The current quality assurance culture demands the explicit articulation, by means of publication, of what have been hitherto tacit norms and conventions underlying disciplinary genres. The justification is that publication aids student performance and guarantees transparency and accountability. This requirement makes a number of questionable assumptions predicated upon what we will argue is an erroneous epistemology. It is not always possible to articulate in a publishable form a detailed description of disciplinary practices such as assessment. As a result publication cannot (...) achieve its stated goals. There are always elements of our knowledge that cannot be linguistically articulated. (shrink)

The current quality assurance culture demands the explicit articulation, by means of publication, of what have been hitherto tacit norms and conventions underlying disciplinary genres. The justification is that publication aids student performance and guarantees transparency and accountability. This requirement makes a number of questionable assumptions predicated upon what we will argue is an erroneous epistemology. It is not always possible to articulate in a publishable form a detailed description of disciplinary practices such as assessment. As a result publication cannot (...) achieve its stated goals. There are always elements of our knowledge that cannot be linguistically articulated. (shrink)

This book is a rich blend of analyses by leading experts from various cultures and disciplines. A compact introduction to a complex field, it illustrates biotechnology's profound impact upon the environment and society. Moreover, it underscores the vital relevance of cultural values. This book empowers readers to more critically assess biotechnology's value and effectiveness within both specific cultural and global contexts.

Trait emotional intelligence concerns our perceptions of our emotional abilities, that is, how good we believe we are in terms of understanding, regulating, and expressing emotions in order to adapt to our environment and maintain well-being. In this article, we present succinct summaries of selected findings from research on the location of trait EI in personality factor space, the biological underpinnings of the construct, indicative applications in the areas of clinical, health, social, educational, organizational, and developmental psychology, and trait EI (...) training. Findings to date suggest that individual differences in trait EI are a consistent predictor of human behavior across the life span. (shrink)

The problem of change recurs across Frantz Fanon's writings. As a philosopher, psychiatrist, and revolutionary, Fanon was deeply committed to theorizing and instigating change in all of its facets. Change is the thread that ties together his critical dialogue with Hegel, Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche and his intellectual exchange with Césaire, Kojève, and Sartre. It informs his analysis of racism and colonialism, négritude and the veil, language and culture, disalienation and decolonization, and it underpins his reflections on Martinique, Algeria, the (...) Caribbean, Africa, the Third World, and the world at large. Gavin Arnall traces an internal division throughout Fanon's work between two distinct modes of thinking about change. He contends that there are two Fanons: a dominant Fanon who conceives of change as a dialectical process of becoming and a subterranean Fanon who experiments with an even more explosive underground theory of transformation. Arnall offers close readings of Fanon's entire oeuvre, from canonical works like Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth to his psychiatric papers and recently published materials, including his play, Parallel Hands. Speaking both to scholars and to the continued vitality of Fanon's ideas among today's social movements, this book offers a rigorous and profoundly original engagement with Fanon that affirms his importance in the effort to bring about radical change. (shrink)

This paper explains why and how we should introduce birth into the canon of subjects explored by philosophy. It focuses on the epistemology of birth, namely, on the nature, origin, and limits of the knowledge produced by and/or related to giving birth. The paper provides a view on the philosophy of birth, i.e., an approach to construct a new logos for genos.

El pintor Blasco de Grañén, uno de los principales exponentes de la pintura gótica aragonesa del segundo tercio del siglo XV, fue el autor de las pinturas de varios retablos realizados para las tres provincias aragonesas en las que se representaban escenas de la Virgen María con el Niño y la Coronación de la Virgen junto con ángeles músicos. En el presente artículo, además de describir estos temas y tipos iconográficos, se realiza un breve recorrido histórico-artístico de cada pintura, se (...) describen las escenas musicales y se identifican sus elementos. Finalmente, se obtienen ciertas conclusiones acerca del contenido musical de las pinturas de Blasco de Grañén, que se caracterizan por su rica iconografía musical. Painter Blasco de Grañén, one of the main exponents of Aragonese Gothic painting of the second third of the 15th century, was the author of the paintings of several altarpieces made for the three Aragonese provinces, on which scenes of the Virgin and Child and the Coronation of the Virgin were represented with angels musicians. This article, as well as summarizing these iconographic subjects and types, makes a brief historic-artistic outline of each painting, describes the musical scenes and identifies their elements. Finally, some conclusions are drawn about the musical content of the paintings by Blasco de Grañén, which are characterized by their rich musical iconography. (shrink)

The search for mechanisms has been a common practice in scientific research. However, since the empiricist critique of causality, and especially during the second third of the twentieth century, other non-mechanistic perspectives—especially deductivism—gained predominance. But the sustained effort of authors such as Michael Scriven, Mario Bunge and especially Wesley Salmon contributed to restoring the respectability of causality and mechanisms in philosophy of science. Some members of the causal family, usually lumped under the name of “new mechanistic philosophy”, emphasize the description (...) of mechanisms, especially causal ones, as a central aspect of explanation and other research practices in several areas of science. This approach offers viable solutions to the various ontological and methodological objections that are opposed to the two traditional approaches. In this work the basic characteristics of three philosophies that highlight the description of mechanisms as a central element to explanation and their suitability for the science of ecology are discussed. (shrink)

Adult humans show exceptional relational ability relative to other species. In this research, we trace the development of this ability in young children. We used a task widely used in comparative research—the relational match-to-sample task, which requires participants to notice and match the identity relation: for example, AA should match BB instead of CD. Despite the simplicity of this relation, children under 4 years of age failed to pass this test (Experiment 1), and their performance did not improve even with (...) initial feedback (Experiment 2). In Experiments 3 and 4, we found that two kinds of symbolic-linguistic experience can facilitate relational reasoning in young children. Our findings suggest that children learn to become adept analogical thinkers, and that language fosters this learning in at least two distinct ways. (shrink)

This article examines numerous conceptions of translation within the Marxist tradition. It begins with Antonio Gramsci’s theorisation of the concept before turning to the problem of Marxism in Latin America and how the Zapatistas have dealt with this problem. The aim is to shed light on a critical school of Marxist thinking, which requires that Marxism’s universalist claims be translated in response to changing historical conditions so that they may become concrete formulations capable of speaking to and intervening in concrete (...) situations. Yet the Zapatistas go further by maintaining that translation must also occur between the universalist claims of Marxist theory and the competing universalist claims of indigenous Maya cosmology. The article thus underscores what can be gleaned from different modes of translation in terms of Marxism’s future and its capacity to enter into mutually beneficial alliances with distinct worldviews and ongoing social movements. (shrink)

Al intentar clarificar lo que Spinoza, Schopenhauer y Nietzsche entienden por deseo encontramos que este concepto está asociado en ellos a una particular acepción de la idea de voluntad. En Spinoza y en Schopenhauer se encuentra presente esta identificación. En Nietzsche el deseo se encuentra oculto, disimulado y encerrado en las figuras metafóricas de lo dionisíaco y lo melódico. Desire, Will and Pain in Spinoza, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche In attempting to clarify what Spinoza, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche understand by desire, we (...) find this concept to be associated, for them, to a particular meaning of the idea of will. This identification is present both, in Spinoza and Schopenhauer. In Nietzsche, desire is hidden, disguised and locked up in the metaphorical figures of the Dionysian and the melodic. (shrink)

Manuel Sacristán Luzón , un lógico, epistemólogo y filósofo heterodoxo, militante del PSUC-PCE durante largos años, que tuvo un papel esencial en la reintroducción de la tradición marxista-comunista en nuestro país a finales de los años cincuenta, sugirió en sus últimos años una fuerte revisión del ideario comunista tras el Mayo del 68, la aniquilación de la Primavera de Praga y, destacadamete, la irrupción de las problemáticas ecológicas. Sus propuestas para una política de la ciencia de orientación socialista, próxima a (...) la tradición tecnocientífica no cegada y crítica a un tiempo de las concepciones neorrománticas inspiradas en la obra de Heidegger , siguen siendo muestra de la lucidez y penetración de un pensamiento nunca servil ni agotado que apostó siempre por una pasión razonada anclada en la informacióncientífica contrastada, en el compromiso con los desfavorecidos de la tierra y en la práctica de un filosofar creativo y humanista. (shrink)

Karl Popper postula que no puede haber una teoría científica del desarrollo histórico que sirva de base para la predicción. Para mejorar la sociedad es necesario recurrir a la ingeniería social gradual, que busca introducir cambios tentativos, en sí mismos valiosos, al margen de que exista o no un plan general. Si no se obtiene el resultado esperado, habrá oportunidad de rectificar. El progreso gradual, la necesidad de un equilibrio de fuerzas bajo el poder del Estado, y la proporción entre (...) Estado y sociedad son vitales para la conservación de la libertad. La base teórico-social se ilustra con el ejemplo de un país imaginado, en el cual luego de un comienzo promisorio, que parecía dirigido a la construcción de una sociedad más justa, se abandonó el gradualismo, surgieron las ilusiones utópicas y terminó por apartarse de toda planificación. Palabras clave: Estado; falsacionismo; gradualismo; historicismo; ingeniería social; libertad; marxismo; planificación; sociedad; utopía. Popper and freedom. Once upon a time there was a country that went off courseKarl Popper argues that there can be no scientific theory of historical development on which historical prediction might be grounded. In order to improve society it is necessary to resort to gradual social engineering, which seeks to bring about tentative changes, valuable in themselves, regardless of whether or not there exists a general plan. If one does not reach the expected result, there will be room for rectification. Gradual progress, the need for a balance of the forces under the State’s power, and the balance between State and society are vital for the preservation of freedom. The social-theoretical basis is illustrated with the example of an imaginary country, which after a promising start -seemingly aimed at building a more just society-, simply gave up gradualism, utopian illusions emerged, and finally all planning was abandoned. Keywords: State; falsationism; gradualism; historicism; social engineering; freedom; marxism; planning; society; utopia. (shrink)

M. Lipman and P. Freire are two thinkers who support the practice of liberty. Liberty is liberty to learn to think, and to exist in communities of dialogue, questioning, and search. This is the project that leads human beings to understand themselves and recognize others. Without liberty there..

“A mouth that speaks, many ears, and half the hands that write. These are the ac a demic ap - pa ra tus, these are the ac tive ma chines of Bildung in the Uni ver sity”, as writen by Nietz sche.. What should we do? Nietz sche gave us some an swers, in his ha bit ual form: ques tions, met a phor..

IntroductionConcussion is a growing public health concern. No uniformly established therapy exists; neurofeedback studies report treatment value. We use infralow frequency neuromodulation to remediate disabling neurological symptoms caused by traumatic brain injury and noted improved outcomes with a novel concussion protocol. Postconcussion symptoms and persistent postconcussion symptoms are designated timelines for protracted neurological complaints following TBI. We performed a retrospective study to explore effectiveness of ILF in PCS/PPCS and investigated the value of using this concussion protocol.MethodPatients with PCS/PPCS seen for (...) their first neurology office visit or received their first neurofeedback session between 1 August 2018 and 31 January 2021 were entered. Outcomes were compared following treatment as usual vs. TAU with ILF neurotherapy. The study cohort was limited to PPCS patients; the TAU+ILF group was restricted further to PPCS patients receiving at least 10 neurotherapy sessions. Within the TAU+ILF group, comparisons were made between those who trained at least 10 sessions using concussion protocol and those who trained for at least 10 sessions of ILF regardless of protocol.ResultsAmong our resultant PPCS cohort leading persistent neurological complaints were headache, memory impairment, and brain fog. PPCS patients in TAU+ILF+CP demonstrated greater net and percent improvement of symptoms compared to PPCS subjects in TAU. PPCS patients in TAU+ILF-CP trended toward significant symptom improvements compared to TAU, and TAU+ILF+CP trended toward greater efficacy than TAU+ILF-CP.ConclusionPPCS patients who received TAU+ILF+CP demonstrated significantly greater improvement as a group when compared to TAU. When used as an integrative modality to treatment as usual in managing patients with PPCS, ILF neuromodulation with use of concussion protocol provided significant symptom improvements. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that some human reproductive genome editing interventions can be therapeutic in nature, and thus that it is false that all such interventions just create healthy individuals. I do this by showing that the conditions established by a therapy definition are met by certain reproductive genome editing interventions. I then defend this position against two objections: (a) reproductive genome editing interventions do not attain one of the two conditions for something to be a therapy, and (b) (...) some reproductive genome editing interventions are therapeutic but in a nonstandard way. In the Conclusion I call for a more nuanced discussion of the nature of reproductive genome editing interventions. (shrink)

In this interview, Jacques Rancière describes the character of the aesthetic regime and the relationship between politics and aesthetics in his work, along with the role of artistic practices, technological innovations, and the institution of the museum in the redistribution of the sensible and the similarities and differences between his theories and Walter Benjamin’s work on modernity. Rancière argues that the aesthetic regime entails both a rupture with what came before it and the possibility of recycling and reinterpreting works of (...) the past, what Benjamin described as the surrealist practice of evoking the outmoded. While emphasizing the political and military preconditions to the aesthetic regime over technological or economic considerations, Rancière also warns against drawing strict parallels between aesthetic regimes and political presuppositions of equality or inequality. Furthermore, Rancière refuses to privilege Marcel Duchamp’s readymades in the aesthetic regime’s redistribution of the sensible, pointing, instead, to Emile Zola’s Le ventre de Paris and the creation of the modern institution of the museum as key moments that broke with preexisting distributions of the sensible. Rancière also distinguishes his discussion of novelistic realism and narration from Benjamin’s characterization of modernity as the decline in the ability to narrate experience, critiquing Benjamin’s nostalgia for the past while recognizing as fruitful his linking of new possibilities in aesthetic experience to the creation of new technologies. (shrink)

In times of climate change and public debt, a concern for intergenerational justice should lead us to have a closer look at theories of intergenerational justice. It should also press us to provide institutional design proposals to change the decision-making world that surrounds us. This book provides an exhaustive overview of the most important institutional proposals as well as a systematic and theoretical discussion of their respective features and advantages. It focuses on institutional proposals aimed at taking the interests of (...) future generations more seriously, and does so from the perspective of applied political philosophy, being explicit about the underlying normative choices and the latest developments in the social sciences. It provides citizens, activists, firms, charities, public authorities, policy-analysts, students, and academics with the body of knowledge necessary to understand what our institutional options are and what they entail if we are concerned about today's excessive short-termism. (shrink)

El presente artículo estudia las representaciones de mujeres con VIH/sida, en el libro Tiempos del SIDA. Relatos de la vida real, de Myriam Francis. El trabajo inicia con un análisis sobre la exclusión de los sujetos femeninos de la literatura “seropositiva” latinoamericana. Se plantea que las pocas representaciones que existen se enfocan en “mujeres sospechosas”, lo cual se repite, hasta cierto punto, en los textos de Francis seleccionados: “La última puerta”, “La viuda alegre” y “La chica alegre”. Luego, se ofrece (...) una explicación sobre el contexto en el que surgen las historias, un “pabellón-moridero” que se describe más bien como un espacio ameno, el cual, sin embargo, enfatiza la tragicidad que rodea a cada “caso”. Después, se estudian los tres relatos mencionados, en los que se mueven los símbolos primarios del mal (la mancilla, el pecado y la culpabilidad), de manera que una mujer es representada como una “víctima inocente” y otras, como “víctimas culpables” (fundamentalmente por sus “estilos de vida nocivos”). Finalmente, el trabajo concluye que la narrativa de Francis moviliza algunos principios de la “teoría de la degeneración”, para explicar las situaciones experimentadas por los personajes femeninos y ofrecer un mensaje didáctico-moralizante. (shrink)

Chronic pain is associated with high levels of mental health issues and alterations in cognitive processing. Cognitive-behavioral models illustrate the role of memory alterations in the development and maintenance of chronic pain as well as in mental health disorders which frequently co-occur with chronic pain. This study aims to expand our understanding of specific cognitive mechanisms underlying chronic pain which may in turn shed light on cognitive processes underlying pain-related psychological distress. Individuals who reported a history of chronic pain and (...) individuals who reported no history of chronic pain were recruited from MTurk to complete an online survey including standardized measures of anxiety and depression and two sentence completion tasks that assessed autobiographical memory and future thinking specificity and content. Chi square analyses revealed that participants who endorsed experiencing chronic pain were significantly more likely to recall at least one painful and negative event and to imagine at least one anticipated painful event in their future. Two ANCOVAs were performed to examine the degree to which chronic pain endorsement influenced specificity in memory and future imagining. Individuals with a history of chronic pain and higher levels of depression symptom severity generated autobiographical memories with significantly less specificity; whereas, individuals with a history of chronic pain also generated future autobiographical events with significantly less specificity. In addition, individuals with a history of chronic pain were more likely to generate episodes related to pain when asked to recall the past or imagine the future. Further research is needed to improve our understanding of the etiology of autobiographical memory and future thinking specificity and content in the pathogenesis of mental health conditions in the context of chronic pain. (shrink)

The emerging area of philosophy of birth is invaluable, first, to diagnose fallacious assumptions about the relation between the womb and reason, and, ultimately, to challenge potentially damaging narratives with major impact on birth care. With its analysis of eighteenth-century epistemic and medical discussions about the role of the uterus in women's reasoning, this article supports two arguments: first, that women's “flawed thinking” was a premise drawn by many modern intellectual men, one that was presented as based upon empirical evidence; (...) and second, that the pervasive construction of the uterus as an element that renders women wild, uncontrollable, and irrational continues to influence contemporary obstetrics, even as today's medicine and science consider themselves to be free of any such prejudices.This article shows the role that Giacomo Casanova played in debunking these prejudices and presents his short manuscript on the issue as an important contribution to the literature of the Enlightenment, with its argument against women's supposed “natural” inferiority and for the idea that differences in education were to blame for women's subordinate position in society.Detailed analysis of the “thinking uterus” debate illuminates the different ways in which various arguments from/by the “anti-uterine” lobby were used to justify the subordination of women: sometimes emphasizing the connection between the uterus and thought and sometimes negating it, but always concluding that women's inferiority is to be found in some known or yet-to-be-discovered anatomical, and mainly sexual, deficiency or problem. (shrink)

The article proposes to sketch an analogy between, on the one hand, linguistic learning and sound dialogue in humanist music therapy and, on the other hand, certain reflections of Maurice Merleau-Ponty: in particular, the centrality of corporeality in the learning, treated in the Phenomenology of Perception and in the courses on the psychology and pedagogy of the child, and the status of inter-corporeality developed through reflections on passivity and the metaphor of flesh. We will trace an analysis of the music (...) therapy of Giulia Cremaschi Trovesi, with reference to the linguistic and musical gesture, through the Merleau-Pontian notion of praktognosia, and of the sound dialogue with reference to institution and intercorporeity. Through an interpretation of music in the terms adopted by Stéphanie Ménasé and in reference to Merleau-Pontian passivity in artistic creation, our objective is to define the musical institution of the vibrating body in music therapy in terms analogous to the institution of the subject according to Merleau-Ponty and, consequently, to find, in the sound dialogue, the intercorporeity which anticipates the individuation of the subject, by describing the communicative authenticity of the musical-therapeutic encounter. (shrink)