For over a century modern scholars have passionately debated whether Augustine’s conversion narrative from Confessions 8 is an accurate description of what ‘has really happened’ in 386 in a garden in Milan without reaching so far a consensus. However, long before modern scholars disputed the historicity of his conversion account Augustine was already confronted with the mistrust of his contemporaries who doubted the authenticity of his conversion and compelled to deal with their accusations. This article intends to show how in (...) the Confessions Augustine defends the truth of his narrative while admitting to his incredulous readers his inability to offer an exact picture of his past life, by looking at his views on memory, language and cognition, as presented mainly in the last non-narrative books of this work. (shrink)

Spirituality in Palliative Care Aimed at the ElderlyEspiritualidade no contexto de cuidados paliativos oncológicos a idososIn the last decade, spirituality has been studied in oncological palliative care for the elderly from quantitative, qualitative, and mixed perspectives. The study seeks to reveal the meaning of spirituality in this context. It reviews indexed literature from the MEDLINE database through PubMed between 2009 and 2019, which was accessed online, in full text, anonymously, and in English and Spanish. Revista Medicina Paliativa was manually searched. (...) The results include 50 subject-relevant articles and four categories. It is concluded that there are challenges related to the meaning of spirituality and quality of life, education, and research perspectives.Para citar este artículo / To reference this article / Para citar este artigoArenas-Massa A, Nocetti-de la Barra A, Fraile-Ducviq CG. La espiritualidad en contexto de cuidados paliativos oncológicos dirigidos a personas mayores. Pers Bioet. 2020;24:136-150. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5294/pebi.2020.24.2.2Recibido: 05/07/2020Aceptado: 01/09/2020Publicado: 27/11/2020. (shrink)

The concept of Smart Healthy Age-Friendly Environments (SHAFE) emphasises the comprehensive person-centred experience as essential to promoting living environments. SHAFE takes an interdisciplinary approach, conceptualising complete and multidisciplinary solutions for an inclusive society. From this approach, we promote participation, health, and well-being experiences by finding the best possible combinations of social, physical, and digital solutions in the community. This initiative emerged bottom-up in Europe from the dream and conviction that innovation can improve health equity, foster caring communities, and sustainable development. (...) Smart, adaptable, and inclusive solutions can promote and support independence and autonomy throughout the lifespan, regardless of age, gender, disabilities, cultural differences, and personal choices, as well as promote happier and fairer living places. The New European Bauhaus initiative gathers “beautiful, sustainable, and inclusive projects and ideas” to inspire a positive transformation around us. The New European Bauhaus 2024 Festival took place between 9-13 April. “Designing the perfect New European Bauhaus neighbourhood: New European Bauhaus meets SHAFE” was a Satellite Event of the Festival, held as an online workshop, organised by the SHAFE Foundation on April 9th, 2024. At the event, a group of 50 participants with a multidisciplinary background discussed how to meet the challenges of the European Garcia family to enable them to live in a perfect neighbourhood. The White Paper presents the findings of the participants with the New European Bauhaus inspiring projects and ideas to house the European Garcia family in their neighbourhood. The White Paper recommends developers, designers, planners, and policymakers to include person-centred design of social and physical environments and technologies. Although awareness of person-centred design is growing, many initiatives still hamper the inclusion of citizens or end-users throughout the development of products and services. (shrink)

The proposal of the ‘Anthropocene’ as a new geological epoch where humans represent the dominant natural force has renewed artistic interest in the ‘geopoetic’, which is mobilized by cultural producers to incite changes in personal and collective participation in planetary life and politics. This article draws attention to prior engagements with the geophysical and the political: the work of Simone Weil and of the editors of the Martinican cultural journal Tropiques, Suzanne and Aimé Césaire. Synthesizing the political and scientific shifts (...) in human-world relationships of their time, both projects are set against oppressive or narcissistic materialisms and experiment with the image of the ‘cosmic’ to cultivate a preoccupation not with a tangible materialism but with an intangible one that emphasizes process and connectivity across wide spatial and temporal scales. The writers’ movement between poetics and politics will be used to enquire what kind of socio-political work a contemporary geopoetic could potentially do. (shrink)

In discussing water justice, this paper distinguishes four concepts of water justice: Distributive justice claims a fair share of water, ecological justice focuses on the integrity of water as a vulnerable resource, cultural justice addresses values attached to water reservoirs, and procedural justice explicates fair procedures in negotiating water conflicts. After having given an overview over recent contributions to the various meanings of water justice, the paper tries to answer the question of how standards of justice can be integrated into (...) an approach that overcomes the alleged tragedies of the commons. It focuses on the example of a water reservoir whose access conditions provoke conflicts among neighbors. (shrink)

Natural law contains much social thought that predates sociology and related disciplines, and can be seen as part of the prehistory of the human sciences. Key concerns of natural law thinkers include the achievement of social life and society, and the individual’s place therein. However, there is an enduring tendency within sociology to dismiss the ahistoricism and universalism of natural law, and therefore to reject natural law thought in its entirety. This article proposes an approach that rescues the sociological relevance (...) of natural law. It draws on the respective methods of Chris Thornhill and Gary Wickham, who each seek to recover the importance of natural law for sociology. Thornhill treats natural law as a valid sociological object by focusing on its functions within society rather than engaging with its ahistorical concepts. His focus on the external functions of natural law, however, leads to a neglect of the internal conceptualisations of the social world in natural law thought. This in turn leads to a misinterpretation of Hobbes and voluntarist natural law. Wickham, on the other hand, explores in detail Hobbesian conceptions of society and the individual that Wickham argues can be utilised within contemporary sociology. This article revises Thornhill’s methodological framework in order to secure a space for the recovery of natural law as social thought. This approach allows for the recognition of natural law as an important piece of the epistemological background against which contemporary understandings of the human and society emerged. (shrink)

Dienes & Perner argue that the explicit representation of an individual to which a property is attributed requires explicit representation of the attributed property. The reasons for this conclusion are similar to the reasons why another of their conclusions may be considered suspect: A property may be explicit without an explicit representation of an individual or the predication of the property to an individual. We question the latter conclusion and draw connections to neurophysiological and cognitive evidence.

FEATURED IN EVENTAL AESTHETICS RETROSPECTIVE 1. LOOKING BACK AT 10 ISSUES OF EVENTAL AESTHETICS. In this article I ask: how to rescue “magical thinking” (a notion I inherit from Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno) in and from Hegel and imagine its possibilities for posthuman society, ethics, and aesthetics? To address this question, I read Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit through Horkheimer and Adorno, who argue that Enlightenment’s program is “the disenchantment of the world”: with the end of magical thinking and the (...) beginning of enlightened thinking came chasm and disparity between subject and object and, for Horkheimer and Adorno, the onset of barbarism. Hegel himself speaks directly to the danger of failed recognition between two consciousnesses, a failure followed by a duel to the death, in which the two figures leave each other indifferently, like things. After reading a distinctly “magical thinking” into the shape of Hegel’s dialectic, I show how contemporary posthumanism and ecopoetics make use of Hegel’s thought in order to reimagine subject-object relations in and as response to ecological crisis. I discuss how Donna Haraway, following in the traditions of Hegel and Adorno, magically thinks her way toward new models for relating more ethically (to borrow Haraway’s own terminology) to human and other-than-human others in the new century. Then, I look at how such models are being adapted in and by aesthetic practice — specifically, in the experimental ecopoetics of contemporary poet Brenda Hillman. In the end, I argue that contemporary posthumanisms and ecopoetics in fact need magical thinking in order to begin reimagining the social and the ecological and resuscitate a devastatingly enlightened world. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Mary as the Exemplar of the Body's PovertyAngela FranksRecent MariologyFollowing the trajectory of Mariology and Marian devotion for the last century or so is enough to give one whiplash. On the one hand, the declaration of the doctrine of Mary's Assumption in 1950 by Pope Pius XII represents a strand of Mariology that emphasizes her divinely granted prerogatives and glory. In popular piety, this dogmatic emphasis was mirrored by (...) devotional practices that stressed Mary's mediatorial power.1 On the other hand, many theologians were concerned that such teaching and practice obscured the centrality of Christ, the Church, and the liturgy in Christian life.2 One could see the placing of Mary within chapter 8 of Lumen Gentium less than fifteen years after the declaration of the Assumption as a rebalancing of Mariology. Lumen Gentium (LG) resituated Mary within the doctrine of the Church, echoing patristic equations of Our Lady with the Church.3 One unintended effect of the conciliar move, however, was to make devotion to Mary seem unnecessary, despite the efforts of [End Page 1097] post-conciliar popes to encourage Marian piety—in particular, John Paul II, with his Marian motto Totus Tuus.John Paul II is in many ways an exemplar of conciliar Marian devotion. His Mariology integrates Mary into ecclesiology by emphasizing her role as the paradigmatic follower of Christ.4 This discipleship is, he is careful to say, due to her maternal role and the extraordinary graces that followed from it.5 But these graces did not eliminate her need to follow her son closely; rather, they made such discipleship possible.This interplay between Mary's need and the unique graces granted to meet that need is perhaps clearest in John Paul II's presentation of Mary's faith.6 This attitude of faith is "central" to John Paul II's presentation of Mary in the encyclical Redemptoris Mater (RM), according to Joseph Ratzinger.7 Because of her faith, which is based on the prior action of God in her life (§38, quoting LG §60), she is due "a wealth of praise" that "is more than ever necessary today" (RM §34). In John Paul II, the seeming either-or of twentieth-century Mariology is dissolved, but through the introduction of a causal relationship between the two. In other words, [End Page 1098] Mary's poverty—her need for and receptivity to God—is what makes her able to be rich, to be worthy of a wealth of praise.Perhaps surprisingly, John Paul Il's presentation of Mary as transparent to the mystery of Christ echoes his theology of the body. There, he repeats a hylomorphic maxim: "The body reveals the person." In this revelation, the poverty and the wealth of the body coincide. The body is of great dignity: it can reveal the person. But it is also poor, because it does not reveal itself but rather is transparent to the inner personal mystery. In this, it resembles Mary.This essay will pick up the trail laid down by John Paul II by examining Mary under the rubric of her poverty. Her poverty, I will argue, is exemplary for the poverty of the body, and neither Mary nor the body can be understood properly without understanding poverty. In this essay, I will explore these topics by looking at the Mariology of John Paul II and Hans Urs von Balthasar, before turning to what this Mariology means for the body and for creation in general.Mary's PovertyRedemptoris Mater presents Mary as a model of pilgrim faith, one who "goes before" us on the pilgrimage (RM §§5–6 and 25–28). Mary's reliance upon faith places her among the anawim, the poor of the Lord. John Paul II quotes §55 of Lumen Gentium to note that Mary "stands out among the poor and humble of the Lord, who confidently await and receive salvation from him" (RM §§8 and 11). As the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under Joseph Ratzinger wrote around the time of the Marian encyclical, she is "totally dependent upon God and completely directed towards him, and at the side of her Son, she is... (shrink)

Als Charles Darwin im Jahr 1859 seine Theorie einer Evolution der Arten durch natürliche Auslese veröffentlichte, sah er bereits eine grosse Debatte voraus, jedoch nicht deren Ausstrahlungskraft und Langlebigkeit. Zu Beginn standen die Folgen für die Wissenschaften, den Glauben an Gott und die Moralvorstellungen im Vordergrund. Bald kamen Überlegungen über Gesellschaft, Politik, internationale Beziehungen und über Eingriffe bis hinunter auf die Ebene des Individuums und seines Erbmaterials, seiner Gene hinzu. Sozialdarwinismus, Eugenik, Rassismus galten zeitweise als wissenschaftlich legitime Diskussions- und Politikfelder. (...) Befürchtungen vor einem vermeintlichen Niedergang lassen sich bis heute angesichts der Biologisierung des Denkens scheinbar wissenschaftlich-objektiv untermauern. Gegenwärtig sind die Kontroversen noch vielfältiger, beziehen weit mehr Menschen ein als im späten 19. Jahrhundert, haben weit gravierendere Auswirkungen. Die aus elf Ländern stammenden Autorinnen und Autoren zeichnen aus unterschiedlichen disziplinären Perspektiven die Facetten einer spannenden und bis in die Gegenwart hochaktuellen Debatte nach und fragen nach der Zukunft des "Streitfalls Evolution". (shrink)

The topic of Women’s sport has engendered increasing scholarship across differing disciplines in recent years; however, in the philosophy of sport literature, it has not been as abundant as it migh...

The perception of sensory effects generated by one’s own actions is typically attenuated compared to the same effects generated externally. However, it is unclear whether this specifically relates to self-generation. Recent studies showed that sensory attenuation mainly relies on action preparation, not actual action execution. Hence, an attenuation of sensory effects generated by another person might occur if these actions can be anticipated and thus be prepared for.Here, we compared the perceived loudness of sounds generated by one’s own actions and (...) actions of another person that either could or could not be anticipated. We found an attenuation of the perceived loudness for self- as compared to other-generated sounds. This difference was independent of whether the sound-eliciting actions of the other person could be anticipated or not. Thus, sensory attenuation seems to be specifically tied to self-generation instead of being a secondary effect of agent-independent preparation for an upcoming action. (shrink)

This article asks how one can rescue magical thinking in and from Hegel and imagines its possibilities for posthuman society, ethics, and aesthetics.

RESUMEN El artículo analiza el complejo tema del derecho a la memoria como derecho humano de carácter cultural así como su consagración en el ordenamiento jurídico chileno. El trabajo alude a la problemática del reconocimiento de los nuevos derechos fundamentales y el modo de hacerlos efectivos, para lo cual se analizará la estructura de dicho derecho en cuanto a su contenido esencial, titularidad y garantías. Finalmente, se plantea el tema de la protección de los derechos implícitos a través de una (...) interpretación sistemática del sistema constitucional chileno. (shrink)