The purpose of this study was to analyze the attitude of a group of cardiologists on the ethical conducts they would accept or adopt when encountered with different hypothetical situations of medical practice. Between August and September of 2011, 700 Argentine cardiologists were surveyed in situations which posed ethical dilemmas in the patient-physician relationship, among colleagues or involving financial agreements with employers or the pharmaceutical industry. Ethical conflicts were evidenced in a series of inappropriate conducts such as differential fees, trips (...) and meals sponsored by laboratories, splitting fees, overbilling, self-referral, charging for patient referral, financial compensation for ordering medical procedures, and various situations derived from the relationship with employers. In general, financial compensation from the pharmaceutical industry was more accepted than the conflictive situations which directly involved patients, colleagues or employers. The rejection of these conducts, the physicians' deontological education and the improvement of financial and organizational conditions in medical practice will help to encourage better medical professionalism and avoid unseemly behaviors. (shrink)

Se trata de mostrar que la“hermenéutica del testimonio” deRicoeur, a pesar de darle la dimensiónde la contingencia histórica que le faltaal concepto de “mundo del texto” y deintroducir la mediación histórica de laconciencia, no rompe con loslineamientos kantianos desde loscuales Ricoeur ha concebido suhermenéutica filosófica, ya que eltestimonio es pensado desde la relaciónkantiana entre las ideas y supresentación sensible.This paper intends to show that in spiteof the fact that Ricoeur’s “Hermeneuticsof Testimony” provides the historic dimension that is missing in the (...) conceptof “world of text” and introduces thehistoric conditioning of consciousness, inno way interrupts connection with the Kantian influence within which Ricoeur conceives his philosophical hermeneutics,since the notion of Testimony has been thought from the point of view of the Kantian relation between ideas and their perceptible presentation. (shrink)

En qué consiste la excelencia del hombre y cómo se la logra es el tema de los sofistas. En cuanto a lo primero, la excelencia se mide por el éxito en la actuación pública, en el ámbito de la Polis. En cuanto a lo segundo, en el conocimiento y hábil manejo de las técnicas del discurso. Excelente será pues el hombre que en las conversaciones privadas, en la actuación en el foro o en las asambleas sea capaz de persuadir, y (...) con ello, de hacerse valer. El peligro uso de las técnicas del discurso persuasivo a fin de lograr sus propósitos consiste en quererlo hacer a cualquier costo. La reacción de Sócrates será explicable en tanto se tenga en cuenta su preocupación para subordinar la técnica del discurso a la ética, es decir, a la finalidad última de la palabra sin lo cual la excelencia del hombre poseedor del logos es puramente aparente. (shrink)

Osteopotin is a secreted glycosylated phosphoprotein found in bone and other normal and malignant tissues. Osteopontin can be autophosphorylated on tyrosine residues and can also be phosphorylated on serine and threonine residues by several protein kinases. Autophosphorylation of osteopontin may generate sites for specific interactions with other proteins on the cell surface and/or within the extracelluar matrix. These interactions of osteopontin are thought to be essential for bone mineralization and function. The polyaspartic acid motif of osteopontin, in combination with neighboring (...) sequences that include serine residues phosphorylated by protein kinases, could fold and assemble into a molecular structure that participates in the mineralization of the bone matrix. (shrink)

Transient changes in DNA torsional tension are generated by environmental stimuli and transcriptional activity. In eukaryotic cells, these changes can only be accommodated by a chromatin structure that is flexible. This property of chromatin may be essential to the regulation of eukaryotic gene activity.

Metal ions may play an essential role in chromatin organization and, thus, be main actors in the gene expression drama. A model is proposed here for the interaction of DNA‐binding transcriptional regulatory proteins with histone H3 via coordinated metal ions and discussed in relation to the conversion of nucleosomal ‘closed’ to ‘open’ states.

The eukaryotic nucleosome, the basic unit of chromatin, is thermodynamically stable and plays critical roles in the cell, including the maintenance of DNA topology and regulation of gene expression. At its C2 axis of symmetry, the nucleosome exhibits a domain that can coordinate divalent metal ions. This article discusses the roles of the metal‐binding domain in the nucleosome structure, function, and evolution.

This article offers a brief critical summary of our Populism(s) project to date, and introduces Thesis Eleven readers to the articles edited in this Special Issue. We comment on significant recent developments on populism scholarship, and reflect about the most recent developments currently taking place and their (potential) impact on current populism research.

The state of debates around the topic of `populism' has made clear the difficulties that exist to provide a coherent definition of the concept. There is much to be argued from historical, epistemological, comparative and sociological perspectives that may provide clarity to the uses of the term. As the world meets new scenarios of uncommon styles of doing politics and the themes of ideological polarization and social segregation take hold, the question about the value of `populism' as a theoretical tool (...) needs to be met with an affirmative stance that delineates its principal characteristics. The present text introduces the reader to four new perspectives that serve such a purpose and locates them among the relevant contemporary literature. (shrink)

Purpose: To determine the relative value that patients place on consent for procedures in the emergency department (ED) and to define a set of procedures that fall in the realm of implied consent. Methods: A questionnaire was administered to a convenience sample 134 of 174 patients who were seen in the ED of a Midwestern teaching hospital. The questionnaire asked how much time they believed was necessary to give consent for various procedures. Procedures ranged from simple (venipuncture) to complex (procedural (...) sedation). Results: Participants valued a simple blood draw at a low mean of 1.02 minutes of extra time and a lumbar puncture at a high mean of 7.78 minutes. Of all participants 52% and 48% noted a time-value of ?0? time on blood draw and intravenous line starts, respectively, indicating that they desire no additional consent for these procedures. Conclusion: Defining a set of ED procedures covered under implied consent will be difficult because many patients value formal consent for even the simplest procedure. (shrink)

El perfil del ensayo donde este artículo se despliega, va a permitir que surjan conceptos dentro de la temática del desarrollo de la conciencia, no son conocidos, sucede de esta manera porque intentan aportar al debate de lo humano, el deseo de ser apropiados para su continuidad y establecerse como práctica. Se expone un esquema que permitirá explicar el modelo denominado: niveles de conciencia de lo humano, con la manera de llegar a la complementariedad entre el conocimiento y el saber. (...) Se divide en tres partes, donde se dilucida la conceptualización sobre la conciencia, también se determinan las diferencias con teorías de la psicología transpersonal y se sugieren dos usos: 1) en elementos ficcionales, para reflejar el tránsito por los niveles de conciencia y 2) en la poesía, en su pretensión de decir sobre el saber que nace de una conciencia asimilada con el trabajo desde el alma o el Espíritu. (shrink)

One of the key problems the field of Machine Consciousness is currently facing is the need to accurately assess the potential level of consciousness that an artificial agent might develop. This paper presents a novel artificial consciousness scale designed to provide a pragmatic and intuitive reference in the evaluation of MC implementations. The version of ConsScale described in this work provides a comprehensive evaluation mechanism which enables the estimation of the potential degree of consciousness of most of the existing artificial (...) implementations. This scale offers both well defined levels of artificial consciousness and a method to calculate an orientative numerical score . A set of architectural and cognitive criteria is considered for each level of the scale. This permits the definition of a cognitive framework in which MC implementations can be ranked according to their potential capability to reproduce functional synergies associated with consciousness. The probability of the implementations having any phenomenal states related to the assessed functional synergy is not specifically addressed in this paper; nevertheless, it could be thoughtfully discussed elsewhere. (shrink)

This chapter argues that from a particularly weak recombination principle and plausible assumptions about the nature of parthood and location, it follows that it is possible that the mereological structure of the material world and that of space-time fail to correspond to one another in very radical ways. The chapter suggests, moreover, that rejecting the possibility of such failures of correspondence leaves us with a choice of no less unappealing alternatives. It also discusses a few ways in which their possibility (...) is relevant to various important debates in metaphysics. (shrink)

Resumen:La afamada helenista francesa Nicole Loraux, en sus textos La Cité divisée y La guerre dans la famille, ambos de 1997, ya nos había introducido a una redefinición topológica de la guerra civil, es decir de la stásis, asignándole una posición de centralidad en el contexto de las relaciones entre ciudad y familia, reexaminando el modo en que el dominio del oîkos conurba a la realidad de la ciudad. Centrada en el texto platónico del Menéxeno, Loraux había advertido que la (...) stásis era un conflicto propio del parentesco de sangre (phylon) entre los miembros de la pólis, de manera tal que la guerra, no sería sino oikeîos pólemos, esto es, un asunto consustancial a la familia y a las relaciones entre ellas, en la misma medida que sería inherente a la ciudad y constitutiva de la vida política. Pues bien, un acabado estudio de semejante problema –pero que excederá con un sello muy personal los límites de la indagación de Loraux– es el que ahora nos viene a ofrecer Juan Pablo Arancibia. (shrink)

This analysis comes from a philosophical glance at Aristophanic comedy, where the problem seems to move towards universality of poetry. The common manner to face this problem is getting close to the concepts of learning and inference, introduced in the field of a sort of action or a sort of character without consideration for the Aristotle’s horizon of the poetic research télos, érgon, oikeía hedone and katharsis, or the Greek theatrical-poetic representation as an autonomous form of universal mythos. The underestimation (...) of the comic genre has centered the research upon Aristophanes in the fields of politics, philology and history, but seldom philosophy. (shrink)

Este trabajo analiza la aparición del Ingreso Mínimo Vital (IMV) como una combinación de necesidad y oportunidad. Reconociendo en las Rentas Mínimas de Inserción a su antecesor directo, se fija, especialmente, en las debilidades e insuficiencias de estas para realizar una valoración del IMV desde la que concluye que lo positivo de esta intervención social no debe impedir reconocer sus límites y campos de mejora.

This study aims at showing how at the basis of Nikolai Berdyaev’s criticism of capitalism and Marxism lays the concept of Imago Dei. The Russian religious philosopher puts forward the Imago Dei as fundamental to the Christian understanding of human dignity. Berdyaev believes that in both capitalism and Marxism an objectification of the person takes place, and therefore a denial of basic human dignity. Berdyaev’s criticism of capitalism refers to its internal principles, partly building on Marx’s early criticism of capitalism. (...) Although he shared some of the same concerns with Marx and other Marxist theorists, ultimately his was a critique from a Christian perspective that was deeply humanistic, whereas Marxism in its Hegelian orientation had failed in achieving what Berdyaev understands as true humanism. Having confronted and engaged both systems of thought during his own life, Berdyaev’s insights are most interesting, and I argue in this paper that they are also relevant for our own reflections on these subjects today. (shrink)

I argue that from a very weak recombination principle and plausible assumptions about the nature of parthood and location it follows that it's possible that the mereological structure of the material world and that of spacetime fail to correspond to one another in very radical ways. I defend, moreover, that rejecting the possibility of such failures of correspondence leaves us with a choice of equally radical alternatives. I also discuss a few ways in which their possibility is relevant to various (...) debates in metaphysics. (shrink)

A great variety of medical conditions are subject to the placebo effect. Although there is mounting evidence to suggest that the placebo effect is related to the expectation of clinical benefit, little is still known about the biochemical bases underlying placebo responses. Positron emission tomography studies have recently shown that the placebo effect in Parkinson’s disease, pain, and depression is related to the activation of the limbic circuitry. The observation that placebo administration induces the release of dopamine in the ventral (...) striatum of patients with Parkinson’s disease suggests a link between the placebo effect and reward mechanisms. In addition to Parkinson’s disease, the placebo-reward model may also apply to other disorders. However, the relative contribution of the different neurotransmitters and neuropeptides that are known to be involved in modulating the activity of the limbic system may be disease-specific. Thus, while the placebo-induced clinical benefit observed in Parkinson’s disease would mostly reflect the release of dopamine in the dorsal striatum, the activation of opioid and serotonin pathways could be particularly implicated in mediating placebo responses encountered in pain and depression, respectively. (shrink)

I give shape to a neglected debate in metaphysics, the debate over the ontological priority between individuality and collectivity. I distinguish the debate from more familiar ones in the recent literature and articulate what I call ontological collectivism, the view that collectivity is prior to individuality. I defend the in-principle intelligibility of the view from forceful general objections and argue that not only is it coherent but also of significant interest to the literature: it allows for overlooked alternatives on a (...) variety of central discussions. (shrink)

GIS has captured planning practice to an unprecedented degree, and this article on how it reconfigures and is configured by institutional context. The author inquires into GIS as a technology for incorporating knowledge into institutional use and includes five propositions: GIS's efficiencies in data processing allows it unprecedented facility and scope of analysis, its use increases alienation, its mimetic language furthers its role in planning, its logic appears rational—purposive, but it conceals an underlying normative logic, and its most profound effect (...) is on the mapper, and the alienating and normative character of GIS necessitate new modes of “social ground-truthing.” The author studies the southeast Los Angeles initiatives to demonstrate these propositions. This article compares two studies: one GIS-based, and the other based on participatory action research and discusses how GIS might be recontextualized into a technology for liberating democratizing processes. (shrink)

This paper propose an analysis focused on different assumptions of time that are taking into account both in social sciences and humanities. The main objective to discuss these proposals is to emphasize the mutual incompatibility of the classic forms to assume time in the context of the contingencie..

In the Schutzian tradition, Berger and Luckmann expand upon the concept of the stranger and discuss the social reality of ritual purification as a coping strategy for reality-maintaining procedures and mental hygiene whereby individuals reconcile their encounter with a foreigner or stranger and their official reality. Using examples from the trans, gender non-conforming community (TGNC), the central question of this paper is: What about those considered a stranger in their home community? Given the hardships that TGNC people have encountered and (...) continue to face, “unsuccessful socialization” does not offer the best account of their challenges, obstacles, and sufferings when marginalized by others. Advancing Schutzian research, we offer two terms that can be applied to the idea of the stranger: ritual desecration and reverse ritual purification. Using a dialectical framework, a social and interpersonal conflict occurs between ritual purification and ritual desecration. Consequently, two personal iterations emerge: those who experience ritual desecration by remaining in their home environment and those who migrate to another community for the possibility of acceptance and belonging, hence, reverse ritual purification. The iterations between ritual purification, ritual desecration, and reverse ritual purification lead to incremental changes and hardships, potentially creating a new social reality. (shrink)

We study whether robots can satisfy the conditions of an agent fit to be held morally responsible, with a focus on autonomy and self-control. An analogy between robots and human groups enables us to modify arguments concerning collective responsibility for studying questions of robot responsibility. We employ Mele’s history-sensitive account of autonomy and responsibility to argue that even if robots were to have all the capacities required of moral agency, their history would deprive them from autonomy in a responsibility-undermining way. (...) We will also study whether humans and technological artifacts like robots can form hybrid collective agents that could be morally responsible for their actions and give an argument against such a possibility. (shrink)

Understanding Transhumanism as a particular turn of contemporary reflection that maintains the current state of humanity is not the final but just a transitional one, which can and should be scientific and technologically enhanced, the bioethical and biopolitical implications of such situation will be examined in this paper. Here it will be explored the transhumanist ideas related to the indissoluble link that in modern times have been established between the development of technologies and politics and strategies of neoliberal governmentality. This (...) is expected to pose a set of questions about the risks associated to the unsuspected modes of production, management and biopolitical control of subjectivity that may be allegedly linked to the transhumanist idea. (shrink)

The transformation of the text from the pre-information technology and Gutenberg modes to the model marked by information or digital technology is such that it substantially changes not only the concept of the text but also the nature of philology itself. This paper presents and discusses the problems encountered in producing a digital edition of the Zibaldone Laurenziano, Giovanni Boccaccio’s handwritten manuscript conserved in the Laurenziana Library in Florence (Pluteo XXIX, 8). The Medieval text in general, and even more with (...) the case of a zibaldone-type text, has intrinsic characteristics that clash with the immobility and definitive nature typical of the print text. The digital edition has been defined by Lebrave as the “critical edition of the 21st century.” It can be based on hypertextuality and hypermediality, using the internet as a resource, and is perfectly able to render textual movement, restoring the text to its specific mobility. Il passaggio del testo dalla modalità pre-informatica e gutemberghiana, a quella segnata dall’informatica o digitale è tale da cambiare sostanzialmente non solo il concetto di testo ma anche la natura stessa della filologia. Il saggio presenta e discute i problemi incontrati nel lavoro volto a stabilire un’edizione critica informatizzata dello Zibaldone Laurenziano, manoscritto autografo di Giovanni Boccaccio, conservato alla Biblioteca Laurenziana di Firenze (Pluteo XXIX, 8). Il testo medievale (e ancor più un testo del tipo-zibaldone) presenta delle caratteristiche intrinseche che entrano in contraddizione con l’immobilità e la natura definitiva tipiche del testo a stampa. L’edizione informatizzata, quella che si può basare sull’ipertestualità, sull’ipermedialità e sul ricorso alla rete, quella che Jean-Louis Lebrave ha definito come “l’édition critique au XXI.e siècle” (Lebrave 127), è perfettamente in grado di rendere il movimento testuale, restituendo al testo la sua rigorosa mobilità. (shrink)

Se ofrece una interpretación del enfoque estructural, fenomenológico y ontológico del mito a partir de una productividad filosófica abierta en Ricoeur por ciertos elementos tomados de Kant, los cuales explican por qué el mito es analizado por la constitución de su forma, por su intención significativa y por su revelación ontológica.

Various sources in the literature claim that the deduction theorem does not hold for normal modal or epistemic logic, whereas others present versions of the deduction theorem for several normal modal systems. It is shown here that the apparent problem arises from an objectionable notion of derivability from assumptions in an axiomatic system. When a traditional Hilbert-type system of axiomatic logic is generalized into a system for derivations from assumptions, the necessitation rule has to be modified in a way that (...) restricts its use to cases in which the premiss does not depend on assumptions. This restriction is entirely analogous to the restriction of the rule of universal generalization of first-order logic. A necessitation rule with this restriction permits a proof of the deduction theorem in its usual formulation. Other suggestions presented in the literature to deal with the problem are reviewed, and the present solution is argued to be preferable to the other alternatives. A contraction-and cut-free sequent calculus equivalent to the Hubert system for basic modal logic shows the standard failure argument untenable by proving the underivability of DA from A. (shrink)

The use of human language is a hallmark of human consciousness, even when it is not used publicly. Inner speech is the way humans consciously communicate with themselves and arguably a key factor contributing to the formation of more self-aware selves. From the perspective of cognitive science and artificial cognitive architectures, inner speech can be also seen as a meta-management system that modulates some cognitive processes of the subject. In this paper, we describe a preliminary version of a computational model (...) of inner speech generation based on the cognitive architecture CERA-CRANIUM. This inner speech generation method is illustrated using a video game non-player character as the subject of the first-person narratives to be produced. We also use this model of inner speech generation to discuss the possibilities of using such a first-person narrative stream as a meta-control input to the artificial cognitive architecture. We argue that this verbal input might be used as an integrated self-explanation of the agent in the world and thus contribute to the formation of self. (shrink)

El artículo constituye una breve investigación histórica y teórica en torno a los principales nexos entre el pensamiento temprano de William James y el trabajo desplegado por Edmund Husserl en las Investigaciones lógicas. A través de un examen preliminar de las relaciones personales entre ambos autores, pasaremos a un estudio sobre el aparato conceptual desarrollado por James, sobre todo en Principios de psicología, con el objetivo de contrastarlo con el planteado por Husserl, mostrando cómo el primer autor esbozó, entre otros, (...) los conceptos fenomenológicos de intencionalidad y objetividad ideal. (shrink)

Experiencing mixed emotions, a combination of two oppositely-valenced emotions, has been shown to reduce bias in decision making and improve the accuracy of judgements made. However, most previous...