O presente artigo tem como objetivo problematizar o discurso de emagrecimento presente na mídia contemporânea. Para tanto, foi realizada uma discussão teórico-conceitual acerca de uma política de corpo como alvo das tecnologias de poder em Michel Foucault, tomando-se, como corpus empírico, reportagens da seção “dieta” de alguns exemplares das edições semanais da revista AnaMaria. Tal revista é uma mídia impressa e eletrônica, com periodicidade semanal. Na análise, utilizam-se ferramentas foucaultianas para tensionar e provocar fissuras em discursividades que reverberam pelos mais (...) diversos ambientes de circulação social e que corroboram a fabricação de um padrão corporal. Tal padrão parece ser o modelo estético vigente na atualidade, segundo o qual os corpos “devem” ser magros. Compreende-se que o corpo dos sujeitos é fabricação condizente com os contextos histórico e social aos quais pertencem, e que tais corpos são subjetivados pelas e nas relações de poder em que estão inseridos. Entende-se que há um processo de subjetivação operacionalizado não só pela revista, mas também pela mídia contemporânea em geral, através de uma interpelação sutil e convidativa. Toma-se a mídia como uma pedagogia cultural, que ensina, educa e fabrica sujeitos e subjetividades para além dos muros escolares. O referencial teórico-metodológico operou com alguns conceitos do filósofo Michel Foucault como ferramentas de análise. A pesquisa possibilitou compreender que existem processos de subjetivação que perpassam a vida dos sujeitos, aqui especialmente, modos de subjetivação atrelados ao corpo que deve transformar-se num corpo considerado normal, saudável, belo e feliz. Palavras-chave: Emagrecimento em discurso. Relações de poder. Corpo. (shrink)

O presente trabalho trata-se de uma discussão sobre algumas ferramentas da análise do discurso de Michel Foucault. Tal estudo se deu a partir de uma tese de doutorado que analisou o modo pelo qual a revista Veja coloca em funcionamento e potencializa um dispositivo da Educação Ambiental no século XXI. As análises situam-se a partir das reportagens de capa da revista Veja de 2001 até a atualidade. Evidencia-se uma determinada constituição discursiva de Educação Ambiental na revista, porém esta funciona em (...) relação a outras práticas contemporâneas. Compreende-se que o dispositivo em estudo não se fabrica apenas nos ditos da revista, mas ela é uma das formas de potencializá-lo, tornando-o visível e enunciável na atualidade. Porém, outros elementos a auxiliam e atualizam tal dispositivo, há uma rede discursiva em torno da EA muito potente e heterogênea Assim, trabalha-se com ferramentas analíticas que fortalecem o trabalho: enunciação, enunciado, discurso, dispositivo, relações de poder e modos de subjetivação. Esta empreitada de estudos alinha-se aos autores da perspectiva Pós-estruturalista e dos Estudos Culturais. O estudo tornou possível entender que há uma constituição de determinado domínio de saber, colocado em funcionamento a partir de relações de poder, que subjetivam os sujeitos a certas práticas ambientalmente “necessárias”. Nesse sentido, os ditos em torno da questão ambiental se pautam em emblemas muito caros aos pesquisadores da EA, isso porque, parece, muitas vezes, que lhes é repassada a tarefa de encontrar o caminho certo para fazer uma adequada Educação Ambiental. Na contramão de tais emblemas, o movimento do trabalho em questão é o de colocar-se a pensar de que modo a EA foi se conjecturando e funcionando como um dispositivo potente neste século. Palavras-chave: Educação Ambiental. Ferramentas Analíticas. Michel Foucault. (shrink)

Humor is a contextual phenomenon that exists in all societies, although the impact of humor may differ across different cultures. The data for this research was collected using an ethnographic approach, incorporating participant observation and semi-structured interviews. Based in three different South Korean organizations, this research offered the opportunity to interact in depth with workers of varying ages, genders, hierarchical levels, and organizational roles. Observations were complimented by 46 in-depth interviews and ad hoc follow-up discussions. This paper adopts a Confucian (...) perspective to understand the perception and use of workplace humor in these South Korean organizations. Confucian philosophy emphasizes the value of formality within society in order to maintain respectful relationships between individuals. We suggest that humor is used in these South Korean workplaces to support traditional Confucian values of harmony and hierarchy, and the changing cultural values in these workplaces influence humor perceptions in complex ways. The Confucian value of harmony maintained through the idea of hierarchy creates pressure for organizational members, to accept and cope with contentious humor in the workplace. In particular, the clash between the need to maintain harmonious relationships in the workplace (through obedience towards superiors) and the desire to reject some types of humor highlights issues for younger organizational members. Internal conflict creates distress for younger employees who may hold more Westernized values and this affects their emotional, psychological well-being. This study presents a cross-cultural perspective to organizational humor, and suggests that humor may not always be a positive experience for organizational members, but instead may create psychological distress in some employees. (shrink)

Desde la perspectiva de la «sociología del espacio» el estudio explora las conexiones que se dan entre los factores ideológicos, los siste­mas de organización clínica y las evoluciones arquitectónicas, y sus re­percusiones en clave de humanización asistencial. Para ello se ha realizado una investigación etnográfica de veinticuatro meses de duración en seis paritorios del servicio estatal de salud de una re­gión del sur de España. La técnica de investigación fue la observa­ción participante, acumulando un total de trescientas veinticuatro horas de (...) análisis. Los resultados muestran cómo las disposiciones arquitectónicas están íntimamente ligadas a los paradigmas y cul­turas obstétricas preexistentes, tendiendo desde las perspectivas tecnocráticas, en clave orgánica, a una fragmentación del espacio asistencial que deshumaniza el proceso, y desde las cosmovisio­nes holístico-humanísticas, en clave de continuum, a una reinte­gración espacio-asistencial que contribuye a la humanización. (shrink)

The scientific literature highlights the risk of the appearance of internalizing and externalizing symptoms, together with difficulties in the academic area, linked to diagnosis of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. This is normally assessed by teachers and primary caregivers, disregarding the self-perception of the adolescents themselves, which limits detection of this disorder at an evolutionary stage. Our aim was to analyze the psychometric properties of a self-report for ADHD in adolescence and its relationship with psychopathology and academic performance. This study assessed (...) an incidental sample of 267 students from secondary schools in the Region of Murcia, Spain, using the EDAH questionnaire adapted for self-report, in order to analyze its psychometric properties in assessing ADHD. The Youth Self-Report and the Brief Self-Control Scale were also used to determine their association with psychopathological, self-control and academic performance variables. An ADHD prevalence of between 3.7 and 13.1% was observed depending on the established cut-off point. The adapted EDAH showed adequate reliability indices and explained a high variance percentage. Adolescents with anxiety/depression difficulties, dissocial behavior, aggressiveness, and poor performance in mathematics showed a higher amount of ADHD symptoms. Moreover, self-control, dissocial behavior, age, and performance in Social Sciences acted as predictors of the disorder. The good psychometric properties of this questionnaire and its adequate correspondence with other variables of interest suggest it is an appropriate self-report instrument to assess ADHD in adolescence. (shrink)

This paper responds to the contributions by Alexander Bird, Nathan Wildman, David Yates, Jennifer McKitrick, Giacomo Giannini & Matthew Tugby, and Jennifer Wang. I react to their comments on my 2015 book Potentiality: From Dispositions to Modality, and in doing so expands on some of the arguments and ideas of the book.

Dutch euthanasia legislation states that an act of euthanasia is only permissible if it is based on a voluntary request made in a situation of unbearable suffering to which there are no alternatives.The central question of this article is whether these criteria can be satisfied simultaneously. In an analysis of several (partly overlapping) definitions of voluntariness it is argued that there are circumstances in which this question should be answered negatively.The possible incompatibility of the criteria reveals a tension between different (...) defences of the permissibility of euthanasia. (shrink)

Enlightened experience (i.e. awakened to the truth) is the most valuable one in most religions including Christianity and Buddhism. As well-known cases of such experience are Apocalypse St. Paul and many Grand Zen masters in Zen Buddhism, it is natural for us to believe that the enlighten is for very talented or speciallytrained ones. However, applying the complexity theory on the structure of enlightenment, based on the power law function, selforganized criticality, phase transition, and emergence, it is clear that the (...) full awakening can be experienced by everyone in daily life. Furthermore, such experiences are not necessary to be limited in religious one. Rediscovering the path to full awakening by complexity theory leads to the demythologization of the enlightenment in Korean Zen Buddhism, which emphasizes a hard apprenticeship in temple for long periods for the purpose. (shrink)

A hard choice is a situation in which an agent is unable to make a justifiable choice from a given menu of alternatives. Our objective is to present a systematic treatment of the axiomatic structure of such situations. To do so, we draw on and contribute to the study of choice functions that can be indecisive, i.e., that may fail to select a non-empty set for some menus. In this more general framework, we present new characterizations of two well-known choice (...) rules, the maximally dominant choice rule and the top-cycle choice rule. Together with existing results, this yields an understanding of the circumstances in which hard choices arise. (shrink)

Amsterdam University Press is a leading publisher of academic books, journals and textbooks in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Our aim is to make current research available to scholars, students, innovators, and the general public. AUP stands for scholarly excellence, global presence, and engagement with the international academic community.

The phrase "natural kind term" has come into the linguistic and philosophical literature in connection with well-known work of Kripke (1972) and Putnam (1970, 1975a). I use that phrase here in the sense it has acquired from those and subseqnent works on related topics. This is not the transparent sense of the phrase. That is, if I am right in what follows there are words for kinds of things existing in nature which are not natural kind terms in the current (...) sense - e.g. planet, woman, and weed. I use the term "nondescriptional", following Salmon (1981), to mean "lacking a Fregean sense", where a Fregean sense is taken to be a property or group of properties semantically associated with an expression which determines its denotation. I hope that the term "nondescriptional" will be clarified in subsequent discussion, but perhaps a few words about it and its opposite, "descriptional", would be useful here. These terms (as Salmon notes (p.15, n. 11)) should be taken as technical terms. The idea is that descriptional words, of which bachelor is the overwhelmingly favorite example, express a semantic content, or sense, which is what mediates their denotation. Entities fall in their denotation in virtue of possessing the property or properties expressed as their sense. (It is not necessary, however, that this sense be as easily paraphrasable with descriptive synonyms as it is typically held to be in the case of bachelor, or even that it be paraphrasable at all.) In the case of nondescriptional words there is no Fregean sense to mediate the link between word and object. Hence such terms are described by what Salmon, following Kaplan, calls "the theory of direct reference". What it is that does associate such terms with their denotations is another question which will be touched on briefly at the end. I have several aims in this paper. The first is to defend a conservative position on nondescriptionality. I will argue that relatively few natural language words have this property. My other aims are primarily clarificatory. Among the issues I would like to clarify are those connected with the determination of this property and flae explanation of why it exists, its relationship with other properties such as rigid designation and essentiality, and its significance for lexical semantics. The organization of the paper is as follows. The first section identifies the position taken here on the question of which expressions are nondescriptional and provides a general defense of it. The second section is a critical examination of criteria associated with nondescriptionality. In the third section provide further defense for the conservative position, and in the fourth section we turn to related issues in lexical semantics. (shrink)

Ulrich Beck's best selling Risk Society established risk on the sociological agenda. It brought together a wide range of issues centering on environmental, health and personal risk, provided a rallying ground for researchers and activists in a variety of social movements and acted as a reference point for state and local policies in risk management. The Risk Society and Beyond charts the progress of Beck's ideas and traces their evolution. It demonstrates why the issues raised by Beck reverberate widely throughout (...) social theory and covers the new risks that Beck did not foresee, associated with the emergence of new technologies, genetic and cybernetic. The book is unique because it offers both an introduction to the main arguments in Risk Society and develops a range of critical discussions of aspects of this and other works of Beck. (shrink)

Szabó follows Heim in viewing familiarity, rather than uniqueness, as the essence of the definite article, but attempts to derive both familiarity and uniqueness implications pragmatically, assigning a single semantic interpretation to both the definite and indefinite articles. I argue that if there is no semantic distinction between the articles, then there is no way to derive these differences between them pragmatically.

In 'Yeogi (禮記)', the Chinese scriptures of Confucianism, they recoded the solar calendar of modern viewpoints. According to the ancient document, the 24 solar terms was one of seasonal divisions in a year. The regularly change of the four seasons play an important part in the national economic project. For a national economy depended on agriculture in East Asia of ancient times, the administration to pay no regard to the change of the season was directly connected to the fall of (...) the nation. And then the legislator must enact laws to reflect the change of the season. According to the 'Wolryeong (月令)' in 'Yeogi (禮記)', there is recoded national regulations to suit with the each twelve momth. The first month of spring is the prime of the year (February). The month shows sign of new livingthings. The ruler take order to protect the first breath of spring and ought to put a ban on the military training and labor mobilization. The reasons are to safeguard the new life and not to interrupt the preparation for farming. Confucian attach value to the nature within a human’s way of life. Therefore the norm of human do correlate closely with the principle of nature. The rule of Wuju (宇宙) was not a simple concept of the natural phenomenon and Cheon (天) was not the Almighty for himself. Cheon was just the existence of virtue and moral influence in the confidence of man. And Ji (地) was the Mother of all things. In this space man had to manage the world in sympathy with the process of cheonJi (天地); Cheonsi (天時), JIri (地利), Inhwa (人和). (shrink)

This paper argues that the philosophical analysis of moral responsibility would benefit from focusing more on the social freedom of individuals. In a critique of Frankfurt, it is argued that an individual only is responsible for the consequences of her action if she had the opportunity not be responsible for them. The resulting theory of moral responsibility is applied to the analysis of collective decision processes, and in particular to political decision making. The main conclusion is that, though we do (...) not bear ‘absolute responsibility’ for all of the consequences of our actions, our moral and political responsibility is larger than often is assumed. (shrink)

Dispositionalism about modality is the view that metaphysical modality is a matter of the dispositions possessed by actual objects. In a recent paper, David Yates has raised an important worry about the formal adequacy of dispositionalism. This paper responds to Yates’s worry by developing a reply that Yates discusses briefly but dismisses as ad hoc: an appeal to a ’plenitude of powers’ including such powers as the necessarily always manifested power for 2+2\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} (...) \begin{document}$$2+2$$\end{document} to be 4. I argue that the reply is not ad hoc at all, by defending the metaphysics of dispositions that should underly it. I then argue, first, that a proper understanding of dispositions’ degrees provides us with an argument for such necessarily always manifested dispositions; second, that all the natural attempts to block that argument can be resisted without being ad hoc; and third, that pragmatic considerations explain our intuitive resistance to the ascription of necessarily always manifested dispositions. Dispositionalism can be formally adequate after all. (shrink)

Reviewing the last fifty years of interaction between religion and science in Catholicism in Southern Europe, common traits are clearly evident: a late awareness of the importance of this interaction and a theological reluctance to address science or to account for its progress. Early signs of the engagement between religion and science appear as a consequence of the work of the French anthropologist and theologian Teilhard de Chardin. In Italy and Spain in the last fifteen years, we see a substantive (...) growth in the rise of research centers and academic activities devoted to exploring the common ground between science, philosophy, and theology. However, despite all these efforts and the many positive signs, there remains a long way to go for theology to consider science as a true challenge and an inspiration and to integrate it into the theological curriculum. (shrink)

This paper presents a non-preference-based approach to the analysis of negative freedom. It is argued that a proper understanding of (different conceptions of) negative freedom necessitates an examination of the consequences of changes in the set of feasible alternatives. For this reason the paper does not focus on freedom rankings of opportunity sets but on freedom rankings of opportunity situations, i.e., pairs consisting of a feasible set and an opportunity set. Three different freedom rankings of opportunity situations are axiomatically characterised. (...) Each of the three rankings forms a generalisation of the purely cardinality-based freedom ranking of opportunity sets presented by Pattanaik and Xu (1990). (shrink)

Cette introduction explique la perception, reconnue par Husserl sous le titre de "donation par esquisses". Il s'agit d'opérer une réduction radicale qui va de la critique du néant au monde comme a priori de tout apparaître. A ce monde correspond un sujet dont le sens d'être fait problème puisqu'il est à la fois un moment du monde et en rapport avec la totalité comme telle.

L'oeuvre de Merleau-Ponty est tout entiere commandee par le souci de mettre rigoureusement en oeuvre le mot d'ordre husserlien de retour aux choses memes, ce qui exige, conformement au geste amorce par Husserl dans la Krisis, de reconnaitre l'oeuvre de l'idealisation -c'est-a-dire de l'objectivation- la meme ou elle se fait oublier, afin de la neutraliser. A l'instar de Bergson, pour qui la tache de la philosophie etait d'aller chercher l'experience au-dessus du tournant ou, s'inflechissant dans le sens de l'utilite, elle (...) devient proprement l'experience humaine, pour Merleau-Ponty, la tache de la pensee est de se situer a ce tournant ou l'experience s'accomplit et se voile a la fois dans des productions ou elle se fait proprement humaine, de definir un sens de l'Etre anterieur a la bifurcation du preobjectif et de l'oeuvre idealisante. Le but des recherches est de tenter de clarifier la nature exacte du tournant de l'experience ainsi que le projet phenomenologique merleau-pontien. (shrink)

This article analyses the relationship between rights and capabilities in order to get a better grasp of the kind of consequentialism that the capability theory represents. Capability rights have been defined as rights that have a capability as their object (rights to capabilities). Such a definition leaves the relationship between capabilities and rights to a great extent underspecified since nothing is said about the nature of those rights. Hence, it is not precluded that they are mere negative liberties, something that (...) capability theorists deny. On the other hand, to say that all capability rights are substantive in the sense that they themselves are capabilities (rights as capabilities) will in a significant number of cases fail to match well with our intuitions. This article presents an account of the relationship between rights and capabilities that avoids these problems of underspecification and of plausibility, respectively. First, it is argued that to take the idea of capability rights seriously, three new ‘list issues’ need to be addressed. Second, developing a point made by Nussbaum, it is argued that capability rights are to be defined as being purely instrumental. Whereas the resulting analysis of capability rights solves the problems of underspecification and plausibility, it raises doubts about the claim that the capability approach gives more importance to rights than do traditional forms of consequentialism. (shrink)

Trends in moral psychology largely support the role that emotion plays in moral cognition with human lesion studies offering the most compelling evidence to date. Specifically, data from ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) patients on moral judgment tasks has suggested the necessity of having intact emotion to behave in morally appropriate ways. However, patients with vmPFC damage also have deficits in a variety of complex judgment and decision-making tasks, regardless of whether emotion is involved. This paper argues that a basic information (...) processing perspective of vmPFC functionality is a better interpretation of vmPFC patient deficits, specifically with the vmPFC being necessary for value assessment rather than being specific to emotion. (shrink)

Contemporary issues involving knowledge and science examined from a constructivist-pragmatist perspective often labeled "relativism." Individual chapters include a review of the difference between constructivist-pragmatist epistemology and "social constructivism;" an examination of recent writings by Bruno Latour; a critique of computational methods in literary studies; a skeptical look at current efforts to "integrate" the humanities and the natural sciences; and reflections on the social dynamics of belief in relation to denials of climate change and to hopes expressed by environmentalists.

Recent theories of negative freedom see it as a value-neutral concept; the definition of freedom should not be in terms of specific moral values. Specifically, preferences or desires do not enter into the definition of freedom. If preferences should so enter then Berlin's problem that a person may enhance their freedom by changing their preferences emerges. This paper demonstrates that such a preference-free conception brings its own counter-intuitive problems. It concludes that these problems might be avoided if the description of (...) the constraints which specify an agent's lack of freedom include the intentions of those who constrain the agents. (Published Online July 31 2007) Footnotes1 Versions of this paper have been read to a diverse set of academics in Bayreuth, Germany; Groningen, Netherlands; LSE, UK; and in Dublin, Ireland. We would like to thank participants at those sessions for their comments. We also thank anonymous referees, Ian Carter and Luc Bovens for their help in improving the paper. (shrink)

This paper makes a contribution to the further development of the game-theoretic analysis of rights. The model presented here differs in several respects from the existing models. First of all, a distinction is made between outcome-oriented and action-oriented rights, a distinction which is closely related to the distinction between active and passive rights. Second, the legal-theoretic notions of negative and positive rights are formally defined. Third, we not only discuss the definition of rights, but also the way rights can be (...) violated. Using the distinction between negative and positive rights on the one hand, and between active and passive rights on the other, four different types of basic rights are distinguished. For each of these rights, the situations in which they can be said to be respected are examined. We thereby distinguish two possible sources of obstruction: by (groups of) individuals, and by law. Finally, the question of the possible realization of rights is examined. Depending on how the problem of the possible mutual incompatibility of rights is addressed, two distinct approaches are examined. It turns out that in both approaches the possible realization of rights crucially depends on characteristics of the 'state of nature'. (shrink)