We study the SIS and SIRI epidemic models discussing different approaches to compute the thresholds that determine the appearance of an epidemic disease. The stochastic SIS model is a well known mathematical model, studied in several contexts. Here, we present recursively derivations of the dynamic equations for all the moments and we derive the stationary states of the state variables using the moment closure method. We observe that the steady states give a good approximation of the quasi-stationary states of the (...) SIS model. We present the relation between the SIS stochastic model and the contact process introducing creation and annihilation operators. For the spatial stochastic epidemic reinfection model SIRI, where susceptibles S can become infected I, then recover and remain only partial immune against reinfection R, we present the phase transition lines using the mean field and the pair approximation for the moments. We use a scaling argument that allow us to determine analytically an explicit formula for the phase transition lines in pair approximation. (shrink)

This paper presents a review of 100 empirical papers studying corporate codes of ethics in business organizations from the time period mid-2005 until mid-2016, following approximately an 11-year time period after the previous review of the literature. The reviewed papers are broadly categorized as content-oriented, output-oriented, or transformation-oriented. The review sheds light on empirical focus, context, questions addressed, methods, findings and theory. The findings are discussed in terms of the three categories as well as the aggregate, stock of empirical CCE (...) studies in comparison with previous reviews, answering the question “where are we now?” Content and output studies still stand for the majority of the studies, whereas the transformation studies are fewer. Within these areas, two new trends are found to have emerged: discursive analyses and a focus on labor conditions. The review finds that the content of CCEs is still predominantly self-defensive, that CCEs are insufficient in themselves in terms of protecting workers’ rights, that CCEs are likely to encounter tensions when implemented across national and organizational boundaries, and that while perception of CCEs is generally positive, CCEs may lead to both positive and negative outcomes. Based on these findings, potential areas for further exploration in the area of CCE research are suggested. (shrink)

"Maira engages eighteen eminent thinkers - scientists, philosophers, artists, brain-mind experts, activists - in a series of conversations around the difficult, enthralling notion of beauty"--Page 4 of cover.

The article deals with the role, peculiarities and philosophical issues of upbringing healthy and well-bred generation in Kazakh ethnomedicine, which has been passed down from generation to generation and has not lost its importance. Attention is paid to the peculiarities of the Kazakh people’s attitudes to nature, formed in connection with the natural environment, and the method of treatment based on shamanic beliefs. Philosophical concepts of nobility norms preservation of the Kazakh nation, following the tradition of exogamy in the formation (...) of generation health, have been analysed. The doctrine of blood purity is discussed in Treatise on Healing by Uteiboydak Tleukabyluly, a scientist-healer of 15th century. Tleukabyluly considers debauchery, love relationships outside of marriage, unacceptable. He gives a reason why Kazakhs should be banned from related marriages up to the seventh generation, since, according to his observations, this leads to infertility and miscarriages or the birth of an imbecile child. The role of the mother in the healthy generation was studied in the national philosophical context. (shrink)

Este artigo é resultado de um projeto de pesquisa e registro de grafites e pichações inscritas nas paredes de Lisboa, e que advém de produção artística e política urbana feita pela população negra portuguesa e imigrante, que habita a cidade. O resultado é esta escrevivência sobre o corpo negro [feminino] em relação - e em atividade - com a experiência de ser e de estar (em) Lisboa, pensando como essas marcas da cidade afetam corpos negros, inclusive o meu. Dada a (...) oportunidade, e destinada ao reconhecimento de dados sobre o que é ser do outro lado do Atlântico, nesta cidade qualquer. Pelas ruas da Damaia, pelas ruas da Linha de Sintra, da Cova da Moura, vi o meu corpo em protagonismo com outros corpos. E desta visagem necessária, articulei uma série de imagens, que revelam as marcas de uma população igual a mim, e diferente a mim, registradas nas paredes dessas cidades específicas, que moram e habitam a Lisboa dourada, das gentrificações, dos turistas em excesso e dos muitos pequenos mundos internos - que a constroem e alimentam. Lavagem, grafitagem, gravidez, sacudimentos e enxertos. (shrink)

I see art as the most efficient technological field for triggering human imagination. I am not alone in my conviction that human imagination has the potential to feed back to arts and science in creative and transforming ways, as does to every humanconceived technology. More than progress, breakthroughs depend on it. A virtually unlimited conceptual hybridization from dramatically distinct knowledge fields is markedly attainable in the present day through use of an art we experience as growingly immaterial and distributed. As (...) claimed by Roy Ascott (2006), the deep significance of this experience is only achieved when a sort of technological intermingling dissolves artwork and observer into a moistmedia that takes the form of a hybrid conscious body. Would the same be true for science? In addressing this question, a first step is to recognize that there is more to the scientific process of thinking and creative conception than mere cognition (as defined by neuroscience); it also parallels artistic processes. Importantly, both artists and scientists operate at levels of subjacent realities. What would be the implications to scientific practice if, instead of romantic, essentially subjective, speculative guesses, we prove scientifically that subjective processes potentiate science? The present article proclaims the centrality of this question as a transforming demand to contemporary neuroscience. Moreover, it reverberates Roy Ascott’s proposition of the brain as an access system – a ‘moistmedia informer’. In this article, hybrid artsci labs are proposed as systems that favour aesthetic rapture at different stages of scientific practices. A conceptualization of scientific objects – either material or immaterial – in contemporary art is central in this model. Artsci labs are essentially conceived as providing for interdigitating scientific, artistic and brain technological paradigms, and the effects on cognitive handling through directly controlled technical evaluation is presented. Results from my lab give support to Ascott’s proposition of an art development informed by the brain. Moreover, the hybrid multimodal character of the artwork returns to science as a gain in abstraction, favouring the idea of contemporary art as a speculum of knowledge resonances, while potentiating intuitive conceptual reframing and associative thinking usually detected as insights. (shrink)

This article develops some of the many ways in which Leonardo and Descartes, throughout the prolific period of human valuation from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, seem to have approached and anchored their seminal contributions on the Cartesian body and metaphysical mind. While Leonardo masterfully developed an iterative thinking system of visual design applied to nature and artifacts, Descartes laid the groundwork for methodical critical thinking in dimensions that ironically ranged from dreams to the controlled narrative, from a deceptive (...) body to a rational man. In an interdisciplinary articulation of historical and neurobiological leanings, contemporary concepts of the cognitive emotional brain, led by Damasio as the basis for his conclusions about the "Descartes Error", as well as a torrent of growing evidence that supports high cognitive abilities in associative processes mediated by action/body lead us to a re-evaluation today of the legacies of Leonardo and Descartes, rescuing a scientific mind/brain/body process that underlies the human mastering of a universal technology of discourse that would revolutionize science. (shrink)

In this paper, reasons of postponing motherhood by professional young women are explored and related with changes of course in their biographies, especially with those sociologically associated with individualization, by means a qualitative research on this demographic group in Caracas (Venezuela) a..

Music and affects share a long history. In recent times, 4E cognitive sciences (embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended), situated affectivity, and related ecological theoretical frameworks have been conceptualizing music as a case of a tool for feeling. Drawing on this debate, I propose to further theorize the role of music in situating our affectivity by analyzing how the very affective affordances of music are technologically situated. In other words, I propose to shift the attention from music as a tool for (...) feeling to the tools for feeling music. I argue that the experience of music as a tool for feeling may be altered, enhanced, or lessened depending on the tools for feeling music. I investigate the extent to which AI might be a case of a tool for feeling music and examine the influence it could exert over musical affectivity. I conclude that AI can be considered a tool for feeling music of curatorial type and that the limitations and/or biases of AI as a method risk lessening the power of musical affective affordances. (shrink)

Soon, the realization that, while economies had been growing, systemic problems of social inequality and environmental unsustainability were becoming intolerable, led to the Sustainable Development Goals, which all countries signed up to achieve. A new toolkit is required to attain these goals that go beyond the precepts of good business management and prevalent best practices in government as well as civil society organizations.

We present an experiment designed to investigate three different mechanisms to achieve impartiality in distributive justice. We consider a first-person procedure, inspired by the Rawlsian veil of ignorance, and two third-party procedures, an involved spectator and a detached observer. First-person veiled stakeholders and involved spectators are affected by an initially unfair distribution that, in the stakeholders’ case, is to be redressed. We find substantial differences in the redressing task. Detached observers propose significantly fairer redistributions than veiled stakeholders or involved spectators. (...) Risk preferences partly explain why veiled stakeholders propose less egalitarian redistributions. Surprisingly, involved spectators, who are informed about their position in society, tend to favour stakeholders holding the same position as they do after the initial distribution. (shrink)

En el terreno de la moral, el contraste entre lo ¿que el filósofo Wilfrid Sellars denominó «la ¿imagen manifiesta» y la «imagen científica» es enorme y tiene unas consecuencias prácticas ineludibles. Este libro reduce la distancia entre esa imagen manifiesta y la imagen científica, dotando al lector de referencias fundamentales, enfoques diversos y un amplio abanico de temáticas a partir de investigaciones experimentales sobre nuestra conducta moral.

The need for urgent, structural transformations to dominant food systems is increasingly recognized in research and policy. The direction these transformations take is in great part influenced by how the problem is framed and what future pathways become seen as plausible and desirable. Scientific knowledge and the organizations producing it hold considerable authority in suggesting what alternatives are or are not worth pursuing, ultimately shaping frames and in turn being shaped by them. This paper examines Brazil’s federal Agricultural Research Corporation (...) (Embrapa), a major contributor to technological advances that made Brazil into an agricultural powerhouse. We examine the ways in which Embrapa’s leadership has framed sustainable agriculture in its public communication and the wider implications for food systems transformation. Drawing from Embrapa news articles in the period 2015–2020, we identify four interrelated frames forming Embrapa’s prevalent position on sustainability. Our results show that while Embrapa promotes practices based on alternative approaches such as agroecology, its deeper framing often reflects the core assumptions driving dominant industrial food systems. This framing reinforces underlying logics of control, efficiency, and competition aligned with the productivist paradigm and excludes divergent perspectives that exist within the organization. (shrink)

This paper explores Victoria Welby's fundamental assumption of meaning process (“semiosis” sensu Peirce) as translation, and some implications for the development of a general model of intersemiotic translation.

O presente estudo consiste em uma análise do processo de composição do Timeu-Crítias de Platão, sob o ponto de vista da modelagem do discurso. Pretende-se mostrar que o diálogo é marcado por uma engenhosa articulação de técnicas de composição, que combinam os aspectos pictorial e dramático da mímesis poética. Estabelecendo as Panateneias como referência implícita, a obra apresenta a performance de uma sequência de narrativas, produzidas como verdadeiras imagens discursivas. A originalidade platônica revela-se no Timeu-Crítias, portanto, no desempenho de uma (...) construção formal ao mesmo tempo dramática e imagética, mediante um singular agenciamento mimético de formas do discurso. (shrink)

We perform an experimental investigation using a dictator game in which individuals must make a moral decision —to give or not to give an amount of money to poor people in the Third World. A questionnaire in which the subjects are asked about the reasons for their decision shows that, at least in this case, moral motivations carry a heavy weight in the decision: the majority of dictators give the money for reasons of a consequentialist nature. Based on the results (...) presented here and of other analogous experiments, we conclude that dicator behavior can be understood in terms of moral distance rather than social distance and that it systematically deviates from the egoism assumption in economic models and game theory. (shrink)

Slavoj Žižek is known for quoting with the same enthusiasm the main names of Western Philosophy and the classics of pop culture, cinema, literature, and music. Therefore, in such rich theoretical framework, it is possible to glimpse a few connections that the philosopher himself has not yet developed in detail. This essay is precisely about of these connections. More specifically, this essay can be seen as an endeavor to think some of Žižek’s writings on music having as a main reference (...) the concept of ontological incompleteness. The philosopher discusses the concept of ontological incompleteness based on several areas, from sciences to movies and literature. Notwithstanding, in this specific case musical examples are left aside. Even though Žižek does not analyse music from the perspective of such concept of ontology, it is possible to argue that Žižek’s writings on music already leave some clues and examples that justify an analysis of that kind. That is the task proposed in this critical essay: to present how an approximation between his thoughts on music and on ontology is pos. (shrink)

RESUMO O artigo visa relacionar a tese da centralidade do outlaw, para se pensar o direito, em Hannah Arendt, com a sua compreensão do direito como “direito a ter direitos”, esboçada em “Origens do totalitarismo”. Partindo da desintegração europeia no início do século XX e do surgimento do outlaw contemporâneo, o refugiado, refletiremos sobre o sentido do princípio da legalidade, sua relação, em Arendt, com a plural condição humana e o mundo comum. Mostraremos como estão contidos, na obra mencionada, elementos (...) para uma articulação inicial entre a ideia do direito como “direito a ter direitos” e uma teoria da cidadania na pensadora judia-alemã. ABSTRACT This article aims to relate the thesis of the centrality of the outlaw to think of Law, in Hannah Arendt with her understanding of Law as "right to have rights" drafted in Origins of totalitarianism. Starting from the European disintegration in the early twentieth century and the emergence of the contemporary outlaw, the refugee, we will reflect on the meaning of the principle of legality, its relationship, in Arendt, with a plural human condition and the common world. We will show how there are elements contained, in the work mentioned, for an initial articulation between an idea of law as "right to have rights" and a theory of citizenship in the Jewish-German thinker. (shrink)

This volume examines the motives behind rejections of beauty often found within contemporary art practice, where much critically acclaimed art is deliberately ugly and alienating. It reflects on the nature and value of beauty, asking whether beauty still has a future in art and what role it can play in our lives generally. The volume discusses the possible “end of art,” what art is, and the relation between art and beauty beyond their historically Western horizons to include perspectives from Asia. (...) The individual chapters address a number of interrelated issues, including: art, beauty and the sacred; beauty as a source of joy and consolation; beauty as a bridge between the natural and the human; beauty and the human form; the role of curatorial practice in defining art; order and creativity; and the distinction between art and craft. The volume offers a valuable addition to cross-cultural dialogue and, in particular, to the sparse literature on art and beauty in comparative context. It demonstrates the relevance of the rich tradition of Asian aesthetics and the vibrant practices of contemporary art in Asia to Western discussions about the future of art and the role of beauty. (shrink)

In this article, we draw upon the Conceptual Profile Theory to discuss the negotiation of meanings related to the energy concept in an 11th grade physics classroom. This theory is based on the heterogeneity of verbal thinking, that is, on the idea that any individual or society does not represent concepts in a single way. According to this perspective, the processes of conceptualization consist of the use of a repertoire of different socially stabilized signifiers, adjusted to the context in which (...) they occur. We start by proposing zones of a conceptual profile model for energy, each zone being characterized by its own commitments and identifiable by certain modes of talking about energy. Based on classroom evidence, we claim that teachers and students negotiate meanings that interpenetrate the domains of everyday and scientific knowledge. Being inevitable and necessary, this heterogeneity of conceptual thinking needs to be considered in teaching design in order to allow its awareness on the part of the students. We argue that students’ conceptual development goals should be considered in terms of general goals of science education, which points to the need of overcoming the encapsulation of scientific school knowledge. We show that the Conceptual Profile Theory provides a basis for science education that can promote the crossing of cultural boundaries, seeking relations between science and the spheres of everyday life. (shrink)

Arendt’s reflections on the reverberations of the bureaucratic way of governing give rise to two distinct and, above all, complementary argumentative trajectories: 1) its investigation as a form of domination originating from imperialism and later used as a model of totalitarian; 2) the role of bureaucrats. Both help to understand why the bureaucracy not only survived the fall of totalitarian regimes, but also remained the organizational model of nations. At the intersection of these readings, the essay “Auschwitz on Trial” presents (...) two types of participants in the Nazi bureaucratic apparatus: bureaucratic assassins (desk murderes) and subordinate men. In common among them was a lack of responsibility for the crimes perpetrated by the regime and thoughtlessness; however, their degree of participation in the hierarchy and their punishability in post-war trials differed greatly. In these terms, this article aims to analyze the similarities and differences between subordinate men and bureaucratic murderers. To do so, it is assumed that understanding them helps to understand bureaucracy as a form of government that makes public freedom and the free exercise of spiritual activities unfeasible. (shrink)

Henri Meschonnic famously gives specific usage to a repertoire of terms such as subjectivity, continuous, rhythm, historicity, recitative and enunciation. Behind them, there is a project to overcome what he calls the “chain of dualisms” (1988), or the tendency toward dichotomy in theoretical thinking, represented in the language fields by the separations between signifier and signified, oral and written, form and content, and others. Following Philip Wilson’s (2012) initiative of applying Ludwig Wittgenstein’s concepts of language games and forms of life (...) to translation studies, we seek to draw an analogy between the Wittgensteinian leap from analytics to pragmatics and the Meschonnician leap from sign to discourse, with the aim of investigating the viability of a synthesis of the two authors’ ideas as a theoretical and methodological proposition for Translation Studies. Meschonnic proposes that the sign (enunciate) be overcome in favor of discourse (enunciation), which he views as a relationship between language and body. We argue that the linguistic experience, in that light, is akin to a performance and that Wittgenstein, by focusing on the use of language, also favors this idea, which may be a possible key for a theoretical practice of translation. (shrink)

O presente texto tem por objetivo compreender a pintura de Wassily Kandinsky a partir da metafísica do belo de Arthur Schopenhauer, especialmente a partir da relação entre pintura e música estabelecida pelo pintor.

En este artículo presentamos las principales corrientes de la Filosofía Experimental y atendemos a una de las críticas más severas a la que se ha sometido este reciente programa de renovación metodológica. Según Antti Kauppinen la Filosofía Experimental está condenada al fracaso porque no puede obtener mediante sus métodos el tipo de intuiciones que interesan a los filósofos –las intuiciones robustas del hablante competente. Aun aceptando parte de las críticas de Kauppinen, en este artículo sostenemos, en primer lugar, que la (...) supuesta incapacidad de la Filosofía Experimental para acceder a las intuiciones robustas de los hablantes tiene que ver en gran medida con los métodos experimentales empleados hasta ahora por los filósofos experimentales. En segundo lugar, defendemos que el proyecto de reforma llevado a cabo desde la Filosofía Experimental resultará viable solo si se adoptan una serie de consejos metodológicos procedentes de la economía experimental. Únicamente entonces podrán los experimentalistas responder con éxito a la objeción de Kauppinen. (shrink)

Este trabajo propone analizar los avances en la jurisprudencia del Tribunal Constitucional de Brasil sobre el control de constitucionalidad de la norma que establece la prohibición de donación de sangre de hombres que hayan tenido relaciones sexuales con otros hombres. La necesidad de ampliación de donadores de sangre por causa de la pandemia de COVID-19 desencadenó un proceso de presión social por parte de instituciones democráticas y de organizaciones no gubernamentales, que culminó con la votación de la ADI 5543 y (...) con la aplicación interna de los principios de igualdad y no discriminación y de normas internacionales de derechos humanos. (shrink)