Name der Zeitschrift: Byzantinische Zeitschrift Jahrgang: 107 Heft: 2 Seiten: 691-710.

The definition of the sophist as "image-maker" allows Plato to add to the novelties he presents in the _Sophist_ two topics he hadn't deepened in his previous dialogues: (a) a "definition" of being (247e) and (b) the influence this position will have on the relationship between image and truth. From a first definition of the image proposed by Theaetetus in 240a we deduce that, even if it is not true, it is "really" (_óntos_) an image, which does not coincide with (...) the devalued or secondary reality that Plato had always attributed to this notion, from which all truth was absent. This conclusion, indeed, astonishes Theaetetus, attached to the Platonic "orthodoxy". This astonishment is not present in the orthodox version of the text of the passage 240a-c of the _Sophist_, which inherits from a modification of the widespread text from 1851. Once the original version is restored, the definition of the fact of being proposed in 247e justifies the "really real" character of the image, which respects the condition required to everything that "possesses" being: the possibility of acting or being affected. Indeed, the image is "affected" by the model, that it tries to imitate, because the model "affects" it. The image, even if it is not true, is real. (shrink)

Il arrive que la guerre froide soit pensée comme une victoire de Tocqueville sur Marx. Le dialogue imaginé dans ce livre montre que les idées de démocratie ou de mode de production capitaliste sont d’abord une alternative théorique pour penser la société contemporaine. La redéfinition possible de la démocratie sur le modèle de celle du communisme par Marx crée cependant un terrain où les positions théoriques et politiques peuvent s’affronter pour déterminer le cours de la révolution permanente de leur temps. (...) Tocqueville veut contrôler ce processus dans un sens libéral et Marx le révolutionner dans un sens communiste. D’un point de vue tocquevillien, la guerre froide est terminée parce que la démocratie est enfin séparée de la révolution. Elle est un ordre où règne la loi, et non un processus. La dialectique de la démocratie et du communisme, à la fois opposées et en continuité, montre cependant la fragilité théorique de cette thèse en faisant sentir la tendance de l’idée démocratique à s’idéologiser, que dénonçait aussi Tocqueville, et pose la question de sa capacité à maintenir sa puissance utopique. (shrink)

Clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats genome editing has already reinvented the direction of genetic and stem cell research. For more complex diseases it allows scientists to simultaneously create multiple genetic changes to a single cell. Technologies for correcting multiple mutations in an in vivo system are already in development. On the surface, the advent and use of gene editing technologies is a powerful tool to reduce human suffering by eradicating complex disease that has a genetic etiology. Gene drives are (...) CRISPR mediated alterations to genes that allow them to be passed on to subsequent populations at rates that approach one hundred per cent transmission. Therefore, from an anticipatory biomedical ethics perspective, it is possible to conceive gene drive being used with CRISPR to permanently ameliorate aberrant genes from wild-type populations containing mutations. However, there are also a number of possible side effects that could develop as the result of combining gene editing and gene drive technologies in an effort to eradicate complex diseases. In this paper, we critically analyse the hypothesis that the combination of CRISPR and gene drive will have a deleterious effect on human populations from an ethical perspective by developing an anticipatory ethical analysis of the implications for the use of CRISPR together with gene drive in humans. (shrink)

In this paper I survey some recent developments in experimental philosophy and discuss their bearing on two leading theories in epistemology: Contextualism and Interest Relative Invariantism. In the first part of the paper, I survey some general issues of how experimental philosophy may be relevant to assessing contextualism and IRI. In the second part, I discuss and critique some of the recent experimental work.

Since ancient Greece’s “megalopolis,” the concept of vast cities has loomed in the urban discourse. A century ago, English planner Patrick Geddes warned about a growing imbalance between traditional society and ever-larger conurbations, an anxiety that Lewis Mumford later invoked to predict that urban hubris would inevitably collapse of its own weight. In 1961, by contrast, the geographer Jean Gottman surveyed the interconnected agglomeration stretching from Washington, D.C. up the east coast of the United States to the cities of southern (...) New England, and more optimistically highlighted this new urban form’s governance potential. Today, the question is not whether urbanism will arrive at the scale that so concerned Geddes and Mumford yet engaged Gottman—it already has. Commentators and scholars increasingly recognize that vast polycentric urban regions are displacing cities and metropolitan areas as the locus of modern growth and development. Eleven distinct urban-centered megaregions, for example, concentrate the bulk of the population and economic activity in the United States, and similar clusters are coalescing globally, from Greater Tokyo, Beijing, and the Pearl River Delta, to the arc from São Paulo to Rio de Janeiro, to the European urban spine running from London to Milan. Grappling with the phenomenon’s legal-institutional dimensions—whether and how to formalize governance to match this scale—requires more than transposing the descriptive and normative discourse on metropolitanism. Crosscurrents around fragmentation, efficiency, inequality, and democratic legitimacy refract, but there are distinct arguments for fostering governance—and equally particular concerns to anticipate—with the rise of the megalopolis. (shrink)

The health emergency due to the COVID-19 pandemic revealed limitations in health systems worldwide, making it necessary to establish a bioethical framework that provides tools to drive health professionals’ decision-making amid scarce health resources. Bioethical models such as principlism, utilitarianism, and personalism seek to focus clinical decisions on respect for people’s rights and dignity, thus protecting the medical practice. Personalism provides a person-centered approach to respect for human dignity during health emergencies to avoid giving material meaning to the individual. Decision (...) criteria are required to face bioethical conflicts in clinical practice, reducing the legal, emotional, and ethical burden of decision-making in pandemic situations. (shrink)

A topological duality is presented for a wide class of lattice-ordered structures including lattice-ordered groups. In this new approach, which simplifies considerably previous results of the author, the dual space is obtained by endowing the Priestley space of the underlying lattice with two binary functions, linked by set-theoretical complement and acting as symmetrical partners. In the particular case of l-groups, one of these functions is the usual product of sets and the axiomatization of the dual space is given by very (...) simple first-order sentences, saying essentially that both functions are associative and that the space is a residuated semigroup with respect to each of them. (shrink)

Intersecting systems of inequality are remarkably resistant to change. Many universities, however, seek National Science Foundation Institutional Transformation awards to change processes, procedures, and cultures to make science, technology, engineering, and mathematics departments more inclusive. In this article we describe a case study with observations for eight years of before, five during, and seven after intensive efforts to increase women through reducing barriers and increasing access to women. Finally, we reflect on flawed assumptions built into the proposal, the slow and (...) uneven change in the proportion of women over time, the strengths and weaknesses of numeric assessments, and the value of a longer view for seeing how seeds planted with promising practices initiated during the award may end with the funding but can reemerge and bear fruit when faculty who engage in equity work are in positions of authority later in their careers. (shrink)

Using a standard trust game, we elicit trust and reciprocity measures in a representative sample of adult players in Montevideo, the capital city of Uruguay, a country that received a sizeable influx of Venezuelan and Cuban migrants, has lower internal disparities than other Latin American countries and exhibits relatively better levels of tolerance towards migrants. We find no statistically significant differences in trust levels of Uruguayans towards countrymen versus migrants and mixed results regarding reciprocity, with migrants exhibiting a flatter response (...) to trust than their local counterparts. (shrink)

Millikan [2000] has levelled a number of persuasive criticisms against Cummins's [1996] theory of mental representation. In this paper, I pave a middle path in the debate between Cummins [2000] and Millikan [2000] to answer two questions. How are representations applied to targets? How is the content of a representation determined? The result is a new theory of mental representation, which I call narrow structuralism.

Because of the failed coupe d’etat in Venezuela on April 11th of this year, the country has fallen into an institutional and governability crisis which appears to have no short run solution. This has not only influenced the political activism of new social actors and movements, very distinct f..

In this essay a vision of the synthesis of thought on the part of the Checkoslovakian philosopher Karel Kosick is presented. His work inspired by theMarxist dialectic and the philosophy of praxis, is, and will become ever more so, a theoretical reference for the understanding of the development o..

The author points in this article to the social and political importance of the theory of fetishism and the alienation of Marx when analyzing the social criticism that the development of the hegemonic forces of capitalism on a global scale de served. The post-structuralist and post-marx ist metaphys..

Shors & Matzel propose that hippocampal LTP increases the effective salience of discrete external stimuli and thereby facilitates the induction of memories at distant places. In line with this suggestion, a neural network model of associative learning and hippocampal function assumes that LTP increases hippocampal error signals to the cortex, thereby facilitating stimulus configuration in association cortex. Computer simulations show that under these assumptions the model correctly describes the effect of LTP induction and blockade in classical discriminations and place learning.

The prospect of replication of human beings through genetic manipulation has engendered one of the most controversial debates about reproduction in our society. Ideology is clearly influencing the direction of research and legislation on human cloning, which may present one of the greatest existential challenges to the meaning of creation. In this article, I argue that, in view of the possibility that human cloning and other emerging technologies could enhance physical and cognitive abilities, there is a need for a different (...) way of thinking about life, new technologies and creation. New scientific discoveries require a shift in the way psychology takes responsibility to help individuals and society. Today, psychology needs to follow the progress that humans are taking toward a transhuman stage of development as a transition to a later posthuman stage. (shrink)