Timely and provocative essays on bioethical questions brought to the forefront by the bioterrorist threat.

We gratefully thank Filipa Matos Wunderlich for the permission to republish this text, which was first published in a shorter version in KOHT ja PAIK/PLACE and LOCATION Studies in Environmental Aesthetics and Semiotics VI, 2008.: Temporality is a fundamental characteristic of urban places. An attribute of nature, people and space, place-temporality consolidates and emerges out of their dynamic relationship in urban space. Temporality is place-specific and a result of compounds - Urbanisme – Nouvel article.

How are patriarchal regimes perpetuated and reproduced? Kate Manne’s recent work on misogyny aims to provide an answer to this central question. According to her, misogyny is a property of social environments where women perceived as violating patriarchal norms are ‘kept down’ through hostile reactions coming from men, other women and social structures. In this paper, I argue that Manne’s approach is problematically incomplete. I do so by examining a recent puzzling social phenomenon which I call (post-)feminist backlash: the rise (...) of women-led movements reinstating patriarchal practices in the name of feminism. I focus on the example of ‘raunch feminist’ CAKE parties and argue that their pro-patriarchal dimension cannot be adequately explained by misogyny. I propose instead a different story that emphasizes the continued centrality of gender distinctions in our social normative life, even as gendered social meanings become increasingly contested. This triggers meaning vertigo, a distinct form of social anxiety and the reactionary impulse at the heart of (post)-feminist backlash. Meaning vertigo both complicates the answer to Manne’s main question—“why is misogyny still a thing?”—and suggests the need and opportunity for a different kind of feminist political intervention. (shrink)

Almost 25 years after Dees’ article on the meaning of social entrepreneurship, conceptual controversy persists. Based on a qualitative analysis of 209 definitions of social entrepreneurship and respective academic articles, we argue that the concept follows a family resemblance structure and identify the 12 distinct attributes that comprehensively define it. Membership in social entrepreneurship is not defined by a case possessing a universally accepted set of criterial features but by carrying shared attributes with other cases. The family resemblance structure points (...) to the persistent fallacy of using the same term to label different phenomena and cautions researchers against causal homogeneity assumptions among different conceptual subtypes. Assuming a descriptive stance, we shed light on how distinct ethical positions relate to different definitions of social entrepreneurship. Among the existing conceptual variety, we identify four prominent subtypes and find that ‘market-based’ conceptualizations relate to _economism_, the ‘social business’ subtype relates to _rule utilitarian_ positions, ‘efficiency-driven’ definitions are associated with _hedonistic act utilitarian_ views, and the ‘transformational impact’ subtype is akin to a _eudemonic act utilitarian_ stance. (shrink)

In this chapter, Filipa Melo Lopes looks at incel violence, and argues that the two most common feminist analyses of their actions—their objectification of women or their sense of entitlement to women’s attention—are insufficient. They fail to account for incels’ distinctive ambivalence towards women, namely their oscillation between obsessive desire and violent hatred. Melo Lopes proposes instead that what incels want is a Beauvoirian ‘Other’—discussed by Beauvoir in her chapter on myths in terms of the ‘Eternal Feminine’. For Beauvoir, (...) when men conceive of women as Others, they function as sui generis entities through which men can experience themselves as praiseworthy heroes, but also risk the denial of their so-called exceptionality. Melo Lopes then goes on to give an illustrative analysis of Elliot Rodger’s autobiographical manifesto, My Twisted World, showing how Beauvoir’s analysis of the myth of woman sheds light on Rodger’s racist and classist attitudes and gives us a better understanding of his ambivalence towards women. Beauvoir, according to Melo Lopes, therefore constitutes a powerful and overlooked theoretical alternative to accounts centered on objectification and entitlement. (shrink)

Forensic DNA phenotyping is a genetic technology that might be used in criminal investigations. Based on DNA samples of the human body found at crime scenes, it allows to infer externally visible characteristics (such as eye, hair and skin colour) and continental-based biogeographical ancestry. By indicating the probable visible appearance of a criminal suspect, forensic DNA phenotyping allows to narrow down the focus of a criminal investigation. In this article, drawing on interviews with forensic geneticists, we explore how their narratives (...) translate contemporary focus on criminal molecularized bodies. We propose the concept of (de)materialization to approach three aspects of the forensic geneticists’ views. The first regards considering bodies as mutable entities. The second relates to socially contingent meanings attributed to bodies. The third regards to controversies surrounding data reliability. By reflecting upon the (de)materialization of criminal bodies, forensic geneticists juxtapose the defence and unsettling of forensic DNA phenotyping claims. (shrink)

Este no es un libro de filosofía, ni de astrología, ni de esoterismo. No hay en él ninguna pretensión más allá de la simple expresión de un recorrido intelectual y vital, de una búsqueda y un encuentro. Desde este punto de vista se intentan exponer tres esferas distintas del ser y del conocer, de forma separada pero con las oportunas referencias cruzadas, y manteniendo siempre la jerarquía que las diferencia. La primera de ellas es la que aquí se considera como (...) un tipo de exoterismo, es decir, un ámbito externo de considerar las cosas (en referencia a los dos siguientes): la filosofía; con la razón como facultad analítica y reflexiva por excelencia, pretende buscar las razones de ciertas problemáticas mediante el pensamiento discursivo. El segundo ámbito, el intermedio, definido como el del simbolismo, de la analogía universal o del anima mundi, es tratado aquí en referencia a una ciencia tradicional y sagrada: la astrología. Y el tercero y último es aquel dominio correspondiente a la Metafísica integral, en el sentido profundo que apunta hacia la Trascendencia misma, como núcleo de toda forma espiritual; se presentará aquí desde el esoterismo tradicional en la línea de los trabajos de René Guénon, pero principalmente desde la tradición más reciente (la islámica) y la considerada por muchos más primordial (la hindú). (shrink)

In this paper, we analyze the legal situation regarding physician-assisted suicide in the world. Our hypothesis is that the prohibitive stance on physician-assisted suicide in most societies in the world today seems to be related to our moral attitudes toward suicide. This brings us to a discussion about life itself. We claim that the total lack of legal protection for physician-assisted suicide from international organizations and most countries in the world lies in a philosophical assumption that supports much of our (...) common beliefs about what life really is. This assumption states that life must be thought of as not belonging exclusively to the individual. We argue that this assumption is a misconception that can be heard in the debate on suicide. Consequently we endorse a different conception of life which tends to favor a pro-choice stance towards suicide and assisted death in general. This position takes the patient’s decision about when to die more seriously. We conclude that there is no reason why physician-assisted suicide does not deserve legal protection as an individual right to die under international law. (shrink)

El filósofo mexicano Emilio Uranga (1921-1988) es recordado por su Análisis del ser del mexicano (1952) y por su labor como periodista político y asesor de López Mateos, Díaz Ordaz, Echeverría y López Portillo. Es posible tender un puente entre los dos aspectos, gracias a su concepción ontologizante de la Revolución Mexicana, leitmotiv de su producción teórica.

The first form of the inside-outside dichotomy appears as a self-encapsulated system with an active border. These systems are based on two complementary but asymmetric processes: constructive and interactive. The former physically constitute the system as a recursive network of component production, defining an inside. The maintenance of the constructive processes implies that the internal organization also constrains certain flows of matter and energy across the border of the system, generating interactive processes. These interactive processes ensure the maintenance of the (...) constructive processes thus specifying a meaningful outside. Upon this basic form of identity formation, the evolutionary and historical domain is open for the emergence of a whole hierarchy and ecology of insides and outsides. These which mutually subsume and collaborate in the maintenance of the essential inside-outside dichotomy that defines the conditions of possibility of the subjects and the worlds they generate. (shrink)

In recent years, online “involuntary celibate” or “incel” communities have been linked to various deadly attacks targeting women. Why do these men react to romantic rejection with not just disappointment, but murderous rage? Feminists have claimed this is because incels desire women as objects or, alternatively, because they feel entitled to women’s attention. I argue that both of these explanatory models are insufficient. They fail to account for incels’ distinctive ambivalence toward women—for their oscillation between obsessive desire and violent hatred. (...) I propose instead that what incels want is a Beauvoirian “Other.” For Beauvoir, when men conceive of women as Others, they represent them as simultaneously human subjects and embodiments of the natural world. Women function then as sui generis entities through which men can experience themselves as praiseworthy heroes, regardless of the quality of their actions. I go on to give an illustrative analysis of Elliot Rodger’s autobiographical manifesto, “My Twisted World.” I show how this Beauvoirian model sheds light on Rodger’s racist and classist attitudes and gives us a better understanding of his ambivalence toward women. It therefore constitutes a powerful and overlooked theoretical alternative to accounts centered on objectification and entitlement. (shrink)

In the distinction 27 of the Commentaries on the four books of Sentences of Master Peter Lombard, in that question where the proper meaning of the concept “Word” is discussed and clarified, Bonaventure invokes the authority of the anselmian thought, as it is exposed upon the several pages of the Monologion, for the conclusion of the problem and the solution of the dissensions. Taking, therefore, such text as the starting point of our incursion on the philosophy of the monk of (...) Le Bec, our aim is to reflect on the mediating character of the Word in the creational act, and on the way in which it becomes the interpretational key of the philosophical question of the one and the multiple. It is this relation between the one and the multiple, in which the mystery of creation is enclosed, that, in its turn, will find Strong aesthetical resonances, within the philosophy of the Seraphic Doctor founded on a certain conception of beauty, of Augustinian matrix, that defines it as “aequalitas nunierosa”, i.e., as unity of the multiplicity. (shrink)

Recent research in philosophy of science has shown that scientists rely on a plurality of strategies to develop successful explanations of different types of phenomena. In the case of biology, most of these strategies go far beyond the traditional and reductionistic models of scientific explanation that have proven so successful in the fundamental sciences. Concretely, in the last two decades, philosophers of science have discovered the existence of at least two different types of scientific explanation at work in the biological (...) sciences, namely: mechanistic and structural explanations. Despite the growing evidence about the radically different nature of these two types of explanation, no inquiry has been conducted to date to determine the ontological reasons that might underlie these differences, nor the way in which these types of explanations can be systematically related with each other. Here, we aim to cover this gap by connecting this plurality of research strategies with the existence of emergent levels of reality. We argue that the existence of these different—and apparently incompatible—explanatory strategies to account for biological phenomena derives from the existence of “ontological jumps” in nature, which generate different regimes of causation that in turn demand the development of different explanatory frameworks. We identify two of these strategies—mechanistic modelling and network modelling—and connect them to the existence of two ontological regimes of causation. Finally, we relate them with each other in a systematic way. In this vein, our paper provides an ontological justification for the plurality of explanatory strategies that we see in the life sciences. (shrink)

One of the key insights of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex is the idea that gender-based subordination is not just something done to women, but also something women do to themselves. This raises a question about ethical responsibility: if women are complicit, or actively implicated in their own oppression, are they at fault? Recent Beauvoir scholarship remains divided on this point. Here, I argue that Beauvoir did, in fact, ethically criticize many women for their complicity, as a sign of (...) what she called “bad faith”. I challenge recent accounts by Nancy Bauer and Manon Garcia, who both read Beauvoir as exonerating complicit women. According to this reading, women emerge as human “freedoms” within a social world where a “destiny” of inferiority is already prepared for them. Their self-subordination is then an inevitable product of acting in a patriarchal world. I argue, however, that this interpretation generates a crucial tension, leading Bauer and Garcia to call on women to stop being complicit, while also claiming they cannot avoid complicity. I propose instead a different interpretation, on which feminine complicity is often fueled by criticizable ethical attitudes that are far from inevitable. By revisiting Beauvoir’s notion of “bad faith”, I show that this account is compatible with recognizing the limitations imposed on women’s agency and I show that this feminist ethical criticism is itself an important part of a collective project of social transformation. (shrink)

This paper develops a largely neglected parallel between prudence and population ethics. Prudence is generally understood to be concerned with the balancing of well-being over time. How, precisely, well-being ought to be balanced over time, however, is a fervently debated question. I argue that developing a standard guiding such evaluations is exceedingly challenging. This is due to an often overlooked fact about prudence, namely that it shares a structural similarity with population ethics: In both contexts, we assess the comparative value (...) of populations of personstages/people, which may vary in number and level of well-being. Based on this analogy, I show that the development of an adequate theory of prudence runs into very similar impossibility results as obtain in population ethics. In particular, I prove that Arrhenius’ fifth impossibility theorem can be applied to prudence. I develop and compare four possible answers to this challenge. First, I discuss the possibility of accepting the very repugnant conclusion intrapersonally. Second, I present and further develop Donald Bruckner’s Minimax Regret approach, which gives up Transitivity. Third, I apply Jacob Nebel’s Lexical Threshold View to prudence and critically evaluate it. Lastly, I introduce what I call the Negative Lexicality View, which is based on Lexical Threshold View but overcomes some of its problems. (shrink)

In her foreword to Science Next, Elizabeth Edwards wrote of science as a tool for social progress: "Innovation is not simply the abstract victory of knowledge [or] the research that gave me years to live; the next science can advance human flourishing and serve the common good. That's the kind of world I want to leave for my children, and for yours." With these words, she joined a tradition that goes back to America's founders, who saw America itself as a (...) "great experiment." Yet while no one can deny that science undergirds the American Dream, it has long been fertile terrain for the "culture wars." Along with arguing the pros and cons of abortion and healthcare, policymakers must now grapple with advancements that raise questions about what it means to be human: we've decoded the genome, but should we modify it to enhance certain "desirable" traits? If we can, should we prolong life at any cost? Will we soon be counting robots, cyborgs, and chimeras among our friends and family?The first book to unpack our love/hate relationship with science from our country's origins to today, The Body Politic is essential reading for science buffs and concerned citizens alike.Jonathan D. Moreno is editor of the Center for American Progress' online magazine Science Progress and professor of bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania. Author and editor of many seminal books and articles on science and science policy, he divides his time between Philadelphia, PA, and Washington, DC. (shrink)

No contexto da Metafísica Medieval, a «beleza» foi pensada como um conceito ambíguo: ora atribuído a Deus, ora atribuído ao Mundo. O propósito deste artigo é clarificar o sentido desta ambiguidade no âmbito da filosofia do Pseudo-Dionísio Areopagita. Se, portanto, o conceito de «beleza» é, em primeiro lugar, despojado do seu carácter sensível e mundano, para ser apropriado à natureza divina, ele é, num segundo momento, aposto à própria criação, de forma a designar a manifestação visível da beleza transcendente e (...) o chamamento vital para a perscrutação teológica. (shrink)

This paper deals with Bonaventure’s stand on the separability of accidents discussed within the framework of the theology of the Eucharist, in his Commentarium in Sententias, IV, d. 12, p. 1, a. 1, q. 1. Since an accident was traditionally defined as ens in alio, the existence of accidents apart from any subject in the Eucharist was considered philosophically challenging. The Franciscan theologian has been credited with having distinguished, for the first time (Bakker PJJM. La raison et le miracle: les (...) doctrines eucharistiques (c. 1250 – c.1400): contribution à l’étude des rapports entre philosophie et théologie. s.n., Nijmegen, 1999; Vijgen J. The status of Eucharistic accidents “sine subiecto”: An historical survey up to Thomas Aquinas and selected reactions. München: Akademie Verlag, 2013), between the relation of accident to subject secundum aptitudinem, and the relation of accident to subject secundum actum, while sustaining that only the relation to subject secundum aptitudinem constitutes the accident’s proper definition, a view that Aquinas would subscribe to and develop further, relying on Avicenna’s idea of the real distinction between essence and existence. The chapter will discuss Bonaventure’s rather different reasons for refusing to accept actual being in alio as the accident’s essence. Bonaventure does not appeal to a distinction between being and essence but draws on the common essence of accidents in individualized substances vs. accidents as universals, or accidents secundum species sive differentias speciales. (shrink)

In the scope of Medieval Metaphysics, «beauty» has been pondered as an ambiguous concept: either attributed to God, or to the World. The aim of this article is to clarify the meaning of this ambiguity within the philosophy of the Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. If, therefore, the concept of «beauty» is primarily withdrawn from its sensible and mundane feature in order to be appropriated to the divine nature, it is secondly apposed to creation itself so that it may designate the visible (...) manifestation of transcendent beauty and vital call to theological pursuit.No contexto da Metafísica Medieval, a «beleza» foi pensada como um conceito ambíguo: ora atribuído a Deus, ora atribuído ao Mundo. O propósito deste artigo é clarificar o sentido desta ambiguidade no âmbito da filosofia do Pseudo-Dionísio Areopagita. Se, portanto, o conceito de «beleza» é, em primeiro lugar, despojado do seu carácter sensível e mundano, para ser apropriado à natureza divina, ele é, num segundo momento, aposto à própria criação, de forma a designar a manifestação visível da beleza transcendente e o chamamento vital para a perscrutação teológica. (shrink)

Feminists have always been concerned with how the clothes women wear can reinforce and reproduce gender hierarchy. However, they have strongly disagreed about what to do in response: some have suggested that the key to feminist liberation is to stop caring about how one dresses; others have replied that the solution is to give women increased choices. In this paper, we argue that neither of these dominant approaches is satisfactory and that, ultimately, they have led to an impasse that pervades (...) the contemporary feminist debate. The problem is that both sides of the debate understand women’s complicity in patriarchal subordination as a matter of what women wear and do. Instead, we propose a phenomenological analysis that understands complicity as based in our relations to our clothes. Starting from this phenomenological perspective, we sketch a new relational feminist ethics of dressing. This alternative ethical paradigm cannot yield a simple recipe for how to dress or tell us what garments are off-limits. But it can offer a way to make critical feminist judgements about clothes without veering into a stifling new prescriptivism. (shrink)

Our goal in this paper is to articulate a precise concept of at least a certain kind of disease-mongering, showing how pharmaceutical marketing can commercially exploit certain diseases when their best definition is given through the success of a treatment in a clinical trial. We distinguish two types of disease-mongering according to the way they exploit the definition of the trial population for marketing purposes. We argue that behind these two forms of disease-mongering there are two well-known problems in the (...) statistical methodology of clinical trials (the reference class problem and the distinction between statistical and clinical significance). Overcoming them is far from simple. (shrink)

At the end of 2017, Kristen Roupenian’s short story, Cat Person, went viral. Published at the height of the #MeToo movement, it depicted a ‘toxic date’ and a disturbing sexual encounter between Margot, a college student, and Robert, an older man she meets at work. The story was widely viewed as a relatable denunciation of women’s powerlessness and routine victimization. In this paper, I push against this common reading. I propose an alternative feminist interpretation through the lens of Simone de (...) Beauvoir’s notion of narcissism: a form of alienation that consists in making oneself both the subject and the ultimate project of one’s life. Framing Margot as a narcissist casts her as engaging, not in subtly coerced, undesired sex, but rather in sex that is desired in a tragically alienated way. I argue that Beauvoir’s notion of narcissism is an important tool for feminists today – well beyond the interpretation of Cat Person. It presses us to see systematic subordination not just as something done to women, but also as something women do to themselves. This in turn highlights the neglected role of self-transformation as a key aspect of feminist political resistance. (shrink)

La lectura nos permite disponer de una caja de herramientas que puede y debe contribuir a la mejora de los entornos en donde los individuos y la sociedad tejen sus quehaceres. Este ensayo analiza con rigor y amenidad las distintas funciones que la lectura puede cumplir: desde su placer hasta sus usos como forma de conocimiento, pasando por la lectura como un instrumento de transformación moral.

Most everyday tasks involve multiple modalities, which raises the question of how the processing of these modalities is coordinated by the cognitive system. In this paper, we focus on the coordination of visual attention and linguistic processing during speaking. Previous research has shown that objects in a visual scene are fixated before they are mentioned, leading us to hypothesize that the scan pattern of a participant can be used to predict what he or she will say. We test this hypothesis (...) using a data set of cued scene descriptions of photo-realistic scenes. We demonstrate that similar scan patterns are correlated with similar sentences, within and between visual scenes; and that this correlation holds for three phases of the language production process (target identification, sentence planning, and speaking). We also present a simple algorithm that uses scan patterns to accurately predict associated sentences by utilizing similarity-based retrieval. (shrink)

When people communicate, they coordinate a wide range of linguistic and non-linguistic behaviors. This process of coordination is called alignment, and it is assumed to be fundamental to successful communication. In this paper, we question this assumption and investigate whether disalignment is a more successful strategy in some cases. More specifically, we hypothesize that alignment correlates with task success only when communication is interactive. We present results from a spot-the-difference task in which dyads of interlocutors have to decide whether they (...) are viewing the same scene or not. Interactivity was manipulated in three conditions by increasing the amount of information shared between interlocutors. We use recurrence quantification analysis to measure the alignment between the scan-patterns of the interlocutors. We found that interlocutors who could not exchange feedback aligned their gaze more, and that increased gaze alignment correlated with decreased task success in this case. When feedback was possible, in contrast, interlocutors utilized it to better organize their joint search strategy by diversifying visual attention. This is evidenced by reduced overall alignment in the minimal feedback and full dialogue conditions. However, only the dyads engaged in a full dialogue increased their gaze alignment over time to achieve successful performances. These results suggest that alignment per se does not imply communicative success, as most models of dialogue assume. Rather, the effect of alignment depends on the type of alignment, on the goals of the task, and on the presence of feedback. (shrink)

The mapping of therapeutic collaboration throughout counseling deepens our understanding of how the helping relationship fosters client change. To better understand the process of career construction counseling, we analyzed the therapeutic collaboration on six successful face-to-face cases. The participants were six Portuguese adults, five women and one man, real clients of a career counseling service, and four psychologists, three female and one male trained in the career intervention model. The participants completed demographic questions and measures of career certainty, vocational identity, (...) career indecision, and psychological functioning. The Therapeutic Collaboration Coding System was used to track collaboration throughout all interactive episodes. The clinical significance of the intervention was calculated by analyzing pre-post-test statistical differences for each case, with the Reliable Change Index and Z score. The findings evidenced a pattern of therapeutic collaboration evolution for good outcome cases. Based on this pattern, we propose a model of process-outcome evolution for the three phases of CCC. (shrink)