nos ha arrebatado el silencio indispensable para el desarrollo integral de los seres humanos.

This ar ti cle ad dresses the dis cus sion of the relationship between political philosophy and po - litical science. Concepts are articulated throiugh poltical thought that of fer vi sion and a re la tion ship of pol i tics from a sci en tific per spec tive. When ap - proaching political scien..

Objectives: The objective of this study is to estimate the proportion of different types of end‐of‐life decisions (ELDs) of physicians in the city of Hasselt (Flanders, Belgium). The question is addressed to what degree these ELD meet legal constraints and the ethical requirements for prudent practice.Methodology: All physicians of the city of Hasselt who signed at least one death certificate in 1996 (N=166) received an anonymous self‐administered mail questionnaire per death case (max. 5/doctor)Results: the response rate was 55% (N=269). In (...) 37.3% of all cases at least one ELD was made (16.5% non‐treatment decisions; 16% potential life‐shortening by intensifying the treatment of pain and symptoms; 4.8% administration, supply or prescription of lethal drugs). In 59.5% of the cases were an ELD was made that decision was legally questionable. Patient characteristics were clearly related to the type of ELD. There was no influence of physician characteristics, except for commitment to life‐stance. In 71.3% of the cases the ELD was in no way discussed with the patient. 8.1% of the ELD‐cases were in response to a direct request from the patientConclusions: The incidences of ELDs in Hasselt are consistent with earlier findings. The study shows that religious commitment influences the behaviour of physicians at the end of their patients' life. The patient's and her family's entitlements to participation in the decision making process were rather poorly respected. (shrink)

Our purpose in this article is to identify and suggest resolution for two core problematics of grounded theory. First, while grounded theory provides transparency to one part of the conceptualization process, where codes emerge directly from the data, it provides no such systematic or transparent way for gaining insight into the conceptual relationships between discovered codes. Producing a grounded theory depends not only on the definition of conceptual pieces, but the delineation of a relationship between at least two of those (...) pieces. Second, the conceptualization process of grounded theory is done in hierarchical fashion, where individual codes emerge from the data but then are used to generate insight into more general concepts and thematic statements. But various works on grounded theory have failed to provide any systematic way of using data specific levels of scale (the codes) to gain insight into more macro levels of scale (concepts and themes). We offer fractal concept analysis as a means of resolving both of these issues. By using a logic structure generator, fractal concept analysis delineates self-similar conceptual frameworks at various levels of abstraction, yielding a method for linking concepts together within and between levels of scale encountered in the grounded theory coding and categorization process. We conclude that this fractal analytic technique can bolster the aims of grounded theory as a formalized and systematic process for generating theory from empirical data. (shrink)

This chapter discusses a version of the descriptive account of content which is compatible with rigidity thesis (RT) and critiques of RT. The rigidity of proper names demonstrates that utterances of sentences containing proper names, and utterances of sentences differing from those sentences only in containing non‐rigid descriptions in place of the proper names, differ in content. The fact that natural‐language proper names are rigid designators is an empirical discovery about natural language. The chapter intends to be a survey of (...) both the background and contemporary discussion of this discovery. However, the survey takes place in the context of an evaluation of the extent to which the discovery that English proper names are rigid itself threatens the descriptive picture of the content of names. The goal is to show that the exact philosophical significance of the discovery that natural‐language proper names are rigid designators is still, and should still be, a matter of controversy. (shrink)

This essay assesses the rationale for regulating research administrators as carefully as they regulate researchers. The reasons for such regulation are identical: protecting scientific integrity, ensuring responsible use of public funds, addressing the lack of effective recourse for victims, creating negative consequences for misbehaving actors, and addressing high incentives for misconduct. Whereas the reasons compelling us to regulate research administrators are obvious, counterarguments to administrative oversight are based on suggestions that the incidence and prevalence of cases of administrative misconduct are (...) too low to warrant formal regulation. I briefly describe examples of the phenomenon drawn from publicly available records. My analysis suggests that the misconduct of research administrators is both serious and worthy of better oversight. Improved oversight of research administration will help steward tax dollars appropriately and enhance the overall integrity of the scientific record and of the free pursuit of knowledge more generally. (shrink)

Jason Stanley's "Knowledge and Practical Interests" is a brilliant book, combining insights about knowledge with a careful examination of how recent views in epistemology fit with the best of recent linguistic semantics. Although I am largely convinced by Stanley's objections to epistemic contextualism, I will try in what follows to formulate a version that might have some prospect of escaping his powerful critique.

This book is the first systematic treatment of 'responsibilist' or character-based virtue epistemology, an approach to epistemology that focuses on intellectual ...

Este artículo demuestra los resultados de la aplicación de La Filosofía para Niños (FpN) como propuesta didáctica para el fortalecimiento de actitudes críticas y reflexivas sobre el tema de la identidad cultural de manera dialógica en un contexto escolar de Educación General Básica Superior en Cuenca (Ecuador). Para el análisis se utilizó la metodología hermenéutica, a través de la interpretación de las transcripciones de las tres sesiones aplicadas con base a historias creadas con preguntas que generaban discusiones y a través (...) de las cuales se logró fortalecer las actitudes críticas y reflexivas de los estudiantes. (shrink)

Self-Efficacy in Action provides a practitioner-friendly overview of the concepts, vocabulary, practices, and contexts related to teacher self-efficacy. This book engages readers in the meaningful discussions of practices and purposes of teacher self-efficacy to advance professionalism.

This paper describes the role of information architecture in the design of socially sustainable pervasive information spaces. The framing of information architecture as an essential part of Design Thinking extends current and historic notions of the field of information architecture. The discussion introduces the notion of the ‘contrived ontology’ which can be understood as the intentional meaning that design infuses in its artefacts, services and systems. Further, we argue that contrived ontology aligns with central themes within humanistic frameworks which view (...) reality as subjective construct. This forms the central theoretical meditation herein: we contend that while design is always an act of interpreted cultural determination, at the scale of Floridi’s infosphere, the immediacy and immersive social reality of technology will become frictionless within our human experience. As this occurs, there is a moral and ethical imperative to ensure social sustainability and to this end that the meanings and intentions that inform the mature design of our human-made world are visible and accountable. It is towards this end that information architecture can make a valuable contribution. (shrink)

Simon Keller and Sarah Stroud have both argued that the demands of being a good friend can conflict with the demands of standard epistemic norms. Intuitively, good friends will tend to seek favorable interpretations of their friends’ behaviors, interpretations that they would not apply to strangers; as such they seem prone to form unjustified beliefs. I argue that there is no such clash of norms. In particular, I argue that friendship does not require us to form beliefs about our friends (...) in the biased fashion suggested by Stroud and Keller. I further argue that while some slight bias in belief-formation might be permitted by friendship, any such bias would fall within the bounds of epistemic propriety. (shrink)

British historians drew on anthropological exemplars to remake social history between 1959 and 1977. Eric Hobsbawm's ‘primitive rebels’, Peter Laslett's World We Have Lost, Keith Thomas’s studies of witchcraft, and E. P. Thompson's ‘moral economy’ were all inspired by contemporary social anthropology, and they transformed historians’ understanding of the past. Reconstructing this moment of cross-disciplinary research contributes to our understanding of broader changes in the mid-century human sciences. This was a moment of grand theorizing about ‘modernization’, capitalism, and industrialization. Social (...) historians responded to these concerns by drawing analogies between the past and the ethnographic present. The result was a number of hugely influential studies of social change that posed new questions to those seeking to create abstract models of modernization out of the English past. (shrink)

El centro de atención de este ensayo es la construcción teórica de la categoría afectividad, la cual se concibe como un sistema formado por las emociones, los sentimientos y las pasiones, de los cuales también se despliegan reflexiones en torno a su elaboración teórica. Este estudio se despliega desde una perspectiva filosófica y con una mirada totalizadora. Forman parte del contenido algunas elaboraciones teóricas de autores imprescindibles para entender estas temáticas y polemizar en torno a ellas, entre los cuales están (...) Juan Luis Vives, Renato Descartes, David Hume (a quien se le brinda una atención más esmerada) y Adam Smith; no obstante, también forman parte del contenido criterios de algunos estudiosos contemporáneos, como el filósofo italiano Remo Bodei y el filósofo español José Antonio Marina. Al profundizar en las categorías referidas, se establecen relaciones con facultades humanas, como la imaginación, así como con los valores, la cultura y el mejoramiento humano. (shrink)

The present work tackles the issue of the effects of digitalisation on employment. This issue has been attracting a growing interest, in particular because of the anxiety generated by the idea that digital technologies could cancel a large number of jobs. Although I agree with argument put forward in opposition to the existence of a causal link between technological innovation and increased productivity at the macroeconomic level, I believe that the novelty and pervasiveness of digital technologies require more in-depth micro-level (...) analysis in order to understand the extent to which new digital technologies are currently employed by leading manufacturing companies and the ways new technologies are affecting employment. The empirical findings show that among the different technologies included under the umbrella of Industry 4.0, mainly robots have received a great deal of attention so far, while the current application and employment impact for other emerging technological opportunities such as 3D printing, Internet of Things, Augmented reality, Big data Analytics have not been studied yet. In relation to the qualitative changes of the labour market, our empirical research confirms that there are new types of skills that will be demanded in the future in manufacturing, in particular in relation to service provision and software development. (shrink)

Este estudio teórico se despliega en dos ámbitos. Uno de ellos es el de las ideas de una figura cimera delpensamiento complejo, Edgar Morin, de quien se revela algunas de sus consideraciones en torno a la integración, las cuales están mayormente implícitas en sus meditaciones. El otro ámbito es la formación universitaria, a propósito de la cual se reflexiona acerca del pensamiento complejo y de la eliminación de características que atentan contra el carácter integrador de la misma. Los objetivos de (...) este trabajo son: argumentar el carácter integrador del pensamiento de Morin, y criticar las acciones que reducen el carácter integrador propio de la formación universitaria. La metodología empleada es la Documental, consistente en el estudio crítico de textos y el análisis de información escrita. Algunos de los resultados son: la revelación del carácter integrador de las ideas de Morin, la formulación de una definición de la categoría académica formación, y la crítica a la reducción del carácter integrador consustancial a la formación universitaria. Entre las conclusiones están: el carácter integrador del pensamiento de Morin tiene una base objetiva; el rasgo distintivo de la formación académica es que se realiza desde la conciencia del implicado y la atención a la afectividad en la formación universitaria fortalece su carácter integrador. (shrink)

Se pretende establecer el contenido del concepto "marxismo" con base en la historia secular del fenómeno conocido con ese nombre. Para ello, se avanzan cinco tesis sobre su contenido teórico, su relación con Marx, su origen y fundación en el pensamiento de Engels y se precisa su relación y distinción con los conceptos de socialismo y de comunismo.

Many philosophers believe that there is a fundamental distinction between knowing that something is the case and knowing how to do something. According to Gilbert Ryle, to whom the insight is credited, knowledge-how is an ability, which is in turn a complex of dispositions. Knowledge-that, on the other hand, is not an ability, or anything similar. Rather, knowledge-that is a relation between a thinker and a true proposition.

El martes 26 de abril de 2016 en la Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana de Medellín, en el curso “De la analítica a los acto de habla” del Doctorado en Filosofía, tuvimos la oportunidad de compartir y hacer una conversatorio con el filósofo mexicano Dr. Alejandro Tomasini Bassols, investigador del Instituto de Investigaciones Filosóficas y profesor de filosofía en la Facultad de Filosofía y Letras de la UNAM. El profesor Tomasini es uno de los investigadores más reconocidos en la obra del Filósofo (...) austriaco Ludwig Wittgenstein, además de haber desarrollado una importante obra alrededor de la tradición analítica y de algunos problemas actuales como la discusión sobre la pena capital. También el profesor Tomasini en su visita a Colombia, inicialmente participó en Medellín con una conferencia titulada “Derecho y objetividad”, en la Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana y luego en la Feria del Libro de Bogotá –FILBO- realizó la presentación y conferencia del libro Hacer mundos: el nombrar y la significatividad. Previo a su viaje a Bogotá, interactuó con el curso doctoral en filosofía y de este encuentro académico presentamos el siguiente diálogo. (shrink)

Unspecific evidence calls for imprecise credence. My aim is to vindicate this thought. First, I will pin down what it is that makes one's imprecise credences more or less epistemically valuable. Then I will use this account of epistemic value to delineate a class of reasonable epistemic scoring rules for imprecise credences. Finally, I will show that if we plump for one of these scoring rules as our measure of epistemic value or utility, then a popular family of decision rules (...) recommends imprecise credences. In particular, a range of Hurwicz criteria, which generalise the Maximin decision rule, recommend imprecise credences. If correct, the moral is this: an agent who adopts precise credences, rather than imprecise ones, in the face of unspecific and incomplete evidence, goes wrong by gambling with the epistemic utility of her doxastic state in too risky a fashion. Precise credences represent an overly risky epistemic bet, according to the Hurwicz criteria. (shrink)

Kritische beschouwing over godsdienst en geloof.

Amsterdam University Press is a leading publisher of academic books, journals and textbooks in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Our aim is to make current research available to scholars, students, innovators, and the general public. AUP stands for scholarly excellence, global presence, and engagement with the international academic community.

La pregunta por el sentido de la actividad filosófica en nuestro medio supone que la filosofía tiene una perspectiva histórica que se determina por su relación con la sociedad. Ella no implica, por lo demás, que esta sea la única perspectiva posible de la actividad filosólfica, porque no es posible afirmar, sin desconocer la historiografía de la disciplina filosófica, que el único objeto o problema dado a su reflexión sea el presente del acontecer histórico. La historia de la filosofía lleva (...) a reconocer, en efecto, la inexistencia de un objeto único de la filosofía y la experiencia en cambio, de problemas de muy diversa índole que pueden considerarse como "genuinamente filosóficos.". (shrink)

RESUMEN Este artículo reconstruye la genealogia arendtiana de las formas extremas de la violencia, tomando como hilo conductor los procesos de desingularización con un doble propósito: por un lado, analizar las (dis)continuidades históricas de dicha genealogia que trasciende la dimensión fisico-instrumental de la violencia y entra conexión con la (des)configuración de la identidad personal; por otro lado, reivindicar la vigencia de la obra de Hannah Arendt para explorar los ecos presentes de esa violencia, sin perder de vista su especificad actual. (...) ABSTRACT This paper reconstructs the Arendtian genealogy of the extreme forms of violence, taking desingularization processes as its guiding thread, with a twofold goal: on the one hand, to analyze the historical (dis)continuities of that genealogy, that goes beyond the physical-instrumental dimension of violence and comes into connection with the (de)configuration of personal identity; on the other hand, to claim the validity of Arendt's work to explore the echoes of that violence, without losing sight of its current specificity. (shrink)

Retroduction -- Contextualized self-interpretations -- Causal mechanisms -- Ontology -- Logics -- Articulation.

According to accuracy-first epistemology, accuracy is the fundamental epistemic good. Epistemic norms — Probabilism, Conditionalization, the Principal Principle, etc. — have their binding force in virtue of helping to secure this good. To make this idea precise, accuracy-firsters invoke Epistemic Decision Theory (EpDT) to determine which epistemic policies are the best means toward the end of accuracy. Hilary Greaves and others have recently challenged the tenability of this programme. Their arguments purport to show that EpDT encourages obviously epistemically irrational behavior. (...) We develop firmer conceptual foundations for EpDT. First, we detail a theory of praxic and epistemic good. Then we show that, in light of their very different good-making features, EpDT will evaluate epistemic states and epistemic acts according to different criteria. So, in general, rational preference over states and acts won’t agree. Finally, we argue that based on direction-of-fit considerations, it’s preferences over the former that matter for normative epistemology, and that EpDT, properly spelt out, arrives at the correct verdicts in a range of putative problem cases. (shrink)