This research focuses on examining the relationship between some attributes of assurance providers and the level of sustainability assurance. By using the propensity to issue negative conclusions in the assurance statement as an indicator of the level of assurance, we examine whether the brand name and industry specialisation of the practitioners have an impact on the assurance opinion issued. Using an international sample of 1233 firm-year observations over the period 2007–2014, the findings document the impact of the brand reputation and (...) industry specialisation of assurance providers on the level of assurance. The probability of detecting material errors and omissions in a sustainability report is higher if it is verified by a Big 4 auditing firm and by an industry expert as an assurance practitioner. The greater experience in providing audit services and the relevant skills and training provided by Big 4 firms, as well as the greater knowledge and experience of industry experts, increase the propensity to report more accurate opinions about a sustainability report. The findings are robust for alternative measures for the level of assurance and the industry specialisation. (shrink)

This paper aims to examine the credibility value of sustainability assurance and the type of assurance provider on cost of capital. A large sample of international companies from the period 2007–2014 was used to develop our models of analysis. We find a greater decrease in cost of capital for companies that publish and assure their social and environmental reports. Thus, voluntary sustainability disclosures decrease the cost of capital. However, companies also have the opportunity to reinforce this decrease by providing an (...) assurance statement, so increasing the credibility of corporate social responsibility information. In addition, the decrease in the cost of capital is significantly higher when such assurance is provided by a top-tier accountancy firm instead of by engineering or consultancy firms; this result supports also the reputational capital of accountancy firms. (shrink)

This article analyzes a panel of 550 international firms, for the period 2004 to 2010, to compare the role of female directors in family and non-family firms in promoting responsible practices. Many studies have associated the presence of women on the board with a higher degree of socially responsible commitment. However, we found that this is much less so in family firms than in non-family firms. In family firms, corporate social responsibility commitment does not vary significantly with the presence of (...) female directors, as the latter tend to behave in accordance with the family orientation toward CSR. This orientation depends on the stakeholders being addressed, with greater social responsibility shown toward external stakeholders than internal ones. (shrink)

La investigación pretende implementar una propuesta de intervención psicológica que fortalezca las estrategias de afrontamiento y habilidades sociales de las personas privadas de la libertad [PPL], internas en el complejo penitenciario y carcelario de Jamundí, que aporte al proceso de resocialización y prevención de conductas disruptivas y suicidas en el marco del programa institucional INPEC “Preservación de la vida”. La metodología cuenta con un enfoque mixto, diseño explicativo secuencial, alcance explicativo – exploratorio de corte transversal. La muestra: conformada por 80 (...) PPL seleccionada por conveniencia. Resultados esperados: Fortalecimiento estrategias de afrontamiento y habilidades para la vida, disminución de conductas disruptivas. (shrink)

Previous studies on body ownership illusions have shown that under certain multimodal conditions, healthy people can experience artificial body-parts as if they were part of their own body, with direct physiological consequences for the real limb that gets ‘substituted’. In this study we wanted to assess (a) whether healthy people can experience ‘missing’ a body-part through illusory ownership of an amputated virtual body, and (b) whether this would cause corticospinal excitability changes in muscles associated with the ‘missing’ body-part. Forty right-handed (...) participants saw a virtual body from a first person perspective but for half of them the virtual body was missing a part of its right arm. Single pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation was applied before and after the experiment to left and right motor cortices. Motor evoked potentials (MEPs) were recorded from the first dorsal interosseous (FDI) and the extensor digitorum communis (EDC) of each hand. We found that the stronger the illusion of amputation and arm ownership, the more the reduction of MEP amplitudes of the EDC muscle for the contralateral sensorimotor cortex. In contrast, no association was found for the EDC amplitudes in the ipsilateral cortex and for the FDI amplitudes in both contralateral and ipsilateral cortices. Our study provides evidence that a short-term illusory perception of missing a body-part can trigger inhibitory effects on corticospinal pathways and importantly in the absence of any limb deafferentation or disuse. (shrink)

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) in its most common form results in cognitive changes in memory function leading to dementia due to underlying neurodegenerative disease. Recent research advancements in AD...

This article analyzes the relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) decoupling and financial market outcomes. CSR decoupling refers to the gap between CSR disclosure and CSR performance. More specifically, we analyze the effect of CSR decoupling on analysts’ forecast errors, cost of capital, and access to finance. We also examine the moderating effect of forecast errors on relationships between CSR decoupling and cost of capital and access to finance. For a sample of U.S. firms consisting of 7,681 firm-year observations for (...) the period 2006–2015, our empirical evidence supports the idea that a wider gap results in higher analysts’ forecast errors, a greater cost of capital, and reduced access to finance. In addition, our results show that forecast errors enhance the effect of the CSR decoupling on cost of capital and access to financial resources. We also note that external monitoring, in the form of greater analysts’ coverage, reduces CSR decoupling. (shrink)

La tesis de Søren Kierkegaard, Sobre el concepto de ironía en constantereferencia a Sócrates, contiene una interesante crítica de la pura ironía endos sentidos: a) la pura ironía es una postura incoherente y por tantoirrealizable; b) la búsqueda de la pura ironía es moralmente débil,psicológicamente destructiva y culmina en el límite de las costumbres. Eneste ensayo intento primero clarificar el pensamiento de Kierkegaard de lapura ironía como “negatividad infinita y absoluta”. Luego planteo unacrítica enfática de la pura ironía. Finalmente considero (...) una distinciónteológica en la crítica de Kierkegaard. Argumento que esta característicade la exposición kierkegaardiana puede y debe distinguirse de la críticaética de la pura ironía. Mi objetivo final en este ensayo es revelar laplausibilidad de la crítica de Kierkeggard a la pura ironía. (shrink)

Este texto se centra en la génesis de las ciencias sociales a través de una reflexión analítico- descriptiva sobre la sistematización de la ciencia. La ciencia es una creación del ser humano y constituye la mejor herramienta para adquirir conocimientos acerca de su entorno, de sí mismo, del universo... Debe ser interdisciplinaria y para dar soporte a este empeño, hemos tenido que elegir, y hemos optado por comparar la sociología con la filosofía buscando aportaciones (implícitas o explícitas) de prestigiosos pensadores.

We highlight how Corporate Social Responsibility can be strategically used against the negative perception from earnings management. Using international data, we analyse the effect of CSR and EM on the cost of capital and corporate reputation. Results confirm that CSR strategy is positively valued by investors and other stakeholders. Contrary to EM, CSR has a positive effect on corporate reputation and lowers the cost of capital. In addition, we also find that the favourable effect of CSR on cost of capital (...) is consistently more intense in firms that show signs of EM indicating that the market does not identify when CSR practices are used as a strategy to mask EM. We also demonstrate how institutional factors influence the above relationship. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:preface In this issue, one cluster of articles presents scholarly and creative work focused on Latin American queer politics. Each article reveals queer challenges—theoretical, aesthetic, political, ideological, libidinal, corporeal—to prevailing logics of heteronormativity and neoliberalism, and to asymmetrical processes of knowledge production and circulation. Rafael de la Dehesa examines how political responses to AIDS in Brazil enabled surprising alliances between NGOs, activists, and the state, which produced radical social (...) change and, at times, engendered exclusion and vulnerability. Christine Keating and Amy Lind’s essay explores indigenous and transfeminist efforts to transform the Ecuadorian constitution, producing new conceptions of both state and family. Constanza Tabbush and Melina Gaona trace the rise and fall of a neighborhood organization in Argentina called Tupac Amaru, which provided a space of encounter for lesbian, non-gender normative, and marginalized women. In a review of recent work on Latin American sexualities, Juan Camilo Galeano Sánchez finds LGBT people across Latin America and the diaspora deploying “queer revolutionary gestures” as a form of resistance to social, political, and economic marginalization. María Amelia Viteri’s commentary examines the intellectual trajectories of a network of queer scholars from across the Americas. The art essay by Tara Daly engages Iquitos artist Christian Bendayán’s visual efforts to queer prevailing conceptions of the Amazon, and tatiana de la tierra’s* poems offer a deep celebration of female eroticism. * We have spelled tatiana de la tierra’s name in lower case in accordance with the wishes of her literary executors. 256Preface Another cluster of essays highlights reproductive rights and race in Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. Gabriela Arguedas Ramírez and Lynn M. Morgan study the tactics that right-wing, US-based organizations deploy against sexual and reproductive rights in Mexico and Central America. Jennifer L. Shoaff examines the Dominican cultural construction of the Haitian mother as “beggar-mother,” which shores up ideas of pathological black maternity. Ana-Maurine Lara’s article considers the gendered and sexual logics of anti-blackness, and anti-Haitianism, in the Dominican Republic. The provocation for our cluster on representations of queer identities and politics in Latin America came, broadly, from developments in Latin America in recent decades: the wave of LGBT organizing around issues from same-sex marriage to transgender rights, alongside the continued, if not escalated, violence against trans, travestis, and other queer people in countries throughout the region. More immediately, it came from a symposium on Latin American/Latin@ queer and sexuality studies, cosponsored by the Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies (CLACLS) and the Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies Department at the University of Massachusetts (UMass), Amherst, in March 2013. Several of the papers published here were initially presented at that event and have been complemented and extended by other analytical essays and creative material on similar questions. Based on their familiarity with the debates, Sonia Alvarez, UMass CLACLS Director and professor of political science, and Amy Lind, head of the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Cincinnati, offered invaluable input for this issue, and we thank them for their intellectual generosity and collaborative spirit. Three of the articles in the cluster take us inside the complex relations between queer movements and neoliberal institutions, illustrating the distinctive ways these dynamics play out in different national contexts and political configurations. In “NGOs, Governmentality, and the Brazilian Response to AIDS: A Multistranded Genealogy of the Current Crisis,” Rafael de la Dehesa argues that the AIDS crisis served as a “doorway to the state” for marginalized actors, such as sex workers and LGBT activists. These groups pushed for and won a national AIDS program that dramatically reduced rates of mortality and new infections in Brazil in the 1990s through universal access to treatment and a nonstigmatizing approach to prevention. Its success was based, in part, on World Bank Preface 257 loans and, in part, on a participatory model of public-private partnerships characteristic of neoliberal government. De la Dehesa argues that, “Far from encapsulating activism in a seamless web of biopolitical management... nodes of articulation between officials and activists became sites of conflict and productive tension.” However, while the alliances between NGOs... (shrink)

This article sets forth a compositional model of ideology by drawing on the tradition of historical materialism and further developing its insights into the aesthetic composition of reality. It demonstrates how ideology is not simply a set of false beliefs but is rather the process by which social agents are composed over time in every dimension of their existence, including their thoughts, practices, perceptions, representations, values, affects, desires, and unconscious drives. By working through a number of diverse debates and authors—ranging (...) from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to Louis Althusser, Eduardo Galeano, Rosaura Sánchez, and Paulo Freire—it thereby elucidates how ideology is best understood as an aesthetic process that includes aspect of sense and sense-making, and that therefore requires a collective, cultural revolution as its antidote. (shrink)

Este trabajo trata sobre el pensamiento político del humanista español Benito Arias Montano . Consta de dos partes: en la primera se estudia la actuación política de Arias Montano como consejero del rey Felipe II en Flandes; en la segunda se comenta elDavid , obra publicada por Arias Montano en colaboración con el artista holandés Philippe Galle en Amberes, donde se puede apreciar su alegoría sacro política.PALABRAS CLAVE: Arias Montano, Philippe Galle, Felipe II, política, República Cristiana (...) Católica, metafórica teocrática, humanismo bíblico, historia sagrada, historia profana, tacitismo, Campos Sánchez-Bordona, Sánchez Lora This paper examines the Spanish humanist Benito Arias Montano’s political thought, divided into two parts. Firstly, a study of the Arias Montano’s activity as advisor to King Philip II in Flanders. Secondly, the comment on his work David , published in collaboration with the Dutch artist Philip Galle in Antwerp, and in which its possible appreciate his sacred political allegory.KEYWORDS: Arias Montano, Philip Galle, Philip II, Christian Catholic Republic, biblical humanism, sacred history, profane history, tacitism, Campos Sánchez-Bordona, Sánchez Lora. (shrink)

As a continuation of the work of the third author in [5], we make further observations on the features of Galois cohomology in the general model theoretic context. We make explicit the connection between forms of definable groups and first cohomology sets with coefficients in a suitable automorphism group. We then use a method of twisting cohomology (inspired by Serre’s algebraic twisting) to describe arbitrary fibres in cohomology sequences—yielding a useful “finiteness” result on cohomology sets. Applied to the special case (...) of differential fields and Kolchin’s constrained cohomology, we complete results from [3] by proving that the first constrained cohomology set of a differential algebraic group over a bounded, differentially large, field is countable. (shrink)

Contemporary literature in philosophy of action seems to be divided overthe place of action in the natural causal world. I think that a disagreementabout ontology underlies the division. I argue here that human action isproperly understood only by reference to a category of process or activity,where this is not a category of particulars.

Testimony is an invaluable source of knowledge. We rely on the reports of those around us for everything from the ingredients in our food and medicine to the identity of our family members. Recent years have seen an explosion of interest in the epistemology of testimony. Despite the multitude of views offered, a single thesis is nearly universally accepted: testimonial knowledge is acquired through the process of transmission from speaker to hearer. In this book, Jennifer Lackey shows that this (...) thesis is false and, hence, that the literature on testimony has been shaped at its core by a view that is fundamentally misguided. She then defends a detailed alternative to this conception of testimony: whereas the views currently dominant focus on the epistemic status of what speakers believe, Lackey advances a theory that instead centers on what speakers say. The upshot is that, strictly speaking, we do not learn from one another's beliefs - we learn from one another's words. Once this shift in focus is in place, Lackey goes on to argue that, though positive reasons are necessary for testimonial knowledge, testimony itself is an irreducible epistemic source. This leads to the development of a theory that gives proper credence to testimony's epistemologically dual nature: both the speaker and the hearer must make a positive epistemic contribution to testimonial knowledge. The resulting view not only reveals that testimony has the capacity to generate knowledge, but it also gives appropriate weight to our nature as both socially indebted and individually rational creatures. The approach found in this book will, then, represent a radical departure from the views currently dominating the epistemology of testimony, and thus is intended to reshape our understanding of the deep and ubiquitous reliance we have on the testimony of those around us. (shrink)

Con el objetivo de evidenciar la forma en que la diversidad sociodemográfica ha resignificado el proceso de desarrollo territorial y origina líneas de fuga que trascienden la hegemonía de los poderes económicos-políticos-ambientales en los Llanos-Orientales, se realiza una metodología experimental que combina análisis situacionales, la genealogía, y la reconstrucción histórica de fenómenos sociales a través de 87 entrevistas a líderes sociales entre el 2019-2021. Los resultados muestran un territorio de activa conexión cultural que favorecen la lucha contra hegemónica dentro de (...) las metáforas de “el mito del Estado nación” y “la imposibilidad de generar alternativas”. El análisis expone la existencia de rebeliones de conducta a través de resistencias cotidianas creativas, políticas y culturales, que favorecen el poder de la confianza, la solidaridad, la cooperación, el afecto, así como los liderazgos colectivos. Se concluye que el poder central no tiene la capacidad de capturar estas resistencias ya que no tiene la potencia analítica para percibir la reconfiguración del espíritu humano ni las variaciones del tejido social. (shrink)

Civil society organizations (CSOs) have significantly impacted on the politics of health research and the field of bioethics. In the globalHIVepidemic,CSOs have served a pivotal stakeholder role. The dire need for development of new prevention technologies has raised critical challenges for the ethical engagement of community stakeholders inHIVresearch. This study explored the perspectives ofCSOrepresentatives involved inHIVprevention trials (HPTs) on the impact of premature trial closures on stakeholder engagement. Fourteen respondents fromSouthAfrican and internationalCSOs representing activist and advocacy groups, community mobilisation initiatives, (...) and human and legal rights groups were purposively sampled based on involvement inHPTs. Interviews were conducted fromFebruary‐May 2010. Descriptive analysis was undertaken across interviews and key themes were developed inductively.CSOrepresentatives largely described positive outcomes of recent microbicide andHIVvaccine trial terminations, particularly inSouthAfrica, which they attributed to improvements in stakeholder engagement. Ongoing challenges to community engagement included the need for principled justifications for selective stakeholder engagement at strategic time‐points, as well as the need for legitimate alternatives toCABs as mechanisms for engagement. Key issues forCSOs in relation to research were also raised. (shrink)

Let ‘semantic relevance’ be the thesis that the wide semantic properties of representational mental states (like beliefs and desires) are causally relevant to behavior. A popular way of arguing for semantic relevance runs as follows: start with a sufficient counterfactual condition for causal or explanatory relevance, and show that wide semantic properties meet it with respect to behavior (e.g., Loewer & Lepore (1987,1989), Rescorla (2014), Yablo (2003)).This paper discusses an in‐principle limitation of this strategy: even the most sophisticated counterfactual criteria (...) systematically misclassify irrelevant properties as relevant when they stand in certain kinds of modal co‐variation or ‘entanglement’ relations to genuinely relevant properties. This entanglement problem, I argue, is more general and more serious than proponents of the counterfactual strategy have recognized: it threatens recent interventionist arguments for semantic relevance, and is not easily solved by appeal to proportionality or naturalness. I end by suggesting that proponents of semantic relevance may need to shift their attention from patterns of counterfactuals to the lawful psychological generalizations that explain them. (shrink)

In this collection of original essays, international scholars put Asian traditions, such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism, into conversation with one or more contemporary feminist philosophies, founding a new mode of inquiry that attends to diverse voices and the complex global relationships that define our world. -/- These cross-cultural meditations focus on the liberation of persons from suffering, oppression, illusion, harmful conventions and desires, and other impediments to full personhood by deploying a methodology that traverses multiple philosophical styles, historical (...) texts, and frames of reference. Hailing from the discipline of philosophy in addition to Asian, gender, and religious studies, the contributors offer a fresh take on the classic concerns of free will, consciousness, knowledge, objectivity, sexual difference, embodiment, selfhood, the state, morality, and hermeneutics. One of the first anthologies to embody the practice of feminist comparative philosophy, this collection creatively and effectively engages with global, cultural, and gender differences within the realms of scholarly inquiry and theory construction. -/- http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-16624-9/asian-and-feminist-philosophies-in-dialogue. (shrink)

Emotional stimuli (e.g. words, images) are often remembered better than neutral stimuli. However, little is known about how memory is affected by an environmentally induced emotional state (without any overtly emotional occurrences) – the focus of this study. Participants were randomly assigned to discovery (n = 305) and replication (n = 306) subsamples and viewed a desktop virtual environment before rating their emotions and completing objective (i.e. item, temporal-order, duration) and subjective (e.g. vividness, sensory detail, coherence) memory measures. In both (...) samples, a Partial Least Squares Correlation analysis showed that an emotional state characterised by high negative emotion (i.e. threat, fear, anxiety) and arousal was reliably associated with better memory in both objective (i.e. item) and subjective (i.e. vividness and sensory detail) domains. No reliable associations were observed for any temporal memory measures (objective or subjective). Thus, an environmentally induced state of negative emotion corresponds with enhanced memory for indices of episodic memory pertaining to “what” happened, but not necessarily “when” it happened. (shrink)

Introduction -- Elucidating complexity theories -- Complexity in the natural sciences -- Complexity in social theory -- Towards transdisciplinarity -- Complexity in philosophy: complexification and the limits to knowledge -- Complexity in ethics -- Earth in the anthropocene -- Complexity and climate change -- American dreams, ecological nightmares and new visions -- Complexity and sustainability: wicked problems, gordian knots and synergistic solutions -- Conclusion.

How, in a secular world, should we resolve ethically controversial and troubling issues relating to health care? Should we, as some argue, make a clean sweep, getting rid of the Hippocratic ethic, such vestiges of it as remain? Jennifer Jackson seeks to answer these significant questions, establishing new foundations for a traditional and secular ethic which would not require a radical and problematic overhaul of the old. These new foundations rest on familiar observations of human nature and human needs. (...) Jackson presents morality as a loose anatomy of constituent virtues that are related in different ways to how we fare in life, and suggests that in order to address problems in medical ethics, a virtues-based approach is needed. Throughout, attention is paid to the role of philosophy in medical ethics, and how it can be used to clarify key notions and distinctions that underlie current debates and controversial issues. By reinstating such concepts as justice, cardinal virtue, and moral duty, Jackson lays the groundwork for an ethics of health care that makes headway toward resolving seeming dilemmas in medical ethics today. This penetrating and accessible book will be invaluable to students of sociology and health care, as well as those who are interested in the ethical uncertainties faced by the medical world. (shrink)

This essay explores the speech act of dogwhistling (sometimes referred to as ‘using coded language’). Dogwhistles may be overt or covert, and within each of these categories may be intentional or unintentional. Dogwhistles are a powerful form of political speech, allowing people to be manipulated in ways they would resist if the manipulation was carried outmore openly—often drawing on racist attitudes that are consciously rejected. If philosophers focus only on content expressed or otherwise consciously conveyed they may miss what is (...) most powerful and pernicious in the speech of political culture. This essay is a call to start paying attention to these more covert speech acts, and a first attempt at beginning to theorize them. It argues that dogwhistles present a complex and interesting case for the philosopher of language, and explores their implications for democratic politics. (shrink)

The present paper tries to answer the question Is religious education compatible with the purposes of liberal education? This work argues that it is possible, and desirable, that democratic states built on liberal ideals include religious education in all schools since increasing the number of options among which the future citizen may choose the conception of the good with which he or she wishes to live is a condition for autonomy as one of its educational purposes. However, the proposal is (...) not based on religious confessional education, which by itself does not satisfy the liberal educational goals, but is redefined from the common principles compatible both religious confessions and non-religious views of morality and citizenship. (shrink)

Why do we find agents less blameworthy when they face mitigating circumstances, and what does this show about philosophical theories of moral responsibility? We present novel evidence that the tendency to mitigate the blameworthiness of agents is driven both by the perception that they are less normatively competent—in particular, less able to know that what they are doing is wrong—and by the perception that their behavior is less attributable to their deep selves. Consequently, we argue that philosophers cannot rely on (...) the case strategy to support the Normative Competence theory of moral responsibility over the Deep Self theory. However, we also outline ways in which further empirical and philosophical work would shift the debate, by showing that there is a significant departure between ordinary concepts and corresponding philosophical concepts, or by focusing on a different type of coherence with ordinary judgments. (shrink)

1. Cine y vanguardias : el cine como promesa estético-política desde Dziga Vertov y Jean Epstein -- 2. Deleuze y las potencias del cine : el acontecimiento de lo inorgánico -- 3. De la vida inorgánica a la vida histórica : recuperación del carácter narrativo del cine a partir de Jacques Ranciere.

Michael Devitt ([2006a], [2006b]) argues that, insofar as linguists possess better theories about language than non-linguists, their linguistic intuitions are more reliable. (Culbertson and Gross [2009]) presented empirical evidence contrary to this claim. Devitt ([2010]) replies that, in part because we overemphasize the distinction between acceptability and grammaticality, we misunderstand linguists' claims, fall into inconsistency, and fail to see how our empirical results can be squared with his position. We reply in this note. Inter alia we argue that Devitt's focus (...) on grammaticality intuitions, rather than acceptability intuitions, distances his discussion from actual linguistic practice. We close by questioning a demand that drives his discussion—viz., that, for linguistic intuitions to supply evidence for linguistic theorizing, a better account of why they are evidence is required. (shrink)

Obras escogidas/M. Sánchez-Mazas. - v.1.