In this chapter, we offer a reconstruction of the evolution of Leibniz’s thought concerning the problem of the infinite divisibility of bodies, the tension between actuality, unassignability, and syncategorematicity, and the closely related question of the possibility of infinitesimal quantities, both in physics and in mathematics.Some scholars have argued that syncategorematicity is a mature acquisition, to which Leibniz resorts to solve the question of his infinitesimals – namely the idea that infinitesimals are just signs for Archimedean exhaustions, and their unassignability (...) is a nominalist maneuver. On the contrary, we show that syncategorematicity, as a traditional idea of classical scholasticism, is a feature of young Leibniz’s thinking, from which he moves away in order to solve the same problem, as he gains mathematical knowledge.We have divided Leibniz’s path toward his mature view of infinitesimals into five phases, which are especially significant for reconstructing the entire evolution. In our reconstruction, an important role is played by Leibniz’s text De Quadratura Arithmetica. Based on this and other texts, we dispute the thesis that fictionality coincides with syncategorematicity, and that unassignability can be bypassed. (In this chapter, we employ “syncategorematic” as a shorthand for “eventually identifiable with a procedure of exhaustion” and, as a consequence, “involving only assignable quantities.” We also identify syncategorematicity with potentiality, as suggested by some part of the scholastics, and in Sect. 2.2, we show that the two characterizations are equivalent, provided that “potentiality” is intended in the correct way: namely as in the unending iterative procedures of Greek mathematics.) On the contrary, we maintain that unassignability, as incompatible with the principle of harmony, is the ultimate reason for the fictionality of infinitesimals. (shrink)

Ethical leadership matters in the context of organizational change due to the need for followers to trust the integrity of their leaders. Yet, there have been no studies investigating ethical leadership and organizational change. To fill this gap, we introduce a model of the moderating role of involvement in change. Organizational change and involvement in change are proposed as context-level moderators in the relationships of ethical leadership and work-related attitudes and performance. We employ a sample of 199 supervisor–subordinate pairs from (...) a wide variety of organizations. Results support a three-way interaction (ethical leadership, organizational change, and involvement in change) for performance and OCBs. Our results have important implications for organizational change since ethical leadership appears to complement follower involvement when change is happening. (shrink)

Blockchain is an open digital ledger technology that has the capability of significantly altering the way that people operations operate in organizations. This research takes a first step in proposing several ways in which the blockchain technology can be used to improve current organizational practices, while also considering the ethical implications. Specifically, the paper examines the role that blockchain technology plays in three primary areas of people operations: entry to the organization, intraorganizational processes, and exit. In each section, the paper (...) reviews the ethical implications from the lenses of virtue ethics, utilitarianism, deontology and contractarianism. The paper concludes that in whole the implementation of blockchain technology in people operations processes can create a more ethical work environment. However, careful implementation is necessary and requires extensive examination of ethical implications in advance. (shrink)

En este artículo se abordan las perspectivas de David Hume y Bertrand Rus-sell en tormo dos asuntos estrechamente vinculados, a saber, el problema de la justificación de la inferencia no demostrativa y de la validez del principio de causalidad, ambos configu-ran el así llamado “problema de Hume”. Desde una perspectiva analítica y comparativa, se intenta mostrar que a pesar de la lectura fuertemente crítica que Russell adopta respecto del filósofo escocés, ambos filósofos comparten en cierta medida un programa filosófico común. (...) En este contexto se hacen notar algunas distinciones de importancia pasadas a menudo por alto en la discusión especializada, que permiten concluir que la teoría de Russell del conoci-miento está en realidad alineada con la del empirista moderno, y por tanto, que es también susceptible de las mismas críticas. (shrink)

Through cultural transmission, repeated learning by new individuals transforms cultural information, which tends to become increasingly compressible . Existing diffusion chain studies include in their design two processes that could be responsible for this tendency: learning and reproducing . This paper manipulates the presence of learning in a simple iterated drawing design experiment. We find that learning seems to be the causal factor behind the increase in compressibility observed in the transmitted information, while reproducing is a source of random heritable (...) innovations. Only a theory invoking these two aspects of cultural learning will be able to explain human culture's fundamental balance between stability and innovation. (shrink)

Significant scientific and technological advances in intensive care have been made. However, patients in the intensive care unit may experience discomfort, loss of control, and surreal experiences. This has generated relevant debates about how to humanize the intensive care units and whether humanization is necessary at all. This paper aimed to explore how humanizing intensive care is described in the literature. A scoping review was performed. Studies published between 01.01.1999 and 02.03.2020 were identified in the CINAHL, Embase, PubMed, and Scopus (...) databases. After removing 185 duplicates, 363 papers were screened by title and abstract. Full-text screening of 116 papers led to the inclusion of 68 papers in the review based on the inclusion criteria; these papers mentioned humanizing or dehumanizing intensive care in the title or abstract. Humanizing care was defined as holistic care, as a general attitude of professionals toward patients and relatives and an organizational ideal encompassing all subjects of the healthcare system. Technology was considered an integral component of intensive care that must be balanced with caring for the patient as a whole and autonomous person. This holistic view of patients and relatives could ameliorate the negative effects of technology. There were geographical differences and the large number of studies from Spain and Brazil reflect the growing interest in humanizing intensive care in these particular countries. In conclusion, a more holistic approach with a greater emphasis on the individual patient, relatives, and social context is the foundation for humanizing intensive care, as reflected in the attitudes of nurses and other healthcare professionals. Demands for mastering technology may dominate nurses’ attention toward patients and relatives; therefore, humanized intensive care requires a holistic attitude from health professionals and organizations toward patients and relatives. Healthcare organizations, society, and regulatory frameworks demanding humanized intensive care may enforce humanized intensive care. (shrink)

We investigate the emergence of iconicity, specifically a bouba-kiki effect in miniature artificial languages under different functional constraints: when the languages are reproduced and when they are used communicatively. We ran transmission chains of participant dyads who played an interactive communicative game and individual participants who played a matched learning game. An analysis of the languages over six generations in an iterated learning experiment revealed that in the Communication condition, but not in the Reproduction condition, words for spiky shapes tend (...) to be rated by naive judges as more spiky than the words for round shapes. This suggests that iconicity may not only be the outcome of innovations introduced by individuals, but, crucially, the result of interlocutor negotiation of new communicative conventions. We interpret our results as an illustration of cultural evolution by random mutation and selection. (shrink)

As a neonatal neurologist, I serve families facing tragic decisions in which they must balance trade-offs between death and life with profound disability. I often find myself in complex discussions about future outcome, in which families sort through in real-time what information they value most in making such a choice. Will he laugh? Will he be in pain? Will he know how much he’s loved? In this month’s feature article, Brick et al share the results of an online survey aimed (...) at assessing public views on when a life is not worth living, in an effort to inform ongoing legal and clinical debates about withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment for children. These findings raise important questions about how we define and measure outcomes that matter to parents as they make these tragic decisions. It is challenging to interpret these findings in the absence of context of how decision-making for infants occurs in real-time. The nature of this study and its objective required that cases be substantially simplified. As the authors acknowledge, the prognoses and function of the children involved in these cases were often deeply contested. Prognostic uncertainty is common for children with significant …. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 1, January 2022.

Orphan drug policy often gives ‘special treatment’ to rare diseases, by giving additional priority or making exceptions to specific drugs, based on the rarity of the conditions they aim to treat. This essay argues that the goal of orphan drug policy should be to make prevalence irrelevant to funding decisions. It aims to demonstrate that it is severity, not prevalence, which drives our judgments that important claims are being overlooked when treatments for severe rare diseases are not funded. It shows (...) that prioritising severity avoids problems caused by prioritising rarity, and that it is compatible with a range of normative frameworks. The implications of a severity-based view for drug development are then derived. The severity-based view also accounts for what is wrong with how the current system of drug development unfairly neglects common diseases that burden the developing world. Lastly, the implications of a severity-based view for current orphan drug policies are discussed. There are no data in this work. (shrink)

This paper examines folk theories of algorithmic recommendations on Spotify in order to make visible the cultural specificities of data assemblages in the global South. The study was conducted in Costa Rica and draws on triangulated data from 30 interviews, 4 focus groups with 22 users, and the study of “rich pictures” made by individuals to graphically represent their understanding of algorithmic recommendations. We found two main folk theories: one that personifies Spotify and another one that envisions it as a (...) system full of resources. Whereas the first theory emphasizes local conceptions of social relations to make sense of algorithms, the second one stresses the role of algorithms in providing a global experience of music and technology. We analyze why people espouse either one of these theories and how these theories provide users with resources to enact different modalities of power and resistance in relation to recommendation algorithms. We argue that folk theories thus offer a productive way to broaden understanding of what agency means in relation to algorithms. (shrink)

La presente investigación tiene por objetivo justificar cómo la pereza constituye una parte intrínseca de la sustancia humana dentro de la cosmogonía en la Antigua Grecia. Para ello, el escrito se divide en tres momentos. Primero, se hace una breve exposición de lo que implica el trabajo duro a partir de su personificación mitológica: Horme. Segundo, se sitúa a la skholè como un concepto en el que convergen la pereza y la contemplación en dirección a una capacidad reflexiva fundamentada desde (...) el no-actuar. Tercero, se argumenta que Ergía y Pasítea son diosas que dan fundamento a pensar la pereza como una categoría ontológica dentro del entendimiento que el ser humano hace de sí mismo. Esto último, ya que son deidades que tienen su ubicación dentro de la constitución humana antes de la skholè, lo cual las ubica como fundamentales para el estudio del ocio en la Antigüedad. (shrink)

Esta obra de Byung-Chul Han, que no es la más reciente en alemán (hace poco se publicó Infokratie. Digitalisierung und die Krise der Demokratie, es la última publicación del coreano en español. Esta investigación, desgraciadamente, brilla por su falta de nueva información sobre la arquitectura teórica que Han ha venido desarrollando en los últimos años. Salvo el primer capítulo y los últimos tres, esta obra se ve como un refrito de temas que el autor ha posicionado en otros de sus (...) libros. (shrink)

El trabajo titulado "Ojo. Una mirada transdisciplinar", realizado por profesor Wilson Andrés Parra, impreso por la Universidad de La Sabana y su Facultad de Medicina, recoge un arsenal de aproximaciones epistemológicas complejas. Sin duda alguna es un esfuerzo de altísimo interés por acercarse a las distintas perspectivas que, sobre el ojo y la visión, la representación y los efectos que sobre la mente y el conocimiento ha permitido este maravilloso y casi perfecto órgano, como portador, y al mismo tiempo receptor, (...) de luz física e intelectual para el género humano. (shrink)

To date, COVID-19 has spread across the world, changing our way of life and forcing us to wear face masks. This report demonstrates that face masks influence the human ability to infer emotions by observing facial configurations. Specifically, a mask obstructing a face limits the ability of people of all ages to infer emotions expressed by facial features, but the difficulties associated with the mask’s use are significantly pronounced in children aged between 3 and 5 years old. These findings are (...) of essential importance, as they suggest that we live in a time that may potentially affect the development of social and emotion reasoning, and young children’s future social abilities should be monitored to assess the true impact of the use of masks. (shrink)

The results in this paper are in a context of abstract elementary classes identified by Shelah and Villaveces in which the amalgamation property is not assumed. The long-term goal is to solve Shelah’s Categoricity Conjecture in this context. Here we tackle a problem of Shelah and Villaveces by proving that in their context, the uniqueness of limit models follows from categoricity under the assumption that the subclass of amalgamation bases is closed under unions of bounded, -increasing chains.

Given that mitigating climate change is a large-scale global issue, what obligations do individuals have to lower their personal carbon emissions? I survey recent suggestions by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Dale Jamieson and offer models for thinking about their respective approaches. I then present a third model based on the notion of structural violence. While the three models are not mutually incompatible, each one suggests a different focus for mitigating climate change. In the end, I agree with Sinnott-Armstrong that people have (...) limited moral obligations to directly lower personal emissions, but I offer different reasons for this conclusion, namely that the structural arrangements of our lives place a limit on how much individuals can restrict their own emissions. Thus, individuals should focus their efforts on changing the systems instead (e.g., the design of cities, laws and regulation, etc.), which will lead to lower emissions on a larger scale. (shrink)

Representation is integral to the functioning and legitimacy of modern government. Yet political theorists have often been reluctant to engage directly with questions of representation, and empirical political scientists have closed down such questions by making representation synonymous with congruence. Conceptually unproblematic and normatively inert for some, representation has been deemed impossible to pin down analytically and to defend normatively by others. But this is changing. Political theorists are now turning to political representation as a subject worthy of theoretical investigation (...) in its own right. In their effort to rework the theory of political representation, they are also hoping to impact how representation is assessed and studied empirically. This volume gathers together chapters by key contributors to what amounts to a "representative turn" in political theory. Their approaches and emphases are diverse, but taken together they represent a compelling and original attempt at re-conceptualizing political representation and critically assessing the main theoretical and political implications following from this, namely for how we conceive and assess representative democracy. Each contributor is invited to look back and ahead on the transformations to democratic self-government introduced by the theory and practice of political representation. Representation and democracy: outright conflict, uneasy cohabitation, or reciprocal constitutiveness? For those who think democracy would be better without representation, this volume is a must-read: it will question their assumptions, while also exploring some of the reasons for their discomfort. Reclaiming Representation is essential reading for scholars and graduate researchers committed to staying on top of new developments in the field. (shrink)

Employee social network strategies play a key role in firm strategies and organizational performance. Currently, scholars underestimate the contributions of employee social strategies in firm strategies. Little is known how informal employee social networks, group entitativity and competition could shape and direct firm strategies and organizational performance. The article examines social network theory and strategic management’s content, process and open schools of thought to propose a new interpretation for managing firm strategies. More specifically, the author examines alternate causal paths, underlying (...) processes and structures as mechanisms in employee social network strategies within a theoretical framework. The article proposes 4 theoretically driven propositions and makes two contributions. First, the article contributes to organizational behavior literature by focusing on the literature gap in network dynamics and competitive actions through employee social networks. Second, although there is immense literature on positive and negative employee competition in business, the article makes a contribution to the strategic management literature by moving beyond formalized structures and roles within an organization to focus on the multilevel informal workplace social interactions and processes that impact strategizing activities. Overall, the article extends strategy research in relation to how employee social networks operate through competition and group entitativity in firm strategies. (shrink)

Gadamer's Ethics of Play examines the ethical dimensions of understanding by focusing on the concept of dialogical "play" in Hans-Georg Gadamer's Truth and Method. The book is accessible to an undergraduate audience, while also being relevant to ongoing debates among Gadamer scholars.

En el texto se exponen algunas reflexiones sobre la importancia que tiene el rescatar los conocimientos tradicionales de las comunidades rurales, indígenas y campesinas sobre las prácticas agrícolas y alimenticias como recurso y mecanismo para favorecer la seguridad alimnetaria y de esta manera la sustentabilidad comunitaria. Se parte de una revisión bibliográfica sobre el tema, y se exponen casos específicos, como ejemplo, donde la experiencia se ha convertido en una oportunidad de algunas comunidades para hacer valer sus derechos de manejo (...) de la tierra, los procesos que se requieren para la diversidad de cultivos, de su propio sistema de producción y de esta forma mitigar los efectos de la pobreza y consolidad una propuesta alterna para el ejercicio de la soberanía y seguridad alimentaria de las comunidades. (shrink)

Georg Simmel’s final work, The View of Life, concludes his lifelong engagement with Immanuel Kant by ‘inverting’ Kant’s Categorical Imperative to produce an ethics of authentic individuality. While Kant’s moral imperative is universal to all individuals but particular to their discrete acts, Simmel’s Law of the Individual is particular to each individual but universal to all the individual’s acts. We assess the significance of Simmel’s formulation of the Law of the Individual in three steps: First, as an articulation of an (...) ethical moment consonant with his relational approach to formal sociology, hinted at earlier in Sociology but not developed as such. Second, as a completion of the framework for Simmel’s formal sociology: the Law of the Individual conceptualizes a decisive but under-theorized relationship in Simmel’s vision of ‘society’ that is a woven fabric of social relationships, namely one’s relationship with oneself. We follow with a third proposal about how Simmel might have continued the line of thought he opens in The View of Life, suggesting that we can take the Law of the Individual as an invitation to fold the self-relation back into analysis of social relations, and to theorize how forms of association are shaped by forms of self-relation. We thus narrow the theoretical gulf between Simmel’s vitalism and his sociology, which commentators usually hold apart. And in so doing, we sketch a distinctively Simmelian approach to an ethics of individuality in sociological inquiry. (shrink)

National and international research cultures for the innovation of new medicines involve various value claims about the ethics of the placebo entity as differentiating comparator. Yet, in turn, the instantiation of the placebo comparator as cultural artefact for the creation and identification of the ‘control group’ depends also upon prior social understandings of ‘comparability’. Reading back the ethics controversies surrounding the Risperidone psychiatry trials in India, the paper illustrates why drug efficacies need to be studied not only through comparative techniques (...) such as randomised controlled trials, but also through analytical modes of inquiry that can begin to place the problem of efficacy within particular social and cultural contexts, as well as across disciplines. It is suggested that future bioethics debates could benefit from a revised conception of the interdisciplinary placebo — one that is rooted in ‘placebo politics’ and that listens responsively to the voices of the global South. (shrink)

The issues involved in deciding whether to use artificial methods of delivering hydration and nutrition are often very difficult for patients, families, and health care providers. Once private and personal matters, these decisions now frequently involve the judicial system. Five years ago, Hospice of Washington recognized the need for a written policy and wrote the one published here. Its goal is to respect individual preferences and family concerns while addressing the nutrition and hydration needs of dying patients. The policy sets (...) parameters on the issue, provides basic information, and encourages crafting the most fitting resolution to each situation. (shrink)

Background:Background: In general, qualitative research design often involves merging together various data collection strategies, and researcher’s may need to be prepared to spend longer periods i...

This _Handbook_ provides a comprehensive guide to the practice and principles of child and adolescent psychotherapy around the world. Contents include: * a brief introduction to the child psychotherapy profession, its history and development * a review of the theory underlying therapeutic practice * an overview of the varied settings in which child psychotherapists work * analysis of the growth of the profession internationally * an examination of areas of expertise around the world * a summary of current research Contributors (...) are experienced practitioners from within a diverse range of schools and approaches and so provide a well-rounded picture of child and adolescent psychotherapy today. _The Handbook of Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy_ will be an essential resource for professional psychotherapists, students of psychotherapy, social workers and all professionals working with disturbed children. (shrink)

This text, commissioned by the OSUN Global Observatory of Academic Freedom, discusses how the concept of academic freedom is codified in Colombian Law and regulations of public and private higher education institutions. It also explores common conceptions of academic freedom among Colombian scholars, as well as commonly observed threats to it.

Mass-marketing frauds are on the increase. Given the amount of monies lost and the psychological impact of MMFs there is an urgent need to develop new and effective methods to prevent more of these crimes. This paper reports the early planning of automated methods our interdisciplinary team are developing to prevent and detect MMF. Importantly, the paper presents the ethical and social constraints involved in such a model and suggests concerns others might also consider when developing automated systems.

Volume 19, Issue 5, May 2019, Page 62-63.

Este artigo se insere no quadro maior dos estudos sobre as identidades no cristianismo antigo. A questão central é compreender de que formas as práticas populares se relacionam com o desenvolvimento e a manifestação das identidades cristãs. Como práticas populares elegemos as práticas de judaização, entre os não judeus adeptos da fé em Cristo, existentes no contexto das comunidades cristãs. A judaização é assim compreendida porque foge à instrução/controle das autoridades e da elite intelectual cristã. O recorte espaço-temporal do presente (...) estudo são as comunidades cristãs da província da Ásia Proconsular, no território imperial romano, no século II d.C. O conceito de etnicidade é empregado no exame das cartas do bispo Inácio de Antioquia a comunidades cristãs da Ásia Menor de forma a iluminar possíveis motivações para uma manutenção da judaização entre não judeus crentes em Jesus em detrimento da forte recomendação de seu abandono pelas autoridades cristãs. (shrink)

This paper considers whether and how ‘vitalism’ might be considered relevant as a concept today; whether its relevance should be expressed in terms of disciplinary demarcations between the life sciences and the natural sciences; and whether there is a fundamental incompatibility between a ‘vitalism of process’ and a ‘vitalism as pathos’. I argue that the relevance of vitalism as an epistemological and ontological problem concerning the categorical distinction between living and non-living beings must be contextualized historically, and referred exclusively to (...) the epistemic horizon defined by classical physics. In contrast to this, drawing on the philosophies of Canguilhem, Whitehead, and Atlan, I propose an appreciation of the contemporary relevance of vitalism premised on the pathic and indeterminate character of nature as a whole. From this perspective vitalism expresses a politically significant ethos concerning the relationship between life, knowledge, problems and their solutions. (shrink)