RESUMEN El trabajo aborda una faceta dentro del humanismo martiano que refleja sus consideraciones en su bregar por tierras de América. Sus postulados constituyen un imprescindible legado para formar en los estudiantes universitarios valores éticos que los conviertan en mejores seres, humanos y profesionales. En su recorrido desde México hacia Guatemala, el Apóstol pretende resaltar la figura del negro de raza pura que allí vivía. Estas consideraciones se ofrecen a partir del texto Livingstone. El artículo tiene como objetivo develar algunas (...) ideas que permitan un desarrollo político-ideológico, ético y estético integral donde se destaque el conocimiento y respeto por la historia, la autoctonía de los pueblos americanos y la cultura patrias. ABSTRACT The work addresses a facet within Martian humanism that reflects its considerations in its struggle for the lands of America. Its postulates constitute an essential legacy to form in university students ethical values ​​that turn them into better beings, human beings and professionals. On his journey from Mexico to Guatemala, the Apostle pretends to highlight the figure of the black of pure race that lived there. These considerations are offered from the Livingstone text. The article aims to reveal some ideas that allow a political-ideological, ethical and integral aesthetic development where knowledge and respect for history, the autochthony of the American people and the patriotic culture are highlighted. (shrink)

We review here some recent data about glucose‐6‐phosphate dehydrogenase (G6PD), the first and key regulatory enzyme of the pentose phosphate pathway. New evidence has been presented to suggest that malaria is a selective agent for G6PD deficiency, which is the most common enzymopathy in man, and that G6PD deficiency, generally considered to be a mild and benign condition, is significantly disadvantageous in certain environmental conditions. At the molecular level, the enzyme structure has recently been elucidated and mechanisms regulating G6PD gene (...) expression have been determined. A G6PD knock‐out mutation introduced in mouse cells makes them exquisitely sensitive to oxidative stress, indicating that this ubiquitous metabolic enzyme has a major role in the defence against oxidative stress, even in eukaryotic nucleated cells, which have several alternative routes for providing the same protection. Because of the high prevalence of G6PD deficiency in many populations, it is expected that these findings will prompt further studies to ascertain the putative role of G6PD deficiency in conditions such as carcinogenesis and ageing. (shrink)

This paper responds to the issues raised by D. Chalmers by offering a research direction which is quite radical because of the way in which methodological principles are linked to scientific studies of consciousness. Neuro-phenomenology is the name I use here to designate a quest to marry modern cognitive science and a disciplined approach to human experience, thereby placing myself in the lineage of the continental tradition of Phenomenology. My claim is that the so-called hard problem that animates these Special (...) Issues can only be addressed productively by gathering a research community armed with new pragmatic tools for the development of a science of consciousness. I will claim that no piecemeal empirical correlates, nor purely theoretical principles, will really help us at this stage. We need to turn to a systematic exploration of the only link between mind and consciousness that seems both obvious and natural: the structure of human experience itself. In what follows I motivate my choice by briefly examining the current debate about consciousness at the light of Chalmer’s hard problem. Next, I outline the phenomenological strategy. Finally I conclude by discussing some of the main difficulties and consequences of this strategy. (shrink)

Cases of akratic behavior are generally seen as paradigmatic depictions of the knowledge-action gap (Darnell et al 2019): we know what we should do, we judge that we should do it, yet we often fail to act according to our knowledge. In recent decades attention has been given to a particular instance of akratic behavior, which is that of “inverse akrasia”, where the agent possesses faulty moral knowledge but fails to act accordingly, thus ending up doing the right thing. In (...) particular, two literary examples are considered as exemplifying this kind of akratic situation: Huckleberry Finn (Arpaly & Schroeder 1999, Arpaly 2000, Hursthouse 1999, Kleist 2009, Holton manuscript) and Neoptolemus as understood by Aristotle (NE; Arpaly & Schroeder 1999). In this paper I will argue that those of Neoptolemus and Huck Finn are not cases of inverse akrasia (Holton manuscript) but are much better explained as instances of what Williams (1993) called “moral incapacity”. In particular, the reason why they fail to act according to their original judgments is due to a lack of motivation to act accordingly, which is grounded in their moral self-identities (Blasi 1984; Vigani 2016). The paper will unfold as follows: I will, first, argue that neither Neoptolemus nor Huck Finn show akratic behavior; thus, they cannot be legitimately labeled as “inverse akratics” (par 1.); then, I will argue that they act the way they do notwithstanding their faulty judgments because they are effectively motivated to do so. Such motivation originates in their moral self-identities and is experienced through the threat of self-betrayal (par 2); finally, I will argue that when an agent is motivated to act in a way that is integral with her moral self-identity, acting otherwise is experienced as something one cannot ultimately do; that is, as a moral incapacity (par 3). This “cannot” is neither a metaphor for an “I shouldn’t”, nor an instance of what has been recently labeled a “moral impossibility” (Caprioglio Panizza 2020, 2021), since it does not arise from the normative force of deontic judgments, and it is neither physically nor psychologically impossible for the agent to act otherwise. (shrink)

This paper starts with one of Chalmers’ basic points: first-hand experience is an irreducible field of phenomena. I claim there is no ‘theoretical fix’ or ‘extra ingredient’ in nature that can possibly bridge this gap. Instead, the field of conscious phenomena requires a rigorous method and an explicit pragmatics for its exploration and analysis. My proposed approach, inspired by the style of inquiry of phenomenology, I have called neurophenomenology. It seeks articulations by mutual constraints between phenomena present in experience and (...) the correlative field of phenomena established by the cognitive sciences. It needs to expand into a widening research community in which the method is cultivated further. (shrink)

En el presente artículo nos hemos propuesto analizar las variantes textuales griegas relativas a los términos “vino” y “vinagre” dentro del contexto neotestamentario de la Pasión de Cristo, así como sus correlatos en la traducción de los Evangelios en antiguo eslavo. Como resultado de dicho análisis, hemos detectado una tendencia a introducir el término “vinagre” por parte de la tradición textológica del Nuevo Testamento griego, que es secundada además por otras tradiciones, como la siríaca o la eslava.

Virtual Reality has often been referred to as an “empathy machine.” This is mostly because it can induce empathy through embodiment experiences in outgroup membership. However, the potential of intergroup contact with an outgroup avatar in VR to increase empathy is less studied. Even though intergroup contact literature suggests that less threatening and more prosocial emotions are the key to understanding why intergroup contact is a powerful mean to decrease prejudice, few studies have investigated the effect of intergroup contact on (...) empathy in VR. In this study, we developed a between-participants design to investigate how VR can be used to create a positive intergroup contact with a member of a stigmatized outgroup and present the results of the effect of intergroup contact in VR on empathy. Sixty four participants experienced either positive contact with a black avatar or no intergroup contact, with situational empathy being measured through a self-report questionnaire up to a week before and right after the VR contact experience. The experiment showed that satisfying degrees of body ownership of participants’ own avatar and co-presence with the contacted avatar can be achieved in simple and universally accessible virtual environments such as AltspaceVR. The results indicated that while VR intergroup contact had no significant direct effect on empathy, exploratory analyses indicated that post-intervention empathic interest increased with stronger feelings of co-presence in the intergroup contact condition. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 40.1 (2006) 35-53 [Access article in PDF] "Truth Is What Works": Francisco J. Varela on Cognitive Science, Buddhism, the Inseparability of Subject and Object, and the Exaggerations of Constructivism—A Conversation Francisco J. Varela Bernhard Poerksen Institut für Journalistik und Kommunikationswissenschaft Universität Hamburg Francisco J. Varela (1946-2001) studied biology in Santiago de Chile, obtained his doctorate 1970 at Harvard University with a (...) dissertation on the insect eye, and worked there for some time in the laboratory of Torsten Wiesel, the later Nobel Laureate for medicine. From his scientific beginnings as a researcher in biology, he not only studied and practiced biology but, resisting the dominating mainstream, pursued a research program that ignored and broke down traditional disciplinary boundaries. This research program is best characterized as experimental epistemology, a concept introduced by the neuropsychiatrist and cybernetician Warren S. McCulloch. Francisco J. Varela's great aspiration was to examine and answer the philosophical ur-question of cognition with scientific precision and with the help of the best possible theoretical framework. [End Page 35]Having obtained his doctorate, he went back to Chile to work as a professor of biology together with Humberto R. Maturana. He contributed to the writing of the theory of autopoiesis, which was to cause a furor in the world of science as a universally applicable explanatory model. After the overthrow of Allende and the installation of the dictatorship by the putsch general Pinochet, Francisco J. Varela first escaped to Costa Rica, then became a professor at the American University of Colorado and University of New York, and finally returned in 1980 to the University of Chile in Santiago for five years. Temporary positions as guest professor for neurobiology, philosophy, and cognitive science in Germany, Switzerland, and France led him to Paris in the end, where he worked as research director of the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique until his death on May 28, 2001.In his research work embracing cognitive science, evolutionary theory, and immunology, Francisco J. Varela, constantly inspired by his fundamental interest in the key questions of epistemology, gave the epistemological debate a new orientation. In his thinking he refuses to accept the strict separation of subject and object, of knower and known, which as a rule unites realists and constructivists alike. Francisco J. Varela rejects the fundamental dualism dividing mind and world, which had shaped Western philosophy from its earliest beginnings. He does not subscribe to the idea that human individuals can invent their own realities—blindly and arbitrarily, and without experiencing any resistance from the external world and all other things given. He equally distances himself, however, from the diametrically opposite position that overstates the eigenpower of the world of objects. The external world and all other things given cannot determine what happens in an organism. Varela's claim is that individual and world create each other. The Computational Model of the Mind Poerksen: The ancient key questions of philosophy are at the center of modern cognitive science. What is the essence of the mind? Do our conceptions represent a given world, which is independent from our minds? What is the formative power of external objects over our perceptions? How does cognition function? The search for an adequate answer and an improved understanding of the human mind has led many cognitive scientists to entertain the assumption that the brain is actually a kind of computer. Memory is taken to be a store. Thinking and perceiving are understood as data processing in the sense that an independent external world is computationally transformed into symbols and represented in the organism in this manner. You are very critical of this view. Why?Varela: If the brain is considered as a kind of computer, then cognitive research is limited to discovering certain self-sufficient shapes—the symbols—together with the rules [End Page 36] governing them—the programs. But this search for symbols and programs will never be profitable because it... (shrink)

Arthur Danto's The Abuse of Beauty was a significant contribution to the acclaimed return of beauty that had been taking place since Dave Hickey's 1993 manifesto announced that beauty would be the defining problem of the next decade. One of the most original and important aspects of Danto's look at beauty is that he thought about it as a contribution to art criticism. External aesthetic qualities would be as meaningless as natural beauty intended to play role in conveying a work (...) 's meaning, constitute the aesthetic dimension of the work. For Danto, elegiac beauty can provide political role for the aesthetic quality, but the impossibility of what could be termed an “angry beauty,” capable of outraging people, seriously limits the option of beauty in “angrily political” contemporary art. Danto thought that activist art will try to inflect works with an angry mood in order to turn people against what they are about. (shrink)

A reflection on the aesthetic status of some typical objects of everyday life, and the relationship we have with them, may originate from the development of “aesthetic experience” by John Dewey and Neopragmatism. The continuity between the common practices and aesthetic ones determines the significance of ordinary objects if they are linked to a project of enrichment and fulfillment of experience. A case that thematizes the richness of these practices in the contemporary world, and also the related theoretical and critical (...) problems, is the production of skateboards. An established artist like Damien Hirst collaborates with the NYC-based streetwear brand Supreme; a new London-based brand, Palace Skateboards, and Tate realize together a few skateboard and a video. (shrink)

In this paper, we propose a methodology of analysis for new videographies based on an analytical grid. We base our epistemological starting point on various critical cultural study authors, a semiotic analysis, and a critical discourse analysis. We apply the grid to a case study composed of a series of videos titledIdentibuzz: Hybrid identities, which was created within UBIQA, a Basque social innovation laboratory. In order to fully grasp the results of the analysis, we briefly outline some data referring to (...) transnational migrations in Spain as well as the representation of immigrants in Spanish mainstream media. We then compare the representations of immigrants in the videos to that in mainstream media to analyze the dissection between new videographies and more traditional video genres. (shrink)

In the late fifteenth centuryMuscovy an intellectual ecclesiastical elite promotes the production of treaties on calendar tables for the calculation of the Easter date (Paskhalia) in order to quell the unrest, that the end of the seventh millennium caused. In addition, in the Paskhalia there are controversial issues against Judaizing Heresy and againstWesternisers. At the same time, the treaties outline the basis of Muscovite hegemonic political ideology.

A book review of Jon Robson, Aesthetic Testimony: An Optimistic Approach. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022, x+166 pp. ISBN 9780192862952.

Resumen En este artículo analizaremos, a través de una serie de actividades diseñadas para implementar en el aula, el modo en el que un grupo de jóvenes gallegos co-construyen el conocimiento metalingüístico y metapragmático acerca de las diferentes variedades locales del español y gallego. La exposición de su trayectoria biográfica permite que afloren diversos saberes y conocimientos metalingüísticos que los estudiantes han ido adquiriendo a lo largo de su escolarización y, además, surgen diversas categorizaciones sobre lenguas y variedades que ponen (...) de manifiesto sus ideologías lingüísticas, pp. 157–174). A través del análisis de las prácticas metalingüísticas y metapragmáticas comprobaremos cómo se reproducen las ideologías lingüísticas de estos jóvenes; por una parte, las ideologías de la institución académica y escolar; y por otra, las ideologías lingüísticas de los jóvenes presentes en el aula, en donde etiquetan, clasifican y establecen jerarquizaciones y valoraciones de su repertorio comunicativo. Finalmente, se comprueba cómo las diferentes variedades del español y del gallego actúan como índices de identidad social diferente de la reconocida en el ámbito institucional y académico, con distintos valores en el mercado lingüístico. (shrink)

"Knowing how we know" is the subject of this book. Its authors present a new view of cognition that has important social and ethical implications, for, they assert, the only world we humans can have is the one we create together through the actions of our coexistence. Written for a general audience as well as for students, scholars, and scientists and abundantly illustrated with examples from biology, linguistics, and new social and cultural phenomena, this revised edition includes a new afterword (...) by Dr. Varela, in which he discusses the effect the book has had in the years since its first publication. (shrink)

The Embodied Mind provides a unique, sophisticated treatment of the spontaneous and reflective dimension of human experience.

Esta conversación tuvo lugar durante una visita de varios días de Pablo Posada Varela a la casa de Marc Richir en Haut-Vaucluse en junio de 2012. He aquí tres extractos (de extensión variable) de una conversación del 8 de junio, y algunos otros fechados el 10 de junio.

Pedro Alvares Cabral's ships left Portugal on 9 March 1500 en route for the territory that he first named Terra de Vera Cruz and that later came to be known as Brazil. On the 22 March they called at the island of São Nicolau [Caminha, 1500], one of the northernmost islands of the Cape Verde group; this was about forty years after the discovery of the archipelago in 1460-62 [Albuquerque, 1991]. It is known that Vasco da Gama had stopped at (...) the island of Santiago in 1498 on his voyage to India, and also in 1499 on the return journey. Straight after the discovery of Brazil Cabral sailed for India and on the way back also dropped anchor at Santiago. Indeed, our archipelago, which is situated off Cape Verde in Senegal (the place from which it appears to take its name), was to become an important stopover point for maritime traffic between Europe, Asia and the Americas in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, both to allow crews to rest and to take on water, wood and some food supplies. It also became important as a holding point for slaves (a large number of whom came from around thirty Guinean ethnic groups and subgroups). They were dispatched from Santiago, known then as Cape Verde island, to territories such as Brazil from the early sixteenth century onwards, since these territories, which had only recently been discovered and were little known, needed people to work and populate them. (shrink)

This paper develops computational models to monitor patients with hip replacement surgery. The Kinect camera is used to capture the movements of patients who are performing rehabilitation exercises with both lower limbs, specifically, ‘side step’ and ‘knee lift’ with each leg. The information is measured at 25 body points with their respective coordinates. Features selection algorithms are applied to the 75 attributes of the initial and final position vector of each rehab exercise. Different classification techniques have been tested and Bayesian (...) networks, supervised classifier system and genetic algorithm with neural network have been selected and jointly applied to identify the correct and incorrect movements during the execution of the rehabilitation exercises. Besides, prediction models of the evolution of a patient are developed based on the average values of some motion related variables. These models can help to fasten the recovery of these patients. (shrink)

The Abuse of Beauty can be seen as the beginning of a “turn” in the philosophy of art of Arthur Danto, based on the conceptual divorce between art and aesthetics, through which he has vindicated a significant role for the aesthetic in the art of today. However, Danto is still reluctant to make aesthetics part of the definition of art. The paper analyzes some of his most relevant new concepts and examines their implications for that central thesis of his theory (...) of art. (shrink)

This ambitious work aims to shed new light on the relations between Husserlian phenomenology and the present-day efforts toward a scientific theory of cognition—with its complex structure of disciplines, levels of explanation, and ...

The book is an intellectual analysis of the political ideas of English radical thinker Thomas Spence (1750-1814), who was renowned for his "Plan", a proposal for the abolition of private landownership and the replacement of state institutions with a decentralized parochial organization. This system would be realized by means of the revolution of the "swinish multitude", the poor labouring class despised by Edmund Burke and adopted by Spence as his privileged political interlocutor. While he has long been considered an eccentric (...) and anachronistic figure, the book sets out to demonstrate that Spence was a deeply original, thoroughly modern thinker, who translated his themes into a popular language addressing the multitude and publicized his Plan through chapbooks, tokens, and songs. The book is therefore a history of Spence's political thought "from below", designed to decode the subtle complexity of his Plan. It also shows that the Plan featured an excoriating critique of colonialism and slavery as well as a project of global emancipation. By virtue of its transnational scope, the Plan made landfall in the British West Indies a few years after Spence's death. Indeed, Spencean ideas were intellectually implicated in the largest slave revolt in the history of Barbados. (shrink)

I discuss Aristotle’s opening argument against Platonic Forms in _Metaphysics_ A.9, ‘the Razor’, which criticizes the introduction of Forms on the basis of an analogy with a hypothetical case of counting things. I argue for a new interpretation of this argument, and show that it involves two interesting objections against the introduction of Forms as formal causes: one concerns the completeness and the other the adequacy of such an explanatory project.

This book searches for the sources and means for a disciplined practical approach to exploring human experience. The spirit of this book is "pragmatic" and relies on a Husserlian phenomenology primarily understood as a "method" of exploring our experience. The authors do not aim at a neo-Kantian "a priori" new theory of experience but instead they describe a concrete activity: how we examine what we live through, how we "become aware" of our own mental life. The range of experiences of (...) which we can become aware is vast: all the normal dimensions of human life (perception, motion, memory, imagination, speech, everyday social interactions), cognitive events that can be precisely defined as tasks in laboratory experiments (e.g., a protocol for visual attention), but also manifestations of mental life more fraught with meaning (dreaming, intense emotions, social tensions, altered states of consciousness). The central assertion in this work is that this immanent ability is habitually ignored or at best practiced unsystematically, that is to say, blindly. Exploring human experience amounts to developing and cultivating this basic ability through specific training. Only a hands-on, non-dogmatic approach can lead to progress, and that is what animates this book. (Series B). (shrink)

The study of conscious experience per se has not kept pace with the dramatic advances in PET, fMRI and other brain-scanning technologies. If anything, the standard approaches to examining the 'view from within' involve little more than cataloguing its readily accessible components. Thus the study of lived subjective experience is still at the level of Aristotelian science, leading to a widespread scepticism over the possibility of a truly scientific study of conscious experience. Drawing on a wide range of approaches -- (...) from phenomenology to meditation -- The View From Within examines the possibility of a disciplined approach to the study of subjective states. The focus is on the practical issues involved. (shrink)

Some major leftist thinkers, including Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek and Terry Eagleton, have lately offered readings that claim the relevance of alternative interpretations of the Christian tradition in the face both of the conservative turn in the Catholic Church and of the contemporary secular oblivion of anything that has to do with religion. Furthermore, post-colonial studies have tended to blame the West en bloc for the disasters of past and present colonization, and have attacked the western endeavour to extend universal (...) truths as an ethnocentric device to facilitate and justify exploitation. In Holy Terror, Terry Eagleton both condemns western politics and questions its appeal to universals; but he also hears in this tradition a demand for a relationship with the other which offers an alternative to that established by current politics and capitalist exploitation. The other is the excluded, the oppressed, the exploited; the true material, rather than ideal, universal produced by global capitalist exploitation. As a consequence, anything that happens in any part of the planet belongs in our world and indicts us, though we tend to build barriers around an ideally safe and stable identity that ignores part of its own reality and that is therefore haunted by it. Texts like the Bacchae or the New Testament open the gates of the city and of the heart to the excluded. Terrorists — saints for their own communities and satanic for the rest — offer an example of the other that is impossible to comprehend within our conventional ways of life. Nevertheless, only if we hear in their violence a demand for justice can an exit be found from the vicious circle of violence and revenge. (shrink)