Differences in Common engages in the ongoing debate on ‘community’ focusing on its philosophical and political aspects through a gendered perspective. It explores the subversive and enriching potential of the concept of community, as seen from the perspective of heterogeneity and distance, and not from homogeneity and fused adhesions. This theoretical reflection is, in most of the essays included here, based on the analysis of literary and filmic texts, which, due to their irreducible singularity, teach us to think without being (...) tied, or needing to resort, to commonplaces. Philosophers such as Arendt, Blanchot, Foucault, Agamben or Derrida have made seminal reflections on community, often inspired by contemporary historical events and sometimes questioning the term itself. More recently, thinkers like Judith Butler, Gayatri Spivak or Rada Ivekovic—included in this volume are essays by all three—have emphasized the gender bias in the debate, also problematizing the notion of community. Most of the essays gathered in Differences in Common conceive community not as the affirmation of several properties which would unite us to other similar individuals, but as the “expropriation” of ourselves (Esposito), in an intimate diaspora. Community does not fill the gap between subjects but places itself in this gap or void. This conception stresses the subject’s vulnerability, a topic which is also central to this volume. The body of community is thus opened by a “wound” (Cixous) which exposes us to the contagion of otherness. The essays collected here reflect on different topics related to these issues, such as: gender and nation; nationalism, internationalism, transnationalism; nationalism’s naturalization of citizenship and the exclusion of women from citizenship; the violent consequences of a gendered nation on women’s bodies; gendering community; preservation of difference(s) within the community; bodily vulnerability and new politics; community and mourning; community and the politics of memory; fiction, historical truth and (fake) documentary; love, relationality and community; interpretive communities and virtual communities on the Web, among others. Joana Sabadell-Nieto is Professor of Contemporary Spanish Literature (Gender and Feminist Studies) at Hamilton College (USA) and Researcher at the Center for Women and Literature at the University of Barcelona. Marta Segarra is Professor of French and Francophone literature and Gender Studies at the University of Barcelona (Spain), Director of the UNESCO Chair Women, Development and Cultures and co-founder and director of the Center for Women and Literature (2003-2012). (shrink)

El sistema filosófico de Spinoza no puede ser considerado en rigor como panteísta, sino panenteísta. Este artículo intenta reforzar esta tesis analizando los conceptos de Natura naturans y Natura naturata, a veces confundidos en la obra de Spinoza. Se establece además una comparación de ambos conceptos en Spinoza y en David Nieto, autor de una obra titulada De la divina providencia, o sea naturaleza universal o natura naturante, al tiempo que se señalan las diferencias entre las concepciones inmanentes de (...) la divinidad de ambos autores. (shrink)

This study investigates whether employees attribute different motives to their organization's corporate social responsibility efforts and if these motives influence employee performance. Specifically, we investigate whether employees could distinguish between intrinsic and extrinsic CSR motives by surveying 229 employee–supervisor dyads from various industries , and the impact of these perceptions on in-role and extra-role performance of subordinates. We found that employee task performance increases when employees attribute both intrinsic and extrinsic motives for CSR. Moreover, when employees perceive that their organization (...) invests in a CSR practice that is both intrinsic and extrinsic, they also tend to exert extra effort in their work. Theoretical and practical implications are also discussed alongside future research directions. (shrink)

Irony is acknowledged to be usually critical: the ironic speaker tends to exhibit an apparent positive attitude in order to communicate a negative valuation. The reverse is considered to be also possible though: the ironic speaker can praise by apparent blaming, although it seldom happens. This unbalance between the two sorts of ironic examples is the so-called asymmetry issue of irony. Here I shall deny the possibility of being ironic without criticizing — hence the asymmetry issue is an illusion. By (...) claiming that irony is always critical I suggest an even stronger claim: criticism is what distinguishes irony from the similar phenomenon of metaphor. (shrink)

The purpose of this study was to identify the relative contribution of individual and contextual predictors to students’ attitudes toward the acceptability of cheating and plagiarism. A group of 324 students from a tertiary institution in New Zealand completed an online survey. The findings indicate that gender, justice sensitivity, and understanding of university policies regarding academic dishonesty were the key predictors of the students’ attitudes toward the acceptability of cheating and plagiarism, both as agents of dishonest conduct and as witnesses (...) of misconduct among their peers. The implications of these findings for the development of policies and initiatives in tertiary institutions are discussed. (shrink)

Ethical banking, microfinance institutions or certain credit cooperatives, among others, grant socially responsible loans. This paper presents a credit score system for them. The model evaluates social and financial aspects of the borrower. The financial aspects are evaluated under the conventional banking framework, by analysing accounting statements and financial projections. The social aspects try to quantify the loan impact on the achievement of Millennium Development Goals such as employment, education, environment, health or community impact. The social credit score model should (...) incorporate the lender’s know-how and should also be coherent with its mission. This is done using Multi-Criteria Decision Making. The paper illustrates a real case: a loan application by a social entrepreneur presented to a socially responsible lender. The decision support system not only produces a score, but also reveals strengths and weaknesses of the application. (shrink)

A lo largo de este artículo se va a tratar de analizar la concepción del Romanticismo propuesta por Flaubert. En ella, a raíz del viaje a Oriente entre 1849 y 1851, se produce un cambio que hace constituir a la tarea del literato, artista o filósofo romántico en una tarea en la que la cuestión fundamental de la Estética y del Arte debe mezclarse con la tarea Ética y de pensamiento de la Política para la sociedad del futuro.  .

Joana Garmendia, Irony, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2018, 166 pp.

The present study aimed to explore and map the views of Portuguese laypersons regarding the acceptability of downsizing and restructuring measures during a recession. Two hundred and seven participants with various levels of training in economics were presented with a number of realistic scenarios depicting various measures, and were asked to indicate the extent to which they considered them to be acceptable. The scenarios were created by varying three factors likely to have an impact on people’s views: the magnitude of (...) a company’s reduction in net sales, the magnitude of planned downsizing, and the way in which downsizing would be implemented, either through layoffs, job alliances or both. Six qualitatively different personal positions were found. Four of these following positions were expected: never acceptable, mainly depends on the magnitude of downsizing, mainly acceptable and job alliance. Two unexpected positions were also observed: drastic measures and undetermined. (shrink)

Science aims to transform the subjectivity of individual observations and ideas into more objective and universal knowledge. Yet if there is any area in which first-person experience holds a particularly special and delicate role, it is the sciences of the mind. According to a widespread view, first-person methods were largely discarded from psychology after the fall of introspectionism a century ago and replaced by more objective behavioral measures, a step that some authors have begun to criticize. To examine whether these (...) views are sufficiently informed by actual scientific practice, we conducted a review of methodological approaches in the cognitive science literature. We found that reports of subjective experience are in fact still widely used in a broad variety of different experimental paradigms, both in studies that focus on subjective experience, and in those that make no explicit reference to it. Across these studies, we documented a diverse collection of approaches that leveraged first-person reports, ranging from button presses to unstructured interviews, while continuing to maximise experimental reproducibility. Common to these studies were subjects acting as sensors, intentionally communicating their experience to the experimenter, which we termed “second-person” methods. We conclude that, despite views to the contrary, first-person experience has always been and is still central to investigations of the mind even if it is not recognized as such. We suggest that the conversation ought to be reframed: instead of debating whether to accept subjects’ first-person knowledge we should discuss how best to do so. (shrink)

Aquest llibre recull els textos de les reflexions que van tenir lloc en l'encont re internacional SCAN (festival de fotografia), a Internet del 29 de febrer al 1 7 d'abril de 2008, i al Teatre Metropol, el dia 17 d'abril de 2008. Tres teòrics de la imatge de reconegut prestigi internacional -Christian Caujolle, Joan Font cuberta i Radu Stern- van debatre virtualment a internet i posteriorment de form a presencial a Tarragona sobre el paper de la imatge al nostre temps.

The present study aimed to explore and map the views of Portuguese laypersons regarding the legitimacy of bonuses for senior executives. Two hundred eight participants, with various levels of training in economics, were presented with a number of concrete scenarios depicting the circumstances in which senior executives have received bonuses of variable amounts, and they were asked to indicate the extent to which such bonuses may be considered as legitimate. The scenarios were created by varying four factors likely to have (...) an impact on people’s views: the extent to which the objectives fixed by the company have been met or not, the global economic context in which the company has performed, the availability of experienced senior executives in the sector under consideration, and the amount of money that has been awarded, in terms of both the euros and multiples of the average worker’s pay. Five qualitatively different personal positions were found. The most common positions were that executive bonuses were either never legitimate or not very legitimate. People without any background in economics were more likely to hold these views than people with a background in economics. The remaining 45 % of the participants supported the awarding of bonus, but their support was conditional, and the main condition was the extent to which the company’s objectives were met. Thus for most participants, the practice of awarding extra pay to senior executives was either never legitimate, or legitimate only when the company’s objectives have been attained, or legitimate only when, even in a time of economic crisis, the company’s objectives have been surpassed. (shrink)

Volume 31, Issue 4, December 2017, Page 429-432.

The cognitive reserve is widely accepted as the active ability to cope with brain damage, using preexisting cognitive and compensatory processes. The common CR proxies used are the number of formal years of education, intelligence quotient or premorbid functioning, occupation attainment, and participation in leisure activities. More recently, it has employed the level of literacy and engagement in high-level cognitive demand of professional activities. This study aims to identify and summarize published methodologies to assess the CR quantitatively. We searched for (...) published studies on PubMed, ScienceDirect, and Web of Science between September 2018 and September 2021. We only included those studies that characterized the CR assessment methodology. The search strategy identified 1,285 publications, of which 25 were included. Most of the instruments targeted proxies individually. The lack of a gold standard tool that incorporates all proxies and cognitive tests highlights the need to develop a more holistic battery for the quantitative assessment of CR. Further studies should focus on a quantitative methodology that includes all these proxies supported by normative data to improve the use of CR as a valid measure in clinical contexts. (shrink)

The transition and adaptation of students to higher education involve a wide range of challenges that justify some institutional practices promoting skills that enable students to increase their autonomy and to face the difficulties experienced. The requirements for this adaptation were particularly aggravated by the containment and sanitary conditions associated with coronavirus disease 2019. With the aim of promoting academic success and preventing dropout in the first year, a support program was implemented for students enrolled in two courses in the (...) area of education at a public university in northern Portugal during the first semester of 2020/2021. Three sessions of 50/60 min were implemented, namely, the first session focused on the verbalization of the demands, challenges, and difficulties of the transition, and the second and third sessions focused on the difficulties of academic adaptation and academic performance. Data from a dropout risk screening instrument and from the activities performed during sessions were analyzed. The main results point to student satisfaction with the content and the activities of the sessions and their usefulness. Students report not only high satisfaction levels with HE attendance, but also some emotional exhaustion due to academic activities. The continuity of the program is recommended with some improvements in its planning to ensure a more definitive version of the program in the next two years. (shrink)

The years 2016 and 2017 have been particularly prolific in the field of utopian studies. Spain alone has seen thirty items published since 2016 that were indexed as "utopian" by the Biblioteca Nacional de España, the database from which this article draws its data.1 As we will see, the concept of utopia has inspired researchers and artists from different areas in their production of knowledge and art, as well as in expanding the debate about the philosophical, economic, political, and social (...) issues of contemporary society to the general public. The idea of utopia has also inspired contemporary Spanish poets, namely, Iosu Moracho, who published La Utopia tiene los Pies Descalzos, and José... (shrink)

Spontaneous actions are preceded by brain signals that may sometimes be detected hundreds of milliseconds in advance of a subject's conscious intention to act. These signals have been claimed to reflect prior unconscious decisions, raising doubts about the causal role of conscious will. Murakami et al. (2014. Nat Neurosci 17: 1574–1582) have recently argued for a different interpretation. During a task in which rats spontaneously decided when to abort waiting, the authors recorded neurons in the secondary motor cortex. The neural (...) activity and relationship to action timing was parsimoniously explained using an integration-to-bound model, similar to those widely used to account for evidence-based decisions. In this model, the brain accumulates spontaneously occurring inputs voting for or against an action, but only commits to act once a certain threshold is crossed. The model explains how spontaneous decisions can be forecast (partially predicted) by neurons that reflect either the input or output of the integrator. It therefore presents an explicit hypothesis capable of rejecting the claim that such predictive signals imply unconscious decisions. We suggest that these results can inform the current debate on free will but must be considered with caution. (shrink)

Despite its recent popularity, Emergence is still a field where philosophers and physicists often talk past each other. In fact, while philosophical discussions focus mostly on ontological emergence, physical theory is inherently limited to the epistemological level and the impossibility of its conclusions to provide direct evidence for ontological claims is often underestimated. Nevertheless, the emergentist philosopher’s case against reductionist theories of how the different levels of reality are related to each other can still gain from the assessment of paradigmatic (...) examples of discontinuity between models in physics, even though their implications must be handled with care. (shrink)

School climate is a multidimensional construct that has been related to a series of psychological, social, and school variables. The dual school climate and school identification measure-student is a measure that has a multidimensional factor structure, with four first-order factors and a second-order factor, plus an independent factor that evaluates school identification. However, the SCASIM-St is long, with 38 items measuring school climate. The first objective of this study was to examine the psychometric properties of reliability and validity of the (...) abbreviated version of the dual school climate and school identification measure-student, for use in contexts with time limitations or for explanatory studies that need to apply multiple instruments simultaneously. The second objective was to analyze the degree of invariance for the groups: sex, type of education, and age. The sample was made up of 2,044 students of both sexes, with a mean age of 14.64, representing 27 secondary schools in Chile. The results indicated that the SCASIM-St15 presents adequate indicators of reliability and construct validity. Evidence of external criterion validity confirmed significant associations with the Attitudes to Institutional Authority in Adolescence Scale measure. The results of the factorial invariance analysis indicate that the SCASIM-St15 remains stable up to the level of metric invariance for the variable sex and the level of scalar invariance for the variables type of education and age. The study concluded that despite the significant decrease in the number of items, the SCASIM-St15 measures school climate in a reliable and valid way, without losing its theoretical and conceptual robustness. (shrink)

Drawing on the hypothesis that workplace harassment may be considered a genre of negative communication serving malicious purposes, the purposes of this paper are threefold. In the first place, we consider the difficulties involved in proving workplace harassment before administration or in court. In the second place, we analyse the challenges workplace harassment poses to linguistic analysis, with special reference to genre theory, and suggest ways of making the theory compatible with the new linguistic input the language of harassment provides. (...) Finally, we illustrate the knowledge the expert linguist can offer from the perspective of genre theory in cases involving workplace harassment. In order not to build a castle in the sky, our analysis is grounded in an exemplary case study relating to a specific type of harassment in the workplace that Leymann named « workplace mobbing ». (shrink)

The fascination with brain research is widespread, and school teachers are no exception. This growing interest, usually noticed by the increased supply of short-term training or books on how to turn the brain more efficient, leads us to think about their basic training and outreach resources available. Little is known about what the official Initial Teacher Training offers concerning the brain literature and if it meets scientific standards. Also, what are the science communication materials that teachers can access to learn (...) about the developing brain remain undiscussed. First, we examined the ITT courses taught in Portuguese Higher Education, both in public and private institutions, to identify the syllabus with updated neuroscientific knowledge. Second, we searched for the neuroscience-related books published in the last 6 years through the National Library of Portugal database. Thirty ITT courses and 35 outreach publications were reviewed through a rapid review methodology. Our results showed an absence of curricular units indicating in their programs that brain research, and its relationship with learning, would be taught in a representative and updated way. In contrast, the number of brain-related books for educators increased in Portugal, corroborating the demand for this field of study by these professionals. Based on the literature that shows how misunderstandings about the brain have increased in school contexts, our discussion recognizes that science outreach could be a way to increase the scientific literacy of school teachers with the research community working more in this direction, but, since a previous problem seems to be unsolved, there is an urgent need for specialized attention to the development of training curricula for future kindergarten and elementary school teachers. (shrink)

Partimos de unas reflexiones sobre el Racionalismo y el Historicismo como dos enfoques con perfiles epistemológicos claramente diferenciados, que llevan a quien en ellos se sitúe a muy diversos planteamientos respecto a cualquier cuestión de carácter social. Examinamos el alcance y potencial de ambos en su argumentación cuando pretenden dar cuenta del origen de la sociedad política y todo lo que ello representa, instituciones, valores… Esbozada esta cuestión se recala en el análisis jovellanista de la mujer. Jovellanos conoce bien ambos (...) enfoques, sus lecturas de los autores aquí citados están plenamente contrastadas y no son objeto de este trabajo; apuesta por el enfoque historicista inglés para comprender el rol femenino, para situar a las instituciones que le niegan su ingreso en su decurso histórico, y curiosamente convierte el modelo historicista en una vía de análisis y acceso a propuestas de una extraordinaria modernidad. Analizamos desde estos enfoques los planes de estudio en los que estamos inmersos. (shrink)

In the context of the free will debate, both compatibilists and event-causal libertarians consider that the agent’s mental states and events are what directly causes her decision to act. However, according to the ‘disappearing agent’ objection, if the agent is nothing over and above her physical and mental components, which ultimately bring about her decision, and that decision remains undetermined up to the moment when it is made, then it is a chancy and uncontrolled event. According to agent-causalism, this sort (...) of problem can be overcome if one realizes that the agent herself, as an irreducible substance, is the true originator of her actions. I’ll present arguments that favor this view. Event-causalists have countered that if the agent identifies with some of the inner states that play the self-determining causal role in bringing about the action, then it is as though the action was directly caused by herself. I’ll object that this is not a distinctive aspect of free agency. Agent-causalism has been criticized from most naturalistically inclined fronts, and it must address risks of implausibility, contradiction and unintelligibility. Even though I’ll acknowledge these challenges, I’ll still argue that libertarian free will cannot be defended by any reductionist alternative, and that agent-causalism does not conflict with contemporary science but only with some of its unproven assumptions. (shrink)

Les travaux de Margareth Rago, historienne assez connue du public brésilien, portent sur l'histoire des femmes et des rapports entre les genres, dans une perspective marquée par les travaux de Michel Foucault. Dans ce livre, l'auteure utilise ce cadre théorique pour analyser la vie et l'œuvre de Luce Fabbri, intellectuelle anarchiste, sans cacher une certaine sympathie pour son sujet. Sur un ton alerte, l'ouvrage raconte la vie de cette femme-écrivain italienne qui a vécu 92 ans. Le sa..

Evangelization in the present contemporary context, transmission of faith, and the new architecture of communication are this article’s central axes. Just as interconnected cogwheels, they need to function together to hand on faith appropriately in today’s world. Our society, marked by unprecedented experiences in the field of digital culture, gave rise to a “new person”, who lives and relates within a new architecture of communication altogether. In the communicative process of digital culture, the modality of communication has changed from a (...) unilinear mode of transmission to networked, interactive, collaborative forms of interaction. Based on the teachings of the Second Vatican Council, and in an effort to rethink the present modalities of faith transmission, this study concerns both the convergence and continuity of the Magisterium of the Church on evangelization and the urgency for her to engage in a dialogue between faith and culture. This requires an attitude of courage to consider more deeply the relation between faith, Church life, and the current transformations as experienced today. For in the digital culture, a new perception and understanding of faith has grown and developed. New languages have challenged conventional paradigms and prompted us into a change of mentality and pastoral practice. (shrink)