Historia mínima de Israel, publicado por El Colegio de México en el 2017, debe recibirse como un acontecimiento editorial raro, ya que son pocos los libros académicos en lengua española sobre el estado de Israel y la sociedad israelí. O tal vez sea más acertado afirmar que son pocas las obras de divulgación sobre una realidad tan compleja y dramática, tan densa y cambiante, que se propongan un análisis crítico y reflexivo alejándose de modismos y maniqueísmos que sólo han producido (...) y continúan produciendo lecturas apasionadas, diseminadoras de polémicas falsas e inútiles. (shrink)

Background: Evidence indicates that the processing of facial stimuli may be influenced by incidental factors, and these influences are particularly powerful when facial expressions are ambiguous, such as neutral faces. However, limited research investigated whether emotional contextual information presented in a preceding and unrelated experiment could be pervasively carried over to another experiment to modulate neutral face processing.Objective: The present study aims to investigate whether an emotional text presented in a first experiment could generate negative emotion toward neutral faces in (...) a second experiment unrelated to the previous experiment.Methods: Ninety-nine students were randomly assigned to read and evaluate a negative text or a neutral text in the first experiment. In the subsequent second experiment, the participants performed the following two tasks: an attentional task in which neutral faces were presented as distractors and a task involving the emotional judgment of neutral faces.Results: The results show that compared to the neutral context, in the negative context, the participants rated more faces as negative. No significant result was found in the attentional task.Conclusion: Our study demonstrates that incidental emotional information available in a previous experiment can increase participants’ propensity to interpret neutral faces as more negative when emotional information is directly evaluated. Therefore, the present study adds important evidence to the literature suggesting that our behavior and actions are modulated by previous information in an incidental or low perceived way similar to what occurs in everyday life, thereby modulating our judgments and emotions. (shrink)

Mindfulness is intentional focus of one’s attention on emotions, thoughts, or sensations occurring in the present moment with a nonjudgmental attitude. Recently there has been increased interest in the effects of mindfulness practice on psychological processes such as concentration, focus, and attention. In the present study, a prepulse inhibition/facilitation paradigm was employed to investigate the effect of brief mindfulness practice on automatic attention regulation processes. PPI occurs when a relatively weak prepulse is presented 30–500 ms before a startle-inducing stimulus, and (...) reduces the magnitude of the startle response. Prepulse facilitation is the increase in startle magnitude when the prepulse is presented 500 ms or more before the startle-eliciting stimulus. In the present study, the effect of engaging in a 23-min mindfulness exercise on PPI and PPF was investigated. Participants listened to either a mindfulness instruction or relaxing music. In a PPI/PPF pretest and posttest, a startle-eliciting noise was presented at lead intervals of 60, 120, and 2,000 ms. Results showed that engaging in brief mindfulness practice increased prepulse facilitation at the 2,000 ms lead interval in the posttest compared to the pretest. The amount of PPI did not differ between tests. (shrink)

The heated debate over whether there is only a single mechanism or two mechanisms for morphology has diverted valuable research energy away from the more critical questions about the neural computations involved in the comprehension and production of morphologically complex forms. Cognitive neuroscience data implicate many brain areas. All extant models, whether they rely on a connectionist network or espouse two mechanisms, are too underspecified to explain why more than a few brain areas differ in their activity during the processing (...) of regular and irregular forms. No one doubts that the brain treats regular and irregular words differently, but brain data indicate that a simplistic account will not do. It is time for us to search for the critical factors free from theoretical blinders. (shrink)

Given its non-invasive nature, there is increasing interest in the use of transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation across basic, translational and clinical research. Contemporaneously, tVNS can be achieved by stimulating either the auricular branch or the cervical bundle of the vagus nerve, referred to as transcutaneous auricular vagus nerve stimulation and transcutaneous cervical VNS, respectively. In order to advance the field in a systematic manner, studies using these technologies need to adequately report sufficient methodological detail to enable comparison of results between (...) studies, replication of studies, as well as enhancing study participant safety. We systematically reviewed the existing tVNS literature to evaluate current reporting practices. Based on this review, and consensus among participating authors, we propose a set of minimal reporting items to guide future tVNS studies. The suggested items address specific technical aspects of the device and stimulation parameters. We also cover general recommendations including inclusion and exclusion criteria for participants, outcome parameters and the detailed reporting of side effects. Furthermore, we review strategies used to identify the optimal stimulation parameters for a given research setting and summarize ongoing developments in animal research with potential implications for the application of tVNS in humans. Finally, we discuss the potential of tVNS in future research as well as the associated challenges across several disciplines in research and clinical practice. (shrink)

Given its non-invasive nature, there is increasing interest in the use of transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation across basic, translational and clinical research. Contemporaneously, tVNS can be achieved by stimulating either the auricular branch or the cervical bundle of the vagus nerve, referred to as transcutaneous auricular vagus nerve stimulation and transcutaneous cervical VNS, respectively. In order to advance the field in a systematic manner, studies using these technologies need to adequately report sufficient methodological detail to enable comparison of results between (...) studies, replication of studies, as well as enhancing study participant safety. We systematically reviewed the existing tVNS literature to evaluate current reporting practices. Based on this review, and consensus among participating authors, we propose a set of minimal reporting items to guide future tVNS studies. The suggested items address specific technical aspects of the device and stimulation parameters. We also cover general recommendations including inclusion and exclusion criteria for participants, outcome parameters and the detailed reporting of side effects. Furthermore, we review strategies used to identify the optimal stimulation parameters for a given research setting and summarize ongoing developments in animal research with potential implications for the application of tVNS in humans. Finally, we discuss the potential of tVNS in future research as well as the associated challenges across several disciplines in research and clinical practice. (shrink)

Recreational Drugs European Network (ReDNet) project aims to use the Psychonaut Web Mapping Project database (Psychonaut Web Mapping Group, 2009) containing novel psychoactive compounds usually not mentioned in the scientific literature and thus unknown to clinicians as a unique source of information. The database will be used to develop an integrated ICT prevention approach targeted at vulnerable individuals and focused on novel synthetic and herbal compounds and combinations. Particular care will be taken in keeping the health professionals working directly with (...) young people showing problematic behaviors regularly updated in terms of novel compounds and combinations as well. A user-friendly project website will be developed aimed primarily at delivering the information/prevention approaches, but will also be a way of communicating with project partners and relevant stakeholders (e.g. thematic forum facilities, instant messages, blogs, video chat, wikiblog, newsletters distributed via mailing list). The website will support various ICT prevention tools, including an SMS alert service. Different areas and sections will be aimed specifically at the different target groups. -/- . (shrink)

The purpose of this essay is to address the problem of the relationship between translation and art by relying on F. Hölderlin’s and W. Benjamin’s theories of translation. These theories, which at first appear to be opposed, are actually very close since they discuss both art and translation as marked by a linguistic and theoretical renunciation. In the first section, I demonstrate in what sense this relationship is fundamental for an aesthetic consideration of translation. The second section discusses the two (...) main reasons for the divergence between art and translation, focusing especially on the philosophical limitations of Hölderlin’s theory as indicated in Benjamin’s The task of the translator. In the third section, I deal with the commonalities of the two theories, which are both marked by the notion of linguistic failure. I argue that Benjamin’s juvenile essay On language as such can be approached from a confrontation with Hölderlin’s lyric Patmos. In the fourth and last section, I conclude that the concept of the linguistic renunciation can mark both Hölderlin’s and Benjamin’s theories of translation. I finally argue that renunciation can be attributed to both art and translation, which are therefore intimately related critical activities. (shrink)

The purpose of this essay is to address the problem of the relationship between translation and art by relying on F. Hölderlin’s and W. Benjamin’s theories of trans- lation. These theories, which at first appear to be opposed, are actually very close since they discuss both art and translation as marked by a linguistic and theoretical renunciation. In the first section, I demonstrate in what sense this relationship is fundamental for an aesthetic consideration of translation. The second section discusses the (...) two main reasons for the divergence between art and translation, focusing especially on the philosophical limitations of Hölderlin’s theory as indicated in Benjamin’s The task of the translator. In the third section, I deal with the commonalities of the two theories, which are both marked by the notion of lin- guistic failure. I argue that Benjamin’s juvenile essay On language as such can be approached from a confrontation with Hölderlin’s lyric Patmos. In the fourth and last section, I conclude that the concept of the linguistic renunciation can mark both Hölderlin’s and Benjamin’s theories of translation. I finally argue that renun- ciation can be attributed to both art and translation, which are therefore inti- mately related critical activities. (shrink)

The paper reviews the book written by F.M. Kamm, entitled Bioethical Prescriptions: To Create, End, Choose, and Improve Lives. Kamm is one of the most prominent analytical philosophers in moral philosophy, known from such works as Intricate Ethics. She defends the rights-based approach to ethics and is also famous from constructing multilayered moral dilemmas. The review poses methodological questions, of whether scientific-like thought experiments performed in a moral lab, and the Method of Hypothetical Cases are able to transform our ethical (...) dilemmas and provide any solutions. In the final part of the review, the first chapter of the book on Tolstoy’s essay is discussed in more detail. (shrink)

The professionalization of science is a recent phenomenon. Before the mid-1800s, investigations of the natural world were largely performed by those hobbyists who had the leisure time to do so. Things are very different today. Open one of the over twenty thousand scientific journals currently in circulation, and you would be hard pressed to decipher the technical prose, much less the methodological and conceptual strategies being employed. This is changing, however. People are not only taking greater interest in how science (...) works, but choosing to actively participate in the process, whether this involves discovering new protein configurations , identifying and categorizing cancer cells from tissue samples , or analyzing the vocalizations of canids .Why start a review on what might seem like an academic book in contemporary philosophy of biology with a discussion of citizen science? Craver and Darden’s book, In Search of Mechanisms, is positi .. (shrink)

In his treatise Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik, Gottlob Frege tries to find a definition of number. First he rejects the idea that number could be a property of external objects. Then he comes with a suggestion that a numerical statement expresses a property of a concept, namely it indicates how many objects fall under the concept. Subsequently Frege rejects, or at least essentially modifies, also this definition, because in his view that a number cannot be a property – it should (...) be an object. In this article, I try to show that Frege’s first definition of number seems to be, despite his own opinion, much more promising than he supposed. I also argue that Frege’s argumentation against the empirical character of number is by no means convincing. (shrink)

UNESCO Philosophy Day/Night 2016 was full of intellectual input and efforts for critical reflection in a popular form which, we would like to hope, could motivate, in a great number of people, an interest in philosophy not only as cultural heritage but also a dynamic and constantly developing sphere of thought which is no less relevant at present than it was in the past. It could, thus, be concluded that, in the true sense, the event was a celebration of philosophy (...) and human thought in a complex form. (shrink)

Recent extensional logic considers a formula containing existential quantifier as an adequate way of rewriting a statement about the existence of something. Quine even claims that “to be is to be the value of a variable”. That means that if we consider a theory to be true, we have to treat all members of an appropriate universe as existing. This article intends to point out a difficulty in this conception: The primary task of an existential quantifier is only to claim (...) that something can be found in a universe, whatever the universe is. (shrink)

Instead of the existential quantifier Bernard Bolzano uses his notion of Gegenständlichkeit einer Vorstellung an sich . This approach makes it possible for him to solve the traditional problem of the predication of existence in accordance with an approach common today, namely to take existence to be primarily a property of a corresponding representation in itself, and not a characteristic of individuals. However, Bolzano considers a property of real existence to be attributable also to particular individuals, which is essentially different (...) from the usual practice. (shrink)

The nominalist attitude in medieval logic supported a fully extensional conception of the sense of expressions. Many arguments against this approach were raised at that time. I would like to show in this article that there is a extensional conception of notions in current logic, namely in the interpretation of formal theories and the creation models of them and that, and how, traditional arguments against the extensional conception are relevant also for logic today.

Bernard Bolzano presents in his work Wissenschaftslehre a definition of derivability among sentences. Tarski publishes his well-known definition of logical consequence almost one hundred years later. This article intends to prove that the Bolzano´s definition is fully satisfactory compared to the Tarski´s one, even though no attention was drawn to Bolzano´s definition at that time.

Let L be a commutative residuated lattice and let f : Lk → L a function. We give a necessary and sufficient condition for f to be compatible with respect to every congruence on L. We use this characterization of compatible functions in order to prove that the variety of commutative residuated lattices is locally affine complete. Then, we find conditions on a not necessarily polynomial function P(x, y) in L that imply that the function x ↦ min{y є L (...) | P(x, y) ⪯ y} is compatible when defined. In particular, Pn(x, y) = yn → x, for natural number n, defines a family, Sn, of compatible functions on some commutative residuated lattices. We show through examples that S1> and S2, defined respectively from P1 and P2, are independent as operations over this variety; i.e. neither S1 is definable as a polynomial in the language of L enriched with S2 nor S2 in that enriched with S1. (shrink)

There is widespread interest in the possibility that music training enhances nonmusical abilities. This possibility has been examined primarily for speech perception and domain-general abilities su...

The Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT) literature tends to focus on bias as a problem that requires ex post solutions (e.g. fairness metrics), rather than addressing the underlying social and technical conditions that (re)produce it. In this article, we propose a complementary strategy that uses genealogy as a constructive, epistemic critique to explain algorithmic bias in terms of the conditions that enable it. We focus on XAI feature attributions (Shapley values) and counterfactual approaches as potential tools to gauge these conditions (...) and offer two main contributions. One is constructive: we develop a theoretical framework to classify these approaches according to their relevance for bias as evidence of social disparities. We draw on Pearl’s ladder of causation (Causality: models, reasoning, and inference. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000, Causality, 2nd edn. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2009. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511803161) to order these XAI approaches concerning their ability to answer fairness-relevant questions and identify fairness-relevant solutions. The other contribution is critical: we evaluate these approaches in terms of their assumptions about the role of protected characteristics in discriminatory outcomes. We achieve this by building on Kohler-Hausmann’s (Northwest Univ Law Rev 113(5):1163–1227, 2019) constructivist theory of discrimination. We derive three recommendations for XAI practitioners to develop and AI policymakers to regulate tools that address algorithmic bias in its conditions and hence mitigate its future occurrence. (shrink)

Sometimes subjects have sufficient internal and external resources to retrieve information stored in memory, in particular information that carries socially charged content. Yet, they fail to do so: they forget it. These cases pose an explanatory challenge to common explanations of forgetting in cognitive science. In this paper, I take this challenge and develop a new explanation of these cases. According to this explanation, these cases are best explained as cases of norm-induced forgetting: cases in which forgetting is caused by (...) social norms in a relevant sense. These cases draw attention to the normative aspects of the mechanisms of forgetting. This is an important but neglected aspect of cases of everyday forgetting, in particular of those characterized by a social dimension. By investigating some ways in which the psychology of social norms is causally relevant in the mechanisms of retrieval failure, I begin to fill this gap. (shrink)

The central idea behind this paper is that presuppositions of soft triggers arise from the way our attention structures the informational content of a sentence. Some aspects of the information conveyed are such that we pay attention to them by default, even in the absence of contextual information. On the other hand, contextual cues or conversational goals can divert attention to types of information that we would not pay attention to by default. Either way, whatever we do not pay attention (...) to, be it by default, or in context, is what ends up presupposed by soft triggers. This paper attempts to predict what information in the sentence is likely to end up being the main point (i.e. what we pay attention to) and what information is independent from this, and therefore likely presupposed. It is proposed that this can be calculated by making reference to event times. The notion of aboutness used to calculate independence is based on that of Demolombe and Fariñas del Cerro (In: Holdobler S (ed) Intellectics and computational logic: papers in honor of Wolfgang Bibel, 2000). (shrink)

Some presuppositions are easier to cancel than others in embedded contexts. This contrast has been used as evidence for distinguishing two fundamentally different kinds of presuppositions, ‘soft’ and ‘hard’. ‘Soft’ presuppositions are usually assumed to arise in a pragmatic way, while ‘hard’ presuppositions are thought to be genuine semantic presuppositions. This paper argues against such a distinction and proposes to derive the difference in cancellation from inherent differences in how presupposition triggers interact with the context: their focus sensitivity, anaphoricity, and (...) question–answer congruence properties. The paper also aims to derive the presuppositions of additive particles such as too, also, again, and of it-clefts. (shrink)

This paper examines a little studied type of perspective shift that I call protagonist projection, following Holton :625–628, 1997). PP is a way of describing the mental state of a protagonist that conveys, to some extent, her perspective. Similarly to its better known cousin free indirect discourse, the shift in perspective is achieved without an overt operator. Unlike FID, PP is not based on a presumed speech-act of a protagonist. Rather, it gives a linguistic form to pre-verbal perceptual content, sensations, (...) feelings or implicit beliefs. I propose to analyse PP in a bi-contextual framework, extending Eckardt’s approach to FID. Under the resulting analysis, FID and PP are two instances of a more general category of perspective shift. (shrink)

A complete, illustrated survey of Etienne-Jules Marey's work that investigates the far reaching effects of her inventions on stream-of-consciousness literature, psychoanalysis, Bergsonian philosophy, and the art of cubists and futurists.

There is currently a consensus among comparative psychologists that nonhuman animals are capable of some forms of mindreading. Several philosophers and psychologists have criticized this consensus, however, arguing that there is a “logical problem” with the experimental approach used to test for mindreading in nonhuman animals. I argue that the logical problem is no more than a version of the general skeptical problem known as the theoretician’s dilemma. As such, it is not a problem that comparative psychologists must solve before (...) providing evidence for mindreading. (shrink)

This paper considers a host of definitions and labels attached to the concept of smart cities to identify four dimensions that ground a review of ethical concerns emerging from the current debate. These are: (1) network infrastructure, with the corresponding concerns of control, surveillance, and data privacy and ownership; (2) post-political governance, embodied in the tensions between public and private decision-making and cities as post-political entities; (3) social inclusion, expressed in the aspects of citizen participation and inclusion, and inequality and (...) discrimination; and (4) sustainability, with a specific focus on the environment as an element to protect but also as a strategic element for the future. Given the persisting disagreements around the definition of a smart city, the article identifies in these four dimensions a more stable reference framework within which ethical concerns can be clustered and discussed. Identifying these dimensions makes possible a review of the ethical implications of smart cities that is transversal to their different types and resilient towards the unsettled debate over their definition. (shrink)